To a twenty-first-century reader, it may seem strange to give so much weight to the writings of philosophers. We tend to think of philosophers as the inhabitants of ivory towers, or at any rate of book-lined studies; they are caricatured as unable to poach an egg or drive a car, and as incapable of saying anything decipherable. But English philosophy is woven into English history (and vice versa). Hobbes, Locke and Shaftesbury were widely read by their contemporaries and by succeeding generations, who did not regard them as obscure, but thought their writings essential and exciting. It is only in the nineteenth century that discussions of manners and behaviour detach themselves from philosophy. Up till then, philosophy was not seen as a dry academic specialism and the literature of civility was not seen as pedantic.
Even as Shaftesbury and Mandeville were hammering out their different arguments, picturing a distinctly masculine world, others besides Addison and Steele were constructing a new ideal of politeness, more relaxed and much less assertively male. On a practical level, an important figure in these developments was Richard ‘Beau’ Nash. A generous and extravagant showman, who had toyed with a legal career in London, Nash was elected Master of Ceremonies by the Corporation of Bath shortly after his arrival there in 1705. Bath was at that time an increasingly fashionable spa town, a symbol of the leisured classes and their aspirations. (The health-giving properties of water, so long regarded with doubt, had been talked up by John Locke and in Sir John Floyer’s 1701 The History of Cold Bathing.) Encouraging easy sociability in place of Bath’s existing culture of haughty elitism, Nash laid down rules for public behaviour. Men were forbidden to carry swords; now manners, rather than sharp blades, were the means of protecting honour. He moved to curb drunkenness, specified that evening entertainment should end punctually at eleven o’clock, and ventured public criticism of those who flouted his rules. From 1716 until about 1740 he wielded authority on a regal scale. The ideals of polite behaviour that obtained in Bath – and also at Tunbridge Wells, which in the late 1730s Nash helped turn into a smart destination – were reproduced throughout fashionable society.
Programmes such as Nash’s attracted the satirical attentions of Jonathan Swift, a writer temperamentally inclined to be suspicious of anyone who pretended to be the saviour of the art of sociability. In Swift’s view, ‘good sense is the principal foundation of good manners.’ However, because good sense is in short supply, ‘all the civilized nations of the world have agreed upon fixing some rules for common behaviour … as a kind of artificial good sense.’10 In the trio of dialogues he published in 1738 as Polite Conversation – the title of which resonates today, though it would have struck his contemporaries as bizarre – he draws attention to this artificiality.
It is not easy to be sure whether Polite Conversation is a record of eighteenth-century speech, a satire on upper-class idiocy, an extended bad joke or a lament for the passing of conversational skill. Perhaps it is all these things. But there is something painful in Swift’s exposition of the mechanical inanity that passes for respectable chatter: ‘May you live all the days of your life’, ‘There’s none so blind as they that won’t see’, ‘That’s as well said, as if I had said it myself.’11 Swift suggests that you cannot learn by rote how to talk. He sees what he thinks is the decay of conversation and notes the degree to which, for modish folk, conversation has become an end it itself. Here, as in so many of his works, Swift contrasts skin-deep refinement with all the brute impulses that lurk beneath it.
Five years after Swift published Polite Conversation, Henry Fielding’s ‘An Essay on Conversation’ appeared. Fielding explained how to please others with one’s talk. His approach was philosophical rather than closely detailed. He provided guidance about subjects to be avoided: general reflections on countries, religions and professions; other people’s physical blemishes and past accidents; anything obscene, including obscene jokes (jokes as a whole being regarded as the preserve of fools). When he speaks of ‘The end of conversation being the happiness of mankind’, we feel we ought to be a long way from Swift’s examples, but may wonder how far from them we really are.12
It is Swift who is most alive to the ironies, discontents and delusions of eighteenth-century English society. It helped, no doubt, that he was an outsider: born and brought up in Ireland; drawn to England but always a visitor there, even if a well-connected one; and, back in Ireland, conscious of being ‘a stranger in a strange land’ or merely ‘a poisoned rat in a hole’. He was perceptive about inequalities. We see this in his Directions to Servants (posthumously published in 1745, begun thirty years earlier), which pictures servants and their masters engaged in something akin to guerrilla warfare. He advises a manservant, if he happens to be good-looking, ‘whenever you whisper [to] your mistress at the table, run your nose full in her cheek; or, if your breath be good, breathe full in her face.’13 Directions to Servants was not read by servants, but by people accustomed to receiving poor service. After digesting Swift’s observations, they were probably grateful that they had not been even worse served.
