English Taste Research Articles

The Offences of the Imagination: The Grotesque in Kant’s Aesthetics

Abstract In the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant claims that ‘the English taste in gardens or the baroque taste in furniture pushes the freedom of the imagination almost to the point of the grotesque’ (KU 5:242). This paper attempts to reconstruct Kant’s views on the grotesque as a theoretical foundation for the modern conception of the grotesque as a negative aesthetic category. The first section of the paper considers and ultimately rejects the interpretation of the grotesque as a difficult kind of beauty. The second section contrasts the experience of the grotesque with similar experiences of sublimity and dreams. The third section examines the discord between faculties underlying the experience of the grotesque, defining the grotesque as a subclass of ugliness and addressing potential objections to its inclusion in Kant’s aesthetics. The fourth and final section briefly discusses the specificity of the grotesque as a subclass of ugliness.

Amphibious Author: Abel Boyer, Iphigénie, and Huguenot Migration

This article centres on the idea of an ‘amphibious author’, an epithet applied to the London-based Huguenot writer, lexicographer, and translator Abel Boyer (1667?–1729). Cross-channel migration of word-usages corresponded with the migration of people. While the French term ‘amphibie’ was used in relation to suspected Huguenot status in early modern France, the English counterpart, ‘amphibious’, could be used to keep a French migrant writer at bay. The ‘amphibiousness’, the half-Englishness, half-Frenchness, of Abel Boyer was negotiated through his translation of Racine’s Iphigénie, a play which presents characters displaced by state politics. While Boyer adapted the surface to English taste for varied spectacle, the undercurrents of his translation – repeated emphasis on the transitional setting and character duality – reveal an interpretation which resonates with his own status. The satirical epithet is not merely a label, but a productive means of investigating the translation work and reception of a Huguenot migrant.

Interior Britishness – The Policy of Taste in The Great Interior Design Challenge

This paper looks at British home décor to analyse its distinct features from the perspective of a specific national identity. It also examines the impact of the upper class’ taste dictating the norms for the rest of society despite having a different cultural capital. The BBC programme, The Great Interior Design Challenge, is examined as a good example of the British tendency to seek advice from authorities in a field who are the arbiters of taste. The specific competitive scheme and aim of this TV programme present a telling body of information to examine which features are favoured among the winners and which are condemned in failed projects. As a result, the programme captures and reflects the preferred national British taste. The concepts and prescriptions of cultural capital as well as media and authorities as the source of taste are visible in this society. The members of the lower social classes, being instructed by the professionals, strive to follow the upper-class’ taste. However, their choices are determined by the education they received and people by whom they are surrounded. The upper classes are more accustomed to art due to their families’ art collections and art education, so their taste is more sophisticated and informed. Moreover, the study of the programme pays attention to the presence of certain distinctive national features of British society visible in its home décor.

