Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 89)

Beginning with Adam Smith's dictum that labour was the most significant human occupation, and William Cowper's idealisation of 'The Task', Richard Adelman traces the ways in which Romantic writers responded to a debate over the dangers and rewards of idle contemplation taking place in the second half of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Evolving over a series of discourses which the book considers at length - Scottish Enlightenment political economy, penal and educational reform debates, literature, British and German aesthetic theory, social philosophy - this debate precipitates the growth of a 'British idealism' in these decades. Exploring the thought of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Schiller, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, and many of their contemporaries, this study analyses the chain of events that leads to this 'British idealism', and considers its social and political consequences in the cultural theory of the first decades of the nineteenth century. "Reconstructing the literary and philosophical reaction to Adam Smith's dictum that man is a labouring animal above and before all else, this study explores the many ways in which Romantic writers presented idle contemplation as the central activity in human life. By contrasting the British response to Smith's political economy with that of contemporary German Idealists, Richard Adelman also uses this consideration of the importance of idleness to Romantic aesthetics to chart the development of a distinctly British idealism in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Exploring the work of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Schiller, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and many of their contemporaries, this study pinpoints a debate over human activity and capability taking place between 1750 and 1830, and considers its social and political consequences for the cultural theory of the early nineteenth century"-- Provided by publisher Introduction 1. The division of labour 2. Utilitarian education and aesthetic education 3. Cowper, Coleridge and Wollstonecraft 4. Coleridge's pantisocracy, biographia and Church and state Conclusion Epilogue: Wordsworth and Kingsley. This study traces the ways in which Romantic writers responded to a debate over the dangers and rewards of idle contemplation, and examines the resulting growth of a 'British idealism'.