In Our Time - Taste

Episode Date: October 25, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 18th century obsession with taste. In the mid 18th century the social commentator, George Coleman, decried the great fashion of his time: “Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world…The fine ladies and gentlemen dress with Taste; the architects, whether Gothic or Chinese, build with Taste; the painters paint with Taste; critics read with Taste; and in short, fiddlers, players, singers, dancers, and mechanics themselves, are all the sons and daughters of Taste. Yet in this amazing super-abundancy of Taste, few can say what it really is, or what the word itself signifies.”From the pens of philosophers to the interior decor of the middle classes, the idea of good and bad taste shaped decisions about dress, wallpaper, furniture, architecture, literature and much more. The period saw an explosion in the taste industries - the origins of Chippendale furniture, Wedgwood pottery and Christie's auction house - and a similar growth in magazines and journals devoted to the new aesthetic, moral and social guidelines. But taste was also a battle ground that pitched old money against new, the city against the country and men against women. With Amanda Vickery, Reader in History at Royal Holloway, University of London; John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London; Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the mid-18th century, the social commentator George Coleman decried the great fashion of his time.

Quote, Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world. The fine ladies and gentlemen dress with taste. The architects, where the great fashion, Gothic or Chinese, build with taste. The painters, paint with taste, critics, read with taste, and in short, fiddlers, players, singers, dancers and mechanics themselves are all the sons and daughters of taste. Yet, in this amazing superabundancy of taste, few can say what it really is, or what the word itself signifies. To try and answer Coleman's quandary and explain how the idea became an obsession, redecorated the living rooms and dress codes, and redesigned the social hierarchies of the 18th century, are Amanda Vicketts.

The reader in history at Royal Holloway University of London, Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, and John Mullen, Professor of English at University College London. Mandar Vickery, in the early 18th century, Britain was rich and getting richer, mainly through trade and manufacturing. Were there concerns that all this new money would change British society and did this herald the introduction of the obsession with taste? I think emphatically so.

In the early 18th century, Britain is the leading commercial power bypassing the Dutch in tonnage of shippings, volume of overseas trade, beginning to compete even on financial services. And what that result is is a tide of new wealth really coursing through British society, ever more shops and vast. And I think people thought insubstantial fortunes being made on the stock market, rather the way that we have anxiety today about, you know, hedge fund managers, having fortunes that have come from nothing.

And then all around, people saw evidence of what they, thought of as a tide of luxury. And this is very anxiety-provoking because there's a possibility that Britain, London, the New Rome, will be brought down by all this luxury, that it will make the British soft, unmanly, un-martial, and inevitably decline. I was a feeling that London, you've mentioned London was a new Rome. How deeply was this felt that there was a decline would set in the decline and fall of the London Empire? Well, there's lots of people in the early 18th century who have a cyclical view of history, and they do return again and again the civic humanists to the image of Rome.

They think that Britain is the greatest, going to be the greatest empire since Rome. But at the same time, they want to hang on to their republican values. After 1688, this is a parliamentary monarchy. We've got representative institutions. And there's great concern, particularly looking over the channel to France, that absolutist France, Catholic, opulent, rich, that if all the people start taking on board all these new things, these luxuries, French operas, china, porcelain, silks, then what is going to happen to those very things

that made Britain great? So unlicensed excesses, as it were, just to be very brief about, is the enemy. Where did the idea of taste come in as that which would sort of tame this tiger? Well, I think that, well, taste, which I suppose the narrowest definition is that capacity for discriminating beauty and perfection in the arts and in literature. I think it's fair to say that people have always discriminated, that people have always made choices between this colour and that colour, and between this book and that book.

But taste is using that kind of metaphor from the senses actually is born in France, the French idea of the goo, so literally the taste. And that comes out of a literary debate between the ancients and the moderns over who has the true claims to culture. And so taste is part of the battle in that. And for the modern's taste is courtly, it's also feminine, it's not pedantic, it's not based in the universities.

So it's something that can be enjoyed by a far greater set of people. In Britain, taste gets taken up at the end of the 17th, the beginning of the 18th century, but I think it gets harnessed to the debates around luxury. Can you tell us why that happened? because the idea of an idea, as it were, again, it's rather simple, but it's basically right.

