18th century AD

Magazine Antiques, June, 1994 by Wendell Garrett

Politeness conjures up the civilized, if secular, outlook of Georgian society--its faith in manners, its attachment to elegance and stateliness, its oligarchical politics, and its aristocratic fashions. Politeness is stamped on English country houses and on the portraits of the time, which commemorate rank and status as much as likeness. Politeness is to be found in issues of the Spectator, Alexander Pope's poetry, Horace Walpole's letters, Edward Gibbon's history, Henry Fielding's novels, Edmund Burke's rhetoric, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), and Dr. Johnson's own Lives of the Poets (1779-1781). The writing of the age is characterized by clarity, order, refinement, restraint, and what was then called ease. As Pope wrote in his Essay on Criticism (1711), "True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

The commerce of which Blackstone wrote dramatically increased wealth and improved living standards in that age of empire building. In 1754 the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce was created in London. When Sophie von la Roche, the wife of a German nobleman, visited the society she observed that its projects included the improvement of industry, agriculture, and the arts; the encouragement of tree planting; the extension of drainage and reclamation; the furtherance of education; and methods for reducing industrial injury.

By the end of the eighteenth century, commerce had made Great Britain the strongest, richest, and most powerful country in the world. A logical consequence of commerce was politeness--the means of regulating a society in which the most vigorous and expanding element was a commercial middle class involved in both production and consumption. Politeness conveyed gentility, sociability, and enlightenment to a new elite whose only qualification was money, which they were only too glad to spend on becoming gentlemen.

Those to whom Blackstone addressed his Commentaries were certainly "polite and commercial," but most Englishmen were neither, as he well knew. The yeoman and the peasant lacked the property that made it possible to acquire politeness and engage in conspicuous consumption. Acquisitiveness, opportunism, and polite living were reserved for the men who owned the land, monopolized political and legal power, and dispensed patronage. Despite the diversity of Georgian society, custom still enjoyed great authority and change occurred at a pace that made it possible for people to adapt. New ideas were diffused and accepted in every field of endeavor, proving Burke's observation that "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."