The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785-1865, by Diana Davis

Reviewed by: The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865 by Diana Davis Pamela Fletcher (bio) The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865, by Diana Davis; pp. xii + 308. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2020, $65.00. Late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elite interiors in Great Britain were decorated in a variety of opulent styles, many of which adapted historical visual idioms. The most famous today may be the gothic revival fashion seen at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill or William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey; yet the so-called Louis XIV style was adopted at least as widely and in the very highest of social circles, including at George IV's Carlton House and in the homes of many in his inner circle, before moving into more mainstream circulation as the century progressed. This adoption of ancien régime French style fell out of favor by midcentury, ridiculed as overly ornate, historically incoherent, and filled with fakes. In The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865, Diana Davis argues that our understanding of those interiors and the objects that filled them is still hampered by this change in taste, and offers a persuasive alternative reading of what she calls Anglo-Gallic style as a particularly British invention, knowingly combining old and new objects of both French and British origin. The first part of the book is dedicated to defining the aesthetics of the Anglo-Gallic interior and locating its emergence and popularity in historical, political and—especially—economic contexts. Davis situates the style within both the larger currents of nineteenth-century historicism and the fraught military and political exchanges with France in the period, and she suggests that Anglo-Gallic opulence was a visual statement of "Britain's dominance in the new Europe," though she does not generally emphasize the question of what these interiors meant to their owners and viewers (7). Instead, she shifts attention from collectors to sellers, positioning art dealers as the primary tastemakers behind this design fashion and arguing that "the Anglo-Gallic style was driven by commerce" (56). To make this case, Davis traces the British market for French decorative arts from the Revolutionary period's influx of objects, artisans, and aristocratic refugees to London through the mid-nineteenth century expansion of the market with public exhibitions and catalogs aimed at a wider audience. This work is an important contribution to recent scholarship on the scope and scale of nineteenth-century London's robust art market. The focus on the decorative arts is particularly welcome, not only because it was a very financially lucrative subfield of the art market but also because those who sold decorative arts were often also, as Davis emphasizes, makers of furniture, metalwork, and [End Page 526] other items of home decor. This fact productively complicates a narrative in which the fine art dealer in paintings and sculpture sheds a background in home furnishings as the role of the dealer achieved more status. The second part of the book is devoted to discussions of individual dealer-makers and their work, including Boulle marquetry furniture, ornamental metalwork, and redecorated and mounted porcelain. The section begins with the argument that to identify nineteenth-century recreations or refurbishings of older objects as fakes is to fundamentally misunderstand Anglo-Gallic taste. Using a stricter definition of the term fake to refer only to objects created with the intent to deceive, Davis argues that dealers and patrons alike valued refashioned objects and styles as a desirable and distinctly modern mode. This point, however, is only a prelude to her primary interest in these objects. As she explains, the dealers "were creating a new Francophile decorative style for the contemporary interior to suit British taste. If we accept this, we can then move on to the question of just how good the dealer's workmanship was" (155). Accordingly, the second half of the book consists of close visual readings of individual objects, revealing fascinating details of technique, fabrication, and materials. Davis does offer some interpretive gloss on individual objects and trends, but the main focus is making a connoisseur's case for the objects as the...

The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer by Wynn Wheldon

Reviewed by: The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer by Wynn Wheldon Todd M. Endelman Wynn Wheldon, The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer ( Amberley Publishing, 2019). Pp. 288. $32.95. It is an understatement to say that the history of boxing does not command attention in the field of eighteenth-century studies. Sad to say, Wynn Wheldon's biography of the bare-knuckle fighter Daniel Mendoza, a London-born Jew of Spanish and Portuguese descent who was active in the ring in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, will do little to correct this. It is long on anecdotes and short on analysis. Wheldon, who came to the subject because his wife is a descendant of Mendoza, writes in a lively and engaging way but does not probe the implications of Mendoza's career. This is regrettable. Prizefighting flourished in Britain at this time but not elsewhere in Europe. Why, one wants to know, did the British have a fondness for fisticuffs and what does this say about British taste and social habits? In addition, prizefighting's popularity, which often bridged the social gap between the highborn and the lowborn, its links with gambling and crime, and the imaginative work it did in crystallizing notions of nationality and masculinity are left unexplored. The one dimension of Mendoza's life that Wheldon pursues is his Jewishness, especially its place in his career and in the formation of images of the Jew. In this period, at least thirty Jews made a name for themselves in the ring, Mendoza the best known and the most successful among them. He was credited with introducing a more "scientific" form of boxing, one that emphasized finesse, agility, and intelligence, rather than brute strength and bulk. (He himself was not a big man. He stood five feet seven inches tall and weighed 160 pounds in his heyday.) Long after his career in the ring came to an end, he continued to tour the provinces, attracting large audiences to exhibitions of his prowess, in which he sparred and imitated the boxing styles of other well-known fighters. He was, as Wheldon makes clear, as much a showman as an athlete. His Jewish birth was not an obstacle to acceptance into "the fancy" (the boxing fraternity), success in the ring, and popular acclaim. A "Mendoza" became a slang word for a physical set-to. Throughout his career, he fought as a Jew—that is, he was labelled as such by friends and foes ("Mendoza, the noted fighting Jew"), a label he embraced. He was a great hero to the Jews of London, who vicariously participated in his victories in the ring. His triumphs occurred, however, at the same time that popular culture continued to stigmatize Jews as untrustworthy, scheming, rapacious, and greedy. The coexistence of anti-Jewish sentiment and pro-Mendoza admiration may represent one of the first manifestations of a phenomenon that became commonplace in twentieth-century [End Page 482] America, where athletes and entertainers from minority groups enjoyed public acclaim while racial stereotyping continued to thrive. The concurrence of such seemingly opposed sentiments calls for further comment. One possible reason that Wheldon does not engage with this problem is that he believes that Mendoza, whom he calls, with good reason, "the most famous Jew of his day" (in Britain), made potential assailants think twice before harassing Jews in the street. He did so, according to Wheldon, by erasing "a particular stereotype of the Jew as craven and submissive and un-English" (213). His only evidence for this is a passage from the radical reformer Francis Place's autobiography, in which Place claimed that Mendoza's celebrity and the spread of boxing skills among young Jewish men put an end to Jew-baiting. While there might have been a diminution in random assaults on Jews in London in the first half of the nineteenth century, there is no reason to attribute this to Mendoza. More likely, it was due to the more general decline in casual violence and the Evangelical-inspired growth of civility and respectability. Moreover, even in the wake of Mendoza's triumphs, there...

