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A POLITE AND ENLIGHTENED LONDON?

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Women, feminism and religion in early Enlightenment England. By SarahApetrei. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. x + 325. ISBN 9780521513968. £63·00.
Sympathy, sensibility and the literature of feeling in the eighteenth century. By IldikoCsengei. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. xii + 261. ISBN 9780230308442. £60·00.
The origins of sex: a history of the first sexual revolution. By FaramerzDabhoiwala. London: Allen Lane, 2012. Pp. xi + 484. ISBN 978-1846144929. £25·00.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2016

ROSALIND CARR
ROSALIND CARR*
Affiliation:
University of East London
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Extract

The character of eighteenth-century English society remains a subject of debate, and diverse perspectives are particularly pronounced when it comes to the cultural influence and power of politeness. The monographs discussed below all engage with politeness in different ways. Emma Major and Sarah Apetrei explore the means by which polite culture facilitated female cultural agency, and thus follow Lawrence Klein's call to comprehend the lived experience of politeness. Taking a different tack, Simon Dickie and Vic Gatrell reject the idea that politeness enjoyed the cultural dominance ascribed to it by Klein and other historians. In Ildiko Csengei's study, the narrative of an emergent civility is challenged through an analysis of sensibility's ‘darker side’. This move towards an acceptance of the power of the impolite in British culture is also explored by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, who emphasizes the power of the liberated male libertine, and broadens the scope for understanding eighteenth-century culture. Yet, an abandonment of politeness risks removing women's agency from the picture, with Major, Apetrei, and Karen O'Brien all emphasizing the importance of the feminine to politeness and virtue; in O'Brien's case, in the context of Enlightenment concepts of civility, where the feminine symbolized progress and refinement.

Type
Review Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 623 - 634
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 Klein, Lawrence, ‘Politeness and the interpretation of the British eighteenth century’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), p. 878CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See also John Brewer, Pleasures of the imagination: English culture in the eighteenth century (London, 1997).

3 Csengei, Sympathy, sensibility and the literature of feeling, p. 1.

4 Brewer, Pleasures of the imagination; Robert Darnton, George Washington's false teeth: an unconventional guide to the eighteenth century (New York, NY, 2003); Dena Goodman, Republic of Letters: a cultural history of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, 1996); Margaret C. Jacob, The radical Enlightenment: pantheists, freemasons and republicans (London, 1981); Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: a comparative social history, 1721–1794 (London, 2000).

5 Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination (Cambridge, 2003).

6 Major, Madam Britannia, p. 17.

7 Ibid., p. 276.

8 Apetrei, Women, feminism and religion, p. 11.

9 Brian W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century England: theological debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998). See also Roy Porter, ‘The Enlightenment in England’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in national context (Cambridge, 1981), p. 6.

10 Apetrei, Women, feminism and religion, p. 17.

11 O'Brien, Women and Enlightenment, p. 44.

12 Ibid., p. 67.

13 Ibid., p. 153.

14 Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: women of reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke, 2010); Taylor, Barbara, ‘Enlightenment and the uses of woman’, History Workshop Journal, 74 (2012), pp. 1–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott, eds., Women, gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005).

15 Taylor, ‘Uses of woman’, p. 2.

16 Csengei, Sympathy, sensibility and the literature of feeling, p. 142.

17 Ibid., p. 168.

18 Ibid., p. 177.

19 Dickie, Cruelty and laughter, p. 190.

20 Dabhoiwala, Origins of sex, p. 176.

21 Tony Henderson, Disorderly women in eighteenth-century London: prostitution and control in the metropolis, 1730–1830 (London, 1999).

22 Dabhoiwala, Origins of sex, p. 78.

23 Vic Gatrell, City of laughter: sex and satire in eighteenth-century London (London, 2006), p. 4.

24 Gatrell, First Bohemians, p. 260.

25 Michéle Cohen, Fashioning masculinity: national identity and language in the eighteenth century (London, 1996); Philip Carter, Men and the emergence of polite society: Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001); Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the culture of politeness: moral discourse and cultural politics in early eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994).

