THE PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century.<i> By John Brewer</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 688 pp., $35</i>

The 18th century was a time of dynamic cultural transformation in England, and London was its crucible. During this time, theater, music, literature and painting were endowed with a special collective identity requiring understanding and interpretation by the informed consumer. To appreciate the good and reject the inferior cultural artifacts of that age, whether it be a book, play, picture or piece of music, and converse comfortably about them became hallmarks of a person of taste.

Good taste was the attribute of the refined and the self-taught, those who could claim “sensibility.” Such taste repudiated vulgarity, sexual desire or simple acquisitiveness. The person of taste, who could be either male or female, did not need to be a courtier or even a wealthy aristocrat, although the enjoyment of wealth certainly opened up possibilities for connoisseurship and patronage. Certainly he or she needed to be literate--a requirement that excluded about a good third of the population. Otherwise, membership of this new breed was relatively open.

“The Pleasures of the Imagination,” John Brewer’s delightful and weighty study, seeks to demonstrate how English “high culture” reinvented itself during this fascinating period. Culture depended not only on the artist (the writer, painter, actor), but also on the publisher, printer, bookseller, lending library, theatrical impresario and on the critic and pundit who filled the columns of newspapers, journals and treatises dedicated to instruction on how to look and how to judge. There were professionals and amateurs at every level: While the first international stars reached new levels of virtuosity on the London stage, sheet music and a few lessons from a voice or piano teacher brought music into most people’s drawing rooms. A process of participation mattered. Culture meant sociability, sharing and demonstrating that one knew how to enjoy “the pleasures of the imagination.”

If the opportunities for cultural exposure were most abundant in London, where theaters, galleries, shops, parks, clubs, associations, coffee houses and pleasure gardens abounded, one was not totally deprived elsewhere in the country. The person of taste was virtually ubiquitous--though many existed in their own esteem rather than in that of others--because taste, sensibility, habits of acquiring and demonstrating awareness were not only pleasurable, they became an intrinsic part of individual identity and were critical to self-esteem. Culture was a form of capital, a human resource which shaped a sense of self: One was not only English, a member of a successful undespotic nation and comfortably off, one was also the right sort of English person with a honed sensibility informing eye, ear, hand and mind, a person readily distinguishable from the boor, the country bumpkin and the vulgar. Snobbery ruled, and the comradeship of fellow snobs (the sociability of sensibility) cocooned and confirmed those who believed in their superiority.

Brewer is concerned with the production and reception of culture at many levels: the artist, writer and performer; the agencies that disseminated and made available the printed word, the picture and the print; the critics, connoisseurs and pundits; and the institutionalization of concepts and cultural practices in debating society and the drawing room. “The Pleasures of the Imagination” is not an exhaustive study (with a subject ranging over so many areas, how could it be so?), but it is immensely rich and vividly and eloquently conveyed.

What forces shaped English cultural development in the 18th century? The English had a rather slow start in purchasing pictures and prints. Although both James I and Charles I in the early 17th century had employed the services of Rubens and Van Dyck, the political and moral climate of Puritanism following their reigns interrupted any attempt to marry art and court culture. In addition, suspicion of the graven image and the excesses of papistry stripped art of its role in fostering and inculcating religious devotion. Foreign travel had to be the means whereby a visual awareness was impressed upon the English gentry. Through the Grand Tour, which became a feature of aristocratic life in the late 17th century, Italy became the site of an English education in the glories of painting, and seeing meant purchasing. The outflow of artifacts from Continental Europe was prodigious. The purchase of paintings was, of course, confined to the wealthy, but through prints and engravings a ripple effect occurred, bringing art within reach of more modest incomes. Moreover, the British artist, as portraitist and history painter, experienced a conspicuous evolution. Joshua Reynolds struggled to gain recognition for “the artist as a figure in any civilized society.” He carefully cultivated influential patrons and a lifestyle designed to put him on the same level as his clients to elevate his status, and he wrote to instruct a public on what constituted excellence in painting.

In addition, many good British painters were frequently too jealous of their skills and profits to train apprentices and this, along with a lack of exhibition space even in the capital, severely inhibited the impact of major paintings upon the public. It was easier to read about a painting than actually to see it. One solution was the public gallery.

In contrast to this slow development in painting, the printed word was already a fundamental part of British culture at the beginning of the century. The British did not exceed the Dutch or the Prussians in literacy, but neither country could compete with England for the extent and organization of its reading public. This reflected the size of the population and the link between book distribution and a fast-developing newspaper press in which book advertisements enabled local booksellers to receive and dispatch orders so that no one would wait more than three weeks (a better service in fact than the one currently common in Britain); and there were journals in which the reviews enticed a reading public and generated the desire to be au fait with the latest developments. The founding of the Spectator, the Tatler and, above all, the Gentleman’s Magazine (by Edward Cave in 1731) were landmarks in disseminating opinion and generating debate. Found in most middle-class homes and available to women as well as men, the Gentleman’s Magazine generated lively discussion in its lengthy correspondence sections. Women, like Anna Seward, a poet who commands an entire chapter in Brewer’s book, found confidence by cutting their teeth as correspondents in these pages. The growth of a British periodical press was critical in disseminating a canon of taste.

