Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-495rp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-12T12:04:47.910Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Lawrence E. Klein
Lawrence E. Klein
Affiliation:
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the early eighteenth century, the language of politeness became a major fixture of English discourse. Centring on the term ‘politeness’ and consisting of a vocabulary of key words (such as ‘refinement’, ‘manners’, ‘character’, ‘breeding’, and ‘civility’) and a range of qualifying attributes (‘free’, ‘easy’, ‘natural’, ‘graceful’, and many others), the language was used to make a wide range of objects intelligible. Though the word ‘polite’ had been in the English language from at least the fifteenth century, denoting the state of being polished or neat in quite literal and concrete ways, the term entered on its significant career only in the mid-seventeenth century, when it began to convey the meanings of studied social behaviour of the sort inspired by and associated with princely courts. However, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, ‘politeness’ grew to cover a range of meanings, considerably freed from the initial association with courts. Several broad categories of usage of the term ‘polite’ are indicative: as a behavioural and moral standard for members of an elite (e.g. ‘polite gentlemen’, ‘polite ladies’, ‘polite society’, ‘polite conversation’); as an aesthetic standard for many kinds of human artifacts and products (e.g. ‘polite arts’, ‘polite towns’, ‘polite learning’, ‘polite buildings’); and as a way of generalizing about and characterizing society and culture (‘polite age’, ‘polite nation’, ‘polite people’). In the latter usage, ‘politeness’ was frequently deployed retrospectively as an attribute of classical civilizations. ‘Politeness’ helped recast the renaissance model of history, in which modernity was separated from its true ancestor, the ancient world, by the vast dark gulf of the middle ages: the ‘politest’ nations were ancient Greece and ancient Rome; the ‘politest’ ages, the spells of Hellenic and Roman creativity.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 1989 , pp. 583 - 605
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The following paragraph summarizes portions of Klein, Lawrence, ‘The third earl of Shaftesbury and the progress of politeness’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, XVIII (1984–1985), 186–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Saint-Evremond, widely translated in pirated editions, perhaps gave a lead to this sort of conflation, pointing out that ‘every one knows that Greece has given to the World, the greatest Philosophers, and the greatest Legislators: And one cannot deny, but that other Nations have taken from thence all the Politeness they have had’ (de Saint Denis, Charles de Marguetel, de Saint-Evremond, sieur, Miscellaneous essays [London, 1692–1694], p. 213Google Scholar). Other instances include: Gildon, Charles, ‘An essay on the art, rise and progress of the stage’, in The works of Mr. William Shakespear, Volume the seventh (London, 1710), pp. xxi–xxiiGoogle Scholar; Addison, Joseph, The Tatler, No. 122 (19 09 1709/1710)Google Scholar; Addison, Joseph, A discourse on antient and modern learning (London, 1734), p. 3Google Scholar.

3 This perspective has not commonly been adopted in treatments of the political discourse of Queen Anne's reign. It is absent from Kenyon, J. P., Revolution principles: the politics of party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and from the relevant parts of Dickinson, H. T., Liberty and property: political ideology in eighteenth-century Britain (London, 1977)Google Scholar. On the other hand, it is a well-worked theme for the 1730s (Goldgar, Bertrand A., Walpole and the wits: the relation of politics to literature, 1722–1742 [Lincoln, Nebraska, 1976[Google Scholar). By that time, the tories and other oppositionalists are said to have mastered the cultural high ground. That certainly was not the case prior to 1715, as the instance of the third earl of Shaftesbury, used here, illustrates.

4 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, the third earl of Shaftesbury, ‘Sensus Communis’, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Times, Opinions (6th edn, London, 1737), I, 64Google Scholar.

5 Baron, Hans, The crisis of the early Italian renaissance (2nd edn, Princeton, 1966)Google Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, The foundations of modern political thought (Cambridge, 1978), I (‘The Renaissance’)Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar.

