Publications were the most important links to Enlightenment intellectual culture across the Atlantic World. Jamaicans acquired publications in quantity despite the difficulty and expense, challenging the colonial reputation of philistinism. The trade in books and periodicals was connected to a commercial revolution that brought a variety of cultural commodities—musical instruments, telescopes, globes, etc.—to colonial and metropolitan doorsteps. These objects helped assert their owners’ gentility: a wealthy planter might house his collection in a suitably dignified library, but a Kingston businessman could showcase his modest collection in a mahogany bookcase, and a merchant based in a small coastal town could increase his intellectual capital by borrowing reading material from neighbors and friends. Evidence drawn from a variety of sources—advertisements for books and book furnishings; book orders and library inventories; accounts of borrowing and lending—show that Jamaican readers could satisfy a desire for everything from the classics of Antiquity to now-canonical Enlightenment works, from sentimental and scurrilous novels to popularizing works of science and practical how-to treatises.

‘ The inns of court man that never was studient’ argues that the contemporary stereotype of the idle and dissolute young inns of court gallant with more interest in playgoing than reading law reports, while doubtless exaggerated for moral and satirical effect, is corroborated by an abundance of biographical evidence.It also reflects two prime causes of student delinquency and disinclination for legal studies: lack of supervision and the intractability of the common law as a subject of study. ‘Guides to Method’ surveys the legal literature available to students, concluding that it offered little assistance to those attempting to navigate the law’s complexities. ‘Lay and Professional Legal Knowledge’ emphasises the gulf between the practising barrister’s expertise and the kinds of legal knowledge which most laymen were likely to need or possess.

Yet members acquired and exercised a remarkably wide range of non-legal accomplishments and skills. ‘Accomplishments and the Decline of Creativity’ argues that the inns did little to encourage such activities, especially after c.1615. ‘Varieties of Learning’ surveys the remarkably diverse intellectual life of the early modern inns, while the closing section ‘Achievements, Failures, Prescriptions’ evaluates their diverse roles as educational institutions, and the few contemporary proposals for their reform.

As voluntary unincorporated societies, the inns hardly existed apart from their members. This chapter opens with a discussion (‘Motives and Status’) of reasons for the boom in admissions to membership from the mid-sixteenth century and the unsuccessful efforts to regulate and restrict that expansion. The following section (‘Income and Social Origins’) considers economic barriers to membership and the familial origins of those so admitted during the half-century before the Long Parliament, concluding that the inns’ students were generally recruited from a considerably higher social stratum than the student population of the two ancient universities. The chapter moves on to examine the ‘Regional Origins’ of inns of court entrants, showing that while they came from all over England, Wales and Ireland, each society had a distinctive regional recruitment pattern. At the same time, attendance at the inns did much to strengthen the national identity of the future governing elite, rather than merely reinforcing local divisions. A final section (‘Social Tensions and the Exodus of the Gentry’) points to tensions between young gentlemen students and the inns’ lawyer members, contributing to the gradual abandonment of the inns as finishing schools for the upper ranks of society after the civil wars.

This essay explores the novel’s vexed position within the emergent genteel culture of the early United States. It charts a broad transformation in the genre’s status between the 1780s and 1820s as the novel gradually becomes widely, if unevenly, accepted as respectable, even edifying, reading material. In tracing this shift, the essay explores how certain novelists of this period sought to establish the respectability of their own novels in part by distancing their works from the novel genre’s association with aristocratic frivolity. In this, these novels exemplify the early republic’s conflicted attitude toward gentility as such. The essay argues that these novels played an important role in this era’s more general recasting of gentility as bourgeois respectability rather than aristocratic fashionableness. The prevailing social and political conservatism of these novels, however, should not obscure the sustained literary experiment they undertook in reimagining the social meaning of the novel in the early United States.

In the eighteenth century, the Massachusetts House criminalized speech, and the general sessions courts prosecuted it, for being impolite as well as ungodly. Politeness became a core element of social order and elite white masculine identity. This study identified more than 1,600 criminal speech prosecutions in the records of justices and courts. These include any document that specified verbal threats or abuse; profane cursing or swearing; verbal noise; lying; false reports; defamatory speech; or perjury. Criminal procedure was simple and discretionary, and required widespread community participation in order to effectively prosecute impolite speech. Such prosecutions helped to define elite identity and status around matrices of sensibility, civility, and credibility. Sensibility was a moral and genteel quality not manifested by those prosecuted for noisy or abusive speech. Civility connoted pleasurable sociability that was undermined by contempt, cursing, and defamation. Credibility was the gentlemanly reputation for truthfulness, destroyed by lying, perjury, false news, and mumpers (pretended gentlemen). The Revolution replaced this regime with one based on respectability.

A polite social order emerged out of significant demographic, economic, and political changes in the early to mid-eighteenth century, and was established according to novel ideas about personal virtue, piety, and white masculinity. Members of an exclusive merchant elite embraced new models of personal deportment and constructed physical spaces, both public and domestic, in which to practice and display their gentility. Shared values, including an ethos of polite speech, united this elite and linked them with their English counterparts. Polite speech was explicated in conduct and courtesy books, in popular periodicals, in personal conversation with fellow gentlemen – and as distinct from vulgar speech, increasingly associated with particular types of people. Linguistic and social hierarchies proved to be mutually reinforcing, and, for the genteel, it was increasingly impolite (not ungodly or sinful) speech that posed the greater threat to good social order or “the peace.” That new social order would be enforced and enacted through law, the statutes, and procedures by which impolite speech was criminalized, prosecuted, and punished.