Lagou in France of the taste, as we're crossing over the channel and still retaining its name and its basic idea becomes something different. How just can you go into a bit? How did that happen? Well, I think it's taken up by various thinkers and writers, particularly Shaftesbury. I think we'll hear a bit more about later.

But I think one of the reasons why it's so appealing or there's even a feeling that you would need it in Britain is after 1688, the authority of the court is declining. So unlike in France, in Versailles, where you've got Louis XIV, says, if I wear it, it is perfection, you must all copy it. In Britain, you've got a situation where you've got a burgeoning commercial sector, the emergence of hacks, critics, and so much more open debate about what taste might be. And I think that's why there's this anxiety about, well, what are the rules?

What are the true rules? Will somebody tell me? And one of the persons who was told early on, John Mullen, as Amanda mentions, was the Earl of Shaftesbury. Can you tell us how he came into this fray and what he said that was important? Yeah, I mean, the extraordinary thing is, a surprising thing, I think, in a way, is that we can, Taste has this economic basis, as Amanda was describing. To be blunt, it dignifies expense, really. But it also has an intellectual basis, which we wouldn't necessarily.

necessarily expect. And Sharsbury, the third Earl of Sharsbury, who is, as his title indicates, a peculiarly philosopher. And he writes in the, he's actually bred up to be a politician, but because of his terrible asthma, he can't go to London. So he writes his philosophy on his estate in Dorset. And he is, I think, the first person who makes aesthetics, brings aesthetics to the centre of philosophy. and the exercise of taste becomes for him, not just a matter of sort of choosing one kind of goods over another, it becomes a deeply important kind of, it's at the heart of the most important intellectual choices a person makes.

And there's two things, really, two reasons for that. The first is that Shaftsbury is a representative of a new kind of attitude to God. He's a deist, which means that he certainly believes in a god, but he believes in a God with whom we commune by looking at the beauty, the order, the proportion of the created universe. He doesn't believe in the Bible and priests and all that stuff. It's a philosophical thing. And of course beauty is at the heart of that because beauty is the best evidence of God. And sort of the man of taste is actually undertaking a sort of religious, a religious exercise in appreciating order.

And the second thing is that he actually. believes that judgments of beauty and of tasteful preference are actually, that's what explains our moral judgments, too. So if there's no sort of set of Christian rules about how we should behave, what is virtue? And he says virtue is our sense of, it's like our sense of order and proportion in external things. It's a sense of virtue, he says it's nothing other than the sense of beauty in society. So it's an aesthetic thing. So the man of cultivation and taste is actually a moral man too. That doesn't apply all that often or not always by any means, as we know.

But the interesting thing is that do you think that he is taking up the wave that was described by Amanda, coming over from France, the commerce, the world, he's he part of it? I'm trying to link the philosophy with the actuality. Well, he would think that he's not. I mean, he would think that he's above it all, and in some sort of literal economic way, he is above it all. And it becomes, it's actually not coincidental that he's an aristocrat,

that he's a lord, because I think, you know, as the story of taste unwinds, we'll find that in the first half of the 18th century, lords have a big role to play. And one of the reasons they have a big role to play is what you called earlier, arbiters of taste, is that they affect to be above it all. Can you bring in more of... Are we talking about Hume and Burke? Just briefly, are they following these ideas

and bringing taste to bear inside their philosophy? No one can come back to that. Yes, I mean, that sense... Charlesbury is very influential, but very sort of slowly and by degrees and often through translators and disciples. And he does bequeathed to later 18th century philosophers, Hume in particular, I think,

this sense that moral judgment, that all are most important decisions about what's good and bad in the world are actually just like aesthetic judgments, really. They're the same thing. And that that's where, therefore it's all about proportion and the sense of being pleased aesthetically.

And that the duty in a way of an educated person is to cultivate themselves in such a way as they're most receptive to order and elegance in the world. The twinning of beauty and goodness, Asper, But it was this, the idea of taste was developed most spectacularly among the middle class, among the reading classes, by the spectator and particularly by Addison two or three times a week. Can you tell us briefly what he brought to the table? Well, I think Addison's exactly contemporary with Sharsbury. And Addison really is the person who makes the business of, the exercise of taste absolutely fundamental to the business of being a modern citizen.

