Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Art and the Politics of Public Life

This book examines nineteenth-century interests in beauty, and considers whether these aesthetic pursuits were necessary to British public life.

Lucy Hartley (Author)

9781107184084, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 August 2017

316 pages, 35 b/w illus. 1 table
25.3 x 18 x 2.1 cm, 0.98 kg

'… this is a very interesting and timely book …' Simon Grimble, Notes and Queries

Could the self-interested pursuit of beauty actually help to establish the moral and political norms that enable democratic society to flourish? In this book, Lucy Hartley identifies a new language for speaking about beauty, which begins to be articulated from the 1830s in a climate of political reform and becomes linked to emerging ideals of equality, liberty, and individuality. Examining British art and art writing by Charles Lock Eastlake, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Edward Poynter, William Morris, and John Addington Symonds, Hartley traces a debate about what it means to be interested in beauty and whether this preoccupation is necessary to public political life. Drawing together political history, art history, and theories of society, and supplemented by numerous illustrations, Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain offers a fresh interdisciplinary understanding of the relation of art to its publics.

1. 'Of universal or national interest': Charles Eastlake, the Fine Arts Commission, and the Reform of Taste
2. Reconstituting publics for art: John Ruskin and the Appeal to Enlightened Interest
3. The pleasures and perils of self-interest: calculating the passions in Walter Pater's essays
4. Figuring the individual in the collective: the 'art-politics' of Edward Poynter and William Morris
5. The humanist interest old and new: John Addington Symonds and the nature of liberty.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900 [ACV]