The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850

The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity

STUDIES ON THE HISTORY OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Editors

The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity England, 1550 –1850

David Kuchta

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley . Los Angeles . London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2002 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kuchta, David, 1960 – The three-piece suit and modern masculinity : England, 1550 –1850 / David Kuchta. p. cm. — (Studies on the history of society and culture ; 47) Revision of the author’s thesis (doctoral). Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-21493-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Men’s clothing—England—History. 2. Masculinity—History. I. Title. II. Series. gt733 .k83 2002 391.10942 — dc21 2001003099

Manufactured in the United States of America 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48 –1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). 

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Conspicuous Constructions The Old Sartorial Regime, 1550 –1688 The Seventeenth-Century Fashion Crisis The Three-Piece Suit Masculinity in the “Age of Chivalry,” 1688 –1832 The Making of the Self-Made Man, 1750 –1850 Inconspicuous Consumption

1 17 51 77 91 133 173

Notes

179

Bibliography

253

Index

295

Illustrations

1. Robert Greene, “A Quip for an Upstart Courtier,” 1592 2. George Perfect Harding, George Clifford, earl of Cumberland, 1590s 3. Isaac Oliver, Richard, earl of Dorset, 1616 4. After Isaac Oliver, Henry, Prince of Wales, c. 1610 5. Daniel Mytens, Charles I, 1631 6. Roundhead and Cavalier, 1640s 7. Benjamin Keach, War with the Devil, 1676 8. Earl of Sandwich, Charles II’s Vest, 1666 9. Samuel Sturmy, The Mariner’s Magazine, 1669 10. John Ogilby, Brittania, 1675 11. David Loggan, Cantabrigia Illustrata, 1676 12. The Courtier’s Calling, 1675 13. Studio of Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, 1771 14. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Robert Walpole, no date 15. L. P. Boitard, The Imports of Great Britain from France, 1757 16. The Compleat Beau, 1696 17. The Beau Monde in St. James’s Park, c. 1750 18. Arthur Devis, Robert Gwillym and his family, c. 1745 – 47 19. L. P. Boitard, Taste-a-la-mode, 1745

18 22 23 30 32 55 60 83 86 87 88 89 92 98 108 119 120 125 127

viii

20. Bartholomew Dandrige, Rudiments of Genteel Behavior, 1737, men 21. Bartholomew Dandrige, Rudiments of Genteel Behavior, 1737, women 22. Unknown, possibly George Cooke, William Cobbett, c. 1831 23. Auguste Millière, Thomas Paine, after an engraving of 1793 by William Sharp, after George Romney, inscribed c. 1880 24. The Young Politician, c. 1772 25. Richard Earlom, John Wilkes, no date 26. Sir George Reed, Samuel Smiles, no date 27. Sir Daniel Macnee, John Ramsey McCulloch, before 1840 28. Lowes Cato Dickinson, Richard Cobden, 1870 29. Adam Buck, Thomas Hope and his family, 1813

Illustrations

128 129 134

140 145 146 150 152 159 176

Acknowledgments

Research for this work was conducted at the British Library, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the Kress Library of Business and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Business, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the University of London’s Goldsmith’s Library, the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Geisel Library of the University of California, San Diego. I thank the librarians of each of these institutions for their help. Financial support for research came from the Department of History of the University of California, Berkeley. The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis was very generous in providing me with a postdoctoral fellowship to begin turning a dissertation into a book. Without this support, this project would have been impossible. Portions of this work have been read at academic gatherings since 1990, and I am grateful for much constructive criticism. Thanks go to my friends and colleagues in Berkeley, Rutgers, and San Diego for their emotional and intellectual support, whether in the form of criticism of earlier versions of this work or general advice on fashion. I especially appreciate the dissertation supervision and academic support of Thomas Laqueur and Randolph Starn. My UCSD research assistant Saleem Waraich aided in selecting and analyzing the images for this work. Thanks for help at different stages of this work go to Ben Bertram, Lige Gould, Victoria de Grazia, Sue Grayzel, Nicky Gullace, Doug Haynes, Tim Hitchcock, Jennifer Jones, John Marino, Kathy Peiss, Michael ix

x

Acknowledgments

Roper, Martha Stacklin, John Styles, and John Tosh. I also thank my editors, Eileen McWilliam, Laura Driussi, and Sheila Levine, and anonymous readers at the University of California Press. Great appreciation goes to Kathy Steuer, whose continual support preceded my entering graduate school. I’d finally like to thank my partner, Jennifer Tuttle, whose role as colleague and companion have made my life so rewarding. Her advice and encouragement have helped me negotiate academia, while her own talents and accomplishments have been an inspiration. This work is dedicated to my parents, Adeline and Edward Kuchta, and to my brothers and sisters, Bob, Nan, Jan, Lynn, and Mike, who have provided me with a lifetime of warmth, support, and friendship. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in my essay, “The Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaissance England,” in James Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images (Cambridge University Press, 1993). An early version of chapter 4 appeared as “‘Graceful, Virile, and Useful:’ The Origins of the Three-Piece Suit,” in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America 17 (1990). I am grateful to the Costume Society of America for permission to reprint this material. Portions of chapter 6 appeared as “The Making of the SelfMade Man: Class, Clothing, and English Masculinity, 1688 –1832,” in Victoria de Grazia, ed., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (1996). Reprinted by permission of the Regents of the University of California Press.

