Contents

pp v-vi

List of illustrations

pp vii-viii

List of contributors

pp ix-xii

Foreword

pp xiii-xv

Acknowledgements

pp xvi-xvi

Introduction

pp 1-4

Part 1 - Emergence of new political and social practices

pp 5-6

1 - ‘Restoration’ England and the history of sociability

pp 7-24

2 - Mapping sociability on Restoration townscapes

pp 25-44

3 - Club sociability and the emergence of new ‘sociable’ practices

pp 45-68

4 - The tea-table, women and gossip in early eighteenth-century Britain

pp 69-88

Part 2 - Competing models of sociability

pp 89-90

5 - ‘Amateurs’ vs connoisseurs in French and English academies of painting

pp 91-108

6 - Masonic connections and rivalries between France and Britain

pp 109-126

7 - Competing models of sociability: Smollett's repossession of an ailing British body

pp 127-144

8 - A theory of British epistolary sociability?

pp 145-162

9 - Gender and the practices of polite sociability in late eighteenth-century Edinburgh

pp 163-182

Part 3 - Paradoxes of British sociability

pp 183-184

10 - In company and out: the public/private selves of Johnson and Boswell

pp 185-198

11 - Friendship and unsociable sociability in eighteenth-century literature

pp 199-218

12 - The anti-social convivialist: toasting and resistance to sociability

pp 219-236

13 - Sociability and the Glorious Revolution: a dubious connection in Burke's philosophy

pp 237-250

14 - Respectability vs political agency: a dilemma for British radical societies

pp 251-270

Conclusion

pp 271-274

Bibliography

pp 275-294

Index

pp 295-304