I mean, he doesn't so much write essays on taste as other philosophers did, but taste is in almost every single number of the spectator. And what he says is that if we want to, as it were, distinguish good pleasures from bad pleasures in society, this commercial society that Amanda has described for us, how can we make sure that we don't succumb to mere appetites? How can we make sure that we're something better, than pursuers of pleasure? Well, there are these things called the elegant arts or the refined arts, the polite arts, all these various phrases he uses. And these are the things which

teach us that we're better than mere pursuers of pleasure. And taste is this capacity we cultivate, which makes us receptive to those. And it's a sociable thing because taste is also what we can talk about in the coffee house with other gentlemen and occasionally over the tea table with ladies as well. So it becomes a distinguishing mark of the polished, modern citizen. Jeremy Black, broadly speaking, can you give us the underlying design rules of the taste that was being brought to bear on society at the time by, which was talking about a small group of people, but a very influential group of people, and we could even talk about percolating down with some sense of it being real at that time. Tia had just come in. Anyway, can you talk about the design

rules under that. The design rules, excuse me, the design rules are philosophical and practical. In philosophical terms, they're opposed to enthusiasm and opposed to excess. So in other words, taste is originally conceptualised as, as it were, an opposition to religious enthusiasm and Puritanism, so that's part of it. It's also opposed to what is seen as the excess linked with the court of Charles II. And this carries through... And the excess of the civil war, which was still within... living memory. Yeah. So if you want to look, absolutely right,

if you want to look at an opposition to taste in the 18th century, think of Methodism, think of enthusiasm. And in many senses, what you're talking about is a way of behaviour, which is seen as, as it were, appropriate virtue, as opposed to what is seen as dangerous enthusiasm. So all of the kind of design rules in terms of balance, in terms of order, in terms of perspective, in terms of, as it were, buildings, for example,

if you look later in the century neoclassical buildings, are seen as in some ways a reaction against what you don't like. It's a reaction against the Baroque, for example. It's a reaction against a whole set of rules which are seen, aesthetic rules which are seen as in some way un-English or un-British. So in the artefacts, you're taking on John Mullen's point that the objects, the proportions, the harmony and so on, are aesthetically reflecting or expressing a moral order

that is profitable to the unlicensed appetites of the new commercial, lustful, abandoned, world-conquering world? Yes, I think John is absolutely right. And in a way, the idea of balance and taking the middle path and order and stability, in a sense, can then be used against whatever you don't like. It's a common language we can always use against what we don't like. It's a particularly important language to use in the 18th century because people are very much in the shadow of their anxieties about religious enthusiasm.

And I think that's quite important because in the 18th century, a lot of scholarship in the last 20, 30 years, has emphasised debates within the religious community, debates within the Protestant tradition. And in a way, taste is a vocabulary for an ordered religiosity. Can I just have one more dig in to the idea of London, the New Rome, and looking back to the classical world as a model for the way we build, can you talk more about that?

Yes, I mean, I think Amanda's absolutely correct. There is an enormous anxiety. that luxury is going to subvert virtue. I mean, if on the one hand virtue can be subverted by enthusiasm, on the other hand, an exuberant interest in self-gratification is seen as sapping collective virtues. And in one respect, very interestingly, taste argues to a later interest in collectivism.

Taste, after all, is a matter not just of individual taste, but also how you comport yourself towards others in your community, how you do not follow simply selfishness, so that again, exactly the themes we're bringing out, aesthetic judgment and philosophical judgment is linked to a political understanding of the best way for a civil community to operate, and ancient Rome is seen as having fallen

because it lacked this mediating moral moderation. Now, one of the fascinating things about this is it didn't only dwell in the land of philosophy and in a land of which sliced right through to a great deal of society, we can't possibly say the whole of society. there we are. Amanda Vickery, and he came into the home, and therefore he came into the territory of women. Can you tell us why that became very significant, the home is a place for the expression of taste and the discussion of taste by women? I think the first thing that I would say is agree with what's gone before about how taste is more than just aesthetic judgments.

