TOPOGRAPHIES OF POLITENESS

Abstract

Politeness was a quintessentially urban concept; the formulation of a code of polite behaviour was a response to the pressures of urban living and the cultivation and display of polite manners took place in the social spaces of the urban locale. Not all towns were equally polite, however, and the degree of politeness on display in a town became another yardstick by which to categorise and judge provincial society. London was often presented as the centre of true politeness, in contrast to provincial vulgarity, but other towns were quick to appropriate the concept and its rhetoric as a means of self-promotion. In so doing politeness underwent modification as it was reinvented as a virtue of provincial, middling urban society.