num_pages: 447
description: Founded in London in 1754, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (later known as the Royal Society of Arts, or RSA) has a worldwide membership of nearly fifteen thousand fellows. Its long roll of members and associates has included such cultural and intellectual giants as Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Ambrose Fleming, and Guglielmo Marconi. Formed to encourage applications of science for the general good, the Society sought to reward "ingenuity in the...Polite and Liberal Arts, useful Discoveries and Improvements in Agriculture, Manufactures, Mechanicks, and Chemistry." During the Society's first decades, more than one contemporary observer saw a direct relation between its accomplishments and England's growth in wealth and power.This volume draws together twenty essays by British, American, and European scholars, all of whom had access to the Society's archives. With one exception, all the essays first appeared in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. Illuminating the Society's origins, defining its principal features, and suggesting the range of its contributions during its founding century, the essays are grouped into four the Society's distinguished, eclectic membership; its support of "useful arts" (encompassing both pragmatic and beaux arts); its overseas influence and activities; and the institutional decisions that enabled it to persist into the nineteenth century and beyond. The book also includes a general introduction as well as introductions to each section.Complementing, but also amending, earlier histories of the Society, this collection provides a valuable overview of its significant influence on eighteenth-century life.
language: English
title: The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts & Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts
titlecomplete: The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts & Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts
publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr