Abstract

Joseph Addison’s 1712 collection of papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination has been read extensively as a founding statement of modern aesthetics. The great majority of studies take Addison’s essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination to be a self-contained document which prevents their authors from turning their attention to The Spectator at large. As I turn my attention to the periodical at large, my aim in this paper is to show how the urban experience of Mr. Spectator was consequential in the emergence of a modern aesthetic discourse. First, I will present the views of Donald Newman, Martha Woodmansee, John Brewer and Wilhelm Dilthey, in order to support the view that the city could be envisaged as a condition for the aesthetic. This lends itself to extra-textual approaches to the periodical, tracing the importance of the social, political and economic contexts for the rise of aesthetics. A short introduction to the scope of aesthetics outside of art will help me recuperate the aesthetic dimension of Mr. Spectator’s reflections on his urban environment. I will then start my analysis of the city as a source of the aesthetic. I argue that the locus of aesthetic theory, Addison’s essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination, needs to be enlarged so as to accommodate Mr. Spectator’s reflections on the city. Tracing back the findings in The Spectator at large to the imagination papers, I show how the metropolis offered Mr. Spectator an immediate space where his two most important aesthetic categories —the new and the great—would be played out.