On Chinese and English Metaphors of Taste Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory: A Case Study of Taste Word Translation in <i>Fortress Besieged</i>

Metaphor is very common in literature. Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) provides a brand-new way to study metaphor from cognitive perspective. This paper applies corpus analysis toolkit Antconc to analyze Chinese and English metaphors of taste based on the corpus of <i>Fortress Besieged</i> written by Ch’ien Chung-shu and its translation by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao. It adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the taste words in <i>Fortress Besieged</i> and their translation methods, discusses the similarities and differences between the metaphorical meaning of Chinese and English taste words, hoping to help with future translation practice. Through data collection and analysis, “酸’’(sour), “甘/甜’’(sweet), “苦’’(bitter) and “辣”(spicy/hot) turn out to be the most commonly used metaphors of taste to elucidate the characters’ personalities and experiences in the novel. However, the metaphors of taste in the original text of <i>Fortress Besieged</i> are more commonly used than that in its translation and the metaphorical meaning of taste words is richer in Chinese. Although, there are some similarities between Chinese and English metaphors of taste, there are much more differences. From the perspective of CMT, the metaphors of “酸”, “甜/甘”, “苦” and “辣” belong to the structural metaphors and are mapped from taste domain to the domains of physiology, emotion, life, sleep, visual sense, degree, personality and conduct, while the metaphors of “sour”，“sweet”，“bitter” and “spicy/hot” are hardly mapped to physiology, degree and conduct domain. To deal with this, translators can use free translation and amplification translation methods, omitting, substituting the original vehicles in source text or adding explanations to achieve functional equivalence during translation.

COMMODITIES AND HISTORY: A LITERATURE REVIEW ON COMMODITY HISTORIES

Imperial commodities have been the subject of both popular and scholarly histories in recent years. A considerable amount of literature has been published on commodities such as tea, coffee, sugar, chocolate, tobacco, and spices such as pepper and cloves. Those commodity histories reveal the lure of exotics for Europeans, importantly the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and British, who engaged at various times in commercial imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, slave labour, commodity democratisation, changing diets and changing food habits. This paper presents a literature review on selected popular histories that examined commodities, for instance, Sidney W. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1986), Roy Moxham’s Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire (2004) and James Walvin’s Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 (1997). This literature review will help us to understand commodity histories literature in a broader perspective.

