Sorry!

by Henry Hitchings

  It is clear that Pepys loved Elizabeth, even if he was intrigued by the idea of her more than he was satisfied by the reality. They married two weeks before her fifteenth birthday; the union, bedevilled early on by arguments, seems to have matured into a largely characteristic mixture of jealousies, intimacies and periods of indifference. They had no children, which meant Elizabeth was able to enjoy a much fuller life of leisure than most of her female contemporaries. Pepys paid for her to have dance lessons; he was jealous when she appeared to enjoy a special rapport with her teacher Pembleton, and even listened at the door during their private sessions.

  It is worth emphasizing that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dance was considered the best means of developing skills in the use of one’s body. Of particular importance was what one did with one’s head. The art of gracefulness began with mastering how to stand still; then movements could be added to a person’s repertoire. In his treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education John Locke argued that little children should not be ‘much tormented about … niceties of breeding’, but felt that dance endowed them with confidence and that ‘they should be taught to dance, as soon as they are capable of learning it’. Even in 1822 William Hazlitt in his essay ‘On the Conduct of Life’, presented as a letter of advice to a schoolboy, busily advised the study of Latin, French and dancing, and wrote: ‘I would insist upon the last more particularly’.9

  For men of Pepys’s generation, the standard work in the field was John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651). Pepys himself had had no early instruction in dance, and a diary entry in 1661 suggests that he did not even try to dance until he was in his late twenties. In due course he bought a copy of Playford’s book. There he could read that the ability to dance was ‘a commendable and rare quality fit for young gentlemen’ and had the effect of ‘making the body active and strong, graceful in deportment’.10 For Pepys and his contemporaries, dance was a means of engaging entertainingly with the question of deportment (a word first used around 1600). Experts in this area, concerned with their subjects’ carriage and bearing, paid close attention to the positioning of the legs, which were to be turned a little outward – not at the ankle, but from the hip. Women for their part were encouraged to take small steps and concentrate on walking in a straight line.

  Even sitting was taught, and its importance increased with the rise in tea-drinking, a sedentary practice. Tea was brought to England in 1644 by East India Company traders. The first shop where the public could obtain it was run by Thomas Garway; it opened in 1657, and Garway publicized the drink’s virtues. Pepys records consuming tea – ‘a China drink’ – for the first time in September 1660. This was an early hint of what would develop into an upper- and middle-class mania for chinoiserie, a lust for Chinese silks, screens, lacquerware, jars and delicate figurines. Within a few years Elizabeth was consuming tea for its alleged medicinal properties.

  Reflecting on a century of tea-drinking, Jonas Hanway in 1756 published a scathing attack on the habit. A merchant and philanthropist, Hanway was the first Englishman to make regular use of an umbrella, for which he was ridiculed and also resented (mainly by the men who protected rich folk from the elements by carrying them around in sedan chairs). In addition, he was a production-line writer specializing in moralizing manuals. In his treatise of 1756 he claimed that tea was ‘prejudicial’ to commerce, ‘pernicious … with regard to domestic industry and labour’ and ‘very injurious to health’, causing men to become effeminate. ‘This many-headed monster … devours so great a part of the best fruits of this land,’ he wrote. ‘Were they the sons of tea-sippers, who won the fields of Crécy and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood?’11 Hanway felt about tea the way a modern commentator might feel about, say, crack cocaine.

  Yet even a less partisan observer could grasp that as tea grew more popular, overtaking coffee by around 1730, social life changed. Tea was drunk mainly at home, whereas coffee was drunk outside the home. Both were stimulants, though, and encouraged a busy, sober sociability different from that produced by alcohol. Furniture changed as well; it had to be lighter so that it could be moved around more easily, and the tea table became a crucial marker of its owner’s aspirations. The ritual serving of tea was a female activity: the taking of tea gave women the chance to assert themselves socially, and the whole business of tea-drinking reinforced domesticity. I hardly need say that tea has become the English national drink, though there are other countries (Morocco, Turkey) where it is more liberally consumed. It continues to be associated with alertness but also with calmness and meditation. Appropriated from the far-flung outposts of Empire, it has been transformed into something completely dissociated from its origins in China, India and Burma: a tonic, a necessity, a suitable beverage for a phlegmatic people.

