Paradise Preserved

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.