chapter 1

Conspicuous Constructions

As history records it, October 7, 1666 marks the beginning of the threepiece suit, for it was on this day, according to Samuel Pepys’s Diary, that England’s King Charles II declared “his resolution of setting a fashion for clothes, which he will never alter. It will be a vest, I know not well how; but it is to teach the nobility thrift, and will do good.”1 Donned with a mixture of solemnity and fanfare, the vest marked a new beginning to Englishmen’s fashion, ending a long era of doublets and hose. The court diarist John Evelyn witnessed the king “changing doublet, stiff collar, and cloak, etc: into a comely vest, . . . resolving never to alter it, and to leave the French mode, which had hitherto obtained to our great expense and reproach.”2 King Charles’s court, not known for its frugality, initially resisted this attempt to teach the nobility thrift, yet Charles never abandoned his resolution, the court soon fell in line, and in modified form, Charles II’s vest is still with us today. We thus have a solemn royal gesture made in the seventeenth century to thank for the style of modern men’s clothes. This book seeks to explain why Charles II would concern himself with introducing the three-piece suit, and, equally importantly, why men still wear three-piece suits. Why, only six years after the English monarchy’s restoration, when the crown was still rather insecure about its legitimacy, would a king of England spend time and fanfare setting a new sartorial standard? What seventeenth-century values gave political and economic urgency to a change in fashion? What made the “comely 1

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vest” comelier than the doublet, worth resolving never to alter? And equally, why did the three-piece suit continue to appeal to eighteenthand nineteenth-century English gentlemen, despite changes in culture, politics, economics, and social relations? Certainly since 1666 the three-piece suit has gone through many alterations: at no discernible rhythm, colors have darkened, styles have become less varied, vests have lost their sleeves, lapels have widened and narrowed, ties have expanded and contracted. What has never altered, however, along with the basic structure, is the underlying definition of masculinity that propelled the initial adoption of the suit. If the threepiece suit is still with us, it is because the values of masculinity that it embodies today are more or less the same as those that ushered it in: since 1666, male gentility has been associated with modesty and plainness in dress. Eschewing fashion as an increasingly feminized realm, Charles II’s vest inaugurated a new and essentially modern era of masculine aesthetics, one that reversed a long-held association between elaborate display and high social status. Manly thrift now displayed elite status. Along with the three-piece suit, the view that elaborate clothing consumption is incompatible with masculinity is still a part of modern culture. In the Anglo-American tradition, “conspicuous consumption” has become a phrase of denigration, used to distinguish illegitimate consumer practices from a more inconspicuous consumption practiced by elites.3 The birth of the three-piece suit, then, meant not only the donning of a new wardrobe: it meant the fashioning of a new masculinity, a new ideology about the morality, politics, and economics of elite men’s consumer practices, an ideology still prevalent today. In a sense, then, this work is nothing more than a history of the obvious: since the late seventeenth century, the three-piece suit has been the unofficial uniform of English upper- and middle-class masculinity. Arguably, however, the values of modern masculinity that it embodies have become all too obvious, so obvious as to be unnoticed, unquestioned, second nature, practically synonymous with manliness itself. If the original donning of the three-piece suit was an explicitly political statement—made by a king in a time of great political instability— today wearing a suit is no longer a self-consciously political act. Over the course of three centuries, the personal has been depoliticized. Thus, a history of the obvious is precisely what is needed in order to repoliticize, denaturalize, and destabilize these values of masculinity. This work, then, will be an attempt to raise the reader’s fashion consciousness, to show how what is by now second nature is the result of a process of his-