The making of modern champagne: how and why the taste for and the taste of champagne changed in nineteenth century Britain

ABSTRACT Between 1800 and 1900, the taste of and for champagne in Britain changed entirely. From a sweet, and often, still wine it became both universally sparkling and extremely dry. Its usage also changed; drunk on its own or with sweet desserts in 1800, an accompaniment to savoury dishes and roast meats by 1900. How and why did these changes occur? Letters exchanged between the champagne houses and their London agents document changing styles of production whilst the changing nature of British taste can be tracked from the British press, from the many contemporary wine books and the records of the dominant distributive firm of W. & A. Gilbey. Using the Social Practice Theory of Shove and Pantzar and building on Leibenstein’s ground-breaking 1950 article on “snob” and “bandwagon” effects this article suggests a framework for understanding taste changes in British society.

China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 by Eun Kyung Min

Reviewed by: China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 by Eun Kyung Min Yu Liu Eun Kyung Min. China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2018. Pp. xii + 277. $99.99. Erudite and excellently written, Min's book casts a valuable and at times even uniquely revealing light on the once pervasive but today too often overlooked presence of China in the evolution of modern English taste, gender politics, literary identity, and commercial and consumer culture. Her remarkable success, however, also exposes a regrettable limitation. The problem is her conceptual framework, shared with quite a few other recent scholars, which confines her study to English representations or misrepresentations of China rather than opening it to the more interesting and more important aspect of the early-modern cross-cultural encounter that involved the transmission and reception of actual Chinese ideas. As Min points out in her introduction, the very concept of modernity implies an awareness of something not modern or premodern, or a self-conscious contrast of past and present, us and them, and more. Beginning with the English battle of the books in the 1690s, she persuasively shows the historical English literary self-consciousness as growing in a global context, particularly in relation to China. Sir William Temple's well-known admiration of China, for instance, complicated his defense of the ancients against the moderns and made him a surprising initiator of various changes later associated with English literary modernity. Moving the restless adventures of Crusoe from the Caribbean Islands to the Far East, Defoe effectively wrote China into the new prose narrative of formal realism that he helped to invent while highlighting the same point as had been made by William Wotton in his earlier dispute with Temple that China as an ancient rival to modern England and Europe had to be confronted. Taking cues from Temple's discussion of the irregular Chinese garden layout, Addison developed in The Spectator his enormously influential aesthetics of the new, the uncommon, and the strange. Though already contested in the mid eighteenth century, China's immense prestige still enticed Goldsmith to impersonate a resident Chinese scholar in London and to satirize the social, [End Page 227] political, and consumer culture of England from the serial vantage point of a wellregarded foreign correspondent or "Citizen of the World" (1760–1761). Riding the same widespread interest in China, Thomas Percy used a Chinese love story, The Pleasing History (1761), to serve his ulterior agenda of locating English literary antiquity in the Gothic or Germanic oral tradition and martial history. In her account of these authors, Min considerably enriches our understanding through a conceptual framework that focuses close attention on English representations or misrepresentations of China. What makes possible her accomplishment, however, also severely limits her success. Her book, as she writes in her introduction, is "geared toward China's influence on English literary history and form," but precisely this objective in a strict sense is not achieved, because she rarely checks English ideas of China against any reality in that country. The Chinese irregular gardening style, for instance, is inextricably linked with the longstanding Chinese sense of a deep affinity between humanity and heaven (tianren heyi), which inspired not only the use of art to imitate or follow nature in landscaping but also similar efforts in cosmological thinking, ethical deliberation, medicine, and political theory. Min rightly recognizes the English discussion of Chinese landscaping as important. However, without any reference to Chinese reality, she is simply unable to make clear how Temple's understanding was insightful and may have influenced decisively his thoughts about government, ethics, health, and poetic creativity. Similarly, she fails to point out how Addison's echo of Temple played an important propagandic role in English garden design reform but his pet project of the new, the uncommon, and the strange had little to do with China. Much of the information about Chinese landscaping in the first half of the eighteenth century was about Chinese imperial garden complexes such as Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Brilliant Brightness) in Beijing and Bishu Shanzhuang (Mountain Resort for Escaping the Summer Heat) in Chengde, built...

