John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera is tackled several times: it was the theatre phenomenon of the age. There is also a great deal about painting, prints, the world of art, and of course the stage. We move from Charles II to the Prince Regent, from Milton to Byron, from periwigs and tumbling skirts to naturally ruffled hair above stocks and cravats. I was reading this most of the time in bed, or with the book resting on a fat cushion on my lap.īut I really wanted to keep reading, discomfort or not, because this history book is now, for me, the last word on how British literary culture changed between the last days of the early Modern period and the really Modern period of the Victorian age. It’s also very heavy, and produced in a largish format that, with its length, makes it just a bit too heavy to hold comfortably in one’s hands while one tries to maintain the right distance between the type and one’s eyes. It’s a huge, magnificently illustrated and pleasingly well produced slab of a book on eighteenth-century British cultural history. This book by John Brewer (a reissue from its 1997 incarnation) is a monster.
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