6 On the courtesy tradition, Magendie, Maurice, La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l'honnêteté en France au XVIIe siècle de 1600 à 1660 (1925Google Scholar; reprint, Geneva, 1970). On the domestication of that tradition in England, Whigham, Frank, Ambition and privilege: the social tropes of Elizabethan courtesy theory (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar.

7 Pocock, Machiavellian moment, chapter 11.

8 This argument is made in Klein, Lawrence, ‘The rise of “politeness” in England, 1660–1715’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1983), ch. 4–5 (pp. 167–339)Google Scholar.

9 We are used to thinking of the peculiarities of this era's political discourse in terms of the relations between virtue and commerce, between the civic tradition and the recognition of economic and social change. (Pocock, Machiavellian moment, ch. 13 and 14; Virtue, commerce and history: essays on political thought and history, chiefly in the eighteenth century [Cambridge, 1985], pp. 230 ffGoogle Scholar.) It is incontestable that a neo-Harringtonian line, ultimately of Machiavellian inspiration, was alive and well in the 1690s and that a major component of the political discourse of the era concerned itself with questions of the character of wealth and its implications for politics. However, the theme here, the politics of culture, is only tangentially related to matters of commerce. Later indeed the Scots were to make much of the connexions between commerce and politeness. However, that link is only weakly implicit in the third earl of Shaftesbury, the principal subject here.

10 Worden, A. B., introduction to Ludlow, Edmund, A voyce from the watch tower, part five: 1660–1662, Camden Fourth Series, 21 (1978), 39–46Google Scholar; Robbins, Caroline, The eighteenth-century commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 129–30 and also 56, 88–91, 128, 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holmes, Geoffrey, British politics in the age of Anne (London, 1967), p. 221Google Scholar; Plumb, J. H., The growth of political stability in England, 1675–1725 (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 138nCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Aside from these brief discussions, there is little work on Shaftesbury's writing from the perspective of the history of social or political; thought. Shaftesbury scholarship has dwelled on his philosophical or literary contributions (e.g. Grean, Stanley, Shaftesbury's philosophy of religion and ethics (Athens, Ohio, 1967)Google Scholar, for the first; Brett, R. L., The third earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1951)Google Scholar, for the second). A sound guide to the career is now available in Voitle, Robert, The third earl of Shaftesbury 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, 1984)Google Scholar.

11 Pocock, , Virtue, commerce, and history, p. 235Google Scholar.

12 Browning, Reed, Political and constitutional ideas of the court whigs (Baton Rouge, 1982), pp. 1–34, 210–56Google Scholar.

13 Phillipson, Nicholas, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikulas, eds., The Enlightenment in national context (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 22–6Google Scholar; Robertson, John, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition’, in Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, Michael, eds., Wealth and virtue: the shaping of political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 140 ffGoogle Scholar.

14 Surveys of the textual material on gentility are available in: Brauer, George C. Jr, The education of a gentleman: theories of gentlemanly education in England, 1660–1775 (New York, 1959)Google Scholar, and Mason, J. E., Gentlefolk in the making: studies in the history of English courtesy literature and related topics from 1531 to 1174 (Philadelphia, 1935)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. James', MervynEnglish politics and the concept of honour, 1485–1642 (Past & Present, Supplement 3, 1978)Google Scholar is a genuinely historical account, for an earlier period, of changing ideals of gentility, centring on the evolution of ‘honour’. James accounts for the rise of gentility based on service and learning out of a chivalric honour code.

15 Thompson, E. P., ‘Patrician society, plebeian culture’, Journal of Social History, VII (1973–1974), 382–405Google Scholar; Wrightson, Keith, English society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1982), pp. 13–14, 220–6Google Scholar. This development is set in its European context in Burke, Peter, Popular culture in early modern Europe (New York, 1978), pp. 270–81Google Scholar. It should also be added that the rise of politeness contributed to ‘the social theory of elite hegemony’, described in Clark, J. C. D., English society 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 93–119Google Scholar.

16 Sidney, Algernon, Discourses concerning government (London, 1698), sig. A2rGoogle Scholar; Skinner, , Foundations of modern political thought, p. 6Google Scholar.