Catherine II’s Anglophilia and Lord Cathcart’s “Extraordinary Embassy” in St. Petersburg, 1768–1772

Looking at eighteenth-century relations between Russia and the West through the prism of diplomatic culture and rituals, this article concentrates on a “happy period” in Anglo-Russian contacts in 1768–1772, when Sir Charles Cathcart was dispatched to St. Petersburg to negotiate a treaty between the British and Russian Empires. The article argues that close relations between Great Britain and Russia at that time influenced ceremonial practices, individual contacts, and the transfer of the British culture to the Russian court. Study of the Cathcart’s archive points to the peculiar character of his mission – to the leading role that he, as British ambassador, played among diplomats in Russia; to the role of his wife, who became the first ambassadrice officially presented to Catherine ii; to their residence, which they transformed into an exemplar of “British taste” in St. Petersburg. The Cathcart case study opens up new perspectives on the diplomats in the Age of the Enlightenment.

Ambrose Philips’ "The Distrest Mother": The myth of Andromache in English (Neo)classicism

The focus of this paper is an analysis of the Ambrose Philips (1674- 1749) neoclassical tragedy “The Distrest Mother” (1712). This play is an adaptation of Jean Racine’s (1639-1699) “Andromaque”(1667), which is, in turn, an adaptation of the Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy “Andromache” (ca. 426 BC). Philips’ tragedy is an example of an early English adaptation from Racine. Philip took Racine’s play and moulded it to appeal to English taste. Therefore, this study shall analyse Philips’ play focusing on his innovations, mainly in comparison with the Racine version, but also with the ancient Greek myth.

‘Little flat furnished by Maple . . . ’ The ‘English Taste’ in Buenos Aires: The Thompson and Maple Companies (1887–1986)

‘Little flat furnished by Maple . . . ’ The ‘English Taste’ in Buenos Aires: The Thompson and Maple Companies (1887–1986)

Organisational studies in an era of educational reform

One social science base for educational administration proposed in the Baron and Taylor collection was organisation theory. In the event this expectation turned out to be over-optimistic. Organisation theory was much too contested and insufficiently pragmatic for the British taste. Major developments in this field occurred mainly in the USA. Nevertheless, the more general approach of organisational studies continues to enhance our understanding of schools where a ‘both-and’ perspective is adopted towards organisational dualities, particularly in the face of what we have provocatively termed ‘transformania’. The article explores the unintended consequences of relentless transformania through three examples of duality: organisation–institution, bureaucracy–professionality, and the culture of teaching–the culture of managerialism. Finally, it is suggested that a revival of an interest in the somewhat dormant theory of ambiguity would be timely.

‘Smoaking hot with fashion from Paris’: The Consumption of French Fashion in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

When young Fanny Herbert returned to her native Co. Tipperary after a short trip to Paris in 1791, she was judged to be ‘smoaking hot with fashion […] from Paris’. She offers a good example of how French sartorial matters were held in great esteem in eighteenth-century Ireland, despite the domination of British-manufactured goods and British taste. This article attempts to answer some questions regarding the consumption of French fashion in Ireland throughout the eighteenth century, focusing on Dublin as the centre of culture and commerce. It will explore where an Irish consumer could acquire French sartorial goods, and enquires how widely available such goods were. It will consider specifically what was available to purchase and discovers how an Irish shopper could hear news of the latest French trends in fashionable dress.

