Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660-1800

Philip (Research Editor, New Dictionary Of National Biography) Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317882251
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book presents an account of masculinity in eighteenth century Britain. In particular it is concerned with the impact of an emergent polite society on notions of manliness and the gentleman. From the 1660s a new type of social behaviour, politeness, was promoted by diverse writers. Based on continental ideas of refinement, it stressed the merits of genuine and generous sociability as befitted a progressive and tolerant nation. Early eighteenth century writers encouraged men to acquire the characteristics of politeness by becoming urbane town gentlemen. Later commentators promoted an alternative culture of sensibility typified by the man of feeling. Central to both was the need to spend more time with women, now seen as key agents of refinement. The relationship demanded a reworking of what it meant to be manly. Being manly and polite was a difficult balancing act. Refined manliness presented new problems for eighteenth century men. What was the relationship between politeness and duplicity? Were feminine actions such as tears and physical delicacy acceptable or not? Critics believed polite society led to effeminacy, not manliness, and condemned this failure of male identity with reference to the fop. This book reveals the significance of social over sexual conduct for eighteenth century definitions of masculinity. It shows how features traditionally associated with nineteenth century models were well established in the earlier figure of the polite town-dweller or sentimental man of feeling. Using personal stories and diverse public statements drawn from conduct books, magazines, sermons and novels, this is a vivid account of the changing status of men and masculinity as Britain moved into the modern period.

Chapter One
Exploring polite society

Polite society has recently become an important subject for historians of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. This, to an extent, is a case of scholars now taking seriously a theme that has long been central to popular literary and cinematographic images of an era synonymous with a ‘measured code of manners’ as practised at the tea-table, the London pleasure garden or at polite resorts such as Bath.¹ Scholarly interest in politeness has prompted renewed scrutiny of these and other areas as a valid and useful subject of historical research. Early findings reveal polite society’s importance as a significant, far-reaching and much considered aspect of eighteenth-century culture. As we might expect, its impact has featured prominently in recent studies of eighteenth-century art and design, concepts of taste, and the production and appreciation of high culture.² But its reach also guarantees its relevance in other initially less obvious subject areas including scientific exploration, civic consciousness, politics and religion.³ Finally, the origins and dissemination of polite society has become a vibrant subject in its own right, encompassing histories of ideas, advice literature, publishing and reading.⁴

This chapter offers a closer look at aspects of eighteenth-century polite society as a prelude to my subsequent discussion of gentlemanliness. It begins by considering the ways in which the term has been applied by historians and eighteenth-century commentators and, with these in mind, how I intend to use it for the purposes of this book. A section on ‘Polite and sentimental ideologies’ examines the rise of early-eighteenth-century theories of politeness and how, in turn, these gave way to an alternative idea of refinement: sensibility. The significance of these intellectual debates was ensured by their communication to a wide-ranging audience of would-be gentlemen and women actively engaged in practising new forms of polite reading and sociability. That many discussions of social refinement came from churchmen and theologians draws attention to an interesting reciprocal relationship between Christian morality and social refinement examined as part of a final section, ‘Problematising polite society’. As later chapters show, this stress on morality was crucial for eighteenth-century advocates of new forms of gentlemanliness within a polite society that was constantly regarded as both a source and a potential threat to manhood.

Applications and definitions

How do historians apply, and what do they mean by, ‘polite society’? To offer a few examples: J.G.A. Pocock interprets the post-medieval drive towards ‘more polished and humane modes of conduct’ and the ‘increased circulation of goods’ as ‘a major step in the direction of a commercial and polite society.’ Paul Langford suggests that by the mid-eighteenth century ‘the unity of polite society’, composed of a professional class, had coalesced ‘into a largely consistent mass’. Amanda Vickery’s survey of community relations in eighteenth-century East Lancashire provides us with a study of a ‘local polite society’ of ‘minor gentry, professional and mercantile families’. Finally, Richard Sher notes both the appeal of Moderate Church of Scotland ministers to a ‘polite society’ of ‘well-bred people of taste and refinement’, and the criticisms from other members of the kirk against what they saw as the Moderates’ pandering to ‘the impious affectations and amusements’ of that society.⁵

