"public sphere.

" This term is shorthand for the world of newspapers,

pamphlets, coffee-houses, and political and social clubs, in which the
nation's affairs were discussed and public opinion was formed. The
development of the state and the public sphere were accompanied by the
growth of trade, science, and technology, the waning of religious zeal, the
rise of reason and politeness, and the legitimation of political "party."
And together they contributed to the formation of practices and institutions
which made it possible for the English to live with their undeniable
cultural, religious, and political diversity. Differences were managed:
while contest was allowed in some arenas, partisanship was rigorously
excluded from other areas of life. In practice, the same institution or
process could embody both principles: "by a curious paradox that same
transformation of the professions which was so vital a force for social
change in England became almost by the same token, a powerful
tranquillising and stabilising agent as well.'4 The same can be said of the
many associations which came into being in our period. This was a great
age of joining and belonging: from leisure activities such as subscription
concerts, musical societies, choirs, and bell-ringing, to discussion clubs
and coffee-houses, from setting up almshouses and hospitals to building
bridges and policing the community, men of property and good will came
together because that was simply the most effective way of getting things
done. Contradictory impulses were often at work simultaneously. Religious
and political partisanship led to strife in existing institutions of
church and local government; new clubs and societies, cultural and
philanthropic bodies, were then created either as alternative institutions or
as neutral meeting grounds.5
And what is true of the professions and voluntary associations, of polite
society and political parties, is also true of works of the literary imagination
.
It is no function of this essay to survey the literary achievements of
Augustan England, but it is impossible to disentangle literature and its
makers from political and social life, or indeed the imagination from
politics. It is not simply that so much of the literature was topical, partisan,
and satirical. Nor that these writers were so deeply engaged - as politicians
themselves, as self-appointed spokesmen of the age, or as Grub Street hacks
making a profession of journalism and pamphleteering. It is rather that
Augustan literature provided the language in which politics was conducted,
it supplied the metaphors of monarchy and the discourses of civility and
commerce: it did much to constitute the public sphere. And, naturally, it is
implicated too in the paradoxical process of change and stability: it
manages to thrive on ideological difference and yet simultaneously contain
animosities.