In Our Time - Politeness

Episode Date: September 30, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of Politeness. A new idea that stalked the land at the start of the eighteenth century in Britain, Politeness soon acquired a philosophy, a literature and even a society devoted to its thrall. It may seem to represent the very opposite now, but at that time, when Queen Anne was on the throne and The Spectator was in the coffee houses, politeness was part of a radical social revolution.How did the idea of politeness challenge the accepted norms of behaviour? How did a notion of how to behave affect the great wealth of eighteenth century culture? With Amanda Vickery, Reader in History at Royal Holloway, University of London; David Wootton, Professor of History at the University of York; John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English at University College London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, at the start of the 18th century, more precisely in 1711, a new idea took wing. It was complete with a philosophy, a literature, and very soon society was in its thrall.

The idea was politeness. When Queen Anne was on the throne and the spectator was in the coffee-houses, politeness, surprising, as it may seem to us now, was part of a social revolution. So how did the idea of politeness challenge the accepted norms of behaviour? And how did a notion of how to behave affect the great wealth of 18th century culture?

With me to discuss politeness at David Wooten, Professor of History at the University of York, John Mullen, senior lecturer in English at University of London, and Amanda Vickory, reader in history at Royal Holloway University of London. Amanda Vickery, at the end of the 17th century, before we come to that great 1711 date,

What were the guidelines for best behaviour? I think there's really a courtly model of behaviour, which has been well established in the 17th century. But at the end of the 17th century, there are three major political events which change the map of culture and redraw the map of politics. 1688, the so-called glorious revolution when Parliament invites William of Orange to the throne

rejecting the incumbent King James II, the Act of Toleration of 1689, which acknowledges Protestant descent and tries to draw a line under a century of religious strife. And finally, the lapse of the Licensing Act of 1695, which ends political censorship effectively and unleashes a tide of print. And those three things together recreate,

well, recreate politics, recreate culture and establish what came to be called the Whig supremacy. And that changed world means that it's a world of debate, a world of public life, particularly in London, a world of socialising, and it needs a new model of behaviour and politeness comes forth. But until then you would say that the model had been dictated by the court and that had happened for many centuries

and it was court circles that set the pace. I think that court models of civility had been dominant since at least the Renaissance. But even before the Renaissance, could go back as far as Aristotle's idea of moderation and the mean. Stoicism, Epictetus, many people in the 17th and the 18th century were embraced stoicism to the full. And all of this together was absorbed into kind of Renaissance humanist ideas of courtly behavior. And I suppose the best expression of that was Castiglione's book of the courtier, which was read in the Italian courts. So Castiglione brought in Aristotle's idea of, of, of,

of moderation and the Cicero's idea of decorum and the idea of stoicism. Can we go into the idea of decorum a little bit more and then say why Castigulia was important for the Renaissance, 30th 16th century, and then how that might have carried on to what we're going to talk about? The idea of decorum is the notion that everybody's supposed to behave according to their place in society, according to their age, their rank and their sex, and that certain sorts of behaviour is appropriate for each station. and so if you are, so excessive dignity in the young would be indecorous,

Amazonian masculinity in women would be indecorous, and if a servant behaves like a lord, that would be indecorous. So it's quite a hierarchical system, which assumes that everybody's going to behave according to their place. David Wooden, this, as Amanda's pointed out, the change at the end of the 17th century, bringing in this new idea. I think it's quite difficult for me when I was reading about,

and people to think that politeness was a really big idea. But we are talking about John Locke writing the Law of Opinion and his pupil of Shastbury writing that book, Characteristics of Men, Manor's Opinions, Times. It had a philosophical basis. Can you give us a summary of that? Well, I think Shastbury had been taught by Locke, and the whole of his philosophy in a way is a response to Locke.

And he does two things, I think, with regard to Locke. The first thing he does is he takes up from Locke, the idea of self-consciousness. and Locke had invented the word self-consciousness, he'd presented people as having a reflective understanding of themselves, but he'd seen the self as essentially passive, the result of experience, molded by external factors. And what Shaftesbury wants to do is present the self as having an internal vitality,

a capacity to reflect on itself and change itself. So that Shaftree, when he talks about conversation, is talking about conversation between people, but also an internal conversation, and an internal conversation whereby you modify and develop yourself. That's the respect in which Shaftree is developing Locke. At the same time, Shaftree is very hostile to Locke, because Locke says that in the end, right and wrong are simply questions of divine law.

They're associated with pleasure and pain, with punishment. Shaft Three wants to detach virtue from punishment and vice from punishment, and he wants to say that there is something that's intrinsically good, and human beings have the capacity to recognize it and respond to it, and human beings are naturally benevolent. And this is a quite new notion of human nature to insist on man's capacity to love each other and to feel sympathy for each other

and to respond empathetically to each other. And politeness is partly about feeling other people's feelings, recognizing how they respond in circumstances, traveling alongside with them in conversation. Amanda spoke very clearly about 1688, 1699 and the release of the license. accessing access. But is there a sense in which this was a final reaction to the civil war, to the country being torn apart? Does that come into the mix of thinking at all?

Absolutely. I mean, it's a reaction to... Because that was only 50 years previously. That's right. It's a reaction to a continuing pattern of conflict around the issues of the civil war. The two parties that you have in the late 17th, 18th century, the Whigs and the Tories, are essentially the parties that fought the Civil War. And what's happening is that the Whig Party, which had fought the Civil War, had in the end lost at the restoration, or its previous its precursors are now becoming the party of government, and you have to change what had been an opposition party into a ruling party and change its values along with that.

But throughout English society is riven in the early 18th century by the rage of party, by party conflict. And politeness is about trying to moderate party conflict, moderate religious conflict. And this issue remains important right through until 1745 because of Jacobitism. The whole question of where legitimate authority lies is contentious. Before I go to John Marlon,

Just one final brief question. So we are bringing in a new philosophy. This is not just how to raise a teacup. It is a philosophy of how to live your life. That's coming in strongly, and he's felt to be such by thinking people at the time. Oh, that's right. And what's fundamental to this philosophy is it's a secular philosophy. It's a view of morality which leaves God out of the picture.

John Mullet, at 1711, we have this book published by Shaftesbury, but we also have the spectator launched. And that, too, had an extraordinary effect launched by Joseph. of Edison and Richard Steele. Could you tell us about that launch and how that fits into the picture? Right. Well, actually, the contrast with Sharsbury is quite sort of useful in a way because Sharsbury may provide a philosophy of politeness.

But actually, if you were to read, listeners would try reading Sharsbury now, they would find it really remarkably sort of lofty and its very kind of tone and form actually perhaps rather ill-suited to the, the amicable collisions, as he called them, of urban life that he seems to be sort of laying the foundations for. And indeed, Sharsborough himself was sort of trained up to be one of these kind of urban new public men. But he had such bad asthma.

He has to spend his time in the countryside. So he couldn't actually sort of practice a lot of the urbanity that he seems to recommend. But what the spectator is, is it's a new kind of publication which in its very form embodies the politeness that it recognizes. So Amanda mentioned at the beginning of the program, this extraordinary kind of is actually a cock-up. They fail to renew the Licensing Act in 1697. And so there's journalism, as we would call it now, is sort of unleashed. And most of that journalism is incredibly political, vituperative, partisan. And the spectator seems to be part of this flood, but is also separate from it.

it. And one of the big plays of the spectator is to say here is a genre, it's an essay which comes out every day and many of the essays are set in the coffee house, but also the spectator is laid out in the coffee house for people to read. And it's above the kind of squabbling world of rivalries that characterises most of the journalism of its age. Now, according to what I've read in preparation of this program, this had a tremendous effect. It ran for two years, as you say, daily, except on Sundays, written mainly by these two men.

Who is it getting to, John, and what effect was it having on them? I mean, I suppose the fundamental idea is the idea that the world can be, and we, the citizens of it, can be improved. So the spectator, although it's a very droll and ironical and often self-mocking periodical, does have quite a strong reformist agenda. We can make ourselves more polite, it says to its readers, but also it teaches what Dr. Johnson,

who much admired it later, called the elegances of knowledge. So the modern world is a world in which people can behave in a polished way that they didn't behave in before. And so, for instance, one thing that's spectator and its precursor, the tatler, which was mostly written by steel, really set out to do was to reject the previous world of the restoration,

rake the restoration liberty in the restoration court. So, for instance, it mounted a campaign against restoration comedy, which it took as exhibiting the essential amoral frippery of that culture. This was a culture which was going to be open. No, not open in a way that we might think, not open to every kind of working person in the street, its model for how we should enjoy life was conversation. That was where we met people.

That's where you met people and where you learnt politeness. And as Steele said, the life of conversation is equality. So it's the opposite in a way, not the opposite, it's different from this idea of decorum where people behave according to their station. In the spectator, and literally in numbers of the spectator which record conversations and debates between characters, people can meet on equal terms. David, what's coming, in the beginning of the 18th century,

roads are improving a bit, quite a bit, and people are coming to London. Is there pressure from a different group, one might say, class of people that's helping to push this forward? Do they need a place in society which this provides them with? One of the key things that the spectator is for is to tell you if you're arrived in the city, how you're supposed to behave.