Clearly people felt that it could be expressed in your house, in the order of proportion. of your architecture in the delicacy of your interior decorating, but also in the way that you walked in your manners. And so once you get a kind of argument whereby taste is this ineffable thing, which women by their gentility might be able to express in the way they held a teacup or perhaps the way they choose a ribbon, once it tastes opens up, I think that then there is plenty of rhetorical room for women to claim it. Not that someone like Shasbury would be very happy with this sort of form.

because he famously thought that all the new consumer luxuries were lady fancies, he called them, and had to be regarded with stoic distaste, you know, that you'd have a bit of classical sculpture, but you certainly wouldn't be having all this Chinese trash. So throughout the 18th century, there is a burbling anxiety that some of these new tastes are effeminizing, they are unmanly, and that, you know, what are you doing with all this porcelain on your mantelpiece? So I think that that's the corner, the wedge really, that women manage to sort of push in. And increasingly you find women making claims to the Empire of Taste. A particular set of letters that I'm most interested in are those of Lord and Lady Shelburne.

Lord Shelburne goes on to be Prime Minister. But when he's at the Board of Trade, he's newly married and it's an arranged marriage, but it's fantastically successful marriage. They're young, they're happy, they're in love. and taste is the terrain of their marriage. They go around all the shops together, choosing things, and when occasionally they're alone, which isn't very often, he reads aloud to her from Birx, the sublime and beautiful,

and she plays on her guitar. And then they leaf through their architectural prints together. And when she's in labour with their first baby, he calls on William Hunter, the great surgeon, and while William Hunter's coming across town, Lady Shelburne's in labour, and they're looking at their architectural prints together. I mean, it shows you that this is this world

that husbands and wives might expect to enjoy together. But it wasn't just too old of Irish secrets, Jeremy Black. This went down to, let's call them, the ever-rising middle classes, but there they were. They wanted to be there too, and they brought it into their homes, and they went for war and so on. So can you just be a bit more detail of what they're bringing into their homes? Yes, I think, first of all, the objects of the new society,

teapots and so on, the actual rituals of the new society in terms of domestic space, family music making. The pianos and tea times. And interestingly enough, crucially also, not just in Britain, but also in the British Empire, if you were to go into America and you would go to a place like Philadelphia or New York or Boston, you would see exactly the same debates about taste

and exactly the same way in which taste is used in order to create the idea of here we are living on the frontier of society, but nevertheless comporting ourselves as if we are at the cutting edge of how it is appropriate to behave. Wedgwood and Chippendale became these two. The manufacture of what they did was an important part of the middle class is moving towards that. The key element I would say, which is absolutely brings out your theme,

is the idea is that you could have taste without necessarily having to have birth. Indeed, we can take this a stage further. There was a literature about how the elite had, as it were, betrayed the country by their fascination for foreign culture, for example, Italian opera, French theatre, you know, sort of generally undesirable things. And the idea was that in some respects true culture, the culture of balance, the culture of a kind of ordered, polite, elegance and gentility

could just as easily be shown by somebody who was even a servant. I mean, if you think about Pamela in Richardson, Pamela shows in many senses a much better taste than many of the social betters. I think that's, taste is potentially a socially very subversive idea. But that's a very contestant. Can I go to John for one time?

Then I come back to you. John, can you just, This obviously, as Jeremy's really said it up, is an arena for mockery and for a rapid rise of persons of obscurity, like servants who become really titled ladies at the end of the book. So can you tell us a bit about the sort of the way it was mocked as well it was embraced? Because those two went together, didn't they? Yeah, absolutely. They went together almost from the off, as they say.

And often, of course, I mean, that quotient. the head of the programme about what is taste, what is this terribly important thing, which we're asking the programme, was of course, the question they kept asking. So being able to distinguish between good and bad taste and mock those who had bad taste was an important activity amongst those who thought taste

was very, very important. I mean, one great literary example of this dear to my heart is Pope who was certainly a man of taste and was a great friend, for instance, of Lord Burlington, one of the most important arbiters of good taste in the early 18th. The man who brought Palladianism, one of the great movements of taste of the early 18th century, to England. And, you know, in a kind of classic story,

went off on the grand tour and came back from Italy with the lumber of art and a lot of new, or he would have said old, ideas about what beauty in proportion were. But what we remember Pope for is not actually, as a propagandist for taste, but as a satirist of bad taste. And, I mean, his epistle, he wrote a wonderful poem called an epistle to Burlington.

And it's all about bad taste. It starts being about good taste, but he can't keep on that subject for more than a couplet or two. And he's off on bad taste. And most of the poem is taken up by a memorably wonderful and witty portrait of what we would recognize, I think, as an 18th century country, estate and country house. And we would now go and see it and think, doesn't it look wonderful?

