Manners make the man: Politeness, chivalry, and the construction of masculinity, 1750-1830

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 312-329

  Cohen, Michèle ^a,b  

^a AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY BANGLADESH   (Bangladesh)

^b UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 39649089069     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/427127     Document Type: Review

References (133)

1. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society (London, 2001)
2. Caroll Smith Rosenberg, "The Republican Gentleman: The Race to Rhetorical Stability in the New United States," in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (Manchester, 2004)
3. Lee Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle-Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987)
4. Carter, Polite Society, 209
5. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 110
6. John Tosh, "Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender," in Dudink, Hagemann, and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War, 55, 42. This is an illuminating critique of the use of the concept
7. George Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in "Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1992)
8. Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996)
9. Philip Carter, "Men about Town: Representations of Foppery and Masculinity in Early Eighteenth-Century Urban Society," in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (London, 1997), 49
10. The Spectator, no. 433 (17 July 1712)
11. Michèle Cohen, "Manliness, Effeminacy and the French: Gender and the Construction of National Character in Eighteenth-Century England," in English Masculinities, 1660-1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London, 1999), 50
12. Marcia Pointon, "The Case of the Dirty Beau," in The Body Imaged: The Human Form of Visual Culture since the Renaissance, ed. Karen Adler and Marcia Pointon (Cambridge, 1993), 175-89
13. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1998), 217
14. John Tosh, "Gentlemanly Politeness and Manly Simplicity in Victorian England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 455-72, 455
15. Marjorie Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774-1858 (Basingstoke, 1994)
16. Michael Curtin, "A Question of Manners: Status and Gender in Etiquette and Courtesy," Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 395-423
17. Curtin, "A Question of Manners," 409
18. Tosh, "Gentlemanly Politeness," 456, 458-59
19. John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady on Useful and Interesting Subjects Calculated to Improve the Heart, to Form the Manners, and Enlighten the Understanding, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1789), 2:7, 8
20. See also Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity. Pleasing has remained an essential trait (and sometimes a pathology) of females until today
21. Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt (Basingstoke, 1999), 147
22. Dror Wahrman, "Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England," Past and Present, no. 159 (1998): 113-60, 151
23. Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity, 9
24. David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of Genre (Cambridge, 1994), 117
25. Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2004), 333
26. See also Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the New Tradition (London, 1990)
27. Smart Piggott, Ruins in a Landscape: Essays in Antiquarianism (Edinburgh, 1976), 118-19
28. Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London, 1995), 69
29. However, James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832 (Cambridge, 1999), argues that it had not completely lost these associations by the turn of the nineteenth century
30. Translated into English by Susan Dobson in 1784. I owe this information to Sweet, Antiquaries, 77
31. Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (London, 1971), 17
32. Raymond Chapman, The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature (London, 1986), stresses that Hurd's Letters mark a change of attitude, not just a mere revival of interest
33. See also Clark, The Gothic Revival, 69
34. Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, CT, and London, 1994), 15
35. Watt, Contesting the Gothic, 27-28
36. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; repr., Harmondsworth, 1969), 170
37. Chandler, Dream of Order, 2
38. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge 1985), 19
39. The essay on "Chivalry" first appeared in the supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1814
40. Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, 19
41. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 (Oxford, 2000), 245
42. Colin Kidd, British Ethnicity before Nationalism (Cambridge, 1999)
43. Piggott, Ruins in a Landscape
