The Pleasures of the Imagination by John Brewer

Bewick’s images, contained in his three main publications, A General History of Quadrupeds (1790), his two-volume History of British Birds (17), and his Fables of Aesop (1818), were immediately and startlingly successful, making Bewick’s fortune and transforming the popular representation of natural history. While Brewer can rightly assume that his own readers will know nothing of the world of an obscure amateur composer and musician like John Marsh, he is concerned here with the way that the traces of eighteenth-century culture survive in the different consumer culture of the late twentieth century. Purged of its reformist associations and transformed into the celebration of a rural idyll, his work adorns tea towels and toasters as well as works of rustic nostalgia his vignettes assuage the pastoral longings of the urban sophisticates who read the New York Review of Books and they are taken, in both Britain and North America, to embody Englishness. The memory of Thomas Bewick endures, albeit in sanitized, commercialized form. As John Brewer, in his exhilarating remapping of eighteenth-century culture in The Pleasures of the Imagination, turns his attention from the engravings of Thomas Bewick to the provincial musical life of the amateur musician John Marsh, he takes a sideswipe at the readers of this journal:

The Pleasures of the Imagination by John Brewer