And Pope describes all that's wrong with it. It's a work of massive, massive littleness, he says, of vulgarity. This guy's removed hills and scooped out lakes. He has wonderful collections of sort of books, but they're only there for show, music played while you eat, which puts you off your meal. And this man who's called Tymon is an aristocrat. The suffering eye, inverted nature sees, trees cut to statues, statues, thick as trees. That's what it's like out there. And this man, Tymon, is a representative aristocrat with lots and lots of money and bad taste. And of course, the reaction to the poem tells you about the problem with taste,

which was the readers who read this terribly amusing poem, all started identifying who Tyman really was. And Pope got into terrible trouble over it, because they all said it was a lord who was a friend of his, whom he'd betrayed and was belittling. And Pope said it's nobody in particular, but everybody thought it was some particular aristocrat, as inevitably they would.

Amanda? I think part of the problem with Taste is that it's based on a set of rules. So anything that's based on a set of rules that can be written down is ostensibly open to the masses as long as they can read. But at the same time, Taste is also supposed to be the long practice, It's long exposure to the rules so that you intuitively know what's correct in any given circumstance. But I think, as we've said, poor taste is the theme on which the 18th century is most voluble.

There's not actually a lot of commentary on what good taste is in actuality. It's mostly about getting it wrong. It's one of the favourite, favourite obsessions. And one of the things I think that critics fall back on is the ancient classical idea of decorum, which is still embroiled in taste. Decorum the idea that everybody should decorate according to their situation, that your surrounding should reflect status. So magnificence is fine if you're shaftsbury, but magnificence is emphatically not fine if you're Squire mushroom or Lady Squanderfield or someone's just made their money on the stock market.

Hence you get a flood of commentary on the monstrous impertinence, the tasteless glitter and the profusion of the people who are dressing above their station. And there's this hatred, really, that all this new money seems to have come from absolutely nowhere. People would argue it's unfettered by classical education. And one of the things that people always focus on is all the villas around Twickenham. So they're always going on about this. And or clapham. And there's a famous satire which is called a poem in 1756 and a print that goes with it called the SIT's Country Box. And it's a much love.

The SIT, CIT, meaning citizen, a man of the Zit's. of the city of London, and he's retiring to his rural idyll in Clapham and he's built his house, but his house has every architectural feature on it. So it has a Chinese dragon on the top. It has a Venetian window. It has a Gothic window. It has a portico.

So the joke is it's got all the money. He can get all the architects, but he hasn't the taste to absorb these into a tasteful, harmonious whole. You can see that also taking up classical themes. Many of these people, exactly as Amanda says, have

read the classical literature and of course one of the classic things in Roman poetry is often making fun of new men of money then. So in some respects they are saying we know how to have true taste and this has been a long-standing problem in society. Another thing that's happening, Jamie, if I can come to you

for a second now, is that actually the middle class public is now stuff is available to them that was not available. If you want to hear good music, it was in private, now it's being played in public. If you want to see paintings there in private, now you can go and see a lot more paintings. and the novel is reaching a public.

It isn't literature for a few. So the availability of the information which would give you the basis to enter into this argument at quite a high level is there for a lot more people. For example, take music which you mention. It is easily possible to purchase sheet music so you can play the latest music in your own home as long as you have the wherewithal to have a few musical instruments.

And you're absolutely right. It is not necessary to be a member of a charmed circle in order to take part in the arts or literature. And as Amanda says, this is disturbing for some people. This is disturbing. The idea that, in fact, pretty well anybody who's got a little bit of money can reach out. And again, exactly the same thing in America where there's a tension between Virginia gentlemen

and what they see as the vulgarities of the mob in Philadelphia or Boston. The mob, in fact, are perfectly decent ordinary artisans. And they're not wrong that actually people of middling fortunes are buying all these new things. We know from inventories that it's the wives, of the East India Company merchants, who were some of the earliest adopters of things like porcelain, you know, exotic Chinese, blue and white porcelain,

lacquerware, Indian chinses. And so this idea that all these things are coming in, affecting the balance of trade, why are we importing all these things? And you can see it must have been incredibly annoying if you're a sort of, you know, vaguely impoverished gentlewoman to see the wife of a merchant swanking around.