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torical invention, and thus to return the anxiety and instability to that invention.4 To understand the origins and long durée of the suit, then, we must reconsider the importance of this forgetting of history, this process by which explicitly political decisions and values become internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits—a process, to use Edmund Burke’s eighteenth-century terms, that “renders a man’s virtue his habit” so that “his duty becomes a part of his nature.”5 Modern English masculinity is nothing if not a conspicuous construction, a self-consciously political and conspicuously public creation, precisely because contemporaries like Burke saw the inculcation and naturalization of virtuous masculine habits as central to England’s political order. As Burke wrote: “manners are of more importance than laws . . . they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them,” and elsewhere, “they become a sort of nature both to the governors and the governed.”6 “Manners precede principles,” agreed the Anglican divine John Brown in a famous 1757 diatribe against presumably “effeminate” manners.7 It was good manners, or “principles, early and deeply ingrafted in the mind,” as Rev. Brown understood it, that would prevent England from falling into ruin.8 For contemporaries, it was manners upon which rested the power of the governors and the consent of the governed, as Burke realized—and feared, since it was a critique of the “general corruption of manners” among England’s governors that political reformers would use to undermine aristocratic power.9 Since at least the mid-sixteenth century, both radicals and conservatives of all stripes saw the inculcation of virtues, manners, and manliness as a central form of power. Understanding the importance of ideals of masculinity to notions of politics, economics, and the social order, then, allows us to understand the basis for the birth and continued relevance of Charles II’s three-piece suit. This study will analyze one aspect of this fashioning of English masculinity, this rendering of virtue into habit, by studying the habits of men’s clothing consumption from 1550 to 1850, under three different political and cultural regimes: Tudor-Stuart court culture, eighteenthcentury aristocratic society, and early Victorian middle-class culture. Because consumer habits are everyday statements about class and gender, markers of taste, and actions that involve moral, economic, and often political decisions, they take place at the intersection of the personal and the political, the cultural and the economic, the social and the sexual, the religious and the aesthetic. Thus we will see how men’s habits of con-

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sumption took shape through the combined influence of political, economic, religious, social, and aesthetic ideologies. We will witness the construction of masculine ideals compatible with changing political, economic, and social orders from 1550 to 1850. This work will examine the ideologies of consumption that influenced the creation of a new aesthetics of masculinity in the late seventeenth century, those ideologies that maintained it throughout the eighteenth century, and those forces that attached it to middle-class identity in the nineteenth century. Introduced in 1666 to teach the nobility thrift, the three-piece suit went through various transformations in Restoration England, finally settling on an image of refined simplicity soon after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. With the post-revolutionary modesty of the three-piece suit, a new aesthetics of masculinity, a new image of the gentleman, came to dominate upper-class fashions: sartorial renunciation was opposed to the presumed luxury and extravagant dress of decadent courtiers and middle-class social climbers. This sartorial revolution shifted elite masculinity from a regime that valued sumptuous display as the privilege of nobility to one that rejected fashion as the concern of debauched upstarts; from a world that reserved fine fabrics for honorable aristocrats to one that abandoned them to those considered effeminate fops. In the main, proper male gentility was signified before 1688 by noble magnificence, and after 1688 by refined simplicity. The end of the seventeenth century thus witnessed the triumph of a strategy among gentlemen of repudiating rather than trying to exceed the lavishness of their presumed social inferiors. Sartorial renunciation was embraced as manly refinement, extravagance renounced as base effeminacy. Since 1666, there of course have been numerous exceptions and visible resistance to this general trend toward simplicity. It is these gallants and fops who received all the scandalized condemnation from contemporaries, as well as much attention from historians, who have come all too easily to identify sartorial splendor with aristocratic behavior.10 But court chroniclers and social observers noticed a new modesty in male dress after 1688, a modesty that conformed to Charles II’s original resolution, and to the prescriptions of courtesy manuals, economic tracts, religious writings, political treatises, and social criticism. They witnessed the beginnings of what fashion historians have called the “great masculine renunciation,” the adoption of a more modest and sober image of masculinity that began with Charles II’s vest and took full shape in the eighteenth century. It is in the nineteenth century that this great masculine renunciation became recognizably modern in its uniformity, and it

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is during this same period that sobriety and thrift came to be seen as quintessentially bourgeois values. Yet we must look earlier, to the aristocratic culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to understand the origins of this middle-class masculinity, since it is then that these values first took root in English political and economic culture. With this new masculine image came a new relationship between clothing and status, material fabric and social fabric. After 1688, the good repute of the gentleman rested not on conspicuous consumption, but on inconspicuous consumption, on the display of public virtue, while virtue itself was defined as the absence of display. Thus the sartorial revolution can also be called a semiotic revolution, for it was a revolution that altered English status symbols, signs of English male gentility, and signs of Englishness itself. The sartorial revolution of the late seventeenth century was an important change in dress that declared changes in dress to be unimportant. It was a form of masculine display that disdained display, a fashion that denied its fashionableness. It gave birth to a new semiotic regime, a modern signifying system that declared fashion itself to be insignificant, with all the instability that this implied, since the display of modesty was still a form of display. And as a form of display, even modesty itself was susceptible to calls for further renunciation of display. Inconspicuous consumption was still a form of consumer behavior, subject to the same condemnations that conspicuous consumption was. It is the fact that even modest display was still a form of display that in large part motivated men’s fashion change from 1666 to 1850. Since Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class, the idea of conspicuous consumption has dominated historical and sociological analyses of consumer behavior, and is now a part of our everyday vocabulary.11 Veblenite theories of consumer behavior argue that fashion changes are motivated by social emulation, conspicuous consumption, and invidious distinction—“the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves.”12 This book, however, will show how men’s fashion changes from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century were driven by an increasingly inconspicuous form of consumption, a form of consumption— equally invidious, to be sure—that balanced class demands for social distinction with a gender ideology of masculine renunciation. Conspicuous consumption is merely one social dynamic that motivates fashion change: understanding the variety of systems of consumer behavior means identifying how social and gender groups at

