Gentlemanly politeness and manly simplicity in Victorian England.

Between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century the notion of the 'polite gentleman' lost its political purchase. 'Manliness' became the identifying code of both the business class and the 'respectable' working class. The virtues of rugged individualism and personal integrity were emphasised at the expense of sociability and ease of manner. In the political sphere debates about who should be included in the franchise were permeated by the language of manliness, and the politicians with the greatest popular following were hailed as 'plain men' possessing a 'simple manliness'. POLITENESS is not a quality we readily associate with Victorian men. In the light of the received picture of sober, dutiful earnestness, it strikes a trivial and anachronistic note. If Gladstone or Mill can be counted as 'polite' we feel that this was a superficial accomplishment, revealing little of the individual or the cultural values he espoused. Unlike the Georgians, the Victorians had little invested in the social virtues of politeness. The first casualty of the new seriousness was that paragon of Regency fashion, the dandy the man who lived for appearances.' Fenimore Cooper reported in 1837 that the English dandy was no more: 'the men, as a whole, are simple, masculine in manner and mind'.' The second casualty was the conduct book the dominant genre of advice literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries now supplanted by the etiquette manual. Whereas the conduct book had taught manners in a fundamentally moral framework, the etiquette book reduced the perplexities of behaviour in company to strict conformity to fashion. Viewed through the lens of etiquette, politeness was no more than a mask to facilitate and conceal the * For helpful comment I am most grateful to Michdle Cohen, Paul Langford and Matthew McCormack. 'Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981); Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (I960). 'J. Fenimore Cooper, England (1837), I95-