44. Sheila Cottrell, "The Devil on Two Sticks: Franco-Phobia in 1803," in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel, 3 vols. (London, 1989), 1:263
45. Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford, 2002), 73
46. Anthony Smith, "The 'Golden Age' and National Renewal," in Myths of Nationhood, ed. Geoffrey Hoskins and George Schopflin (London, 1997), 39, 41
47. See also Stefan Dudink, "Masculinity, Effeminacy, Time: Conceptual Change in the Dutch Age of Democratic Revolutions," in Dudink, Hagemann, and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War
48. Watt, Contesting the Gothic, 46-7, 44, 57
49. See also Harriet Guest, "The Wanton Muse," in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780-1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London, 1992)
50. Stephanie Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford, 2000), 35
51. See J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1999), 2:310-11, 314
52. Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance to the Regency (London, 1989), 151
53. Jane Rendall, "Tacitus Engendered: 'Gothic Feminism' and British Histories, c. 1750-1800," in Imagining Nations, ed. Geoffrey Cubitt (Manchester, 1998), 57-74
54. Duff, Romance and Revolution, 118
55. See, especially, John Millar, "The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks" (1779), in John Millar of Glasgow, 1735-1801, ed. William H. Lehmann (Cambridge, 1960)
56. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 317
57. Rendall, "Tacitus Engendered," 64, 66
58. Howard Weinbrot, "Politics, Taste, and National Identity: Some Uses of Tacitism in Eighteenth-Century Britain," in Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, ed. J. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 178
59. A similar process has been described by Dudink in "Masculinity, Effeminacy, Time."
60. Weinbrot, "Politics," 178
61. Cottrell, "The Devil on Two Sticks," 265
62. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1768; repr., Edinburgh, 1966), 309
63. Men's reverence and respect for women was also a key feature of The Poems of Ossian, notes John Dwyer, The Age of the Passions: An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (East Linton, 1999)
64. Richard Hurd, "Letters on Chivalry and Romance," in Moral and Political Dialogues, 3 vols. (London, 1765), 3:209
65. Ferguson, Civil Society, 310-11, 200-201
66. See also Jane Rendall's introduction to William Alexander, History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time, 2 vols. (1781; repr., Bath, 1994), v-xxvi
67. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vols., ed. J. B. Bury (London, 1907), 7:283
68. See Burke, Reflections, 171
69. R. J. Smith, Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863 (Cambridge, 1987), 119-20
70. Donald T. Siebert, "Chivalry and Romance in the Age of Hune," Eighteenth-Century Life 21 (1997): 62-79, argues that Hume and Burke are among the few who take chivalry seriously
71. Barbara Taylor, "Feminists versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain," in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke, 2005)
72. Reverend George Thomson, The Spirit of General History in a Series of Lectures from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century (Carlisle, 1791), 176. This text is an early example of the popularization of chivalry
73. Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, 1:171
74. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 6:283
75. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity
76. Millar, Origin, 215
77. see also Gilbert Stuart, A View of Society in Europe in its Progress from Rudeness to Refinement (Edinburgh, 1778)
78. Dwyer, Age of the Passions, chap. 4
79. Hurd, "Letters on Chivalry."
80. Thomson, Spirit of General History
81. Ferguson, Civil Society, 201
82. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (1790; repr., Cambridge, 1995), 25, 179
83. Lucy Aikin, Epistles on Women (London, 1810), 52
84. Siebert, "Chivalry and Romance," 76
85. Allen J. Frentzen argues that this connection was underplayed in the nineteenth century, stress being placed rather on chivalry's value as an instrument of reform. Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago, 2004), chap. 6
86. Dafydd Moore, "Ossian, Chivalry and the Politics of Genre: The Case of Fingal King of Morven, a Knight-Errant," "British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (2000): 21-35, 27
87. Frantzen, Bloody Good, 149
88. David Hume, History of England, cited in Siebert, "Chivalry and Romance," 69
89. Edward Prestage, Chivalry: A Series of Studies to Illustrate Its Historical and Civilising Influence (London, 1928), 27, argues that "chivalry vanished from the practical arts of war in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries" but "lingered in education."
90. See Cohen, "Manliness, Effeminacy," and Michèle Cohen, "The Grand Tour, Language, National Identity and Masculinity," Changing English: Studies in Reading and Culture 8, no. 2 (2001): 129-41