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different historical moments used consumer objects in a number of ways to define themselves in the midst of political, economic, and social change.13 Thus King Charles II changed men’s fashion by instituting a modest anti-fashion that he promised he would never change, while eighteenth-century aristocrats instituted an even more modest fashion for men in opposition to what they saw as Restoration and middle-class luxury. In turn, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, aristocratic and middle-class men furthered the great masculine renunciation by attempting to demonstrate their own modesty in contrast to the presumed luxury and effeminacy of their political opponents. Since 1666, men’s fashion change has been motivated by a masculinist antipathy to fashion, itself driven by attempts to legitimize elite men’s social, economic, or political power. This is a history of the obvious in a second sense as well. Clothing is nothing if not an obvious, all-too-apparent sign of class and gender. It was in part the ideological dismissal of fashion as superficial, insignificant, frivolous, as mere fashion—an ideology that triumphed in the seventeenth century—that allowed (and allows) men’s fashion to remain as an unmarked category, inconspicuous and unexamined. And it is as an unmarked category that this ideology of masculinity has escaped critical analysis, and thus has retained its power to reproduce elite male status. This is thus an in-depth history of the superficial, or rather a superficial history of masculinity—but not as opposed to the real, the deep, or the true history of masculinity. Rather, this is a history of the power of appearances, of the way in which attitudes toward men in the public eye were shaped by, and in turn helped shape, political, economic, and cultural change. “The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men,” the political reformer James Burgh asserted.14 This book will study those characters—men of the public sphere, men at their most superficial, men in the process of conspicuously constructing their own images.15 By studying the most obvious signs of English culture, this work nonetheless does not argue that the study of clothing merely provides a lens through which to study the more important political, social, and economic transformations of England. Were that the case, this work would instead be concerned with those more important changes, instead of worrying about all the superficial trappings of power, “all the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal,” as Edmund Burke well understood them, “. . . all the superadded ideas, fur-

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nished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature.”16 Rather than dismissing this wardrobe as a pleasing illusion, this book seeks to understand the power of that illusion, its ability to command liberal obedience and clothe the naked defects of English society. Because contemporaries—both radical and conservative—invested public images with great power, these images must be studied as in part constitutive of, and not merely supplementary to, the structure of power. Power was rarely naked in early modern England. The wardrobe of power was itself a form of power, and thus important to political culture precisely because it embodied social, sexual, political, religious, and economic relations; it gave them shape, materiality, and visibility. By doing so, clothing put power in plain view; it shaped the way in which power was thought, enacted, and reformulated. Clothing display was not merely an inert political symbol—some static afterthought of power that manifested preformulated ideologies. Rather, clothing display was a form of power, enacting the articulation, negotiation, and personalization of power.17 Manners and material culture gave shape to ideological processes; material signs formed and informed systems of power, rather than standing outside them in some exterior symbolic realm.18 Thus while ideas of masculine character were constructed by changing political ideologies, political ideologies in turn were constructed around changing notions of character. For contemporaries, the personal was politicized precisely because the political was personalized. The personal and the political were not separate spheres, and thus one cannot be understood as a mere sign through which to analyze the other, presumably nonsymbolic, realm. Rather, it is necessary to reconsider the epistemology that sees cultural artifacts as merely symbolic of changes in other, more real realms. We must rethink the relationship between symbol and substance, between cultural practices and the social, political, and economic realities that presumably stand behind them. As contemporaries saw it, transformations in personal habits were integral to the great transformations that shook England from 1550 to 1850. The present work thus seeks to understand this investment in appearances, by showing how political, economic, and social history can be read as a history of appearances, as a history of relationships between clothing and status, appearance and reality, beauty and truth, image and substance, signifier and signified. In effect, this is

