In the eighteenth century, it was common even for people of good breeding (such as Chesterfield) to have bad teeth. Modern dental care means that most Europeans have teeth that they are not ashamed to bare, except perhaps in the presence of affluent Americans, whose incisors tend to be resplendently straight and white. In the eighteenth century it was common to admire the lustre of Frenchwomen’s teeth, and, although the Swiss commentator Béat-Louis de Muralt had in the 1720s identified as ‘a great injury’ Englishwomen’s ‘not taking care of their teeth’, there were now much more concerted attempts to maintain dental health – for reasons of fashion as much as hygiene.15 But while Chesterfield’s censure of laughter was in part to do with preventing embarrassing dental exposure, it was more than that: we may instinctively think that laughter is happily cathartic, yet in practice we are likely to see how often laughter reeks of jeering complicity.
Chesterfield associated laughter with the mob, and he associated the mob with buffoonery, an absence of proportion, a lack of restraint and moderation. He was doubtless influenced as well by the advice his mother had received from his grandfather in the 1680s: ‘It is not intended … that you should forswear laughing; but remember, that fools being always painted in that posture, it may fright those who are wise from doing it … That boisterous kind of jollity is as contrary to wit and good manners, as it is to modesty and virtue.’
From Chesterfield we may get the sense that eighteenth-century society was fantastically sophisticated. For many, it was. The rich young men of eighteenth-century London were defined by their tastes and sensibilities, and there were plenty of ways in which they could school these. They could attend the Soho academy run by Domenico Angelo, who taught gentlemanly elegance alongside the intricacies of horsemanship. They could wallow in sentimental literature, such as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, the most popular novel of the 1770s and an education in the fine art of tearful compassion. More likely, though, they would associate with like-minded individuals, as per the satires of Ned Ward, within a club – literary, antiquarian, sporting, or simply of the ‘roaring’ sort where convivial drinking was the main concern. Clubs were important beyond London, too, with debating societies offering an alternative to boozy leisure.
There was a different side to the period: men and women being placed in the pillory, the custom of going to Bedlam to gawp at the insane, public hangings at which the condemned were pelted with offal. De Muralt wrote of English ‘férocité’ – an addiction to violent sports and an indifference to death. In his view it was permitting evil, rather than committing it, that was the real English vice. Criminality affected everyone: highwaymen held up coaches, pickpockets darted through the city streets, freshwater pirates snatched goods from boats, burglars worked in gangs, graves were robbed to provide corpses for trainee surgeons, and there was widespread anxiety about the degree of violence that criminals used. This is the flagrantly vicious world of Hogarth, and it is the world vilified by John Wesley, who crusaded against barbarous ungodliness. London’s swarms of prostitutes were well-known. From the 1750s to the 1790s it was possible to buy Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, an annual directory of prostitutes – a sort of Very Yellow Pages. Anarchy was answered with brutality. Until 1789 a woman who murdered her husband could be burned at the stake; until 1817 she could be whipped in public, and men could be whipped in public as late as 1868.16
But eighteenth-century visitors to England were struck by the uniformity of manners. They observed how little regional variation there was, a state of affairs very different to that in France or Italy. They presented the English as doers rather than thinkers, a nation of solemn men and modest women, rough children and violent schoolmasters, fast walkers and bloodthirsty hunters, melancholics and dullards, a tribe of practical, businesslike figures torn between restlessness and self-control. Yet most often the English were regarded as steady and regular, and their solid thinking and temperament were commonly traced to their very solid diet.17
That solidity, of temperament and body, expressed itself in frankness, an aversion to change, an almost monastic style of domestic life combined with a tendency to travel with their worldly goods bundled around them, and what William Hazlitt described as an appetite for ‘hard words and hard blows’. Even pleasure-seeking seemed industrious. Some visitors found this dispiriting, and claimed that their intellects and emotions atrophied after just a brief time ashore. The French novelist Stendhal claimed that the moment one landed in England, where common sense was exalted, genius lost 25 per cent of its value. Another novelist, Robert Martin Lesuire, addressed the matter rather more tartly in Les Sauvages de l’Europe (1760). According to one character, the only difference ‘between the English, and their brother-savages of Africa, is, that among the latter the fair sex meet with some consideration’. Friedrich Kielmansegge, a German who travelled around England in the 1760s, saw in Shakespeare’s plays the essence of a nation condemned to be tragic: ‘most of the characters go mad, or get blind, or die.’18
One form of Hazlitt’s ‘hard words’ was xenophobia. The main targets were, naturally, the French. Visitors from France complained of meagre hospitality: an Englishman’s idea of a token of friendship was a visiting card, three inches by one and a half. Anti-Catholic sentiment was rife at this time and found sensational expression in the Gordon Riots of June 1780, sparked by resentment of recent legislation that provided for greater tolerance of Catholics. Mob disorder erupted; soldiers called in to disperse the rioters shot 285 of them dead. The riots reinforced the impression abroad that Britain was undemocratic, with the threat of disorder never remote.
