Paradise Preserved. Recreations of Eden in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England. 1985. 54 illustr. XV,368 p. Lex8vo. Cloth.

Histories of the idea of paradise have tended to stop at the end of theseventeenth century, the assumption being that the so-called Age ofEnlightment marks a decline in Biblical authority and in the religiousorientation of life. This major new study carries the story further andexamines the many ways in which the idea of an earthly paradise continued to inspire English life and thought during the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. The approach is ambitiously interdisciplinary,beginning with a review of the eighteenth-century passion for greatlandscape gardens (Stowe, Stourhead, Hafod, etc.) which sought torecreate Eden on earth. A second section traces the subsequent'internalizing' of Eden by the Romantic poets and by artists such asConstable and Samuel Palmer. Professor Schulz then turns to the Victorians, and their urge to identify paradise not with a garden butwith the city - a technological Eden achieved by massive feats ofengineering that would control the environment. He considers the bridge,canal and railroad construction that represented this conquest, and theCrystal Palace and Great Exhibition of 1851 that proclaimed its success.Chapters follow on Turner, Tennyson, Coventry Patmore and thePre-Raphaelites, tracing an increasing disillusion with an urban andtechnological ideal as the century declined towards the purelyimaginative paradise of Beardsley's drawings and Whistler's PeacockRoom - Eden recreated in the drawing room of a Liverpool shippingmillionaire.