Even from this modest selection it is apparent that the concept of ‘polite society’ can be used in a variety of ways to characterise different themes and distinct social groups. Thus Pocock applies the term in its broadest sense as a synonym for that section of the population, unspecified as to class or geographical location, which benefited from developments in a late-seventeenth-century consumer economy. Paul Langford’s ‘polite society’ similarly encompasses a wide-ranging professional group whose aspiration for social improvement helped to erase regional variations and establish a shared culture. Amanda Vickery’s study does much to confirm Langford’s picture of a mobile and fashion-sensitive population eager to draw upon the latest offerings of an intra-regional commercial economy. However, Vickery’s local focus also allows her to explore the tensions between named families for whom catalogue shopping or attendance at a nearby polite resort was intended less as conformity than as a bid to establish status over neighbouring social equivalents. Within the confines of a regional study, therefore, the concept of ‘polite society’ exists as a more geographically and demographically restricted category wherein the potential for social rivalry produced a less holistic, more competitive community composed of individuals thought to have attained politeness, and defined in opposition to those who had not. Lastly, Richard Sher’s identification of ‘polite society’ as a negative descriptor reveals the ambivalence of eighteenth-century observers to the effects of social change both on national society and on local communities Seemingly given over to pursuing trivial metropolitan culture or, as in the case of the Moderate Church of Scotland, to promoting an immoral and profane theology.

In contrast to its frequent use in recent scholarship, the precise term ‘polite society’ appears to have been seldom applied in eighteenth-century commentaries. One of the few exceptions occurs in the preface to Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714). It was here that Mandeville proposed his soon infamous thesis linking public benefits not to acts of civic pride, but to innate private self-interest. Communities ‘cured of the Failings they are Naturally guilty of’ would, he believed, ‘cease to be capable of being rais’d into such vast, potent and polite Societies, as they have been under the several great Commonwealths and Monarchies that have flourished since the Creation’.⁶ Mandeville’s application in certain ways prefigures Pocock’s; that is, as an identification of an advanced level of societal development measured in terms including new standards of refined conduct.

These ideas, purged of what critics identified as Mandeville’s unpalatable cynicism, proved especially popular among a later generation of enlightened social observers for whom daily standards of affluence and interpersonal behaviour were evidence of Britain’s successful evolution into a sophisticated and civilised society. If the precise language of ‘polite society’ was absent from these discussions, the idea certainly was not. Writing in the 1740s, the Scottish moral philosopher and historian David Hume (1711–96) contrasted the incivilities of former ‘barbarous nations’ with those of a modern ‘polite people’. The legal scholar William Blackstone in turn rooted Hume’s work in the England of the 1760s when he declared it a nation of ‘polite and commercial people’.⁷ A decade on, John Millar (1735–1801), professor of civil law at Glasgow University, detected an ‘advancement of society in civilization, opulence and refinement’.⁸ Millar’s fellow countryman, James Boswell, who had of course been impressed by behavioural standards in Highland Scotland, likewise spoke several years later of the ‘advantage of civilised society’ in a ‘nation [with] all the symptoms of a great and flourishing state’.⁹.

Certain eighteenth-century commentators also applied the language of polite society to descriptions of more restricted communities. Thus, in the subtitle to his Reflexions Upon the Politeness of Manners (translated 1707), the French conduct writer Jean-Baptiste Bellegarde offered to teach readers the ‘maxims for polite society’. Bellegarde’s subsequent comments suggest this to have been a limited category, since ‘’Tis not common to find so great a confederacy of Perfections, and therefore ’tis no wonder if the numbers of the Polite be so small.’¹⁰ In an essay from The Spectator periodical (1711–14), Richard Steele bemoaned how, on leaving university, few students entered the ‘polite World’ of fashionable London.¹¹ The anonymous guide to The Man of Manners (1733) warned the reader to avoid behaviour that would be ‘a prejudice to him in polite Company’.¹² Samuel Johnson chose to address only ‘the politer part of mankind’ in an essay from his periodical, The Rambler (1750–2), while in 1769 James Boswell explained Johnson’s potential for boorishness in terms of his having ‘not… lived more in polished society’ – by which Boswell, given his frequent bouts of snobbery, presumably meant the elegant parts of London rather than the provincial Lichfield of Johnson’s birth.¹³

