The faculty of possession: Property and the aesthetic in English culture, 1730-1850

This dissertation examines the culture of the English middle-class between 1730 and 1850. It focuses in particular on the role played by property and the act of possession in defining the identity of a middle-class subject. The first chapter investigates the transition from an aristocratic to an agrarian capitalist culture in the English countryside during the eighteenth century, with a particular analysis of the discourse of agricultural improvement. The second chapter outlines the function of property and possession in eighteenth century moral and political philosophy, specifically the relationship between the physical possession of land and cognitive possession of knowledge in the works of John Locke and Immanuel Kant. In the third chapter this research is linked to the status of somatic experience in the aesthetic philosophy of Burke, Hutcheson, Kant, Schiller, and Shaftesbury, leading to the elaboration of a "property-based" model of identity. In the fourth chapter this model is related to the specific cultural practices of the natural style English landscape garden. I argue that there is a parallel between the concept of an original community of the land in liberal political philosophy and the spectacle of an endless expanse of uncultivated land in the gardens designed by Charles Bridgeman and William Kent. In the fifth chapter I develop a concept of moral property to analyze the significance of evangelical programs for the conversion and education of the rural poor under Hannah More and attempts to reform the morals of the middle and upper class by William Wilberforce. In the sixth chapter I explain the influence exercised by the spatial practices of the landscape garden and the moral practices of the evangelicals on the nineteenth century urban middle class. I argue that the landscape garden and evangelical schools provided models for the development of suburbs and secular urban reform movements in the Victorian era. I focus here on Clapham Common, a suburb of London, and on the impact of Malthusian political economy on the passage of the Poor Law Reform of 1834.