Georgian Britain: Modernity and the Middle Classes

Georgians Revealed, an exhibition held at the British Library in London, offers a lively perspective on the cultural history of Britain between 1714 and 1830. Drawing mainly from the library’s awesome bibliographic holdings, it is especially strong on literary culture, though it also displays objects—clothes, porcelain, musical instruments—from the Museum of London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other private and public collections. Furthermore, the accompanying book offers over two hundred full-color illustrations, making the exhibition a valuable teaching and research resource even at remote distance. Georgians Revealed concentrates explicitly on middle-class experiences and concerns; whether this can be equated straightforwardly with “Georgian life” or the coming of “modernity” is a matter for debate.

The exhibition frames itself as an investigation of the “unprecedented economic, social, and cultural changes” in eighteenth-century Britain. The guide leaflet dutifully notes the new constitutional monarchy, military successes, growth in overseas trade and domestic manufacturing, improvements in the transport network, and the expansive shopping, fashion, and entertainment industries. The exhibition is principally interested in the last of these topics: the Georgians’ legacy to the contemporary world turns out to be a “consumerist culture that we can recognise today,” a relentless pursuit of acquisition and display that “enriched the lives of a growing middle class” and “helped to shape modern Britain.”¹

The exhibition contains four overlapping sections. The first, “Public Places, Private Spaces,” concentrates on architecture, interior design, and the social activities of the home. This grouping usefully collapses distinctions between public display and the cultivation of the private self: visitors can examine polite letters alongside the conduct manuals that directed them; and porcelain next to pamphlets celebrating (and satirizing) tea-drinking culture. These arrangements help to question romantic notions of discreet self-hood, instead showing the performative nature of private actions, even the socially constructed nature of privacy itself. They also yield some unexpected and productive connections. One display discusses the Burkean sublime as an influence on conceptions of landscape and gardens, before showing wall-paper bedecked with natural patterns. Some of the key conceptual developments of the period—for example, an interest in the aesthetic sensibilities of the natural world—are shown to have been packaged for tightly commercial reasons. Importantly, this section also draws examples from beyond London. Not only is Grand Tour transnationalism foregrounded as an important source of objects and inspiration, but the exhibition also takes provincial culture seriously, and prevents London from acting as a proxy for the experiences of the whole country.

The second section, “Buying Luxury, Acquiring Style,” deals with fashion and shopping. The display texts argue for the emergence in this period of many key components of consumer culture: spacious shops, advertising, sales catalogs, fashion magazines. There are some witty layouts: Georgian dresses on mannequins are presented in a cabinet with a transparent back, allowing one to observe other exhibition-goers as they continue round the displays. By encouraging visitors to look past the objects and watch other people engaged in acts of looking, the exhibition makes one complicit in the fashionable rituals of furtive scrutiny and judgment. The ironies of fashion are also well emphasized, especially how innovation is set within the often conservative frameworks of socially acceptable appearance and behavior. Strangely, despite some brief allusions to the “dark side of consumerism,” there is little mention of some important components of consumer culture: industrialization, slavery, and imperial markets are referred to only briefly, or are buried in euphemistic language, as in “Britain became wealthy through trade” (55). The accompanying book does mitigate this a little with more extended discussions, but these are surely central components in the story of modern consumption and merit greater prominence.

The third section, “Pleasures of Society, Virtues of Culture,” discusses key facets of the burgeoning leisure industry...