91. Prestage, Chivalry
92. See Michèle Cohen, "The Grand Tour: Constructing the English Gentleman in Eighteenth-Century France," History of Education 21, no. 3 (1992): 241-57
93. Richard Hurd, Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel Considered as a Part of an English Gentleman's Education: Between Lord Shaftesbury and Mr Locke (London, 1764), 105, 160
94. Cohen, "The Grand Tour, Language, National Identity," and "Manliness, Effeminacy."
95. Catharine Graham [Macaulay], History of England, 8 vols. (London, 1763-83), 1:xv-xvi. Macaulay's argument is rooted in republicanism rather than chivalry, but, Duff notes in Romance and Revolution, the two are not incompatible
96. John Andrews, Letters to a Young Gentleman on his Setting out for France (London, 1784), 4
97. Hurd, Uses of Foreign Travel, 71
98. John Moore, MD, "View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance," prefixed in Tobias Smollett, Works, 8 vols. (London, 1797), 1:xv-xi
99. Town and Country Magazine (1771), 413
100. Vicesinms Knox, Liberal Education (London, 1781)
101. For concerns about the effeminacy of the military, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995)
102. John Bonehill, '"A Trip to Cock Heath': War, Fashion and Femininity in Graphic and Literary Satire of the Late Eighteenth Century" (unpublished paper)
103. Kenelm Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour; or, Rules for the Gentlemen of England (London, 1822)
104. Digby was the foremost expert on chivalry and its history in the nineteenth century and was admired by Wordsworth, John Ruskin, and especially Edward Burne-Jones. Frantzen, Bloody Good, 17, 131
105. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT, 1981), 60. Girouard suggests that Baden Powell drew on the Broad Stone when he was forming the Boy Scouts
106. Digby, Broad Stone, xi
107. Knox, Liberal Education, 29
108. William Barrow, An Essay on Education, 2 vols. (London, 1802), 2: 162
109. See Michèle Cohen, "Gender and the Public Private Debate on Education in the Long Eighteenth Century," in Public or Private Education? Lessons from History, ed. Richard Aldrich (London, 2004)
110. Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education (London, 1790), 142
111. Sydney Smith, "Review of the Remarks on the System of Education in Public Schools" Edinburgh Review 16 (1810): 327-29
112. Charles Mills, History of Chivalry, or Knighthood and its Times, 2 vols. (London, 1825)
113. Alan Sinfield, "The Wilde Century," quoted in George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (Chichester, 1999), 5
114. Samuel Foote, "The Englishman Returned" (1756), in The Plays of Samuel Foote, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and D. Howard (London, 1983)
115. See Cohen, "Manliness, Effeminacy."
116. Moore, "Ossian, Chivalry," 31
117. see Girouard, Return to Camelot
118. Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s; Wollstone-craft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (London, 1995), 199
119. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760-1830 (Oxford, 1981), 99
120. Peter Mandler, personal communication, 2001
121. Ward Hellstrom, "Francophobia in Emma," Studies in English Literature 5 (1965): 607-17, 611 n. 12, has argued on the other hand that "the biographical facts . . . appear to have no significance to the theme and the structure of the novel, nor would [Austen] care . . . to have Churchill associated with a favoured brother Frank."
122. Abbé Nicolas Charles Joseph Trublet, Essays upon Several Subjects of Literature and Morality, 3 vols. (London, 1744)
123. Stuart, View of Society, 67
124. David Fordyce, Dialogues concerning Education, 2 vols. (London, 1745-48), 1:43
125. For a discussion of the meaning of knowing or not knowing French, see Michèle Cohen, "French Conversation or 'Glittering Gibberish'? Learning French in Eighteenth-Century England," in Expertise Constructed: Didactic Literature in the British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell (Aldershot, 2003)
126. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 201
127. He argues that Mr. Knightley is "associated with a specific knight - St George, the patron saint of England," while Mr. Churchill embodies the depravity of France. Hellstrom, "Francophobia," 611
128. Jane Austen, Emma (London, 2003), 305, 352, 347, 141, 56, 419, 208, 327, 128, 400, 208
129. William Alexander, History of Women, From the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time, 2 vols. (London, 1779), 1:42
130. Aikin, Epistles, v
131. Alexander, History of Women, 1:42, 43
132. David Hume, "Of Essay Writing," in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1777), ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987), 535
133. Henry Home, Lord Karnes, "On the Progress of the Female Sex," in Six Sketches on the History of Man (Philadelphia, 1776), 195