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  • The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing by James Noggle
  • Ian Higgins
James Noggle. The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing. Oxford: Oxford, 2012. Pp. viii + 234. £60; $110.

Much of this fine book is outside the chronological range covered by the Scriblerian, but not the opening chapter on Pope’s Epistle to Burlington (1731). There is a large body of theory and scholarship on taste, “the most potent evaluative term in eighteenth-century British culture,” and Mr. Noggle converses with it. He considers “the two temporal modes of taste,” the “compound character of taste,” in the 1730s to the 1780s. Taste was understood as an individual’s immediate capacity to appreciate and judge a thing, an intense, instantaneous unmediated act of a particular sensibility. But taste also works through time, reflecting slowly evolved, collective processes and outcomes that consolidate into such descriptors as modern, Gothic, classic, British, Chinese, manly, or feminine taste.

The book proceeds principally through close reading of exemplary canonical texts that “thrive on the exchange between taste’s two temporal components.” Chapters consider writings on landscape gardening by William Gilpin, Joseph Warton, and Horace Walpole; taste and history in Hume’s work; taste in works by More, Barbauld, and Burney; and taste as fashion in the work of Adam Smith, and Joshua and Frances Reynolds. The final chapter is an absorbing account of William Beckford’s writings on connoisseurship and collecting. The book is based on contemporary texts and contexts, but in its Introduction and Epilogue especially, it engages with modern theoretical accounts of eighteenth-century taste and culture. Mr. Noggle contests the view, prominently articulated by Pierre [End Page 49] Bourdieu, which sees eighteenth-century taste as a “denial of the social.” “It is a fantasy of recent scholarship,” Mr. Noggle argues: “the double discursive temporality of taste” enabled contemporary writers to use taste to criticize the very ideological constructs that many scholars think it upholds. Mr. Noggle conceives his book as a “defence of taste” against those cultural critics who would reduce it to the ideological function of serving hegemony and against a version of aesthetics that would isolate taste from its social and historical circumstances.

Taste was a much contested term. It was paradigmatic in the polite culture promoted by Whigs such as Addison. In this book’s index, entries under “Whigs” greatly outnumber those under “Tories.” Opposition satirists such as the author of The Modern Englishman (1738) had no doubt that taste was the servant of Hanoverian Whig hegemony: “The reigning Foible of the Times explode, / This Thing call’d TASTE, this new fam’d ALAMODE!” Mr. Noggle might perhaps have accorded more space to oppositional voices and their use of the two temporalities of taste. Swift’s satiric commentary on taste and politeness across several works is not noticed. For Addison, taste is innate, but it finds its medium and is cultivated in conversation with men of polite genius. For Swift, taste was not to be attuned to the echo of Whig coffeehouse conversation. He looked to the period of Charles I’s Personal Rule as the apogee of politeness in England. It is Charles I’s architect Inigo Jones, Palladio’s foremost English disciple, who exemplifies taste for Pope in the oppositional poem which Mr. Noggle treats extensively.

Ubiquitous in the century’s discourse of taste, the Epistle to Burlington satirizes false taste and emphasizes terms such as “use,” “sense,” and “nature,” as well as “taste.” Mr. Noggle writes that “Pope had every reason for distrusting taste’s role as an index of modernity and the present of culture, promoted by Whiggish, Walpolean writers.” Pope’s project in Burlington aligns taste with Burlington’s. To support an anti-commercialist civic humanist judgment that reflected his “Patriot,” and perhaps “crypto-Jacobite” ideology, Pope invokes the instantaneous immediacy of taste. Wresting taste from the Whig present, Pope, in Mr. Noggle’s account, becomes an enthusiast. Taste is guided by an inner light of sense. It is a spontaneous appreciation, not something to be derived from social exchange or ruled by Addisonian conversation between gentlemen. Unsubordinated to external canons of style, taste resides in individual...

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