  It is apt that Pepys should provide this early sighting of tea, for he is alert to novelty. In 1663 he buys Elizabeth what he refers to as a ‘Chinke’ – a painted calico for lining the walls of her study, which later generations would call a chintz. The previous year he records going to Gray’s Inn with her to see what the latest fashions are, to be sure of getting the right outfits for spring. Visiting his bookseller, he is impressed by some modish French pornography; after sampling it extensively, he buys a copy. He is struck by the well-equipped shops set up during the rebuilding that follows the Great Fire. He is excited by a new vintage of French wine and has his crest stamped on bottles that are to be served at table. All the while he uses his diary to make sense of his daily activities and their relationship to the world at large; he is clarifying the structure of his life. He glories in his ego, too, in a way that seems thoroughly modern. Pepys is the earliest diarist whose writings in this vein are well-known today; the genre would later be applauded by etiquette experts as an extension of the author’s mind and a history of his or her development, a place to grow and to make plans, and a moral instrument, a nightly ‘stomach-pill of self-examination’.12

  In Pepys’s England, there were also new ideas of fashionable womanhood, adopted from France. The refined lady was a creature of the French salons, a poised and luminous woman addicted to luxury and intrigue, wit and scepticism. The type is memorably presented by Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, whose letters, meant for sharing rather than the exclusive consumption of individual recipients, were admired for their apparent naturalness. In reality they were artful, but to readers outside her coterie their gossip and intimacy seemed shockingly open.

  The word politesse became current in the age of Mme de Sévigné, and another theorist of salon life, Madeleine de Scudéry, defined it as ‘savoir vivre’. English readers of the period did not pick up this language from the salonnières, but learned the principles thanks to a new French literature of upward mobility. In 1671 the diplomat Antoine de Courtin published a work entitled Nouveau traité de la civilité qui se pratique en France parmi les honnêtes gens (which roughly translates as ‘A new treatise on civility as it is practised in France among honourable [i.e. upper-class] people’). He wrote for an audience of young, well-bred individuals who did not have the means or opportunity to travel to Paris and see how things were done there, and his Nouveau traité soon appeared in English, as The Rules of Civility. De Courtin’s use of the word honnête was loaded. Nicolas Faret had in 1630 published a guide to the art of pleasing at court; this had offered a picture of the ideal royal servant, whose loyal service was the thing that made it possible to call him honnête. By the time de Courtin produced his treatise, the honnête individual was not a devoted subject of the monarch, but someone versed in deft sociability. His contemporary Antoine Gombaud wrote about this new kind of honnête conduct, claiming as its defining feature an elegant ‘je ne sais quoi’.13

  To exalt je ne sais quoi is to exalt the fleeting and the insubstantial, the deliciousness of uncertainty. It is also a sign of a much less precisely defined class structure. Less precisely defined – and therefore more debatable. Previous
ly, the ‘quoi’ of good manners had been exactly identified and understood. As we move into the eighteenth century, discussion of manners grows more abstract. The practical aspects of manners become a separate affair: etiquette. Meanwhile snobbishness is rampant: to speak of je ne sais quoi is to say ‘tu ne sais quoi’ – ‘The secret is mine, and I can’t put it into words you’ll understand.’

