The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Not drinking much but talking wittily’
Brian Young on how the English became obsessed with manners – to live down their bad reputation abroad
From the most ancient times, people have complained that their society has reached new lows in behaviour. The no less longestablished convention is for social commentators to point this out and to tell the public to stop worrying needlessly. This feels increasingly hard to accept; civility is a rare commodity, as our tawdry political summer has demonstrated. But then, as happened in 17th and 18thcentury England, a society can decide to discard its inherited manners and mores through a process of refinement.
This should give us all cause to think: the arrival of Keith Thomas’s long-awaited study of manners and civilisation in England between 1530 and 1789 could not be more timely. Magisterial and richly entertaining, it shows that the English, then as now, were aware that their reputation abroad was not an enviable one: boorishness, routine interpersonal violence, public drunkenness and generally rowdy and squalid behaviour were not necessarily the things for which they wished to be known.
The attempt to become “civil” by consciously adopting the manners of their European cousins was an enterprise that preoccupied many during the 300 years studied by Thomas, which include a brutal civil war culminating in regicide and a makeshift, bellicose and imperialistic republic, the political, social and religious consequences of which haunted England well into the 18th century.
The Tudors began a process of self-examination that the Hanoverians saw themselves as having more or less completed, even if Samuel Johnson refused to enter “civilisation” in his dictionary, preferring instead “civility” (and, more generally, small scale individual interactions over larger social processes). When Becky Sharp throws her new copy of Johnson’s Dictionary out of the carriage in Vanity Fair, it is undoubtedly an uncivil, but clearly not an uncivilised, action.
The category of “early modern” here makes one think hard about what exactly it is to be “modern”. Thomas, the leading social historian of his generation, best known for his landmark 1971 study, Religion and the Decline of Magic, makes judicious use of parallels – between, for example, our fear of the “hoodie” and the panic in 18th-century London about such roaming gangs as the Mohocks. He also avoids the academic jargon that bedevils so much historical research: he prefers “differences”, for instance, to “alterities”.
A defining social difference from modern Britain, as Thomas points out, is that early modern England was simultaneously an urban and an aristocratic culture. Hierarchy mattered. The nobility spent part of the year in London, fulfilling their political duties in the House of Lords during the “season”, but they also retreated to such spa towns as Bath, and
480pp, Yale, £25 The English tried to become ‘civil’ by consciously adopting European manners
occasionally to their country estates. Their collecting habits were an important element in the “civilisation” of early modern England; a turn to more modern habits of mind can be seen when the Whig aristocratic culture of the early 19th century ordained that there should be a National Gallery in London.
Manners were largely promoted by urban elites; country squires were often depicted in 18thcentury literature as feral huntsmen, drunkards and reactionary dunderheads: the gentry were not always gentlemen. As Thomas contends, the “urban renaissance” that promoted county towns, ports and other centres of mercantile and civic endeavour between the 1670s and 1720s was fundamental in spreading civility and manners. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele influentially contrasted rural and urban manners in the pages of The Tatler and The Spectator in the 1710s; they both reflected and inspired the coffee-house culture of individual and social improvement.
The coffee house itself was imported from the Netherlands as was, in 1688, a monarch, William III, the financing of whose wars revolutionised both the state and the economy. London was the centre of such change, but also compromised by the vices that the varied enterprises of civilisation were designed to overcome. Those coffee houses were not so distant, physically, from “Gin Lane”.
A rapid proliferation of conduct manuals, from Of Domestical
Duties to many and varied Helps to Discourse, also played their part in the transformation, first of the nobility, and then of the middling sorts. It was an anxious proceeding, and one that has its modern parallels in dietary publications. Our ancestors were primarily concerned with improving interpersonal behaviour – as when Ben Jonson addressed in verse members of his Apollo Club, in the 1620s: “And let our only emulation be/ Not drinking much but talking wittily” – whereas we are preoccupied with the pursuit of bodily perfection, an altogether more selfish and literally diminishing enterprise.
A good half of Thomas’s inquiry charts English relations with the colonised peoples of its expanding empire. The disturbing beliefs this promoted, especially about racial differences, are – however much we congratulate ourselves on being progressive – still far from being foreign to our own mentality; think of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Thomas’s discussion of anti-Ottoman prejudice and the widespread conviction that English Catholics owed their primary allegiance to the papacy, not their country, reminds us that prejudice is always present; only its victims change.
Keith Thomas’s wonderful book, which is both erudite and energising, thoughtfully confirms that the way in which cultures deal with ethnic, religious and behavioural differences, as well as the often despised poor, is an index of its true civility. Thomas warns us not to be complacent, suggesting that we may still need a civilising mission. In Pursuit of Civility is itself an eloquently civilising book; it ought to be read and meditated upon by our increasingly boorish political classes.