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Politeness [ Taste & Manners / Education ]

… Abstract In the eighteenth century, the term ‘politeness’ became a powerful, if controverted, tool for thinking about and understanding social order and also for … though practice often fell short of the ideal. Theorists disagreed about the fundamental psychology underlying politeness: whether it embodied a human capacity for virtue or it was a sophisticated expression of human egoism. In either case, the attractiveness of politeness grew out of contemporary developments in urban living, class aspiration, print culture and consumption …

Laughter [ Communication ]

… laughing could communicate anything from warmth to outright hostility; a well-placed chuckle could be the epitome of politeness, while an uncontrolled guffaw – especially triggered by a ‘lowbrow’ joke – was anything but. Laughter was … aspirations inherent in sociability quite like laughter. Practices > Communication Keywords Laughter humour Wit Taste Politeness impoliteness Manners civil society In May 1787, author-turned cleric Thomas Monro devoted an issue of his short-lived …

Joseph Addison [ Art and Literature / Politics ]

… Art and Literature People > Politics Keywords Addison Whig Periodical essay Tatler Spectator Coffeehouse Literature Wit Politeness Manners Joseph Addison (1672-1719) was an important theorist of English sociability in the early eighteenth … Ashley Cooper the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Addison helped to develop the ideological foundations for a ‘culture of politeness’ that would achieve hegemony in the age of Whig oligarchy. 3 2 . Lawrence Klein, ‘Joseph Addison’s Whiggism’, … the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2005). 3 . Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994). …

Richard Steele [ Art and Literature / Politics ]

… Richard Steele was one of the most important and controversial figures of early eighteenth-century sociability and politeness. Perhaps best known for his contributions to periodical literature, Steele achieved fame for the style and … view of who constituted the ‘people’. People > Art and Literature People > Politics Keywords Periodical Print culture Politeness Army Morality Politics Slavery Women Theatre Wit This article will not repeat data easily accessible elsewhere … relations between the sexes than about the West Indian slave system. 20   Although in some ways a leader of the field in politeness, he nevertheless shared many of the limiting assumptions of his contemporaries about who it was important to …

Scottish Enlightenment [ Political and Moral philosophy ]

… developed in the post-Enlightenment period. Concepts > Political and Moral philosophy Keywords Moral philosophy Manners Politeness Improvement commerce Cosmopolitanism Britishness Public sphere Urbanity Gender In his 1742 essay ‘ Of essay … of sociability. 3 One dimension of this reorientation in the 1720s and 1730s was a growing interest in the language of politeness and urban sociability that had already been mapped in works like Joseph Addison’s Spectator (1711-12) and even … Scotland was often experienced by contemporaries as a paradox. Traditional European thinking had assumed that politeness, arts, and sociability were dependent on the existence of a court culture, along with a deferential nobility …