Swift was spoofing the conduct book. In doing so, he showed how widely known this type of manual had become. One of his inheritors was Jane Collier, whose An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) issued recommendations about how to irritate one’s friends. For instance, ‘If you have no children, keep as large a quantity of tame animals as you conveniently can’: you should treat them with extravagant fondness, and ‘Let them be of the most troublesome and mischievous sort’ (squirrels and monkeys are recommended). Also: ‘If your friend should come to any worldly misfortune, be sure … not to fail telling him (and that repeatedly), that it was entirely by his own fault.’ Writing for a mainly female audience, Collier poked fun at existing paradigms for women’s conduct. She suggested that women were limited by domestic convention. She urged her readers: ‘Remember always to do unto everyone, what you would least wish to have done unto yourself.’ In reversing the usual wisdom, she hints at some of the frustrations of conventional existence.14
In their different ways, Swift and Collier were deriding the contemporary notion that politeness was a kind of engineering. The sort of book they reviled was François Nivelon’s The Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour (1737), which gave precise instructions – alongside illustrative plates – about how to stand, walk, give, receive and retreat. Nivelon appeared to think that behaviour could be presented as if it were no more than ballet. This seemed ridiculous. Yet in truth, it was precisely the limitations of such schematic guides that made them effective.
Satirists of the period were alert observers of the influence of French and Italian culture. During the eighteenth century large numbers of British men and rather smaller numbers of British women went abroad for pleasure and as part of their education. European tourism was not confined to the British – the Germans and French were also keen recreational travellers – but British tourists were the most numerous. The Grand Tour was a ritual. It involved socializing with foreign dignitaries, examining precious artefacts and classical sites, savouring opera and stunning vistas, and collecting desirable paintings and objets. These activities were believed to have an ennobling effect that equipped young men for positions of power at home. The benefits were rarely explained; instead they were asserted.
It was during this period that it became common to claim that travel broadens the mind and helps one understand one’s own culture. Thus Peter Beckford, an eager tourist between the 1760s and 1790s, could write that ‘It is not in looking at pictures and statues only, that travelling is of use, but in examining the laws, customs and manners of other countries, and comparing them with our own.’ Why? Because ‘an Englishman will learn from a knowledge of other countries to set a proper value on his own.’15 Most travellers set that ‘proper value’ pretty high. Whatever they claimed about their minds’ expansion, the main benefits were social; the Grand Tour enabled upper-class Englishmen to be part of an international elite. It also created a vogue among men for carrying
trifles such as small items of jewellery and scent bottles. Quasi-educational, it was a lesson in affectation.
In Hannah Cowley’s 1780 play The Belle’s Stratagem one character speaks of ‘adventitious [i.e. non-native] manners imported by our travelled gentry’, another of ‘the blessed freedom of modern manners’. Cowley, a shrewd critic of bogusness, captures the changing conditions of society: Sir George Touchwood, the possessive and ridiculous husband of a determinedly free-spirited woman, states that society is ‘a mere chaos’ and a ‘universal masquerade’.16 That chaos, as Sir George can barely comprehend, is partly the result of a changing social order, in which women of independent mind, if not of independent means, are more numerous.