It's partly about educating country bumpkins in city ways of life. It's also about telling people who are upwardly socially mobile, about how to behave. How do you enter the polite society? And the whole fact about polite society is extending itself into new social groups, acquiring new luxuries, dressing better, moving among people who before had been their superiors, who now they're allowed to treat as their equals. And then the third thing that's happening, I think, is new contacts between the sexes. I mean, Sharsbury's world may be essentially a masculine world, but the whole world of the spectator is a world

in which men and women meet and talk to each other, just as Castellani originally had been writing about How should you be polite in a world dominated by women? He was writing for a court dominated by a woman. Politeness is always about politeness between the sexes, and therefore it's always about men and women being able to adopt similar modes of speech, and that's quite alarming in certain ways. To take a point that you may take it on from John Mullen, you said about, you contrasted the politeness with the decorum that I've mentioned earlier,

and politeness, as I understand it, one of the facts in its favours they saw it was that you could speak to anyone, Well, who could speak back to you, regardless of rank, you did not have to be of the same. And this went alongside or even bred public places, coffee houses, assembly. Can you talk about the growth of the public space at that time? She was happening as well. Right, right.

Well, the coffee house is so important because it is both a real place and a sort of metaphorical place, I suppose. It's a real place where, I mean, there were hundreds of coffee houses in London in the early 18th century. They've been around for half a century or more, but they acquire this new importance with this kind of release of opinion and conversation. And most importantly, perhaps, this release of sort of publications, which are, there they are in the coffee house. You go into the coffee house.

Quite often you'd pay a small charge to go in, which isn't prohibitive, but sort of signals that not anybody can just walk in off the street. And the one thing you would do there, apart from drinking coffee and talking, is you would read often read aloud these publications. So the spectator actually is for the coffee house, but it's sort of imagining itself being read in the coffee house. One of the extraordinary things about this publication is it very soon became disseminated throughout the nation.

And so in a way the coffee house became somewhere that you could inhabit the London coffee house if you were somewhere else. I mean, we have extraordinary records of people in spalding, meeting to read the spectator to each other, and the spectator recommended itself to be read aloud. And the idea of space goes along with it. We've got lots of things going. One of them is a sort of architecture, as it were, made way for the conversation. Most people will know most about Bath, which became a place of assemblies. And there was a man who controlled that, the Master of Serum, is Bo Nash. Now, can you tell us about Bath and Bow Nash and why that was important? It happened at Brighton and Box and all various other places. Let's stick with bus. Well, to start with what you said about the urbane and town,

John Wood said the town is the theatre of politeness. And I think most people would know most about Bath. And the master of ceremony is there, the man who sort of gave out the rules and said how people should behave and who should dance with whom was Bo Nash, who's got this kind of almost totemic role in histories of politeness. And what he's supposed to, what he's famous for doing is that he laid out a set of rules for how people should behave

when they came into the assembly rooms. So men had to leave off their dirty boots. They had to leave off their swords. Yes, Bath becomes the Wild West, doesn't it? It's wonderful. I mean, you imagine them taking off their sword. You think that? But it's also more significant than that

because the sword is this symbol of kind of martial honour. And the women used to complain that it would tear their dresses or that they'd be frightened of the men in their swords. And when you leave off the sword, it's effectively saying that politeness is the modern form of honour not this ancient warlike kind of martial aristocratic code. And also what Bonash is famous for is not letting the nobles only dance with each other. And what Oliver Goldsmith said in this history of Nash

was that before Nash, general society amongst people of fortune, was by no means established. So it was Nash who made the nobles and the great vast masses of the gentry socialise. You talked before about there was the implication of a rising middle class. I think what's far more significant in this period is the massive expansion of the gentry. The nobility is only about 160 families at this period where there are tens of thousands of gentry and little gentlemen

and everybody socialising together under a set of strict rules is what's supposed to be kind of Nash's great achievement. And he died of pauper but was buried in Bathabby as I read. What does this mean to you, these open spaces, these assembly places, these not only coffee houses, but they went on, didn't this? parks, the idea of places to meet and talk. Well, I think there are two things going on. One is these new public spaces, which are enormously

important, and where precisely you've got this new range of interaction. But the other thing that's going alongside this, paradoxically, is the emergence of new private spaces. People reading on their own, not only reading aloud, as John said, but also reading silently to themselves. Everybody who acquires a copy of the spectator can in their mind be in a coffee house, engaging in conversation with other people. And the architecture there also takes that up. If you think of the houses of Bath, what you've got as drawing rooms that you can retire into, close the door. People won't be walking through the room.

