The Rake's Progress The Rake's Progress The Rake's Progress is an English-language opera in three acts and an epilogue by Igor Stravinsky. The libretto, written by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, is based loosely on the eight paintings and engravings "A Rake's Progress" (1733–1735) of William Hogarth, which Stravinsky had seen on 2 May 1947, in a Chicago exhibition. The story concerns the decline and fall of one Tom Rakewell, who deserts Anne Trulove for the delights of London in the company of Nick Shadow, who turns out to be the Devil. After several misadventures, all initiated by the devious Shadow, Tom
English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries of the Enlightenment. Dorinda Outram places English coffeehouses within an intellectual public sphere, focusing on the transfusion of enlightened ideas. She justifies her placement of English coffeehouses within an 'intellectual public sphere' by naming them "commercial operations, open to all who could pay and thus provided ways in which many different social strata could be exposed to the same ideas." She also argues that enlightened ideas were transfused through print culture, a culture that became open to larger number of individuals after the 'reading revolution' at the end of the 18th century. According to Outram, as English coffeehouses offered various