Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen Jenny Davidson Frontmatter More Information

Cambridge University Press 0521835232 - Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen Jenny Davidson Frontmatter More information

HYPOCRISY AND THE POLITICS OF POLITENESS

In Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness, Jenny Davidson considers the arguments that deﬁne hypocrisy as a moral and political virtue in its own right. She shows that these were arguments that thrived in the medium of eighteenth-century Britain’s culture of politeness. In the debate about the balance between truthfulness and politeness, Davidson argues that eighteenth-century writers from Locke to Austen come down ﬁrmly on the side of politeness. This is the case even when it is associated with dissimulation or hypocrisy. These writers argue that the open profession of vice is far more dangerous for society than even the most glaring discrepancies between what people say in public and what they do in private. This book explores what happens when controversial arguments in favor of hypocrisy enter the mainstream, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between hypocrisy and more obviously attractive qualities like modesty, self-control and tact.

jenny davidson is Assistant Professor of English and Compara- tive Literature at Columbia University. She has published articles in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Studies in Romanticism. She is the author of a novel, Heredity (2003).

© Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521835232 - Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen Jenny Davidson Frontmatter More information

HYPOCRISY AND THE POLITICS OF POLITENESS Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen

JENNY DAVIDSON

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521835237

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521-83523-7 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-83523-2 hardback

Transferred to digital printing 2006

To my Scottish grandparents, Thomas Davidson (1912–1995) and Beth Davidson (1911–1996) in fond memory of their love of books and education

Contents

Acknowledgments page ix

Introduction: The revolution in manners in eighteenth-century prose 1 1 Hypocrisy and the servant problem 15 2 Gallantry, adultery and the principles of politeness 46 3 Revolutions in female manners 76 4 Hypocrisy and the novel i: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded 108 5 Hypocrisy and the novel ii: a modest question about Mansﬁeld Park 146 Coda: Politeness and its costs 170

Notes 180 Bibliography 213 Index 230

vii

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank the two people who supervised the dissertation with which this book originated, Claude Rawson and David Bromwich, who got me hooked on Swift and Burke respectively. To each of them I owe an immense intellectual debt. For their encouragement, suggestions and/or comments on drafts, I would like to thank the following: Irene Adams, Rachel Adams, Jonathan Arac, Jim Basker, Louise Bernard, Jill Campbell, Vincent Carretta, Seeta Chaganti, Radi Clytus, Julie Crawford, Imraan Coovadia, Marlies Danziger, Alun David, Amy Davidson, Ian Duncan, Katherine Dunn, Paul Fry, Martha Glasserman, James Grifﬁths, Kelly Hager, John Hollan- der, Carra Hood, Pearl James, Bill Jewett, Claudia Johnson, Diane Jowdy, Gene Kilik, Jim Kilik, Sue Lanser, Deidre Lynch, Michele Martinez, Chris Mayo, Edward Mendelson, Melanie Micir, Brooke Jewett Nadell, Astra Outley, Annabel Patterson, Linda Peterson, Adela Pinch, Maggie Powell, Irwin Primer, Joe Roach, Bruce Robbins, Marco Roth, Katherine Rowe, Vanessa Ryan, Arielle Saiber, Michael Seidel, Joyce Seltzer, Joey Slaughter, Emily Steiner, Elizabeth Teare, Michael Trask, Gordon Turnbull, Blakey Vermeule, Alexander Welsh, Emily Wilson, Mary Floyd Wilson, Ruth Bernard Yeazell and Jane Yeh. I would also like to thank my students and colleagues at Columbia, especially the students in my classes on Jane Austen and manners and morals, and the staff of the Columbia University Department of English and Comparative Literature, especially Joy Hayton, Yulanda DeNoon and Michael Mallick. I am particularly grateful to the two anonymous readers for Cambridge and to my editor, Linda Bree, and the staff at the Press. The material support that made this book possible came from a number of sources. A dissertation fellowship from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foun- dation allowed me to spend an entire year writing full-time; the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University offered an ofﬁce and a weekly forum for conversation during that year; and the Yale Edition of the Private Papers ix

x Acknowledgments of James Boswell provided other kinds of support. The Columbia Univer- sity Council for Research in the Humanities provided a summer grant in 2001 and a Macdonald Summer Fellowship in 2003. I owe a great deal to the generosity of Jay Furman, Gail Furman and Jane Stevens, and I am also grateful to Guy and Julia Whitburn for their hospitality in London and to Ian Davidson and Nader Uthman for their help with a variety of computer-related difficulties. This book would not exist without the kind assistance of staff members at the British Library, the Sterling Memorial and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Libraries at Yale University and Butler Library at Columbia University. Parts of the book were presented to meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and its Northeast and East-Central affiliates; to the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Colloquium of the Yale English Department; and to the fellows at the Whitney Humanities Center. I would like to thank everyone who gave me comments and suggestions on these and other occasions. I am also grateful to the following journals for permission to reuse material that appeared first in their pages: “Swift’s Servant Prob- lem,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 30 (2001): 105–125; “‘Professed Enemies of Politeness’: Sincerity and the Problem of Gender in Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Studies in Romanticism 39 (Winter 2000): 599–615 (and particular thanks to the Trustees of Boston University, who hold the copyright); and “A Modest Question about Mansfield Park,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16:2 (Jan. 2003). And thanks as well to those journals’ anonymous readers for their comments on earlier versions of the material. Finally, many thanks to Caroline Davidson, Ian Davidson, Jonathan Davidson, Michael Davidson, Denis Richards and Barbara Richards for their affection and encouragement.