And no wonder you would retreat to, no, no, it's not just money, and plunder, you've got to have true taste. But it went everywhere, and I wanted just to keep emphasising how wide spectrum is covered. And John, I know you want to say, if you want to say what you want to say it, but I'm going to ask you a question as well.

The gardens at Stowe in the 1730s, first they were open to the public, so they can come and see the gardens, the great garden. And secondly, they were remodelled by Capability Brown in a way that was the taste of the time, and it was a dramatic remodeling. Do you want to talk about that?

Yes, I mean, gardening is landscape gardening becomes a big deal early in the 18th century and the person we mentioned Burlington is a great very keen on gardens and I mean the person we know

we've heard of probably most is Capability Brown and gardening of course Capability Brown called Capability Brown not because he was capable but because he used to say to these rich men your garden

your park has capability and what he meant was we're going to shift a lot of soil and cut down some trees and maybe move some buildings and there it'll become something picturesque. And I think one way of kind of fixing on this movement which starts in the early 18th century goes right through. It's right there into the early 19th century with Humphrey Repton and it's cropping up in Jane Austen novels still. So it goes on for a long time and the differences between the different garden fashions which were very visible. to the people at the time are invisible to us.

It's just a sort of picture we have of an 18th century park garden where the park kind of goes into the countryside outside and that was the key thing. Using the ha-ha. Yes. Horace Walpole said about Kent who didn't invent but used the ha-ha, William Kent. He said he let the fence and saw all nature was a garden. Pope said, call in the country.

That's what you do to your estate. In fact, they had lots of sort of different fashions, but the important idea, I think, is the idea which Addison wrote about as well, of the landscape, that word, that idea, that pictures and natural scenes had a relationship to each other. You appreciated nature more

if you learnt to look at it as though it were a kind of painting. So you took your clawed glass around and looked at nature through a mirror to get a representation which could be a painting. Yes, you went around in search of picturesque views. And towards the end of the 18th century man called William Gilpin did this very literally, and you could follow his books and stand at the bits of the banks of the Y where it looked most like a picture.

And people did, lots of people did. The whole point, as you were bringing out your theme, Melvin, is that very large numbers of people read the novels, very large numbers of people did these travels, very large numbers of people saw paintings in public galleries. One of the great claims, I think, though, if you are elite and you can keep going back to it, is the fact that you've sent your sons to Rome.

I think that's one of the things you do, is that if you make it as a merchant, you send your eldest son off to Rome on the Grand Tour, comes back with a bit of knowledge of Pompey and Herculaneum. It doesn't get stuck in Paris on the way. Yes, of course, there's all sorts of jokes about the young Melody, you know, carousing with prostitutes and not, in fact, looking at these ruins at all.

And you're supposed to be able to come back, as we heard, with your bits of trash from all over Europe and put them in that. Well, but at the time, well, I think that they all thought all of it was fantastic. But lots of commentators said, well, they just pick up whatever's offered to them. And actually they have no true connoisseurship. Why should they have? Why should a 21-year-old?

I withdraw, absolutely. But then you set it up in your house, and then all the middling sort and the polite, then they all go around and visit it and look at the gardens. Let's take a couple of minutes to look at this, because this has been underneath the conversation for the last half hour or so, And that is the notion, the taste, because we've got to hold onto that, it's an idea and it's an obsession, and it permeates society. Great philosophers are right, great artists are writing about people using it in their homes,

their houses, their dress, the way they walk, the way they take tea and so and so forth. But the bubbling away there or festering ways, the notion that you can only really have it if you're born to it, if you're aristocrat, if you come from a certain class. and this is one of your birth rights and everybody else is a pretender and won't really get it. Polly, because the goalposts, every time they think they're getting there, the goalposts are moved yet again now. I think that is contentious.

I mean, I think that's a very good, that is a theme. Yes, there is a social snobbery that is built into it, but there are other narratives of taste and there are other ways of looking at it. I mean, for example, one of the ways that sometimes people from the wider world are idealised, the idea of the noble savage, the idea of the, is the idea that these people actually have true virtue and true value. So I would say it's much more socially complex.