Brewer spends much time on the trials of the “scribblers of the pen,” hacks, aspirant novelists, jobbing writers who did translations, reviews, commentaries, schoolbooks (neglected in the book) and contended with dishonest printers and publishers, stolen and plagiarized manuscripts and defaults on payment. The content and reception of the first English blockbuster, Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela,” a paean to female virtue and a phenomenon which aroused the envy of the literary world (as well as the first book to generate an industry of female consumer artifacts like teasets and fans), demonstrated to perfection exactly what good taste should be and what an English middle class wanted its wives and daughters to read. Many struggling poets and learned writers were spared from penury by subscriptions from friends and admirers: a practice that suited publisher, writer and distributor and minimized risks to all parties but that also demonstrated the intricate connection between reader and writer and the role of sociability and association in bonding them together.

Fundamental to the country’s cultural development in the period was the transformation of the theater. In one sense, this was far from absolute. Seventeenth century Drury Lane had been synonymous with a whorehouse and the acting profession with loose morality. David Garrick transformed the actor into an intellectual. He managed and frequently rewrote Shakespearean productions to suit the taste of the century (for example, his elimination of certain scenes such as Petruchio’s throwing his wife’s food to the floor in “The Taming of the Shrew”), and he popularized the bard and helped him to achieve that status in the British national heritage which Jane Austen commented on when she asked how it was one came by one’s familiarity of him. Yet the esteem of the actress was less secure, in spite of Mrs. Siddons’ cultivation of solidity of character and dedication to real-life maternity. Actresses had a disconcerting tendency to end up in the beds of the royal, the aristocratic and the sexually lax, and many of them died in poverty.

With the advent of the Licensing Act of 1737, the content of theatrical productions became less morally lax. The act was devised with the dual intent of protecting public morality and keeping political criticism at bay. It had moderate success. Brewer uses John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” to demonstrate other aspects of early 18th century theater that had largely changed by the century’s end, such as the borrowing and copying by Gay from the works of others. By 1800, writers had lost Gay’s understanding of the cultural baggage of the audience. “The materials its audience needed in order to understand its meaning,” Brewer writes of Gay’s production, “were songbooks, a city gazetteer and a canting dictionary; its author presumed that his audience knew about contemporary politics, graphic murder, intrepid crime and fashionable controversy--the stuff of the newspaper and pamphlet press . . . inter-textuality had arrived with a vengeance.”

“The Beggars’ Opera” played throughout England, in some places 30 and 40 times. Polly Peachum, the heroine whose mother is content to have her marry a highwayman because she would soon be a widow (the state to which most women aspire), appeared in prints and engravings and her sayings became national jokes. The dubious dual morality of “The Thief’s Creed and Common Prayer Book,” as Gay’s opera was dubbed in the Gentleman’s Magazine, was debated throughout the land, denounced from the pulpit and lost its bite only toward the end of the century when transformed by a sensibility that condemned vulgarity and required the excising of the louche.

One of the strengths and delights of “The Pleasures of the Imagination” is that Brewer abandons general analyses to pursue an in-depth study of cultural experience made manifest in diaries, letters and other “ego documents.” For example, the diary of Anna Larpent, wife of a theater censor, recorded in one decade 440 titles, which included novels, plays, histories, biographies, classics, travel literature and philosophy. Her journal makes apparent the ubiquity of books and the vastness of a cultural repertoire that included frequent theatricals and exhibitions as well as her own commitment to educating and shaping the taste of her children.

The voluminous collected papers of Anna Seward demonstrate the openness of English provincial life to developing cultural practices. A dutiful daughter of an ailing father, as well as a spinster, amateur versifier, intrepid critic and correspondent, Seward lived her life in the bishop’s palace at Lichfield, where she received famous visitors like Erasmus Darwin, Walter Scott and Thomas Southey and consciously shunned life in the capital. She wrote forceful reviews and defended them. She attacked Samuel Johnson as the “great Cham [sham]” of literature and his obsequious biographer James Boswell for leaving out the exchanges between her and the man of letters. Her critique of contemporary poetry vaunted sensibility as the key to taste. She was fascinated by the subjects of affliction and woe and had a penchant for those like Thomas Warton and Thomas Gray, whose poetry dealt in melancholy. She believed in natural genius, so amateurs, including untutored women, were not precluded from her esteem. She was, by our standards, self-indulgent and was perhaps wise to shun London, where she would have encountered more competition and would have shone less brilliantly.

Two additional case histories illustrate the burgeoning of English provincial culture. The first is that of the engraver Thomas Bewick, who lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and whose engravings and finely produced works of the natural world reached an appreciative and huge audience not only in Britain but as far away as St. Petersburg and Philadelphia. (Today he is widely regarded as the quintessence of Englishness.) The second deals with John Marsh, an amateur musician who lived in Chichester. Marsh enjoyed modest private means, which allowed him time to compose and travel to performances. He kept records of every piece and performance he heard and lived in a network of professional and amateur performers. A slipshod performance by one musician at the smallest gatherings could be a subject of severe complaint. He was an amateur but totally dedicated to the spreading and perpetuation of musical excellence and musical participation.

Such examples as Bewick and Marsh drive home the dominant message of Brewer’s study: In 18th century England, a remarkable transformation of cultural possibilities occurred that created an atmosphere of enrichment and diversion, challenge and intellectual expansion for a growing public hungry to devour what can properly be summarized as the pleasures of the imagination.