Elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century Scotland

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (07) ◽  
pp. 49-4085-49-4085
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Polite Society

Boston Electric

2020 ◽  
pp. 169-199
Author(s):  
Sara J. Schechner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Scientific Instruments ◽  
Know How ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
Experimental Apparatus

Electricity was a new and developing field of research during the eighteenth century. With a focus on the experimental apparatus employed and the sociable exchange of ideas, this chapter examines how electricity was taught to Harvard students and members of polite society in the Boston area over the course of the century. Without local instrument makers or suppliers of glass and brass parts, colonial American experimenters had to import equipment and repair parts from London. When time and money discouraged imports, they became bricoleurs, incorporating recycled, traded, and ready-to-hand materials into their apparatus. Benjamin Franklin was an important intermediary in getting scientific instruments from London to Boston and Cambridge, and he shared instructional know-how so that locals could assemble their own Leyden jars and other electrical instruments.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH CHILDREN ARE TOLD HOW TO BEHAVE CORRECTLY

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-148
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Children's books during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in both England and this country frequently contained detailed instructions on what polite society considered to be good manners for children. This passage from an English children's book written in 1762 was read and committed to memory by many children in England and also in this country: Of Behavior Before you speak make a Bow or Curtesy, and when you have received your Answer make another. Be careful how you speak to those who have not spoke to you. Nothing shows the difference between a young Gentleman and a vulgar Boy so much as Behavior in eating. Never touch your Meat with your Fingers. Pick your Bones clean and leave them on your plate; they must not be thrown down. Seldom blow your Nose and use your Handkerchief for that Purpose, making as little noise as you can. Never spit in a Room. Never sing or whistle in Company: these are the idle tricks of vulgar children. Take care not to make Faces nor Wink. Keep your Hands quiet, and use no antick Motions. Never laugh immoderately at a Story told by another Person. Never laugh at all at what you tell yourself. Never talk about any Thing but what you know. How foreign all this would seem to the contemporary child!

POLITENESS AND THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BRITISH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 869-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAWRENCE E. KLEIN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Personal Accomplishment ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Semantic Associations ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
British Culture

Politeness has assumed an important place in recent interpretations of eighteenth-century Britain by historians and historically minded scholars in other fields. The use of politeness as an analytic category has relied on varying assessments of the eighteenth-century semantic associations of the term, which included attentiveness to form, sociability, improvement, worldliness, and gentility. Scholars have used politeness in one or more of these senses to characterize distinctive aspects of eighteenth-century British culture: the comportment of the body in isolation and in social interaction; the material equipment of everyday life; the changing configurations and uses of domestic and public spaces; skills and aptitudes that both constituted personal accomplishment and shaped larger cultural enterprises such as religion, learning, the arts, and science; and important aspects of associational and institutional life. Thus, eighteenth-century Britain was polite in that a wide range of quite different activities have been identified as bearing the stamp of the eighteenth-century meanings of ‘politeness’. Furthermore, what made eighteenth-century Britain a polite society was not its horizontal division between polite and non-polite persons but rather the wide access of a range of persons to activities and competencies that contemporaries considered ‘polite’.

Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England

1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence E. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Aesthetic Standard ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In the early eighteenth century, the language of politeness became a major fixture of English discourse. Centring on the term ‘politeness’ and consisting of a vocabulary of key words (such as ‘refinement’, ‘manners’, ‘character’, ‘breeding’, and ‘civility’) and a range of qualifying attributes (‘free’, ‘easy’, ‘natural’, ‘graceful’, and many others), the language was used to make a wide range of objects intelligible. Though the word ‘polite’ had been in the English language from at least the fifteenth century, denoting the state of being polished or neat in quite literal and concrete ways, the term entered on its significant career only in the mid-seventeenth century, when it began to convey the meanings of studied social behaviour of the sort inspired by and associated with princely courts. However, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, ‘politeness’ grew to cover a range of meanings, considerably freed from the initial association with courts. Several broad categories of usage of the term ‘polite’ are indicative: as a behavioural and moral standard for members of an elite (e.g. ‘polite gentlemen’, ‘polite ladies’, ‘polite society’, ‘polite conversation’); as an aesthetic standard for many kinds of human artifacts and products (e.g. ‘polite arts’, ‘polite towns’, ‘polite learning’, ‘polite buildings’); and as a way of generalizing about and characterizing society and culture (‘polite age’, ‘polite nation’, ‘polite people’). In the latter usage, ‘politeness’ was frequently deployed retrospectively as an attribute of classical civilizations. ‘Politeness’ helped recast the renaissance model of history, in which modernity was separated from its true ancestor, the ancient world, by the vast dark gulf of the middle ages: the ‘politest’ nations were ancient Greece and ancient Rome; the ‘politest’ ages, the spells of Hellenic and Roman creativity.

The Wearing of the Red: The Redcoat and the British Brand

Costume ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Arch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

As a concept, the idea of product branding offers insights into the history of uniform in Britain. The creation of a brand, by which a product is understood and recognised by its name, fits the cultural history of the red coat, that part of his uniform by which the British infantryman was known for over three hundred years. While the earliest references to the redcoat in this context occur in the sixteenth century, it is really from the eighteenth century onwards that the term becomes widely employed to denote the soldier. However, a review of royal portraiture in Britain from the late seventeenth century onwards also reveals that monarchs used the red coat as a way of uniting the ideals of patriotism with the monarch — a device that was particularly important for the Hanoverian dynasty. Both literature and the visual arts helped identify the red coat as a synonym for the soldier. Numerous references may be adduced, from Jane Austen writing of polite society, to Rudyard Kipling's Tommy. Lady Elizabeth Butler was perhaps the most famous artist to depict red-coated heroes in battles, which marked the defence or development of the Empire.

scholarly journals The urban inn: gathering space, hierarchy and material culture in the eighteenth-century British town

Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (04) ◽  
pp. 617-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL MAUDLIN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Central Location ◽  
Interior Spaces ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
Key Sites

ABSTRACT:This article locates the ‘principal inn’ within the physical and cultural space of the eighteenth-century British town. The principal inn was the all-purpose venue for the sociable activities of polite society: from dining, drinking and conversing with friends to business deals, meetings of club and societies, legal proceedings, military musters, civic and religious proceedings. Through their central location, carefully designed interior spaces and refined material culture of furniture, fixtures and fittings, principal inns were key sites in the elite control of urban space, the enforcement of social hierarchies and the reinforcement of social values.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document