Polite 'persons': Character, biography and the gentleman

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Volumn 12, Issue , 2002, Pages 333-354

  Carter, Philip ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 21244454951     PISSN: 00804401     EISSN: 14740648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0080440102000130     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), ed. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford, 1989), 110
2. Lord Chesterfield's Letters, ed. David Roberts (Oxford, 1992), 105
3. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (1974)
4. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998)
5. Fenela Childs, 'Prescriptions for Manners in English Courtesy Literature, 1690-1760, and their Social Implications' (DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1984), 102-28
6. Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, IL, 1998)
7. William Fiston, The Schoole of Good Manners (1609), n.p
8. For an alternative discussion of the interaction of manners and morals see Martin Ingram, 'Sexual manners: The Other Face of Civility in Early Modern England', in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack (Oxford, 2000)
9. The term, of course, is Addison's, see No. 9 (10 Mar. 1711), The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (5 vols., Oxford, 1965), I, 39
10. On this transition see Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994)
11. and his 'Coffee-House Civility, 1660-1714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in England', Huntington Library Quarterly, 59 (1997), 30-52
12. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660-1800 (2001), ch. 1
13. Peter Burke, 'A Civil Tongue: Language and Politeness in Early Modern Europe', in Civil Histories, ed. Burke, Harrison and Slack
14. An important statement on earlier Tory concepts of politeness is Hannah Smith, 'English "Feminist" Writings and Judith Drake's An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696)', Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 727-48
15. Abel Boyer, The English Theophrastus; or Manners of the Age (1702), 114-19
16. Spectator, No. 169 (13 Sept. 1711), II, 165-6
17. No. 467 (26 Aug. 1712), IV, 153
18. Edward Alanson, The Man of Integrity's Character (1734), 16
19. Samuel Johnson, No. 98 (23 Feb. 1751), in The Rambler (1750-2), ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (16 vols, New Haven, CT, and London, 1958-90), IV, 161-2
20. The Polite Academy; or School of Behaviour for Young Gentlemen and Ladies (5th edn, 1771), p. 1
21. John Harris, An Essay on Politeness (1775, 3rd edn, 1820), 33
22. Spectator, No. 169 (13 Sept. 1711), II, 165
23. Matthew Towle, The Young Gentleman and Lady's Private Tutor (Oxford, 1771), 86
24. Oliver Goldsmith, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning (1759), in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (5 vols., Oxford, 1965), I, 306
25. Rambler, No. 14 (5 May 1750), IV, 79
26. Joshua Reynolds, 'Reynolds on Goldsmith', in Reynolds, Portraits, ed. Frederick W. Hillies (1952), 42-3
27. Richard Holmes, 'Biography: Inventing the Truth', in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford, 1995)
28. Rambler, No. 60 (13 Oct. 1750), IV, 321
29. Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford, 1999), 188
30. Quoted in Isabel Rivers, 'Biographical Dictionaries and their Uses from Bayle to Chalmers', in Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (Leicester, 2001), 157, 153
31. On the tensions between politeness and the singularity born of biography see Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 (Oxford, 2000), 292
32. Spectator, No. 256 (24 Dec. 1711), II, 495-6
33. Rambler, No. 60, IV, 322
34. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford, 1980), 474
35. Quoted in Adam Sisman, Boswell's Presumptuous Task (2000), 285-6
36. On Boswell's impolite intrusion as biographer see also Richard Wendorff, The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England (Oxford, 1990), 12-13
37. James L. Clifford, 'How Much Should a Biographer Tell?', in his From Puzzles to Portraits: Problems of a Literary Biographer (Chapel Hill, NC, 1970)
38. Keith Thomas, 'Yours', in The State of the Language, ed. Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels (1990)
39. See Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, 137-55
40. Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: Nationalism and Language in the Eighteenth Century (1996), 37-41
41. Hester Chapone, 'On Conversation', in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1775), 29
42. David Hume, 'Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences' (1742), in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (1742/52), ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN, 1985), 131
43. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL, 1992), esp. ch. 1
44. John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988), ch. 5
45. G. S. Rousseau, 'Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve: The Social History of Language in a New Key', in Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1991)
46. James Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men (2 vols., 1777), II, 92
47. Hume, 'Of National Characteristics', in Essays, ed. Miller, 202
48. Alanson, Man of Integrity's Character, 16
49. Shenstone quoted in Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 (New York, 1987), 132
50. Hugh Blair, 'On Sensibility' (1790), in Sermons (5 vols., Edinburgh, 1777-1801), III, 26
51. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 400
52. London Magazine, 43 (1774), 193
53. Westminster Magazine, 5 (1777), 22-3, 69
54. The Letters and Prose of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (5 vols., Oxford, 1979-86), I, 435
55. Spectator, No. 467, IV, 154 (my emphasis)
56. Boyer, English Theophrastus, 10
57. Vicesimus Knox, 'On the Superior Value of Solid Accomplishment' (1782), in The Works of Vicesimus Knox (7 vols., 1824), II, 202
58. Fordyce, Addresses, II, 175
59. Fanny Burney, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide (3 vols., Oxford, 1988-94), II, 62
60. The Manuscripts and Correspondence of James, First Earl of Charlemont, HMC 28 (2 vols., 1891-4), I, 324
61. For Boswell's kinder assessment see Life of Johnson, 188
62. J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1988), ch. 4
63. Stefan Collini, 'The idea of character in Victorian literature', TRHS, 5th ser., 35 (1985), 29-50
64. and idem, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 (Oxford, 1990)
65. Sheldon Rothblatt, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education (1976)
66. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, 82
67. See, for example, the changing tone in biographies of the Bath impresario Richard 'Beau' Nash from complimentary eighteenth-century studies of his sociability to nineteenth-century criticism of his triviality and lack of 'character', Peter Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700-2000 (Oxford, 2000), 110-11
68. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford, 1994), 167-8
69. On Chesterfield's contribution to nineteenth-century transatlantic concepts of refined conduct see C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860 (New York, 1999), esp. ch. 4
70. The Character of a Renewed or Regenerate Man (2nd edn, 1815), 7
71. Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1852)
72. quoted in Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (2000), 158
73. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: The Genius of English Socialism (1941; repr. 1982), 41
74. Michael Curtin, 'A Question of Manners: Status and Gender in Etiquette and Courtesy', Journal of Modern History, 57 (1985), 395-423
75. Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (1973)
76. Marjorie Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774-1858 (Basingstoke, 1994)
77. None the less, generations of commentators have drawn attention to the deterioration of even these basic standards of social interaction. Recent statements, which equate the decline of manners with the rise of a hedonistic pleasure principle, include Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)
78. and Richard Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)
79. while the British implications of these changes, together with that of post-war decolonisation, are considered by Michael Elliott, 'Rude Britannia', Prospect (May 2001)
80. Nor does a recent trend for confessional journalism indicate a revival of the inner self as the marker of true sociability; rather, motives remain closer to Chesterfieldian self-promotion (albeit via distinctly un-Chesterfieldian means), censured by the novelist Philip Roth as 'hyperdramatization of the merest emotion', The Human Stain (2000)
81. For example: The Accomplished Gentleman; or, the Principles of Politeness (1806)
82. The New Chesterfield: Containing Principles of Politeness (1830)
83. and the Encyclopaedia of Manners and Etiquette: Comprising Chesterfield's Advice to his Son on Men and Manners (1850), part of George Henry Bohn's miniature classics series