This chapter explores the transformation of British responses to slavery during the 1830s through the writing of Frances Trollope. In this decade, Britons declared the abolition of colonial slavery as proof of their superior morals and impeccable manners. Trollope’s travel narrative Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1838) participated in the reconstruction of racism as a peculiarly American form of bad manners. Although Black women are virtually absent from Domestic Manners, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw is notable for its range of Black female characters and its frank exploration of the sexual exploitation to which enslaved women were subjected. Trollope’s belated acknowledgement of the gendered effects of enslavement reflects the sensational impact of the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831). Trollope reveals a historic kinship and complicity between Great Britain and the United States as slaveholding nations. The reception of Prince’s History among British abolitionists who did not want to acknowledge this complicity demonstrated how well-intentioned good manners could function as a form of racism.

This chapter reads Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman as integral to her critique of the culture, behaviour, psychology, and ‘manners’ of commercial society. Against a narrative of human motivation deeply rooted in political economic discourse, Wollstonecraft associates property with indolence, libertinism, and immorality, and offers an alternative moral economy which links virtue to effort, labour, and exertion in the linked spheres of mind, manners, and morals. The imagination is revealed as posing a fundamental challenge to political economy, as an independent power which frees the self from the subject relations of property order. In calling for a ‘revolution in manners’ addressed especially to women, Wollstonecraft looks to a moral revolution against the forces of history and calls on women to save commercial society from itself, and to save themselves from it.

This chaptercomments on the relationship between moderation and civility and argues that the latter can work as an effective antidote to a festering climate of fear, rage, and intimidation.

The Introduction outlines how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representations of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain. The study contends that nineteenth-century novelists found in fashion a temporal model for conceptualizing a heightened sense of the evanescence of modernity and the cycle of novelty and obsolescence that produced it. The Introduction traces fashion’s transformations back to the consumer revolution and new media of the eighteenth century, and shows how fashion’s integration with visual culture in the nineteenth century led to a new consciousness of visibility and celebrity. The Introduction develops a theoretical framework for analyzing fashion’s relationship to history and the present, and its unique role in stitching individual identity and self-expression to social and public life. Taking its cue from novels that engaged with the temporality of fashion, the Introduction also provides a revisionist account of the history of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Following Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America regards mores or manners as of the utmost significance for democracy. Tocqueville further attributes to women and especially mothers the primary role of inculcating democratic habits of equality. His portrayals of women in Democracy in America are suggestive of the many ways in which gender, race, and class intersect with one another in Jacksonian America. Looking ahead, Tocqueville also anticipates what contemporary feminist theorist Judith Butler describes as “gender troubles.” In Botting’s view, both Tocqueville and Butler appreciate the complex ways in which women and their sexuality shape the mores and manners that animate the culture of democracy. In Tocqueville’s case, the transformation of American girls from objects of sexual desire coveted by the male gaze to mothers who bear primary responsibility for the transmission of manners takes place between volumes 1 and 2 of Democracy. Botting further suggests that Tocqueville’s shifting attitude toward women parallels his own marriage and an increased ability on his part to identify with the sacrifices of young American wives.

Two young women in apprenticeship, Katherine Venner and Christiana Hutchins, offer case studies of the difficulties that adolescence in apprenticeship might produce. It was a period in which girls learned, and resisted, gender identities. Mistresses might find themselves managing girls who refused to learn, spoke rudely, purloined shop goods and failed to perform the civil manners expected of seamstresses and milliners. Alongside court testimonies, the advice of Hannah Woolley, the one writer who dealt with female apprentices, presents a guide to the ways female apprentices were told to manage their minds and bodies, and how they responded. Work, this chapter argues, was formative of femininity.

Finch’s chapter argues that the rhetorical artifice in Wallace Stevens’s poetry may be best understood through the concept of manner. In contrast with style, which focuses on the personal signature of a writer’s work, manner refers to the more social, public aspects of a writer’s rhetorical bearing. Drawing on a range of critics who have theorized aesthetic manner and the politics of manners, including Pierre Bourdieu, Giorgio Agamben, Henry James, and Lionel Trilling, this chapter proposes that Stevens’s interest in textiles and clothing, in figurations of nobility, and in the mannerist syntax of repetition are not just neutral aesthetic traits but expressions of a sensibility tied to social categories that include class and race. After examining these intersections in poems spanning Stevens’s career, Finch closes by suggesting that the most meaningful approaches to Stevens’s formal prosody should remain attentive to the social posture and cultural tones of his language.

This chapter introduces the history of manners in Thailand, linking it to the sociological concept of habitus or 'second nature': how historical experience leaves its imprint on the way people speak, act, and think. It surveys the sociological literature about habitus, discussing in particular detail the work of Norbert Elias, including his famous study of the history of manners in Western Europe, The Civilizing Process. The chapter argues that Elias’s concept of a civilizing process may be adapted to the Thai context to better understand how manners in Thailand have evolved. It proposes that the history of manners in Thailand may be divided into four periods: the age of colonialism and absolutism (the second half of the nineteenth century); the age of revolution (the first half of the twentieth century); the age of reaction (the post-World War II period); and the age of democracy and development (since roughly the 1970s). The chapter also discusses the related concepts of civility and civilization.

Chapter 12 includes the deeper normative arguments of Burke’s economic theory that come alive in the Reflections. Burke argued that among the real rights of men were the right to industry and the right to acquisition. He further contended that abstract theory overlooked the complexity of circumstance in social life, and that rigid government edicts intended to establish equality in civil society bred social chaos. Social engineering crushed the human soul. More important, I discuss Burke’s emphasis on the limits of transactional exchange in sustaining the growth of civilization. In his view, contracts could produce commercial opulence, but civilizations required pre-transactional bonds of religion, friendship, and manners in order to endure. Man’s moral obligations thus preceded the requirements of voluntary contracts; civilization might persist without commercial vitality, but it could not survive without virtue and chivalry. I also examine Burke’s commentary in Third Letter on a Regicide Peace, in which he provides remarks on the healthy state of the English economy, an Invisible Hand-type phenomenon, and the virtues of limited government, all of which complement his thoughts in Thoughts and Details and the Reflections.

The final chapter of this book presents the analyses and case studies of the previous chapters in a more coherent narrative that focuses on long-term developments rather than the individual details at specific points in the history of English. It draws together the various influences that were responsible for some of the changes, and discusses the question of the point in history when a concern for good breeding and moral behaviour turned into a concern for superficial manners and outward appearance. Today, politeness often has a bad press because it is seen as insincere and hypocritical. But not all commentators have a negative view of present-day politeness: it can be seen as a sincere concern for rapport with the addressee.