8 - Contextualising eighteenth-century politeness: social distinction and metaphorical levelling

Summary

For when to civil things, civil things are added, the whole will be civil. Q.E.D.

(1773 Thomas Twining I, 85)

Introduction

Politeness was a buzzword in eighteenth-century England. In A Tale of a Tub (1704), Jonathan Swift refers to ‘this Polite and Learned Age’, and in the Spectator (1711), Joseph Addison talks about ‘all the polite Nations of the World’. The concept of politeness also occupies a prominent place in eighteenth-century scholarship. Paul Langford includes it in the title of his best-selling book A polite and commercial people: England, 1727–1783(1989). The pursuit of politeness became a major concern for these commercial people, as Susan Fitzmaurice (1998) shows in her study of the emergence of ‘polite English’ in the eighteenth century. Politeness was not only considered to be an ideal of behaviour, but was also displayed in a material context. Lawrence Klein (2002: 870) sums up the ramifications of the concept of politeness by noting that it is used to interpret ‘material and visual cultures, the organisation of space, the constitution of social and political identities, the character of intellectual and artistic life, and even institutional structures’.

Our study approaches eighteenth-century politeness from the perspective of keywords, their socio-cultural embedding and the cognitive metaphors they embody. For this purpose we have selected three sets of ‘polite’ words, which we will study using a corpus of eighteenth-century correspondence.