Parliament Observed

Visitors to the British Parliament, particularly to the House of Commons, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were tolerated under the name of ‘strangers’. Most of them were accommodated in the gallery of the House, a notoriously crowded and uncomfortable space. This chapter discusses the experience and impressions of various visitors, including women, during the period. It reassesses the ‘removal’ of women as spectators in 1778, and considers how their presence in apparently increasing numbers from the 1760s was a sign of a more general and growing interest in watching politics as entertainment, with the chamber being commonly likened to a theatre.

A Polite and Commercial People in the Caribbean

British people throughout the empire as well as at home envisaged themselves as ‘polite and commercial’. There could be no doubt of the commercial success of West Indian plantation islands, but were their societies polite? This chapter focuses on the efforts of an individual planter, Sir William Young (1725–88) to live to the highest ideals of politeness both in England and in the Caribbean, especially in the island of St Vincent, where he acquired extensive estates. For a time he undoubtedly succeeded, but early British settlement on St Vincent encountered problems that meant that Young and other planters could not extract resources from the island adequate to sustain their ambitions. Young ended his life as a debtor to the Crown on his St Vincent plantation rather than enjoying the eminence in English landed society and cultured circles to which he aspired.

Introduction

This introduction assesses the place of A Polite and Commercial People within the career of Paul Langford, and highlights how it made a major contribution to our understanding of Georgian Britain on its appearance in 1989. It also discusses the reception of this work, and clarifies the ways in which it can continue to inspire eighteenth-century studies. The contributions to this volume pay tribute to Langford’s impact on their work, and the book’s organization into three sections (Politics; Society and Culture; England, Britain, and the World) reflects his wide-ranging and enduring influence.

A Devout and Commercial People

The tradesmen and women who form the focus of this chapter appeared in contemporary eighteenth-century texts as a diverse, yet distinct social group: above unskilled workers, but below merchants and those in the professions. By integrating this largely overlooked, but important, social group into our vision of eighteenth-century society this chapter will reconsider existing understandings of class and identity, particularly concerning the ‘middling sorts’: that group most readily associated with Langford’s A Polite and Commercial People. Though Manchester’s tradesmen and women were certainly commercial, it is not so clear that they were best described in terms of politeness. By exploring the nature of personal religious belief alongside the effects of religious change over the long eighteenth century, this chapter will suggest that the lives of a significant proportion of Manchester’s residents were dominated by their devotion to business as well as to religion, whilst they tended to ignore those more fashionable forms of behaviour associated with polite manners and sensibility.

Polite and Commercial’s Twin

While Paul Langford was at work researching and writing A Polite and Commercial People, he worked in parallel on a second book, if anything more impressive and original, though less commonly read and cited—in part because it is not only highly original, but also dense and allusive. The object of this chapter is to make this other book, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, more accessible to readers, by locating it historiographically, providing an overview of its arguments, and identifying some issues that it raises that deserve further attention.

Becoming an Englishwoman

By focusing on the adolescent diaries of Elizabeth (Betsey) Wynne between her arrival in Switzerland in 1791, aged thirteen, and her departure from Ratisbon (Regensburg) in 1796, aged eighteen, this chapter explores the development of a precocious, cosmopolitan European girl into an ardent Englishwoman. It argues for both the continued social utility of politeness into the end of the eighteenth century. and beyond, and illuminates the crucial role that politeness played at three levels: in individual self-fashioning; in the provision of a model for, and through which, gendered identities could be expressed and interpreted; and, by extension, in the development of a set of character traits which could be used to define national identity. In this it draws upon Paul Langford’s work, not only in A Polite and Commercial People, but also in his later work, Englishness Identified. Finally, Betsey’s story reminds us that the French Revolution was a lived experience, one that irrevocably shaped the lives and characters of the generation that went on to shape nineteenth-century Europe. If for no other reason, the place of politeness in shaping those identities deserves wider attention.

The Harcourts

The papers of the Second and Third Earls Harcourt have become available in the last five years. Among them are a substantial number of letters from the French branch of their family, whose head was the duc D’Harcourt. As leading office-holders at the British court, the Harcourts were close friends of the king and queen, and the Harcourts acted as a conduit for first-hand information from France, and this chapter will show that they greatly influenced the king’s views on the Revolution and the wars which followed. Throughout these years, George took a more ideological and intransigent view of these events than his prime minister Pitt, and their sources of information help to explain their differences.

British Imperial Policy and the American Revolution

In the 1760s and early 1770s, British policy towards America was similar to a series of parallel initiatives throughout the British Empire. There was a concerted attempt by the home government to reform the empire, increase revenues, regulate trade, improve colonial defence, incorporate native populations, and strengthen metropolitan control which also resembled similar reforms in the empires of France and Spain. The chapter contends that the causes and aims of those policies are more comprehensible when understood in the broader imperial context which illuminates the origins of the American Revolution. It traces and explains a shift in policy towards more direct metropolitan rule that increasingly involved intervention in colonial affairs by Parliament. The chapter shows that the implications of these novel policies made colonial fears far from groundless even if overstated in the Whig conspiracy theory of a deliberate plan of tyranny by George III and Lord North. Nevertheless, it was one of the ironies of the revolution that the newly independent nation felt obligated to adopt many of the earlier imperial reforms including a more central form of government with the power to tax.

Antiquarian Transformations in Historical Scholarship

One of the most impressive aspects of A Polite and Commercial People is Paul Langford’s skilful synthesis of a bewildering array of lesser known authors and publications to tap into opinion and sentiment on social, economic, political, and cultural questions, including the remarkable popularity of works of antiquarianism (as well as history) amongst eighteenth-century readers. The progress of manners, a thematic undercurrent throughout the book, allowed eighteenth-century antiquaries such as John Brand and Joseph Strutt to look back upon the manners and customs of the past as the expressions of different social mores, characteristic of ruder, less polished times. Through innovative interdisciplinary research which combined written and visual sources, material culture and architectural analysis, this interest developed into historical accounts of manners and customs, sports and pastimes, which documented the everyday practices of the English people from the time of the Roman conquest onwards: it offered in effect a history of the domestic life of the English people. The historicization of domesticity or everyday life was notably elaborated upon in historical novels by antiquarian-minded writers such as Walter Scott (who had himself worked on Strutt’s failed novel Queenhoo Hall), Harrison Ainsworth, and Bulwer Lytton. Rather than focusing upon novels, however, this chapter analyses how ‘domesticity’ and ‘domestic life’, particularly of the middling sorts, became categories of antiquarian and historical research from the later eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century and in the process provided a social history of the mores and lifestyle of Britain’s polite and commercial classes.

Fantasy, Speculation, and the British State Lottery in the Eighteenth Century

The state lottery in the eighteenth century was a striking success, both as a support to public finance and as a financial product. This chapter seeks to explain this success, but also examine who adventured in the lottery and with what motivations. Systematic data on purchase of tickets is sparse, but overall patterns are fairly clear, as is the extent to which lottery speculations fed off fantasies of easy and rapid enrichment and, for many, a consequent transformation in social circumstances and status. In this way, the success of the lottery can shed light on contemporary preoccupations with upward social mobility and the achievement of independence, as well as attitudes towards risk and economic gain.