In 17th century houses, they're laid out so that every room is a room that other people walk through all the time. For the first time you've got private space where you close the door, open a book, and enter a world of your own. And corridors come in. Corridors come in. Staircases and corridors change the shape of private buildings and give people private spaces.

So the public space and the private space develops simultaneously hand in hand. But there's still the gentlemanly hangover, isn't there? When you're polite, and polite society, the gentlemanliness still hangs on. It is not polite to know too much. It is to be too much of a Milton scholar. It is not polite to know too much.

It is not polite to do the job professionally. So the gentlemanliness, the Castilianne idea of the gentleman, the nonchalance, you talk about it. Well, I think, as you rightly said, I mean, one of the things the gentleman is always defined against is the pedant, and one of the quickest ways to end, conversation is to be too

magisterial, to be too know it all, to bore on about history, to bore on about literature. And you've got to sprinkle it with a kind of liveliness. I mean, we said before about the role, that's why women are supposed to be important to polite conversation because the natural gift of women

is supposed to be vivacity, whereas the natural gift of men is supposed to be gravity. Now, each sex is supposed to police its natural bias, but together you get lively, entertaining conversation. And women are particularly good for academics, it said, that women are supposed to, they rub the rust off the academic and force him to be entertaining with his knowledge. So the true man of taste is often said

to inhabit the place halfway between the world and the cell. Yeah, this is a kind of constant emphasis that, as Addison says, my ambition is to bring philosophy out of the closet to the tea table. And he doesn't, it's not just he who says that. And the great, great Scottish and Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, when he's writing about what he's trying to do, almost half a century later, says philosophy needs to be brought into what he calls the conversable world. Otherwise, the philosopher goes a bit bonkers, writes about things which have nothing to do with common life. And philosophy has to be made polite. Well, can we just give a list of a few instances of what this turns into? I mean, what do you do at a dinner table? What do you do about this, that and the other? Can we just have a few specific instances? Because we're talking about something absolutely fascinating in philosophy. a new idea of the way that we are turning itself into social behaviour and then turning itself further into actually knives and forks, right, isn't it? Well, relaxed modern politeness is not supposed to be over-formal and over-ceromans.

We're talking modern in the 18th century. In the modern, I mean, to be modern was what everybody was after, modern, elegant and easy. That's how they would describe themselves in this polite and commercial society. So at the dinner table, first off, you'd get straight to it. There's a mocking and rather gentle satire in, I can't remember the tattler or the spectator, about a country gentleman who comes to town and he spends so long bowing that the soup's gone cold. So you're not supposed to have this very old-fashioned civility.

You're supposed to be relaxed and easy. Now, we might not see it as informality, but they did. But then at the table you're supposed to be able to govern yourself. Well, actually, before you even came in, a man should be able to handle his sword, his cane, his hat. and all his clothes, so he's got to be able to get to the table, disrobe, get the right things off. Then sit down, you're supposed to handle the knife and fork well. It's supposed to handle his handkerchief well.

There are some books which give you actual little kind of rules of do's and don'ts. And some we would recognise today, you know, you're not supposed to put your fingers in your nose or your ears. If you blow your nose, you're not supposed to look into your handkerchief. And then there are all sorts of rules of conversation. You're not supposed to talk about politics. You're certainly not supposed to talk about yourself. You're not supposed to be pedantic.

you're not supposed to digress on virtues that somebody at the table quite obviously lacks. Endless rules. And it's unsurprising at the end of all this that then people comment on the insipidity of polite conversation. And people are left really thinking, the only safe topics of food, weather and the roads. Well, in literature.

Yeah. Well, the right sort of literature. And Steele says something quite interesting, actually, that there are two great enemies to polite conversation. and he says one is fractiousness and disagreement about religion and politics, but he says the other is familiarity. Actually, one of the things about politeness is you mustn't be too familiar. You mustn't tease people too much.

You mustn't wind people up, we would say. You mustn't say things which are directed as it were only at them and which other people around the table can't share. But this is a great difficulty of getting the tone right. You've got to be light and easy and gently mocking, but you mustn't tease and wind people up. You've got to touch on serious subjects. You've got to have moral seriousness,

but at the same time you mustn't become theological earnest. And what Charlesbury and Addison and Steele and everybody like that is trying to get is a notion of tone, where the most serious subjects can be touched on gently and lightly without provoking. But he'd had its critics, didn't it? It was soon thought of as hypocritical, as effeminate,