John Evelyn: The Forestry of Imagination

John Evelyn (1620-1706) was the son of a wealthy landowner in the county of Surrey, England. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and the Middle Temple, London. Starting at age ten, and continuing for the next fifty years, he kept a personal diary (Darley 8). First published in 1818, Evelyn's Diary provides a fascinating record of people, places, and events that he witnessed during a turbulent period of English history. Evelyn also published over thirty books on fine arts, forestry, numismatics, and religion. In his political outlook, Evelyn was a staunch Royalist. However, he decided not to join the Royalist cause during the English Civil War, choosing instead to travel extensively through France and Italy. In 1647, during a sojourn in Paris, he married Mary Browne, the daughter of Sir Richard Browne, Charles I's ambassador to France. Evelyn returned to England in 1652, acquiring his father-in-law's estate at Sayes Court (on the Thames east of London), and settling into the life of a country gentleman. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Evelyn played a more active role in public affairs, serving on several royal commissions (Darley 192). Evelyn was appointed as a founding member of the Royal Society in 1662, and in this capacity he published Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber (1664). Evelyn's Sylva foreshadows the development of a conservationist ethic in the management of forests and wild-lands throughout the English-speaking world. In this treatise, Evelyn advocates the replanting of woodlands that had been devastated during the English Civil War as a means of restoring the nation's defenses, particularly its navy and merchant marine. The book describes the various kinds of trees, their cultivation, and the best use for each kind of timber. Foremost among all English tree species is the oak, which Evelyn regards as producing the most elegant and useful of kind of wood, almost magical in its properties: The land and the sea do sufficiently speak for the improvement of this excellent material; houses and ships, cities and navies are built with it; and there is a kind of [oak] so tough, and extreamly compact, that our sharpest tools will hardly enter it, and scarcely the very fire itself, in which it consumes but slowly, as seeming to partake of a ferruginous and metallin shining nature, proper for sundry robust uses. It is doubtless of all timber hitherto known, the most universally useful and strong, (i.52) Although it is mainly utilitarian in its purposes, Sylva also presents a philosophical and aesthetic justification for the reforestation of Britain, particularly in its fourth and final book, entitled Dendrologia: An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of Standing Groves, which first appeared in the second edition of 1670 and was greatly expanded in the subsequent editions of 1679 and 1706. In its final form, Dendrologia delves deeply into the ancient traditions of sacred groves, and it provides a classic argument for the creation of large open estates with park-like groves and tree-lined scenic vistas. Sylva provided a crucial impetus for the eighteenth-century shift in British taste away from walled formal gardens and toward a more open style of landscape design that involved the extensive planting of trees. Almost single-handedly, Evelyn's popular treatise created a vogue for forestry among the British gentry (Harrison 100). It advocated a new way of seeing forests: not merely as game-hunting preserves, or as sources of raw timber, but as having intangible aesthetic value and an intrinsic sacred character worthy of nurturance and preservation. In this way, Sylva marks the birth of forestry as a mode of imaginative dendrology, through which such diverse writers as Evelyn and Walter Scott sought to discover the vital roots of their own national identity. Although he never traveled to Scotland, Evelyn was fascinated by what he had heard of its wild and remote character, and intrigued by the vanished abundance of the aboriginal Caedonian forest. …

Imperial Names for ‘Practical Cats’: Establishing a Distinctly British Pride in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

AbstractT. S. Eliot provides three categories — the familial, the particular, and the secretive — to delineate the naming of cats in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; however, the poet’s categories fail to explain completely his onomastic decisions. Instead, Eliot’s naming process reflects the Anglophile’s acquired British tastes. London, a city of Anglican churches and secular theatres, is home to Eliot’s fictional cats and an influence upon many of his name choices. Literary sources, in particular British Nonsense poets, provide additional inspiration for the 54 cat names mentioned in Eliot’s volume.

Curzon nostalgia: landscaping historical monuments in India

When ages grow to civility and elegancy men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely. Sir Francis Bacon Soon after my book Flora's Empire: British Gardens in India appeared, an Indian ne...

