The Spirit of Inquiry
The Spirit of Inquiry
The chapter examines the virtue and pleasure of curiosity as a growing characteristic of the age. It examines the growth of the flâneur, and of public guides to urban cultures, following the success of Egan’s Life in London. In addition to curiosity as a form of entertainment, it considers the practice as a moral and political necessity in the emerging political culture of late Georgian and Victorian Britain. Paul Pry became part of the more democratic political discourse at the national and local level, taking the Poor Laws as a particular example. The final section examines the career of the last great caricaturist William Heath, who used Paul Pry as his nom de plume for the final flourishing of the genre in the late 1820s. The chapter concludes with a reassessment of Jurgen Habermas’s influential account of the rise and fall of the public sphere.
Keywords: flâneur, curiosity, Pierce Egan, political discourse, political inquiry, caricature, Cruikshank brothers, William Heath, Habermas, public sphere
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