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a history of ideas about signs, display, and appearance in England, and a history of those signs themselves. Yet this is a semiotic history, not a semiotic interpretation, of men’s clothing—not an interpretation, that is, that would ahistorically take the language of contemporary semiotics and impose it on an earlier period of history that did not share its notion of signs.19 This work will not attempt to explain the truth about what clothing signs actually meant, but instead to explain what writers in the past thought they meant, how they thought fashion should have worked. Using contemporaries’ own understanding of the importance of appearances, this work will analyze English power at its most “superficial” level—the level of material culture. To give a materialist reading of power, then, is to rethink the epistemological priority of abstract thought over material artifact. This is neither purely a history of ideologies nor purely a history of material culture. Rather it is an intellectual history from the neck down, a materialist history of ideas and an intellectual history of material culture. It seeks to understand the dialectic between intellectual practice and everyday life: both how changing ideas of manners and material culture influenced everyday habits, and how personal habits influenced the history of political, economic, and social thought. This work thus weaves its way somewhere in the middle between high theory and material practice, the grand and the trivial, the sublime and the ridiculous, political culture and personal identity. For a political thinker like Edmund Burke, eighteenth-century men’s dress was sublime, not ridiculous, because it conformed not only to his masculine aesthetics but also to his masculinist sense of politics. In this intersection of personal taste and political culture, then, studying the changing values that informed men’s consumer habits should help us better understand the importance of manners to the political transformations in England from 1550 to 1850. If, as Burke believed, “the most important of all revolutions” is “a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions,” then we should investigate the ways in which political regimes were legitimated, undermined, and reorganized by changing ideologies of gender, public display, and manners, including clothing.20 We need to look at the intersection of ideals of masculinity and English political culture, to determine not only the cultural underpinnings of political regimes, but the political nature of revolutions in everyday life. A growing body of scholarship has focused on the role played by gender ideology in European political culture. Emphasizing not only the political nature of gender distinctions, but the gendered nature of polit-

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ical debates, this new wave of feminist scholarship has profited both from an understanding of the importance of gender as a category of historical analysis and from a shift away from political philosophy studied in isolation and toward a growing interest in “political culture”—which includes works of political thought but also extends to everyday rituals, political symbolism, and what had in an earlier era been considered private or merely civic life.21 Historians of eighteenth-century France have been in the forefront of this shift, demonstrating how ideals of masculinity and femininity were important in defining a new political culture in the revolutionary era.22 Historians of England, however, have only begun to profit from this convergence of gender analysis and the study of political culture.23 Political theorists have analyzed the role of masculinity in early modern political theory, arguing that patriarchal justifications for kingship were replaced by the “fraternal patriarchy” of contract theory.24 Yet this study of patriarchalism is confined to the classics of political philosophy, especially Filmer, Hobbes, and Locke, while Susan Amussen’s more sociological study focuses on the impact of patriarchalism on ideals of the family.25 And although nearly two decades of scholarship have revised our understanding of English political culture and ideology,26 demonstrating how “politics were integrated into the tissue of everyday life,”27 gender has been a conspicuously absent category of analysis.28 “Those are but shallow politics, which do not comprehend sound morals,” wrote James Burgh, who worried that “a people enervated by luxury are but a nation of women and children.”29 Studying masculinity in political culture should thus offer us a key to better understanding the rise and fall of political regimes whose ideological defenses were often gendered ones: patriarchalism and chivalry. It means looking at the ways in which political legitimacy was defined in part by issues of character—by the personal integrity and manliness of those claiming a place in the political arena. “Men are qualified for civil liberty,” wrote Edmund Burke, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; . . . in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption.”30 The great masculine renunciation was nothing if not a moral chain upon the appetites—part of “the renunciation and restraint of impulses” that Norbert Elias has seen as central to “the civilizing process.”31 Without embracing Burke’s vision of the social order, this work nonetheless adopts his critique of the Enlightenment notion of politics as a disembodied and dispassionate discussion of law, rights, and sovereignty,

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a rational public sphere separate from private life. By studying a form of power whose code is “not that of law but that of normalization,”32 I offer what might be called a feminist Burkean reading of English political culture from 1550 to 1850, one where the politics of style is central to the style of politics. By analyzing the ways in which masculine sobriety qualified men for civil liberty, we will better comprehend the masculinist political morality by which women’s access to the formal institutions of power was so limited. If masculinity was a prerequisite to power, then femininity itself, as eighteenth-century feminists well understood, was reason enough to disqualify women from political participation. Cultural definitions of femininity went hand in hand with the political exclusion of women from power. This book is thus a history of the obvious in a final sense: men held political power from 1550 to 1850. This is a fact that continually needs explaining. As this book argues, since contemporaries placed great emphasis on the importance of masculine character, one of the ways in which men maintained power was by creating a public image of manliness. Thus this work seeks to understand the political exclusion of women from formal politics by exploring the ways in which displaying masculinity was a prerequisite to political authority in England. By studying the persistent preoccupation with masculinity in political culture, then, we will better understand that the exclusion of women from power was a persistent and pervasive act in England, something that needed to be constantly reproduced, something not taken for granted by the men who were perennially anxious about England’s decline into effeminacy. If women gained equal access to power, “manliness” would no longer be a yardstick by which to measure political leaders, and denunciations of “effeminacy” would hold no political weight. What was obvious to contemporaries was not that only men held political power, but that, like femininity, masculinity was a conspicuous construction, one that needed constant reinforcement against the threats posed by women and “effeminate” men.33 From 1550 to 1850, effeminacy and luxury were seen as being among the chief “political vices,”34 along with corruption, anarchy, and tyranny. For the late Tudor and Stuart courts, sumptuous dress was part of its prerogative and cultural leadership, while for court critics, male sartorial splendor was the most visible sign of the court’s corruption. Conflict over royal expenditures, which often focused on what was considered the court’s excessive consumption, was the immediate cause of