Response

Response Sharon Marcus (bio) Victorian Theater: Three Axioms If you know little about Victorian theater, and care still less, you are in good company. Consider this statement, made in 1832: Acting had always appeared to me to be the very lowest of the arts. . . . It originates nothing: it lacks, therefore, the grand faculty which all other arts possess—creation. An actor is at best but the filler up of the outline designated by another. . . . A fine piece of acting is at best, in my opinion, a fine translation. Art must be to a certain degree enduring. . . . To me [acting] seems no art, but merely a highly interesting and exciting amusement. (125) The author of this pronouncement was neither a lofty sage nor an anti-theatrical crusader, but a young actress, Fanny Kemble, whose family was the closest England had to thespian aristocracy. To be sure, the very reasons Kemble gave for denying acting the status of art would have led her to embrace dramatists capable of creating original, enduring works. Yet for most of the century Victorian plays and playwrights fared no better, precisely because they were considered subordinate to players. In 1866, for example, drama critic Henry Morley diagnosed the contemporary drama as “an ailing limb of the great body of our Literature” (8) and traced the cause of the disease to the public taste for plays that were “all leg and no brains” (6). The popularity of actors cutting capers and actresses flashing thighs resulted in “the too frequent perversion of the stage into an agent for the ruin of the written drama” (6–7). With enemies like these in its past, it is not surprising that Victorian theater has so few friends in the present. The belief that drama is only aesthetically worthy if it approximates literature, and can become literary only by leaving theater’s corporeality, popularity, [End Page 438] and ephemerality behind, has few explicit adherents today. Nonetheless, an opposition between theatricality and dramatic literature shaped modernism (Puchner), modern literature departments (Jackson, Professing), and even performance studies programs (Carlson 196).1 A persistent cleavage between art and entertainment helps to explain why theater has such a negligible place in Victorian literary studies today, despite (or even because of) theater’s popularity for much of the nineteenth century. Like Kemble and Morley, most Victorianists prefer studying durable works by well-known authors to reconstructing the ephemeral work of acting, and have little interest in theater that elevated performers over authors (Stephens xiii) and does not lend itself to being read as literature. The work most often pressed into service as the representative Victorian play, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), is Victorian only on a technicality, produced six years before the monarch’s death but well after the birth of the fin-de-siècle. The major Victorian playwrights—Thomas Holcroft, Douglas Jerrold, Dion Boucicault, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Tom Taylor, Thomas Robertson, Charles Reade, W. S. Gilbert, Sydney Grundy, Arthur Jones, and Arthur Pinero—are mostly absent from histories of European drama, surveys of Victorian literature, and English department syllabi and orals lists.2 It is not exactly my contention here that we do the authors and texts of Victorian plays an injustice by neglecting them. Victorian playwrights rarely fancied themselves originators and creators of lasting works of art, and labored under conditions that vitiated the author function. Few playwrights developed individual styles; instead, most wrote to order for specific theaters and performers. Victorian actors often improvised dialogue, invented their own stage business, and claimed generic roles (butler, soubrette, fop) as “lines” whose distinctive points and costumes defined plays even more than the words penned by authors (Booth; Tolles; Wojcik 228–30). Indeed, until the 1890s, British playwrights had such weak property rights in their work and were so poorly paid that few took the time to write original works from scratch (Stephens; Tolles). For much of the nineteenth century, Kemble’s point that acting was at best a fine translation applied even more literally to plays, which were often poor translations that adapted German and French hits to English tastes (Rowell; Marcus). As Henry James put it, with less hyperbole than one...

Making the Case for Middlebrow Culture

It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture—which is considered derivative of Europe and not rooted in the Caribbean—and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. In Caribbean Middlebrow, Belinda Edmondson recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. Edmondson shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture, she finds, is further gendered as female : women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. Edmondson also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century. This is counter to the notion that the islands were exclusively under the sway of British tastes and trends. She finds the origins of today's dub or spoken-word Jamaican poetry in earlier traditions of genteel dialect poetry-as exemplified by the work of the Jamaican folklorist, actress, and poet Louise Miss Lou Bennett Coverley-and considers the impact of early Caribbean novels including Emmanuel Appadocca (1853) and Jane's Career (1913).

