3 - The Romantic Revolution in Taste

Summary

The Romantic Revolution in Taste entailed a radical revision of the category of art and a toppling of the traditional hierarchy of the senses. In the wake of the French Revolution, Parisian gastronomers emerged as necessary adjuncts to the phenomenon of the restaurant, guiding the public in the formerly exclusive practice of food connoisseurship and applying the aesthetic art of judgment to products of culinary artistry. This chapter examines the response of British literary writers and critics to the cultural upheaval the age of gastronomy represented. It surveys the different “schools” of thought that emerged at this time – in the language of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Leg of Mutton School, the Cookery School, the Soda-Water School – in addition to the more well-known Cockney and Lake Schools – and considers the role of William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, William Kitchiner, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron in the Romantic Revolution in taste.