26 Berry, Helen, ‘Rethinking politeness in eighteenth-century England: Moll King's coffee house and the significance of “flash talk”’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 11 (2001), pp. 65–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 For a critique of singular definitions of eighteenth-century manhood, see Harvey, Karen, ‘The history of masculinity, circa 1650–1800’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 269–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Karen Harvey, The little republic: masculinity and domestic authority in eighteenth-century Britain (Oxford, 2012); Henry French and Mark Rothery, Man's estate: landed gentry masculinities, 1660–1900 (Oxford, 2012); Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in early modern England: honour, sex and marriage (London, 1999); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of manhood in early modern England (Oxford, 2003).

29 Dabhoiwala, Origins of sex, p. 108.

30 Shoemaker, Robert, ‘The taming of the duel: masculinity, honour and ritual violence in London, 1660–1800’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 525–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foyster, Elizabeth, ‘Creating a veil of silence? Politeness and marital violence in the English household’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12 (2002), pp. 395–415CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

31 Harvey, Karen, ‘The century of sex? Gender, bodies, and sexuality in the long eighteenth century’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 899–916CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Bailey, Joanne, ‘“A very sensible man”: imagining fatherhood in England, c. 1750–c. 1830’, History, 95 (2010), pp. 267–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; French and Rothery, Man's estate; Harvey, Little republic.

33 Bailey, ‘Imagining fatherhood’, p. 271.

34 Amanda Vickery, Behind closed doors: at home in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 2009), p. 7. Original italics.

35 Amanda Vickery (presenter), At home with the Georgians [documentary], BBC2, 2010; Belle, directed by Amma Asante (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013); Joanne Bailey, ‘Muses on history: talking through my research’, https://jbailey2013.wordpress.com/, accessed 13 Mar. 2015; Lucy Inglis, ‘Georgian London’, http://georgianlondon.com/, accessed 10 Mar. 2015; Sarah Murden and Joanne Major, ‘All things Georgian’, https://georgianera.wordpress.com/, accessed 10 Mar. 2015; Caroline Warfield, ‘A Covent Garden Gilflurt's guide to life: glorious Georgian dispatches from the long eighteenth century’, http://www.madamegilflurt.com/, accessed 18 Mar. 2015; Alun Withey, https://dralun.wordpress.com/, accessed 10 Mar. 2015.

36 Allen Lane, http://www.penguin.co.uk/about-penguin/allen-lane/, accessed 28 July 2014.

37 Anna Clark, The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working class (London, 1995); Robert Shoemaker, The London mob: violence and disorder in eighteenth-century England (London, 2007); Carolyn Steedman, Labours lost: domestic service and the making of modern England (Cambridge, 2009).

38 Lawrence Klein, ‘Gender, conversation and the public sphere in early eighteenth-century England’, in Judith Still and M. Worton, eds., Textuality and sexuality: reading theories and practices (Manchester, 1993), pp. 100–15.

39 See also Amanda Vickery, The gentleman's daughter: women's lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1998), and, in the Scottish context, Katharine Glover, Elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2011).

40 Klein, ‘Politeness’, pp. 869–98.

41 Elaine Chalus, Elite women in English political life, c. 1754–1790 (Oxford, 2005); Kathryn Gleadle and S. Richardson, eds., Women in British politics, 1760–1860: the power of the petticoat (Basingstoke, 2000).

42 Hannah Greig, The beau monde: fashionable society in Georgian London (Oxford, 2013), p. 20.

43 Greig, Beau Monde, pp. 131–66.

44 Major, Madam Britannia, p. 186.

45 Taylor, ‘Uses of woman’, p. 3.

46 Major, Madam Britannia, p. 190.

47 Langford, Paul, ‘The uses of eighteenth-century politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12 (2002), pp. 311–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 326.

48 Langford, ‘Politeness’, p. 323.

49 This is emphasized in recent studies of eighteenth-century masculinity, including Davison, Kate, ‘Occasional politeness and gentlemen's laughter in eighteenth-century England’, Historical Journal, 57 (2014), pp. 921–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harvey, Karen, ‘Ritual encounters: punch parties and masculinity in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, 214 (2012), pp. 165–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and my recent monograph, Gender and Enlightenment culture in eighteenth-century Scotland (Edinburgh, 2014), esp. ch. 3.