Several prominent eighteenth-century commentators, writing for male audiences, prescribed ‘the company of virtuous women’ as a recipe for politeness. Swift and Shaftesbury applauded its effects; so did David Hume. As the feminist democrat Mary Wollstonecraft would point out at the end of the century, elevated ideas of female excellence had the effect of degrading women, making them resemble treasures or jewels – toys and trinkets, not free and fully rounded individuals. She wrote of the ‘false system of female manners … which robs the whole sex of its dignity’.17 But in the altered public and private spheres of the late eighteenth century, women, though lacking many rights and much control of property, were able to extend their influence. They constructed family life as if it were a little world, which they peopled, made comfortable and made moral, and in which they performed roles unavailable to them in public life, as diplomats and economists. Meanwhile as writers they promoted a broader sense of life’s possibilities, women’s education and themselves, through pamphlets, novels, songs, poems, plays, memoirs, polemics, newspapers and magazines. By the start of the next century a new idea of necessary female accomplishments was being set out, by middle-class women. Before that, though, there appeared the single most controversial book ever written about English manners.
13
Lord Chesterfield and the invention of etiquette
We can date to the late eighteenth century the beginnings of our present distinction between manners, a word suggesting broad principles of behaviour, and etiquette, which denotes the actions that articulate those principles. In the century that followed, protocol offered a further shade of meaning, as it became the preferred term for the etiquette of a particular sphere (most often diplomacy). The word had been used since around 1700 for records of diplomatic negotiations; it derived from a Greek term for the first leaf of a papyrus roll, on which an official stamp would have been set. But the emergence of etiquette is far more important.
The word was popularized by Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield. In his lifetime (1694–1773) he was successful as a politician and diplomat. After his death, his reputation changed, and he was regarded as an arbiter and exemplar of good manners. This new reputation rested on letters he had written to his illegitimate son – another Philip.
Chesterfield is of consequence for two reasons. First, his letters are the culmination of the tradition of courtesy books aimed at men; after them, books of this kind are mainly written for women. Second, he chose to divorce manners from morals. He promoted self-interest rather than probity. He wanted Philip to understand how to get ahead. But his original contribution was a code of manners marked by amorality – and not the immorality of which his critics would later convict him.
The conservative moralist Hannah More was one of the main opponents of Chesterfield’s school of delicate artifice. In 1788 she anonymously published her Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society, arguing that the upper classes had a responsibility to set a good example to those less fortunate. For More, simplicity was the true mark of sincerity, whereas patrician polish could be a mask for wickedness. The routines of gentility, such as the emptier sort of philanthropy or insisting a servant cut one’s hair on a Sunday, disrupted morality. Principles were important; observing polite codes mattered much less. But the rise of etiquette books, which were more in tune with the competitive nature of the world, had already eclipsed such a view.
The first English use of etiquette that I have found is in the Gentleman’s Magazine in January 1737. It relates to the behaviour of the kings of Spain before Philip V, who were ‘slaves to their grandeur. They kept with the utmost rigour to a regulation called there the Etiquette; it contained all the ceremonies the Spanish monarchs were obliged to observe.’1 The word was brought to wider attention by Chesterfield. Its first OED citation is in a letter he wrote in 1750: ‘Without hesitation kiss his [the Pope’s] slipper, or whatever else the etiquette of that Court requires.’ It caught on in the final decades of the eighteenth century, applying not only to the court, but also to the more general intercourse of polite society. Among those to use it, just a little tentatively, were Edmund Burke and the novelist Laurence Sterne. In 1776 a work entitled The Fine Gentleman’s Etiquette appeared – the first book to advertise itself in such terms. On inspection, it consists of Chesterfield’s advice, turned into verse.
In adopting the word etiquette, Chesterfield was responding to what he considered the inadequacy of existing terminology: in place of large notions of ethics, he promoted a small ethics – etiquette being a diminutive that preserves a hint of the French éthique. In French, etiquette principally signified a ticket or label. A Victorian writer on manners, Eliza Cheadle, claimed that ‘Centuries ago, the word “etiquette” … specified the ticket tied to the necks of bags or affixed to bundles to denote their contents. A bag or bundle thus ticketed passed unchallenged.’2 The exact details of this are doubtful, but Cheadle captures a key role of etiquette: as a means of averting challenges, of protecting our bundles from close inspection.