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the outbreak of the English Civil War, and the Restoration introduction of the three-piece suit was a direct response to this seventeenth-century crisis. In the eighteenth century, the political discourse that legitimated Whig aristocratic rule associated luxury with effeminacy, tyranny, corruption, anarchy, and middle-class upstarts, while it associated refined simplicity with aristocratic moral example, social superiority, and political stability. From 1750 to 1850, however, middle-class men gained political power in great part by undermining the moral authority that legitimated aristocratic rule, portraying aristocrats as effeminate and prodigal parasites living off a virtuous and industrious nation. In middleclass political discourse, masculine character remained a means for determining political legitimacy, but this character was now an attribute not of aristocrats but of middle-class men. In the male homosocial world of England’s political elite, then, accusations of effeminacy were means of excluding not only women, but other men, from power. Both by making masculinity a prerequisite to political legitimacy and by claiming masculinity as their own, men in power used the label of effeminacy to directly exclude from power all other men—men of other classes, as well as men with alternative sexual practices. The use of the label “effeminacy” demonstrates that gender ideals were both socially and sexually constructed in early modern England: politically legitimate masculinity was defined in opposition to three “others”—the other gender, other sexual practices, and other classes.35 From the patriarchal king to the chivalrous aristocrat to the self-made man, then, manly virtue was a crucial ideological trope in English political culture. If studying “those inbred sentiments which are . . . the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals”36 should help us better understand English political culture, then studying the role of gender ideology and cultural values in English economic ideology should help us better understand transformations in English political economy. Economic historians have begun to look at the moral ideas that influenced the development of English economic concepts, policies, and practices, though gender has rarely been a part of this cultural analysis of capitalism. Joyce Appleby has analyzed the ways in which seventeenth-century economic policy emerged out of a struggle with older definitions of moral economy.37 Albert Hirschman has articulated the ways in which economic theory in the eighteenth century was influenced by a new, positive evaluation of passions, interests, and virtue.38 And Michael Ignatieff, Donald Winch, and others have taken a renewed interest in the so-called

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“Adam Smith problem” by attempting to understand the connection between Adam Smith the moral philosopher, Adam Smith the political philosopher, and Adam Smith the political economist.39 By connecting political economy with moral economy, historians have sought to understand the mutually defining relationship between culture and capitalism, a relationship where economic relations influenced cultural habits, and cultural values in turn influenced the formulation and acceptance of economic theories and practices.40 Historians are thus returning to the study of political economy in the classical sense of the term: “political economy,” wrote the nineteenthcentury economist Robert Torrens, “has a connection more or less intimate with almost every question of politics and morals; . . . whether with respect to the conduct of private life, or to the administration of public affairs.”41 Or as the seventeenth-century mercantilist Edward Misselden rhetorically asked: “Is not the public involved in the private, and the private in the public?”42 In classical and preclassical political economy, public and private were not separate spheres, and thus political economists saw English moral values and consumer habits as the basis of economic growth. The mercantilist Thomas Mun wrote in 1621: “by the corruption of men’s conditions and manners, many rich countries are exceedingly poor, whilst the people thereof, too much affecting their own enormities, do lay the fault in something else. Wherefore, industry to increase, and frugality to maintain, are the true watchmen of a kingdom’s treasury.”43 Industry and frugality were as much cultural values as they were economic terms, synonyms for production and consumption. Since the birth of political economy in the sixteenth century, consumption has been a central category of economic analysis, and from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution clothing had been the backbone of the English economy. Studying cultural attitudes toward clothing consumption should help us better understand changing conceptions of the function of consumption in an economy whose central industry was textile production, whose industrial revolution first began in the clothing trade. In their attempts to decrease the consumption of foreign luxuries, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantilists often drew upon gendered definitions of manners and consumption. Imported silk and calico were superfluous, luxurious, and effeminate, while English wool was useful, sober, and manly. It was thus men’s conditions and manners that would maintain a positive balance of trade. In calling upon gentlemen to reform their luxurious ways, mercantilists merged nationalist

