The pleasures of the imagination

John Brewer's landmark book shows us how English artists, amateurs, entrepreneurs, and audiences developed a culture that is still celebrated for its wit and brilliance.

Brewer's purpose is to show how literature, painting, music, and the theater related to a public increasingly avid for them; how artists used, or were used by, publishers, plagiarists, impresarios, and managers; and how contemporary ideas of taste combined with patriotic fervor and shrewdly managed commerce to create a vibrant, dynamic national culture.

In Brewer's transforming analysis, we see revealed a picture of English eighteenth-century art and literature that is less familiar but more surprising, more various, and more convincing than any we have seen before.