But that's later, isn't it? That is later. That coincides with the wordsworthian idea of the natural and the beauty. I would agree with Amanda that what you've got is simultaneously, and this makes it very interesting, you've got a vocabulary that can be used in order to discriminate between people and in order to be critical of those who appear to be upwardly socially aspirational. But you've also got a vocabulary that is potentially subversely.

because the whole idea in theory is not necessarily open simply to people with birth. So I think it's both ways. I think it's very interesting though. Who are the legislators in taste and where do new ideas come from? And returning to Wedgwood, who you mentioned, he's a fascinating case because Wedgwood thinks you can't, he's obviously a fantastic innovator, absolutely brilliant chemist, that he understands pottery backwards and forwards. But every time he brings out a new pot, he says,

well, I need the stamp of the legislator's in taste. And so what he does is he endlessly tries to court what he sees as the leading connoisseurs, royalty, nobility, and one or two less exalted connoisseurs. And then once they pick it up and it gets established, then it becomes a fashion. So the new fashions have come from this triangulation, really, of the entrepreneurs, the critics and the nobility.

John Muller. Well, I think this is true. I think one thing that perhaps we have a number, established is that there's also chronology here, so that Lord Burlington and Wedgwood are not in the same worlds, you know, they're almost a century apart, there's certainly 70 years

apart, and that this making available of, I think what we would now call high culture. I mean, some of it isn't that high, but, you know, music and painting and literature and the polite arts, the making widely available

of those, often now on the basis of just paying a price for a ticket. You don't get invited. You buy your ticket. You go to it. That, I think, comes largely from the mid-18th century. And all those developments in the later 18th century, I think, kind of herald a world rather different from the world of Burlington and Shaftsbury and these sort of cultural nabobs. And it's a world, there's a wonderful novel written in the 1770s by Fanny Bernie called Evelyna, which takes you on a kind of timeout tour, really, of late 18th century London through all these cultural pleasures which make you genteel and you and that's available

to anybody. The heroine of the novel is a sort of she's a genteel girl but she's a nobody and you can mix with lords and so on who are also going to these events but also it's a world in which you have to they're all these sort of vulgar people. They're all these silversmith's families from the city and it's accessible to them as well and you're really in the world which I think lots of people were recognised from Jane Austen actually where there's a lot of middling classes all clustering together, all trying to claim they know about the piano and they know what a good painting is and they've all got their own little gardens, not huge parks anymore, they've all got nice gardens. And how can you tell the difference between the people who are really genteel and the ones who are

vulgar? And that's become by the late 18th century a really common thing and no longer a socially lofty thing. Jeremy, can I ask you, you mentioned the British Empire, if you go to, I think you're said Philadelphia or Boston, you see the same, having the same tea, especially in Boston, having lots of tea in Boston. But when we're talking about this, are we talking, because it's very intense the way it happened in this country,

the British Empire. Is it particularly British Empire, English-stroke British Empire? It's certainly very strong in the British Empire. It's a way in which people organise themselves socially. It's much more of the future of, say, of the British Empire than the French Empire. And the French Empire, essentially, your social position is set by your relationship to the political authority of the state.

So if you go to somewhere like Quebec in the 1750s, it is dominated by a hierarchy of the government officials, the church and so on. If you go to the equivalent British city in the empire in the 1750s, Kingston, Jamaica, for example, or Charleston, South Carolina, obviously there is the social discrimination against people and ethnic discrimination against slaves and people down at the bottom. But within those who are British settlers, the organising of hierarchy in many senses is related to a mixture of taste

and the idea that you can recreate yourself. Nobody essentially really knows if you're in Kingston, Jamaica, what your background is, what your family background is back in London. So one of the great purposes of empire is to recreate yourself socially and you recreate yourself socially by showing taste, by showing discrimination. And it's going out, it goes out to the stage where the word taste, I really your notes, John, at first uttered in the seven, 17th century in a play in English

playing in the 17th. He has not good... Congrieve in the double dealer, yes. No good... A man of no good toast. Yeah, well, it's telling that it's the first ever occasion is somebody saying somebody hasn't got it. It goes back to that point.

It goes onto the stage and it goes into dress and so and so forth. Amanda, you're bursting to say something. And I'm not going to spoil it by asking a question. Well, I think that one of the reasons why it's such an obsession in Britain is that we are particularly interested in luxury. It's not quite the same obsession

in France, but also it's a more mobile society. And given that, the possibilities for making yourself, no wonder everybody wants to know what is the right choice. But I think there's a gulf between the aesthetic literature and the mockeries, the aesthetic literature is saying, oh, everybody must have true taste and must be part of their good breeding. And then the mockeries, we say, look at all these people getting it wrong.