One explanation of the word’s transition to denoting a prescribed set of formalities lies in the use of tickets at the French court to show courtiers where they should sit at table or at a ceremony. Alternatively, it may have been related to the custom of annotating soldiers’ billets with practical instructions. It was Chesterfield, rather than a French author, who established etiquette as a term for polite behaviour. A word that in French signified something small became in English a more generously encompassing term. As for kissing the Pope’s slipper, the custom continued into the twentieth century, but we should note that French experts contemporary with Chesterfield regarded it as superstitious and embarrassing.
By the end of the eighteenth century, etiquette was a word that could be used without conceit or any very shameful sense of its foreignness. In 1791 John Walker in A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary defined it as ‘the polite form or manner of doing anything; the ceremonial of good manners’. He rightly diagnosed the element of ceremony. In matters of etiquette a real consideration for others was secondary to an observance of whatever ceremonial acts were at the time fashionable.
The difference between the etiquette books that proliferated in the nineteenth century and the guides that preceded them was that, whereas it had formerly been assumed that socializing was inherently desirable, the new writers on etiquette emphasized privacy – the importance of not violating it and of maintaining social distance. The rise of the word etiquette was a marker of this change. Its popularity appears to have peaked between 1830 and 1900. It is to that period that we can trace what is now its dominant sense: the little rules about how to deal with shellfish, introductions and overnight guests.
In addressing his ideas about etiquette to his son, Chesterfield was subscribing to a mature tradition. For instance, King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, had in the 1590s written for his son Basilikon Doron, an instructive guide to monarchy. In 1687 the politician George Savile, first Marquess of Halifax, had addressed some advice to his twelve-year-old daughter Elizabeth, in the form of a ‘New Year’s Gift’. By then, little books of this kind, redolent of a suave paternal authority, had been popular for almost a century. Lord Burghley, principal secretary and then lord tre
asurer to Elizabeth I, had put together a collection of ‘precepts’ for his son Robert: guidance about choosing a wife, how to dress, what kind of hospitality to offer, and how to treat servants. This was published in 1615, seventeen years after Burghley’s death. It proved a model for many others: one of these was the controversial politician Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, who wrote a letter of advice to his nephew Sir William Savile, the father of George Savile. Francis Osborne’s Advice to a Son we have already encountered; another notable book in this vein was the jurist Sir Matthew Hale’s didactic Advice to his Grandchildren (1673), which stressed the difference between acquaintances, companions and friends, as well as discoursing on matters such as the importance of quickly overcoming anger, and more unusual ones, such as the value of knowing all about the planting and ordering of a country farm.
George Savile was unusual in addressing himself to a girl; his letter would become the model for many works of instruction written by men for young women. At first his advice circulated privately in manuscript, but soon a publisher pirated the text and it was translated into French and Italian, though Savile’s name did not appear on any edition until 1699, four years after his death. Some of what he says will now make us uncomfortable. Must a wife put up with marital unhappiness, overlook her husband’s dalliances, and weep in order to get her way rather than using her powers of reason? And why does he urge upon Elizabeth an unquestioning adherence to organized religion, when in private he claimed that it was a fraud perpetrated by self-interested clergymen on their credulous congregations?
The tone of the advice is not always serious. Savile writes that spring brings out flies and fools and sends them thronging to Hyde Park. No soldier, he says, is more obedient to his captain’s trumpet than he is to the desire to see a puppet show. Nevertheless, we can see the practical bent of Savile’s counsel: he tells his daughter that ‘one careless glance giveth more advantage [to predatory men] than a hundred words not enough considered’, and that she must ‘every seven years make some alteration … towards the graver side’, so that she does not become like one of those ‘girls of fifty, who resolve to be always young, whatever Time with his iron teeth hath determined to the contrary’. There is a well-phrased worldliness in his observations that ‘Whilst you are playing full of innocence, the spiteful World will bite’ and ‘Your husband may love wine more than is convenient.’ We may recognize a strategist’s savviness in his advice that his daughter should avert the possibility of being teased by means of ‘looks that forbid without rudeness, and oblige without invitation’.3
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