The Man of Taste

This volume opens a lively investigation into how eighteenth‑century writers defined and disputed the notion of “taste.” Drawing on essays by Addison, Shaftesbury, and Pope, it shows how taste was presented as both an innate aesthetic faculty and a moral compass, shaping judgments about art, literature, and even architecture. The author traces the shift from a cultivated sensibility to a fashionable status symbol, revealing the cultural stakes of looking and being looked at.

Through careful readings of satirical verses and critical pamphlets, the book illustrates how poets such as Pope and their contemporaries used humor to expose pretensions and to question the reliability of self‑appointed connoisseurs. It also examines the broader philosophical backdrop, linking aesthetic taste with Shaftesbury’s moral sense and Hutcheson’s theories of passion, and shows why the debate mattered to the newly wealthy eager to display cultural legitimacy. Listeners will come away with a richer sense of how a seemingly abstract term guided social ambition, literary rivalry, and the very design of households in the Augustan age.