  De Courtin is more helpfully specific than many of the writers who follow. He is clear about the physical side of mannerly behaviour, saying for instance that one should scratch rather than knock on a bedroom door to gain admission. He states that olives must be taken from a dish with a spoon, not a fork, and that it is impolite to announce one’s dietary preferences. Bowing must be done without extravagance. In the sixteenth century one had stepped back before bowing; in the seventeenth, one stepped forward, which necessitated more caution. This was what de Courtin counselled as he explained the mechanics of the bow: ‘neither throwing ourselves hastily upon our nose, nor rising up again too suddenly, but gently by degrees, lest the person saluted … might have his teeth beaten out’.14

  English moralists recoiled from this kind of writing. In The Ladies Calling (1673) Richard Allestree spoke out against modish pleasures; he wanted to ‘awaken some ladies from their stupid dreams’ and convince them that they had been sent into the world ‘for nobler purposes, than only to make a little glittering in it’. (Tellingly, he defines female modesty not by explaining what it is, but by spending twenty-seven pages on the various ways in which it can be violated.) Mary Astell, in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), urged women to give up frivolous activities such as reading romances; instead they should broaden their attainments. She also attacked the dissolute fashionable men of the day, who trivialized religion and were guilty of ‘brutish appetite’.15 Both writers worried about the way so many contemporary works of literature placed an emphasis on flirtation and ideas of love that were voguish rather than solidly Christian. For Astell, the obsession with refined manners prevented women from getting a useful education. The cult of politesse elevated external values at the expense of internal ones – a preference that would eventually pollute the entire literature of manners.

  Astell and Allestree were trying to resist forces that were much bigger than them. Pepys was more representative of the age’s inclinations: pliable, politically sophisticated, attuned to the minute business of science and finance (and of the self), frequently content to let aesthetics outshine morals. He was also a Londoner, and in the seventeenth century London was associated with opportunity and mobility; by its end, the city’s population was close to 600,000, while the second largest city in England was Bristol, with a population of just 30,000.16 The influence of London was felt all over England, and the city was a honeypot for people with ambition.

  For an insight into a much less exalted form of life at this time, Richard Gough’s The History of Myddle is invaluable. It is an account of a Shropshire parish, written around 1700. As he introduces us to the parishioners, Gough frequently describes their ‘vicious’ actions: one is ‘addicted to idleness’ and consorts with ‘ugly nasty bawds’, and another is reputed to have ‘had no guts in his brains, but it seemed he had gear in his britches, for he got one of his uncle’s servant maids with child’. Among Gough’s common terms of approval for women is ‘modest’, while a favourite term of approval for their housekeeping is ‘orderly’. For men, the equivalent is ‘sober’. In Gough’s vignettes social deficiency is strongly associated among women with sexual brazenness (he calls it lewdness) and domestic laxity, and among men with drunkenness.

  One of the themes of Gough’s writing is the capacity of drink to ruin decent men. For instance, he tells of a farmer who went daily with his wife to the alehouse, ‘and soon after the cows went thither also’. Gough is appalled that a man should have to sell his herd to pay for his drinking, but he is not surprised by it. Drunkenness is a state that has long been associated with the English, by foreigners and by the English themselves. The chronicler John of Salisbury recorded this perception in the twelfth century, and commentators have since then frequently spoken of the joyless, violent inebriation of Englishmen. In the age Gough documents, around 15 per cent of total income was spent on drink.17

  In Myddle, the church is at the centre of the locals’ lives. Gough classifies people according to where they sit in church, and this is how they would have seen themselves: church seating was a visible expression of hierarchy, often disputed. But Gough was writing from memory, and the world he depicted was being swept away. Farms were disappearing, rural communities were shrinking, improved education was gradually broadening local people’s horizons, and as the smaller farms were bought up by bigger landowners, the divisions between rich and poor became more palpable.