and the word then uses, you find? There's always a risk. From the very first people recognise that if you've got a theory of manners, which is supposed to be based on inner morality, that there's always a chance that it can come adrift from its ethical moorings and that it could just be a kind of cynical veneer. It could be a set of manners which you use to get your own way and has no relationship to a kind of inner goodwill. And so there's a lot of ink spilt on the difference between false politeness and true politeness and always a fear that it could be hypocritical, but it's supposed to be, there's supposed to be a synthesis between manners and morals, and it's supposed to be infused with

inner goodwill. But within a few years of Sharsbury publishing, Mandelville's Fable of the Bees, is setting out to show that human beings are fundamentally selfish, that they're incapable of concerning themselves with the welfare of others, that the lubricant of society is not politeness, but hypocrisy. And hypocrisy is not make society possible. So you've got two entirely contrasting views of what human nature is in direct conflict from the very beginning. And one looks back to Hobbes and is in many ways taken up by Russo, who wants to argue that contemporary society is riddled with corruption and hypocrisy. And the other insists that human beings are capable of a natural concern for the welfare of

others and that politeness is a reflection of a genuine interior cell. And there's also the question that bordered us in the 18th century. The restoration doesn't just die because the cloth goes past 1700. We go get fielding and so on. How does that go into the mix, Amanda? Well, I think as you suggested, politeness doesn't carry all before it. I mean, some people are blissfully unaware of politeness. Some people rejoice in overturning it.

And, I mean, I'm thinking of James Boswell, who was very self-conscious in his diary about how he tried to live out politeness. And he seemed to have three personality types. Sometimes he was the manly fellow who was full of gravity and dignity. Sometimes he was the pretty gentleman who pleased, ladies. But sometimes he was what he called the blackguard. And when he said, I am in the character of the blackguard, then he would

put on his dirtiest suit and his nastiest breeches. It would get out his condoms for protection against VD. And he would go to Westminster Bridge to habit with prostitutes. So he managed to go, move between these three different modes. And I wouldn't say that he didn't see a contradiction

between all of those, because he did feel very guilty. But it does suggest that people in the past like us, were capable of being different things in different contexts. You know, there were situations where he thought he should be polite and situations where he was quite happy not to be. Also in culture, perhaps it's not an accident, that the most polite century is also sort of the rudest one as well.

I mean that certainly in the first half of the 18th century, in literary terms, what's it known for? It's known for the Bordia Fielding, the satire, the absolutely kind of Stygian satire of Pope and Swift. And of course, actually those two go together very well. You mention Fielding and Bordy. The reason why it works is because it's actually that the prose of his novels is extraordinarily gentlemanly, and it's full of passages of Horace and Virgil and yet undercut by the way in which people really act.

Similarly, the Pope, dark Pope satire, which is full of audio, but it's written in these kind of crystalline couplets, which seems formally to put into practice just the virtues, poetically speaking, that somebody like Addison recommend. So, I mean, for the best writers and actually other members of the culture as well, it's the age of Hogarth too. For some of these people, politeness gives an opportunity for this wonderful sort of contradictory representations of the dark side of things.

Amanda then, David. Well, some also reject politeness on ideological grounds as well. I mean, there are some who go for the Roman senator model, and think, oh, politeness is too refined. It's far too French. Because although politeness has absorbed all these French theories, nobody's more attacked in the 18th century than the man who has lots of French manners.

And if you look at any pictorial representations, the Frenchman is always incredibly weedy and very, very affected. At the same time, I mean, I've come across lots of letters and diaries where women have a big investment in politeness and their husbands don't. So a woman whose diaries, I've read a lot, Elizabeth Shackleton, she's reading the town of the spectator, she's trying to have this polite life.

But her younger husband, John Shackleton, kicks over the card table, smashes her teapot and then gets incredibly drunk. And she says things like, never saw him so rude, vulgar, nor so drunk, he took his horse whip to me. Or finally, after one drunken episode, the gentleman came home near 12 noon, and Song's ceremony went snoring to a clean bed where he farted and stunk like a pole cap.

So no politeness. Finally, John Mullen, does romanticism at the end of that century, 1711 the Spectator, towards the end of the century, the Romantics are writing, does that provide the big countervailing force? It's just been touched on by a matter, but just to finish, is that the big? Well, if you look at something as narrow as English literature, it seems to, and yet, I mean, I'm not entirely convinced, you know, it depends what evidence you choose. If you read Jane Austen novels, you would think that politeness is as important, as ever, although it has, as it were, percolated down into the bedrock so far that the code for

what gentlemanliness is is almost unspoken. But being a gentleman is still the most important thing in the world. Thank you very much indeed. That's thanks to Amanda Vickery, John Mullen and David. Next week we will be attempting to talk by Jean-Paul Sartre. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about History, Science and Philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com.