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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 …

Enemies and false friends [ Antagonism & Resistance ]

… performed, and enacted during this period. Concepts > Antagonism & Resistance Keywords false friendship enemies Politeness betrayal Gender candour dissimulation reputation female friendship Civility Friendship held an important place … dealt with the subject of enmity. However, it was always a central feature of the literature on friendship and politeness, which contained abundant evidence of the perils that came from contracting close intimacies with those who … concern that surrounded the masquerade-like superficiality that dominated displays of eighteenth-century polite culture. Politeness was ‘implicitly dishonest’ because it demanded dissimulation. This involved not only the suppression of one’s …

Bath (and the reinvention of spa sociability) [ Cities / Politics & Society ]

… politic.   Places > Cities Practices > Politics & Society Keywords Civitas Codes Fashion Healing Health Invalid leisure Politeness ritual Spa The transformation of Bath in the long eighteenth century occurred against a background of urban, …  In a context of rivalry with France, the refinement of manners meant a degree of emancipation from the French model of politeness. 2  The desire to change social behaviour was apparent in the aesthetics of novelty defined by Joseph Addison … Such an undertaking chimes in with the refinement of manners at work in the spa, since, as explained by Lawrence Klein, politeness had a ‘moral potential’ and ‘manners were the foundations of civic politics.’ 19 The Woods designed buildings …

Scottish Enlightenment [ Political & Moral philosophy ]

… developed in the post-Enlightenment period. Concepts > Political & 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 …

Beau Nash [ Fashion ]

… downplaying his moral ambiguity. People > Fashion Keywords Bath Fashion Gaming Social codes Manners Master of Ceremonies Politeness Refinement Spa Wit Richard Nash, who was born in Swansea in 1674, has gone down in history as Beau Nash – the … 6 . Christopher Anstey, The New Bath Guide, 1766, ed. Annick Cossic (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). 7 . See Lawrence Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal (45, 2002), p. 879. Despite … Michele Cohen has demonstrated that ‘the focus on gender relations was a characteristic feature of chivalry as it was of politeness’ in ‘‘Manners‘ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750-1830‘ Journal of …