17 Harrington, James, ‘The commonwealth of Oceana’, in Pocock, J. G. A., ed., The political works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 155–359Google Scholar; Sidney, , Discourses, p. 60Google Scholar.

18 Neville, Henry, Plato redivivus (London, 1681), p. 78Google Scholar.

19 Walter Moyle's treatment of the Spartans is discussed below. See also Rawson, Elizabeth, The Spartan tradition in European thought (Oxford, 1969)Google Scholar.

20 Neville, , Plato redivivus, pp. 57, 64–5Google Scholar.

21 Harrington, , ‘Oceana’, in Political works, pp. 163 ffGoogle Scholar.

22 Moyle, Walter, ‘An essay upon the constitution of the Roman government’, in The Works of Walter Moyle, Esq. (London, 1726), pp. 71–2Google Scholar.

23 A concise statement is available in Bailyn, Bernard, The ideological origins of the American revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 61–6Google Scholar. The subject is treated extensively throughout Pocock's Machiavellian moment.

24 Davenant, Charles, ‘An essay upon universal monarchy’, in Essays upon I. the ballance of power. II. the right of making war, peace, and alliances. III. universal monarchy (London, 1701), p. 267Google Scholar.

25 See Pocock, J. G. A., ‘Virtues, rights, and manners: a model for historians of political thought’, in Virtue, commerce and history, pp. 37–50, especially pp. 48–50Google Scholar. ‘Manners’ is similar in force to the French moeurs, for which see Bloom's, Allen explanation in his edition of Rousseau, , Politics and the arts: letter to M. d'Alembert on the theatre (Ithaca, 1960), pp. 149–50Google Scholar.

26 Neville, , Plato redivivus, p. 33Google Scholar. Similarly, Sidney asserted that the liberty of Greece, and Rome, was ‘the Mother and Nurse of their Venue’ (Discourses, p. 111)Google Scholar.

27 Neville, , Plato redivivus, pp. 33–4, 64–5Google Scholar.

28 Sidney, Discourses, p. 201Google Scholar. In a similar vein, Molesworth, Robert ascribed the decline of European liberty to clerical control of education, in which ‘the enslaving the Spirits of the People’ was ‘a preparative to that of their Bodies…’. (An account of Denmark, as it was in the year 1962, 3rd edn, London, 1694, sig. blv)Google Scholar. Likewise, Fletcher, Andrew pointed to the dependence of all government on ‘the way of living’ (‘A discourse of government with relation to militia's’, in The political works of Andrew Fletcher, Esq; (London, 1732), p. 13)Google Scholar.

29 Sidney, , Discourses, pp. 144–5Google Scholar. A related idea appears in Moyle, , ‘Essay upon the constitution of the Roman government’, pp. 139–42Google Scholar.

30 Swift, Jonathan, ‘The sentiments of a Church-of-England man with respect to religion and government’, in The prose works of Jonathan Swift (ed. Davis, Herbert, Oxford, 1939–1968), II, 14Google Scholar.

31 This point has been made by Jones, Peter, ‘The Scottish professoriate and the polite academy, 1720–46’, in Hont, and Ignatieff, , eds., Wealth and virtue, p. 95Google Scholar.

32 Robertson, , ‘Scottish Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition’, p. 146Google Scholar.

33 Fletcher, , ‘An account of a conversation concerning a right regulation of governments for the common good of mankind’, in Political works, p. 372Google Scholar.

34 Sidney, , Discourses, p. 116Google Scholar. In the introduction to the translation of Hotman's, Franco-Gallia (1721)Google Scholar, Molesworth traced the growth of wealth and population to the guarantees of liberty and property (p. XV).

35 Wellek, Rene, The rise of English literary history (Chapel Hill, 1941), pp. 32–4, 58–9Google Scholar. Meehan's, MichaelLiberty and poetics in eighteenth-century England (London, 1986)Google Scholar is devoted to exploring this theme, which is also implicit throughout Weinbrot's, HowardAugustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England (Princeton, 1978)Google Scholar.