Portrait of a Patron: The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674–1744) by Susan Jenkins

226 Artists (Zoffany and Turner) and poets (Wordsworth, Goldsmith, and Crabbe) dramatized sensibility, developing a stereotype of the pathetic; they transformed rogues and tricksters into objects of sentiment, ‘‘romanticizing the freedom and independence of the beggar .’’ In this ‘‘history from below,’’ Mr. Hitchcock mixes legal documents, criminal records with illustrations, and the fictions of Gay, Defoe, Swift, Smollett, Fielding, and Grub Street. This complex narrative works because the author shows nuance and facility in an admittedly socially constructed text. Mr. Hitchcock moves easily, and sometimes comically, from court testimonies of drunks, criminals, and petty thieves to the sophisticated and ironic voices of upper-class satirists. Arthur J. Weitzman Northeastern University SUSAN JENKINS. Portrait of a Patron: The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674– 1744). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xii ⫹ 219. $99.95. For Scriblerians, James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, is the figure behind Timon’s Villa, the epitome of ostentatious false taste. This judgment, not original with Pope’s Epistle to Burlington , has shaped posterity’s verdict of the Duke. An art historian, Ms. Jenkins undertakes to correct this misunderstanding and show Chandos’s cultural importance as an enlightened patron and collector , who had a ‘‘profound and rounded interest in the arts’’ that helped establish his ‘‘position at the centre of the artistic world and support his claim to be the new ‘Apollo of the arts’ of his generation.’’ The dispersal after his death of all Chandos’s possessions and the razing of Cannons, his suburban mansion, insured there is no legacy by which to judge his taste and achievement; his achievements for the most part must be reconstructed from the documents. Using correspondence , architectural plans and drawings, inventories, contemporary accounts, and sale catalogues, Ms. Jenkins follows the twelve-year building of the mansion (completed by June 1725) and the amassing of its contents, and guides us through its rooms, reconstructing their decorative schemes, paintings, and furnishings . The grounds were laid out on an enormous scale in the formal geometric manner with waterworks and statuary. An amateur architect, Chandos took an active role in designing Cannons . At a cost of upwards of £160,000 for construction and furnishing, there was no available surface in the mansion that did not receive the most lavish and costly decoration possible. From marble flooring, tropical hardwood paneling, and gilded furniture to ceiling paintings, the decorative splendor can be gauged by a tradesman’s bill for ‘‘Japanning the seat in ye water closet £9.’’ Ms. Jenkins situates Chandos’s collecting in the prevailing debates about taste, luxury, and conspicuous consumption , as well as the context of the expansion of the art market, British taste for foreign artists, and the rise of public art institutions. Chandos collected during the transition from the seventeenthcentury virtuoso collector (with his taste for the strange and ingenious rarities and natural objects) to the connoisseur of fine art whose sensibility was informed by new canons of polite taste derived from the model of Italian art. Collecting, although a form of conspicuous consumption and display of status, 227 could also be a public-spirited activity. The connoisseur’s civic responsibility was demonstrated by opening his house and collection to the public, as did Chandos. Central to Ms. Jenkins’s brief is the chapter ‘‘The Duke of Chandos as a Collector,’’ which shows how he built his collection, primarily of books and manuscripts, followed closely by Dutch paintings and Italian Old Masters. He desired to get paintings ‘‘of the most celebrated hands,’’ and his negotiations and acquisitions reveal his sophistication . Relying on catalogues and overseas agents, dealers, friends, or relatives, Chandos was buying sight unseen; we see him stating what he is willing to pay and concentrating on the big names of Italian painting (Guido Reni, Domenichino , the Carracci); he was especially wary of false attributions, copies, and fakes. Ms. Jenkins identifies and reproduces many of the paintings once in Chandos’s collection, and in some cases documents how he acquired them. Her argument that in literature and music he was ‘‘a patron of taste and discernment ’’ is less well supported. The treatment of Chandos as literary patron is dominated by the Timon’s Villa scandal . Chandos...