In these applications, as in those by recent scholars, we are presented with a diverse range of people and locations claiming or being granted polite status. At its broadest and most inclusive when describing the inhabitants of a nation or civil state, the concept of polite society was also applied more specifically to the cities of that nation, like London, or to fashionable new resorts, notably Bath, described in 1762 as ‘the most polite and agreeable Place in England’.¹⁴ More precisely still, polite society could exist as locations within the city in the form of Steele’s ‘polite world’ and Boswell’s ‘polished society’. Finally, we see an inclusive concept of civil society reworked to designate yet more distinctive sets of people – Johnson’s ‘politer parts’ or ‘the polite Company’ – limited to those with whom ‘men of manners’ thought it wise to be associated.

Clear tensions exist within these examples. James Boswell, for instance, applied the concept of polite society both as a descriptor of the national condition and as a select group within that nation. Boswell’s example alerts us to the snobbery and competition that infused many eighteenth-century discussions of polite status in advice guides or in private diaries and correspondence. Moreover, it is evident that the large majority of people who were included in national surveys of civil society had neither the money nor the time to break into more restricted communities of polite living. Thus Bath – a resort whose promoters boasted its accessibility, informality and lack of snobbery – was claimed, even when ‘rank’ was ‘laid aside’, to be the chosen resort of ‘private gentleman upwards’.¹⁵

From such evidence it is apparent that eighteenth-century concepts of ‘polite society’ defy simple categorisation; indeed, its range of applications arguably makes it a meaningless term if used to describe a single social group or location. However, if we recognise these variations, contradictions and tensions as an integral feature of eighteenth-century debates over, and the implementation of, social refinement, then the concept of ‘polite society’ becomes a useful means to understand the breadth and importance of a subject that, as we shall see, many commentators understood, discussed and exploited in all of its ideological and practical complexity.

Conceived of in this way, polite society can be said to consist broadly – as it will be applied in this book – of those who sought a reputation for refinement, whether this reputation be politeness or sensibility, sociability or snobbishness; and of those activities and locations within which individuals, conduct writers or social analysts claimed to detect and pursue refined behaviour, whether this be the nation at large, the city or more intimate venues within these spheres. Thus, participation in this polite society could, as Boswell shows, be understood both as a statement of national progress and as a symbol of competition facilitating personal advancement. Equally, Bath’s polite society could exist as a venue conducive to egalitarian mixing of social ranks while excluding those lacking the financial status of a ‘private gentleman’.

Yet at the same time, the importance of polite society to eighteenth-century culture owed much to the aspirational tone evident in each of these commentaries, regardless of their specific focus. To its promoters, polite society (however conceived) remained a source of self- or societal improvement, though to its critics these aspirations brought social disharmony and, as we shall see, declining gender standards. What gave this debate added vitality was the range of people who thought or were told to think of themselves as actual or potential members of polite society. While it is true that the ‘private gentleman’ may have been an individual of some means, crucially he remained (like the ‘polite Company’ from the distinctly aspirational Man of Manners; or Plebian Polished) a loosely defined character to whom a wide range of readers, eager for self-improvement, might aspire within the context of their own lives. Central to the attraction of eighteenth-century discourses of social refinement was an emphasis on good character, not just on means. Moreover, as many eighteenth-century definitions of politeness and sensibility made clear, the character of the modern ‘private gentleman’ was such that it might well be acquired by every careful reader.

Definitions

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Gentlemen, manliness and polite society
• 1 Exploring polite society
• 2 Men and the rise of politeness
• 3 The manliness of feeling
• 4 Effeminacy, foppery and the boundaries of polite society
• 5 Polite and impolite personalities
• Conclusion
• Further reading
• Index