Chapter 5 introduces two approaches to politeness: politeness as the avoidance of face-threatening acts and politeness as the enhancement of communicative concord. Over time, politeness has changed significantly. The Old English period was a period of “discernment” politeness, growing out of the fixed social order. The Middle English period saw the rise of “deference” politeness following the French fashion (i.e., the honorific system of second-person pronouns). A face-based system began in Early Modern English, but studies are not consistent in finding this to be a positive or negative politeness system. The deference politeness system fell out of use. The eighteenth century extolled polite manners and behavior and has been described as a “compliment culture”. The modern period is characterized by “non-imposition” politeness, most obvious in the development of indirect directives (negative politeness). At the same time, a system of camaraderie politeness, which increases solidarity and eliminates distance between individuals, coexists (positive politeness). The chapter provides case studies of compliments, insults, thanks, and responses to thanks in the history of English.

This chapter examines the variety of ways in which women poets in early eighteenth-century Ireland negotiated expectations of gender. It focuses on Mary Barber’s Poems on Several Occasions (1735), a volume containing work by several other writers, most notably six poems by Constantia Grierson (c. 1705–1732). Female poets tempered the appearance of poetic ambition by means of several strategies. In Barber’s case the best known of these is ventriloquism, in the various poems she wrote to be spoken by her young son. Both Barber and Grierson firmly place their work in the context of decorous female sociability by emphasising its occasional nature: particularly noteworthy being the ruse of presenting poems not as distinguished artefacts, but as supplementary objects, in the several poems taking the form of ‘lines written’ in books. Ambition can, however, be discerned. Barber sought and gained significant patrons in Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Orrery, and successfully raised an impressive subscription list. More subtly, the volume as a whole also shows each poet help to secure the poetic reputation of the other through an elaborate poetics of compliment, reflecting self-consciously on female authorship.