ABSTRACT
The opening of the world and the opening of squares coincided with a new interest in aesthetic experience. To Daniel Defoe, the development of London was monstrous, and it is striking how aesthetics as a philosophical discipline developed at the same time as the process of urbanization was sweeping away the world of tradition. Edmund Burke introduced an inquiry into the sublime, and with reference to Wordsworth’s The Prelude Chapter 14 discusses how the challenge from “the urban sublime” is met by strategies ranging from demonization to domestication. “Spectacles within doors” – such as the panoramas – represented mental compensation for the “unmanageable” sights of modern London.