By the end of the century the violence was less marked, though the threat remained. In the 1780s and 1790s changes were afoot. Some were great: the French Revolution sparked political radicalism and utopianism (answered by a surge in popular conservatism), and Mary Wollstonecraft provoked a bristling debate about the role of women in society. Others were smaller yet significant: for instance, the new Sunday schools curbed delinquency and promoted a pious neatness, and lower-class amusements reportedly became less gross.
In due course commentators reflecting on this – among them Hazlitt – argued that the natural aggression of the English was simply now shielded from view, a condition of the mind that the body rarely disclosed. Carl Philip Moritz, a German who visited in 1782, noted that ‘When two Englishmen quarrel, actions mean more than words. They say little but repetitions of the same thing, clinching it with a hearty “God damn you!”’ Moritz was often impressed by the living standards he observed, but was struck by the casual loutishness exhibited by people of all classes. At the theatre, he was hit on the hat by one of the many rotten oranges lobbed towards the stage from the cheaper seats. ‘Oranges,’ he commented, ‘are eaten practically everywhere in London.’19
Some visitors saw the gruff candour and hearty God-damning as virtues. In 1789 the Prussian writer Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz published A Picture of England, in which he remarked: ‘It has been observed that the common people in England are more intelligent and judicious than in any other country.’ He attributed this to ‘the free and unrestrained manner in which they speak and write’.20 The English had since the fourteenth century been known as les goddems, on account of that lack of restraint. It was a term used without affection, and it persisted into the second half of the twentieth century. Since the 1960s it has given way to a new sobriquet: les fuckoffs. But in the age of Chesterfield and throughout the century that followed, visitors admired England and the English – and the English responded complacently.
Meanwhile radical thinkers such as William Godwin (Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband) argued against the artificial codes so popular among his contemporaries. In Godwin’s eyes, mankind was perfectible: an enlarged personal morality could do the job hitherto done by politicians and the judiciary. He saw manners as playing no part in this; his language suggests he associated them with Chesterfield. He wrote that
By politeness man
y persons understand artificial manners, the very purpose of which is to stand between the feelings of the heart and the external behaviour. The word immediately conjures up to their mind a corrupt and vicious mode of society, and they conceive it to mean a set of rules, founded in no just reason, and ostentatiously practised by those who are familiar with them … to confound and keep at a distance those who, by the accident of their birth or fortune, are ignorant of them.21
These strong words, which will resonate with many readers now (and will appal many others), were typical of Godwin, a man way ahead of his time.
Godwin’s behaviour was in most respects far removed from the insinuating methods of Chesterfield. We can see this in his correspondence especially. Godwin used letters not for disingenuous strategizing, but to tell off friends and acquaintances. He is forever issuing warnings to his correspondents, and sometimes he sternly tells them that they have earned his approval. ‘You are not without some share in my esteem,’ he informs the barrister Thomas Erskine in a letter that is otherwise severe: ‘Take care. Learn a great moral lesson … Do you think you can insult the common sense of mankind … without at the same time insulting yourself & degrading your character?’22 Godwin’s letters, different from those of so many of his contemporaries, demonstrate the range of purposes for which letters were then used.
14
Letters and social change
Jane Austen and Fanny Burney
Until recently the letter, whether formal or personal, was one of the most flexible and popular instruments of communication. In the twenty-first century letter-writing is a lost art and can seem a futile activity; we associate it with a less mobile age. But the letter used to be an aid to personal freedom. Versatile and direct, it could function as a record, a petition, an incitement to rebellion, a grant of privilege or a bond of trust, an advertisement or a memorial.1 Its tone could be, among other things, friendly, amorous, instructive, angry or apologetic.
If for William Godwin letters were opportunities to issue warnings, for Chesterfield they were performances, at once an extension of conversation and a sort of game. A business letter should be set out with ‘elegant simplicity’, whereas a ‘familiar’ letter could incorporate ‘tropes, figures, antitheses, epigrams, etc.’. ‘Neatness in folding up, sealing, and directing your packets, is by no means to be neglected,’ he explained, for ‘there is something in the exterior, even of a packet, that may please or displease’.
It is characteristic of Chesterfield to take this rather limited view of what matters in letter-writing while actually using a great range of nuance in his own letters. He embodies the spirit of an age in which letters were dramas of intimacy. We see this again and again in eighteenth-century novels, which, in a style that feels at once spontaneous and artful, use letters as a means of representing multiple points of view. The best example is Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, a novel that claustrophobically evokes the psychological relationships between its actors and invites the reader to be their judge.
At the same time, there were letters of an altogether less brilliant kind. Richardson in his 1741 book Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions showed that a letter could simply be a means of enlarging one’s social sphere. It was a tool of persuasion. The samples he provided were written ‘in a common style’; the intended audience was ‘country readers’ who did not know much about writing.
