Gentleman [ Taste & Manners / Politics & Society ]
… success. One way of achieving this was through claiming gentlemanly status through their personal achievements and merit. 1 . Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (University of … 1747), I, pp. 136, 232. As middling-sort men’s confidence in the availability to them of gentlemanliness by personal merit grew, so too did this identity take on more oppositional overtones. They began to contrast favourably their … composition, values and ideals of the readership. In these notices, sociability was important in defining a man’s merit, provided it was allied to good sense and industrious habits. The July 1804 obituary of seventy-four-year-old Revd …
Benevolence | Middling sort | Politeness | Rank
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