  Four events at the end of the century changed the texture of social life in England: the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which boosted both law and liberty; the Act of Toleration in 1689, which reduced religious persecution; the financial revolution of the 1690s, which included the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694; and the failure in 1695 to renew the Licensing Act, which ended arbitrary government censorship and resulted in a proliferation of printed material, not least a tide of partisan journalism. The result was a noisy pluralism. As society altered, there was a new relish for artistic, political and philosophical debate. At the same time, courtly models of behaviour were superseded. An example of this was the increasing hostility to duelling; once seen as romantic and honourable, it was in the eighteenth century widely deplored (not least for being a French affectation), and by around 1730 the badge of a gentleman was not a sword but instead a Malacca cane.18 The philosopher David Hume, writing about duels in the 1740s, was unusual in thinking them modern.

  A new urban middle-class value system was emerging: people were mobile, money was mobile, aspiration was bound up with ownership of objects more than with qualities, and transactions were the stuff of life. Manners were increasingly associated with fashionable goods and fashionable places. Indeed, manners were one of these fashionable goods – something to be marketed. But before we see this, we need to look more closely at one of Pepys’s favourite subjects, a matter eternally fraught with perils, confusions and complications, even if also with pleasures.

  10

  Not Mr Sex

  when ‘coffee’ doesn’t mean coffee

  There is an episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza, the show’s resident neurotic, is invited back to a woman’s apartment for coffee. He declines, explaining that the caffeine would keep him awake all night. Later he realizes his mistake: ‘“Coffee” doesn’t mean coffee; “coffee” means sex!’

  Readers of this book do not need to be told why it is unusual for someone to say, ‘Would you like to come back to my place for sex?’ Coffee stands in for sex because it is a post-prandial staple. It is an unembarrassing euphemism, although to some it suggests darker pleasures. Yet really what we see in George Constanza’s misreading is the way fuzziness is an important part of sexual behaviour. We are socially and sexually selective, and this involves competition. Fuzziness exists to mask our impulses. But it is also a filter for screening out of our sex lives people like George Costanza, who on one occasion tells his girlfriend that he loves her while they’re listening to a hockey game on the radio, is bemused by her failure to reciprocate, then delightedly discovers that she is deaf in one ear, and when he next sees her bellows the words ‘I love you’ into her good ear – which elicits the response, ‘I know. I heard you the first time.’

  In essence, sexual manners are about saying ‘coffee’ rather than ‘sex’. But I should add here that a brief survey of friends revealed differences between men and women regarding the fundamentals of sexual manners. Men seemed to think they were a matter of, for instance, not falling asleep straight after intercourse. Women thought they were mainly concerned with the preamble, the preamble’s preamble or the larger issues: can you sleep with someone on the first dat
e or should you wait till the third, and when do you discuss contraception or exclusivity? I can’t be sure that these findings are normal. I can report, however, that George Costanza’s misunderstanding elicited responses every bit as divergent, with men saying, ‘I’ve been there, too,’ and women saying, ‘Ah, but “coffee” really can mean just “coffee”.’ The charades that are assumed to be universally understood can in practice be ambiguous.

  George Costanza may be a native of Brooklyn (and a fictional figure, largely based on his Brooklyn-born creator Larry David), but his problems resonate with an English audience, for whom sex is traditionally a subject mired in hypocrisy, mostly handled with either prudery or prurience, and often treated in a manner that seems a mixture of the furtive and the fetishistic.

  The history of English sexuality tends to focus on outliers: the rakes of the Regency period, the gay brothels known as molly houses, the addicts of flagellation who have earned sexual beating its nickname ‘the English vice’, and the exploits of individuals such as the eighteenth-century diarist (and Scot) James Boswell, who was repeatedly struck down by venereal disease, and ‘Walter’, the author of a Victorian diary that is a monument to his encounters with more than 1,000 women (among whom, he regretfully tells us, there has never been a Laplander). When foreigners think of sex and the English, they think of self-deprecatory remarks rather than of crimson passion, but they may also think of archaic deviancy, which is likely to be much concerned with bottoms. The French call spanking le vice anglais. They like to label bad habits in this way, and we return the compliment: what they call filer à l’anglaise, we call French leave.