Richardson was the inspiration for a new generation of letter-writers, opening a fresh social vista for people who would previously have thought of letters as the preserve of the elite. Banal rather than novelistic, their efforts were part of the machinery of mercantile survival – and of Empire. Today we think of the internet as a technology that has shrunk the globe; in the eighteenth century it was the letter that made the world seem smaller. Letters facilitated connections across long distances. The postal service was improved in the 1660s, and then, between 1720 and 1760, Ralph Allen developed a national postal network. In the 1780s John Palmer introduced the mail coach.
As the infrastructure improved, so it was possible for letters to be the glue holding together individuals and groups who would previously have seemed hopelessly far apart. The historian Susan Whyman has shown that this was not just the preserve of gentlefolk, and great value was attached to mastering the etiquette of letter-writing: how to start and sign off, how much marginal space to leave, the commonplaces needed to achieve a suitable air of sincere politeness. This etiquette was set out in manuals, which aimed to instil dependence not only on certain templates, but also on stock sentiments. Up to about 1750, the model was French; thereafter a more natural, flexible style was adopted, but middle-class parents still required their children to learn penmanship, layout, spelling and forms of address, as well as an appropriate vocabulary which included standard ways of expressing apology, humility and friendship.
The second half of the eighteenth century also saw a proliferation of books about manners aimed at female readers. The Young Lady’s Companion (1740), written by ‘a person of quality’, was an example of the initially limited scope of such works: sixty-eight pages long, it announced only as late as page forty-one that ‘It is time now to lead you out of your house into the world.’ This was ‘a dangerous step’, and numerous cautions followed.2 In time works of this kind became more complex, and they illustrated the degree to which letter-writing was now a powerful vehicle for women’s self-expression. In The Ladies Complete Letter-Writer (1763) there are traces of the old prescriptions of Richard Brathwait: a specimen letter about female education is juxtaposed with one providing a recipe for washing one’s face to beautiful effect. But across its nearly 300 pages this volume suggests just how many letters and how many kinds of letter women were writing.
For novelists of the period, who focused on social detail, the letter was a usefully protean medium. It could also suffer all manner of plot-enhancing fates, being stolen, quoted, misunderstood, delayed, lost or forged. By the end of the century it had become a vehicle for some truly daring representations of women’s desires. ‘The post office is a wonderful establishment,’ says a character in Jane Austen’s novel Emma, the plot of which hinges on secret correspondence. Its wonder was that it revolutionized communication; for Austen, who was born in 1775, the efficient new mail coaches introduced by John Palmer were a given – but one still new enough to be appreciated. In her personal correspondence, Austen was passionate, trivial, jokey, ingenious; reading the letters can feel like listening in on someone’s everyday phone conversations, and the mood is summed up when in one of them she asks her sister Cassandra, ‘Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?’ Important nothings are the stuff of intimate conversation, and in the age of letter-writing they became the material of literature.
We may think of Austen’s world as narrow, and she certainly did, describing the limited scale of her work as being like painting with a fine brush on a little bit of ivory, two inches wide. But how much she can make of that small space. On one occasion she writes to Cassandra: ‘Expect a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject … I shall have no check to my genius.’3 The same applies to her novels. They are not full of action, but she is quietly engaged with social changes, such as those inspired by the French Revolution. Her characters’ lives register the tremors of political upheaval; more straightforwardly, they are affected by faster journey times and greater opportunities for travel. In her last completed novel, Persuasion, she shows the tension between ‘the old English style’ and ‘the young people in the new’ with ‘more modern minds and manners’. Such modern manners achieve ‘a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement’. The main character, Anne Elliot, notices that society is becoming more fragmented. ‘Every moment … brought fresh agitation,’ she feels, as she gobbles up a love letter, and the words seem a summary of the social changes she is witnessing. In the manuscript of her final, unfinished novel Sanditon, Austen wrote the phrase ‘social order’,
which she then deleted, replacing it with ‘the common wants of society’. You sense that she was uncertain about not just the phrase, but the very idea of such order.4
Sensitive to the moral and wider social effects of good manners, and alert to the dangers resulting from their absence, Austen shared with her precursor Fanny Burney the technique of placing a character by referring to his or her lack of particular attributes. Theirs is literature as social vigilance. Burney appears to have originated several words that begin un-: unamusing, unclubbable, unpleasure and unpretty. Austen for her part seems to have coined uncoquettish, unfastidious, unfeudal, unloverlike, unmirthful, unmodulated and unpunctuality. The use of the negative prefix un- with (usually) a positive adjective can seem a telling evasion of direct diagnosis. But a word of this kind, uttered by a character, can be a means of self-congratulation. When Austen’s Emma says that the scorned Miss Bates is ‘so undistinguishing and unfastidious’, she is not only emphasizing that a civilized person should be distinguishing (that is, perceptive) and fastidious, but also making the point that she herself aspires to be both of these things. As we speak of others’ conduct, we establish an implicit set of criteria for judging our own. Emma reflects of the eligible Frank Churchill, a skilful and evasive letter-writer: ‘His indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too much on inelegance of mind.’ She thinks that a man’s mind should be elegant, and that a clear understanding of rank and its importance – important to her, as the queen of her own little world – is a mark of such elegance.
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