But then how are you, as an individual consumer, going to get it right? I looked at all the letters to a wallpaper firm at the end of the London wallpaper firm at the... end of the 18th century. And everybody's worried in that. Whatever their social status, they're all saying, oh, Mr. Trollope, will you tell me whether we should cut the corners out? Would green be okay for my neat and pretty parsonage? Nobody wants to get it wrong. But what they all fall back on, surprisingly, is the language of decorum. We haven't talked about the novels, we can't not,

albeit briefly, John, how do they figure in this? What, the 18th century novels? Well, I mean, one way in which they figure is that many people who would look to literature, we haven't much talked about literature, as something people consumed as an example of taste, and Addison felt literature was on the most important things. But one question is, are novels even part of this kind of a cultural sort of reservoir of good things, things that are good for you? And a lot of people would have said that actually they're not on the map.

and what we now see as a great literary achievements of the period are indeed sort of a vulgar form which people of taste shouldn't be relishing. Jeremy mentioned the evidence from Richardson's Pamela earlier. I mean, Richardson was greatly mocked by arbiters of taste like Lady Mary Murtley-Montague for trying to write about polite manners because this man was a jumped-up printer

and he knew nothing about it. Jane Austen's quite smirking about taste, isn't she, as well? Yeah. Particularly in interior decoration. She's great. She's very up to the minute on when the veranda's introduced and who gets it wrong. And you can always see...

Why do you use the word smoking, though? Well, because she's quietly laughing a lot of the time. And in many of her novels, families are transforming themselves. And there's always jokes about the old... The parents are in the old style and the house is Wayne Scott and the daughters are in the young style with their harp and introducing a bit of disarray.

I mean, what we're showing is that taste is, like freedom or liberty, other great 18th century phrases. In other words, they both mean a lot, but they could also be used for contention. In other words, what I stand for is freedom and liberty and what you stand for as despotism. And you're saying what I stand... I'm wondering a John Mullen.

But I mean, I think in other words, I don't think we're disagreeing here. What I think we're saying is that taste becomes a universal language. As a universal language, it is then employed against those who you disapprove of by arguing that they lack taste. I mean, the one thing I would say about novels, which is still true in the case of Jane Austen,

but truer in the 18th century, is that essentially what the story is in most 18th century novels, it's a story of how somebody either becomes a gentleman or a lady, really. And often from low or they're often low origins like Pamela or Tom Jones, and nobody knows who the hell he is, and they become a lady or a gentleman, and acquiring taste, or somehow in Pamela's case, miraculously showing it. I mean, she can write elegantly and knows what she should be reading,

even though she's a servant girl, some rather clumsy explanations of how that could be. That's part of the process. So, and this was laughed at, derided at the time, but actually it's become a rather triumphant story, I think, by the late 18th century. Well, aren't they part of her qualifications, really, and why she is a true bride

is that she's absorbed all of these features? I think the interesting question, though, is what happens to this in the early 19th century. And it does seem to, or by the Victorians, because there doesn't seem to be the same obsession around the word taste. I think the debate has shifted, rather than the way in the 80s everybody used to talk about yuppies. I mean, we've still got yuppies.

We don't talk about them anymore. We talk about our global footprint. So the same things are being discussed, but under different terms. And by the Victorians, you get the rise of the museums, the rise of the art colleges, and you get far greater variety, really. And so I think the terms of the debate shift and somehow taste is perhaps seen as an old-fashioned thing.

I agree with the matter, but again, The parallel is with liberty. Liberty starts off as being something that gentlemen and aristocrats have and know how to use against the monarchy. It then by the early 19th century is diffused right the way through the body politic, for men, less so, I'm afraid, for women, but right the way through the body politic, and the Americans are showing how they can take it even further. So taste in a way becomes something that socially spreads. Yeah. And I think that's very important. Well, and now tasteful is the ultimate put down, isn't it? Thank you. Very much. All trivia. All trivia. me black. I really enjoyed that. And we'll be back next week talking about the philosophy and theology of guilt.

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