Antiques.(David Hume)

[An] advantage of industry and of refinements in the mechanical arts [is] that they commonly produce some refinements in the liberal [arts]; nor can one be carried to perfection, without being accompanied, in some degree, with the other. The same age which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers and ship-carpenters.... The spirit of the age affects all the arts, and the minds of men being once roused from their lethargy, and put into a fermentation, turn themselves on all sides, and carry improvements into every art and science.

David Hume, "Of Refinement in the Arts," Political Discourses, 1752.

Georgian England is often portrayed in literature and in art--in portraits and "conversation pieces"--as a golden age of elegance, wit, and tradition. Here was an Arcadian idyll of rustic villages and hamlets, where time stood still and generations of beer-guzzling and roast-beef-eating, four-square country bumpkins plowed the patriarchal furrows. At the top of the social pyramid were Toby-jug squires flanked by their dogs and deferential retainers on their vast country estates. Such evocations of Georgian life may be more myth than reality. A closer reading of the literature and a more thorough study of the fine and decorative arts of the eighteenth century indicate that English life was disparate, fluid, and streaked with contrasts and anomalies. Eminent Georgians were often profit-hungry capitalists, and laborers were as insistent on their rights as modern trade unionists. The ups and downs of fortune is one of the major themes from Robinson Crusoe to Roderick Random.

England's rise was the triumph of a commercial and urban society, not the achievement of a royal court. London became the fastest growing metropolis in Europe, a city of riches, where flagging reputations could be revived, fortunes repaired, and new careers launched without the opposition of well-established rivals. Here the middle ...