Paradise Preserved
Recreations in Eden in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England

Examines the ways in which the idea of an earthly paradise inspired English life and thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Max F. Schulz (Author)

9780521118927, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 3 September 2009

388 pages
24.6 x 18.9 x 2 cm, 0.69 kg

This major book examines the ways in which the idea of an earthly paradise inspired English life and thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Professor Schulz begins with the eighteenth-century passion for landscape gardens - attempts physically to recreate Eden on earth. He traces the 'internalising' of Eden by the Romantic poets and by painters such as Constable and Palmer, and then turns to the Victorian identification of paradise not with a garden but with the city - a technological Eden, achieved by massive feats of engineering that would control the environment. Chapters on Turner, Tennyson, and the Pre-Raphaelites show the increasing disillusion with this urban and mechanised ideal as the century declined towards the purely imaginative paradises of Beardsley's drawings and Whistler's Peacock Room - Eden recreated in the dining room of a Liverpool shipping millionaire. Wide ranging in scope and generously illustrated, Paradise Preserved is a remarkable work of literary, artistic and cultural history.

Introduction: the continuing mystique of Paradise
Part I. Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden Paradises: 1. Gardening Lords
Part II. Romantic Paradisal Bowers, Valleys, and Islands: 2. Blake and the unencing dialectic of Earth and Eden
3. Coleridge and the enchantments of earthly paradise
4. Wordsworth and the Axis Mundi of Grasmere
5. Byron's and Shelley's Hesperian Islands
6. Bewick's, Constable's, and Palmer's Locus Paradisus
7. Crabbe's and Clare's enclosed vales
Part III. Victorian Heavenly Cities and Blessed Damozels: 8. From natural landscape to controlled environment
9. Paxton's Hyde Park Crystal Palace
10. Turner's fabled Atlantis: London, Venice and Carthage as paradisal cityscape
11. Tennyson's celestial Camelot
12. Mid-Victorian London and the angel in the house
13. Pre-Raphaelite tainted gardens, lost ladies, and intruders on the green
14. Rossetti's blessed Eve and her daughters
15. Whistler's peacock room: a curvilinear Locus Spiritus for the Times
Notes' Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]