36 Swift, , ‘Sentiments of a Church-of-England man’, p. 18Google Scholar. Elsewhere, he particularized this account of Roman culture with specific reference to the Latin language, which had undergone a slow process of improvement over the centuries but came to grief in the transition from republic to empire (‘A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue’, in Prose works, IV, 8).

37 On luxury, see Sekora, John, Luxury: the concept in western thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977–1938)Google Scholar.

38 Fletcher, , ‘Discourse of government in relation to militia's’, Political works, pp. 10–13Google Scholar.

39 Kliger, S. L., The Goths in England (Cambridge, Mass. 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Moyle, Walter, ‘An essay on the Lacedaemonian government,’ in A select collection of tracts (Glasgow, 1750), pp. 194–5Google Scholar.

41 Ibid. p. 199.

42 Ibid. p. 204.

43 Ibid. p. 195.

44 Ibid. p. 214.

45 Ibid. p. 196.

46 Moyle's, argument against standing armies turned in part on Roman example, in which ‘luxury’ sapped ‘the strict rule and discipline of freedom’ creating an entrance for standing armies and the loss of liberty (‘An argument, shewing that a standing army is inconsistent with a free government…’, in Select collection of tracts, p. 237)Google Scholar. As Neville had earlier pointed out, if the Romans, had wanted to preserve their virtue, they would have had to preserve their poverty (Plato redivivus, p. 57)Google Scholar. Similarly, Molesworth elicited both ‘Greeks and Romans’ as exemplary in the ‘Conservation or Recovery of the publick Liberty’ and in the development of educational forms to cultivate the appropriate correlative manners(Account of Denmark, sigs. b2v–b4v).

47 Dennis, John, An essay on the opera's after the Italian manner (London, 1706), p. 13Google Scholar.

48 Swift, , ‘Proposal for correcting…the English tongue’, p. 12Google Scholar. Swift's Latinate prejudice saw in the English ‘a Tendency to lapse into the Barbarity of those Northern Nations from whom we are descended, and whose Languages labour all under the same Defect’. See also pp. 6–7, 11. I know no place where Swift confronted his Latinate cultural preferences with his Germanic political ones.

49 The Spectator (ed. Bond, Donald, Oxford, 1965), II, 239Google Scholar.

50 Fletcher, , ‘Discourse of government in relation to militia's’, p. 13Google Scholar.

51 Molesworth, , Account of Denmark, pp. 38–9Google Scholar.

52 Ibid. sigs. a3v, C2V–C3V.

53 Fletcher, , ‘The second discourse concerning the affairs of Scotland’, in Political works, pp. 138–42Google Scholar .

54 Shaftesbury, , ‘Soliloquy’, in Characteristicks, I, 220Google Scholar.

55 Ibid. pp. 236–7.

56 Ibid. p. 239.

57 Ibid.

58 Shaftesbury to Michael Ainsworth, 3 Dec. 1709, London, Public Record Office (P.R.O.), Shaftesbury papers, 30/24/20/143; ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, in Characteristicks, III, 138, 152, 231.

59 ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 139.

60 ‘Soliloquy’, I, 250.

61 Ibid.

62 ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 138.

63 ‘Soliloquy’, I, 247–8.

64 Ibid. I, 246–7.

65 Ibid. I, 220, 251, 252n, 271.

66 ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 141.

67 ‘Soliloquy’, I, 216–17, 222–3.

68 Ibid. pp. 215–16.

69 ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 150–1.

70 ‘Sensus Communis’, I, 64–5.

71 Recognizing the importance of Shaftesbury's choice of politeness opens up other rich veins in Shaftesbury's writing. Politeness is the touchstone of his ethics, though most commentators have not noticed this. Cf. the quintessentially Shaftesburian statement: ‘To philosophize, in a just Signification, is but To Carry Good-breeding a step higher’ (‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, III, 161).

72 Shaftesbury to [Somers], 30 Mar. 1711, P.R.O. 30/24/22/4, fos. 153–6.