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“Manners” Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Abstract

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Type
Special Feature on Masculinities
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2005

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References

1 Carter, Philip, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society (London, 2001)Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Caroll Smith, “The Republican Gentleman: The Race to Rhetorical Stability in the New United States,” in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Dudink, Stefan, Hagemann, Karen, and Tosh, John (Manchester, 2004)Google Scholar; Davidoff, Lee and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle-Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987)Google Scholar.

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28 Translated into English by Susan Dobson in 1784. I owe this information to Sweet, Antiquaries, 77.

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33 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; repr., Harmondsworth, 1969), 170Google Scholar; Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity, 9. The “age of chivalry” is always “gone.” As recently as May 2004, Metro, the free tabloid newspaper distributed in the London tube, carried the headline “The Age of Chivalry Is Definitely Over” in its letters page, referring to complaints about the failure of tube passengers to offer their seats to pregnant women (19 May 2004, 13).

34 Chandler, Dream of Order, 2; Vance, Norman, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge 1985), 19Google Scholar.

35 The essay on “Chivalry” first appeared in the supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1814.

36 Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, 19.

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42 Watt, Contesting the Gothic, 46–7, 44, 57. See also Guest, Harriet, “The Wanton Muse,” in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, ed. Copley, Stephen and Whale, John (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

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48 Rendall, “Tacitus Engendered,” 64, 66. Rendall also shows that Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had conflicting analyses of the role of women; Sweet, Antiquaries, 193–94. Sweet also points out the links between the interest in antiquities and in chivalry (333).

49 Sweet, Antiquaries, 194.

50 Weinbrot, Howard, “Politics, Taste, and National Identity: Some Uses of Tacitism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, ed. Luce, J. J. and Woodman, A. J. (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 178Google Scholar. A similar process has been described by Dudink in “Masculinity, Effeminacy, Time.”

51 Weinbrot, “Politics,” 178; Cottrell, “The Devil on Two Sticks,” 265.

52 Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1768; repr., Edinburgh, 1966), 309Google Scholar. Men's reverence and respect for women was also a key feature of The Poems of Ossian, notes Dwyer, John, The Age of the Passions: An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (East Linton, 1999)Google Scholar.

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59 Regarding women, politeness and chivalry are still conflated, but regarding men, they are different. Politeness in men can be associated with wimpishness, but chivalry is always manly.

60 ReverendThomson, George, The Spirit of General History in a Series of Lectures from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century (Carlisle, 1791), 176Google Scholar. This text is an early example of the popularization of chivalry.

61 Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, 1:171; Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 6:283.

62 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity.

63 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 6:283.

64 Millar, Origin, 215; see also Stuart, Gilbert, A View of Society in Europe in its Progress from Rudeness to Refinement (Edinburgh, 1778)Google Scholar; Dwyer, Age of the Passions, chap. 4.

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66 Millar, Origin, 214; Thomson, Spirit of General History.

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70 Ibid., 62.

71 Siebert, “Chivalry and Romance,” 76; Millar, Origin, 218 (my emphasis).

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76 David Hume, History of England, cited in Siebert, “Chivalry and Romance,” 69. Prestage, Edward, Chivalry: A Series of Studies to Illustrate Its Historical and Civilising Influence (London, 1928), 27Google Scholar, argues that “chivalry vanished from the practical arts of war in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries” but “lingered in education.”

77 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity.

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89 Town and Country Magazine (1771), 413; Frantzen, Bloody Good, 116; Knox, Vicesimus, Liberal Education (London, 1781)Google Scholar. For concerns about the effeminacy of the military, see Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar; John Bonehill, “‘A Trip to Cock Heath’: War, Fashion and Femininity in Graphic and Literary Satire of the Late Eighteenth Century” (unpublished paper).

90 Duff, Romance and Revolution, 136; Digby, Kenelm, The Broad Stone of Honour; or, Rules for the Gentlemen of England (London, 1822)Google Scholar. Digby was the foremost expert on chivalry and its history in the nineteenth century and was admired by Wordsworth, John Ruskin, and especially Edward Burne-Jones. Frantzen, Bloody Good, 17, 131; Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT, 1981), 60Google Scholar. Girouard suggests that Baden Powell drew on the Broad Stone when he was forming the Boy Scouts.

91 Digby, Broad Stone, xi.

92 Ibid., 549.

93 Knox, Liberal Education, 29; Barrow, William, An Essay on Education, 2 vols. (London, 1802), 2:162Google Scholar. See Cohen, Michèle, “Gender and the Public Private Debate on Education in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Public or Private Education? Lessons from History, ed. Aldrich, Richard (London, 2004)Google ScholarPubMed.

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100 See Cohen, “Manliness, Effeminacy.”

101 Moore, “Ossian, Chivalry,” 31; see Girouard, Return to Camelot.

102 Johnson, Claudia L., Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s; Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (London, 1995), 199CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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107 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, 65.

108 Ibid.

109 Carter, Polite Society.

110 For a discussion of the meaning of knowing or not knowing French, see Cohen, Michèle, “French Conversation or ‘Glittering Gibberish’? Learning French in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Expertise Constructed: Didactic Literature in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Glaisyer, Natasha and Pennell, Sara (Aldershot, 2003)Google Scholar.

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112 He argues that Mr. Knightley is “associated with a specific knight—St George, the patron saint of England,” while Mr. Churchill embodies the depravity of France. Hellstrom, “Francophobia,” 611; Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 201.

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118 Alexander, History of Women, 1:42, 43.

119 Hume, David, “Of Essay Writing,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1777), ed. Miller, Eugene F. (Indianapolis, 1987), 535Google Scholar.

120 Dwyer, Age of the Passions, 92.

121 Home, Henry, Kames, Lord, “On the Progress of the Female Sex,” in Six Sketches on the History of Man (Philadelphia, 1776), 195Google Scholar.