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ideology with gender ideology, creating an image of masculinity compatible with English commodities and English values. In the nineteenth century, however, free-trade advocates transformed this economic language by turning it against mercantilist protectionism. The argument for free trade was nothing if not an attack on aristocratic control of the means of consumption: free traders portrayed aristocrats as effeminate fops living in luxury, monopolizing consumption. From the birth of mercantilism to the triumph of laissez-faire ideology, then, political economists drew on cultural attitudes and gender ideology to define and redefine relations between production and consumption. Understanding moral attitudes to manly sobriety thus means broadening our definition of political economy, to the point where we will be able to comprehend why Edmund Burke could claim that a nation “destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride” is a nation where “commerce and the arts should be lost.”44 If we need to broaden our definition of political economy, we also need to broaden our definition of class. Class is not only the social relation to the means of production, but also the social relation to the means of consumption. By looking at changing social definitions of consumption, we will be able to better understand how class was constructed (and not merely reflected) through cultural forms, how social identities were created through material culture and consumer behavior. Throughout the period under study, consumption was a socially defined category. As a concept used in political, economic, and moral literature, luxury was more a social and cultural term than a stable economic concept. Luxury was the evil twin of consumption, the debased, debauched, and debilitating form of consumption that effeminated and impoverished England. As such, accusations of luxury and effeminacy were insults aimed at one’s social or political enemies. How one defined consumption, how one distinguished between productive consumption and destructive luxury, depended on one’s social, political, moral, and economic attitudes. Luxury was variably defined as living beyond one’s means, as anything beyond necessity, or as the attribute of certain consumer products. Hence mercantilists tended to define luxury as characteristic of imported goods. Puritans generally defined luxury as anything beyond necessity, since superfluity distracted one from godliness. Defenders of aristocracy often defined luxury as the vice of upstarts ambitiously living above their social station, while critics of aristocracy defined luxury as the essential attribute of an unproductive land-owning class. Cultural attitudes toward consumption thus helped define the identities of various social groups,

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as a social hierarchy was defined according to a healthy or unhealthy relation to the means of consumption. How one defined consumption was also determined by changing consumer practices. In an expanding field of study, Joan Thirsk, Neil McKendrick, Carole Shammas, and Lorna Weatherill have documented the growing market for consumer goods in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury England, where what had once been presumably the private possessions of the aristocracy were increasingly diffused to a wider social audience.45 Analyzing the anxieties that this so-called democratization of luxury (certainly an overstatement) created for cultural elites involves looking at the new theories of taste that emerged after 1700 to redefine aristocratic status. As goods became more widely available, status was redefined less as the possession of luxury goods and more as the possession of refined sensibility, noble simplicity, or simply “politeness.” Lawrence Klein, John Barrell, Terry Eagleton, and Iain Pears, among others, have analyzed the new theories of taste, sensibility, and politeness that emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to create what Pierre Bourdieu has called a new “aristocracy of culture.”46 Thus studying the development of new standards of taste should offer us a key to better understanding the cultural construction of class in an age that saw a greater variety and availability of consumer goods. To be sure, dress was only one among the many objects consumed in early modern England, and each has its own history.47 Contemporary discussion of many of these consumer products, however, often ran parallel to discussions of clothing (simplicity versus ornament, for example), often carried similar gender connotations (especially in items of food, as we will see), and were often grouped together under the general rubric of “luxury” or “taste.” Nonetheless, each consumer item came with its own set of values, connotations, economic weights, and political significance, and thus it would take a much larger project than this one to outline an entire regime of consumption across the spectrum of goods. This study focuses on clothing, not only because it is “the body of the body,” as Erasmus called it, and thus so immediately related to questions of identity, but because clothing throughout the period under study was a primary focus of discussions of consumption, a prime object of derision by critics and satirists of luxury, and usually the first example chosen by contemporaries to illustrate the decadence, disorder, and corruption of the day. For contemporaries, clothing seemed to be the quintessential consumer object.

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As a primary mode of social distinction, clothing consumption led trends in the new social dynamics of taste. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, courtesy manuals and aesthetic treatises expressed a new means of displaying social distinction: English gentlemen should lead society by their refined taste and moral example rather than their sumptuary expense. As a result, displaying wealth was no longer equated with displaying worth. Manliness and sobriety were thus means of claiming social as well as political authority. Social leadership for men was determined by renouncing the effeminating world of fashion, by not following the crowds, by what James Burgh called “superior example.”48 And it is precisely this social ideology that middle-class reformers turned against the aristocracy itself, by claiming public virtue as the private property of middle-class men. The great masculine renunciation was thus driven by this struggle for “superior example,” as aristocratic and middle-class men engaged in what we might call invidious indistinction, driving the three-piece suit into more somber colors and increased simplicity. Who controlled the meanings of consumption, and how social groups defined their relation to the means of consumption, were thus central to the dynamics of a male fashion system in England. Habits of consumption helped define class, and class rivalries helped define habits of consumption. In the chapters that follow, this book will try to explain how politics, class, culture, and economics intersected around attitudes toward men’s clothing consumption. Chapter 2 will discuss the attitudes toward clothing and ideals of masculinity created by the Tudor-Stuart court, as well as the royalist, Anglican, and mercantile ideologies that defended aristocratic conspicuous consumption. Chapter 3 covers the republican, Whig, mercantilist, and Puritan ideologies that opposed and undermined Stuart court culture and constructed a new political culture of masculinity, one that influenced the introduction of the three-piece suit, as chapter 4 demonstrates. Chapter 5 outlines the ways in which eighteenth-century aristocrats appropriated those oppositional ideologies in order to legitimate their own position atop the social, political, and economic hierarchy, while chapter 6 examines how middle-class reformers in turn reappropriated these ideals of masculinity for their own political and economic ends. Together, these chapters outline the ways in which revolutions in politics, economics, and society were constructed as revolutions of everyday life, in the process fashioning a modern definition of masculine consumer attitudes and practices.

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In trying to explain why King Charles II would choose to make a political statement by making a fashion statement, this work hopes to demonstrate the influence of political, social, moral, and economic ideologies on the construction of modern masculinity. If contemporaries were concerned with clothing consumption, it is precisely because contemporary notions of politics, society, morality, and the economy revolved around masculinist ideas about manners, habits, and sentiments—precisely because contemporaries saw revolutions in the means and meaning of consumption as the most important revolutions in early modern England.

chapter 2

The Old Sartorial Regime, 1550 –1688

“There is such a confused mingle mangle of apparel,” lamented Phillip Stubbes in 1583, and such preposterous excess thereof, as every one is permitted to flaunt it out, in what apparel he lust himself, or can get by any kind of means. So that it is very hard to know who is noble, who is worshipful, who is a gentleman, who is not: for you shall have those, which are neither of the nobility, gentility, nor yeomanry, no, not yet any magistrate or officer in the commonwealth, go daily in silks, velvets, satins, damasks, taffetas, and such like, notwithstanding that they be both base by birth, mean by estate, and servile by calling. This is a great confusion and a general disorder. God be merciful unto us.1

God was apparently not merciful unto England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the nation felt the impact of great social change. With the rise of a new gentry, the dissolution of medieval estates and monasteries, the continued growth of enclosures and rural industries, and the increasing wealth of an urban merchant class, new elites created great confusion and general disorder by threatening the cultural superiority of an older aristocracy.2 The social structure of Elizabethan and Jacobean England was sufficiently fluid to challenge any aristocratic monopoly on silks, velvets, satins, and such like. Thus Phillip Stubbes was not the only writer confused by this general disorder in apparel. The dramatist and pamphleteer Robert Greene worried that base and servile men were abandoning their cloth breeches for the velvet breeches 17

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Figure 1. Robert Greene, “A Quip for an Upstart Courtier: Or, A Quaint Dispute between Velvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches,” 1592. While the more humbly dressed “cloth breeches” figure on the right is associated with labor, the “velvet breeches” courtier on the left stands in a traditional pose of authority, his right arm akimbo and his left pointing, as if giving orders. By permission of The British Library. 95.b.19(1).

of the nobility (figure 1). Denouncing “proud and unmannerly upstarts,” Greene longed for a return to the good old days when “the farmer was content his son should hold the plough, and live as he had done before: . . . [now] those dunghill drudges wax so proud that they will presume to wear on their feet what kings have worn on their heads.”3 Concerns about men dressing according to their sex and condition neither began in 1550 nor ended in 1688, nor was the social mobility of unmannerly upstarts specific to this period.4 What was specific was the language in which these concerns were expressed, and the way in which elites attempted to resolve this apparent general disorder: defenders of the social order associated aristocratic masculinity with conspicuous consumption, and appealed to the crown to govern the availability and meaning of consumer goods. In this chapter, we will see the functioning of what I have termed “the old sartorial regime”—a political regime that

The Old Sartorial Regime

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defended aristocratic conspicuous consumption in order to support its definition of social and economic order. From the Tudor commonwealth to the Glorious Revolution, supporters of this old sartorial regime called upon the crown to regulate the consumption of apparel so that Englishmen would “content themselves with that sort of clothing which agrees to their sex and condition, not striving to exceed and equal that of a higher rank,” the royalist divine Richard Allestree sermonized in 1659.5 In their response to the presumed loss of an obvious social hierarchy, social commentators called for the maintenance of a sartorial order whereby consumption would make the social order perfectly conspicuous, thereby reasserting monarchical power. This assertion of monarchy and aristocracy was not without opposition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of course. As chapter 3 discusses, Whigs, republicans, Puritans, mercantilists, and country gentlemen often opposed the import of continental politics, along with the court culture and fashions that accompanied them. Aristocratic gentlemen thus stood uneasily between challenge from upstarts and criticism from opponents. The desire for a visible social order did not mesh easily with claims to a visible moral order: while the display of a social hierarchy required aristocrats to outspend upstarts, the court’s conspicuous consumption was a key object of criticism by political adversaries. Faced with a dual task, defenders of the crown and court constructed a definition of masculinity that argued for the morality of sumptuous display yet made it theoretically inaccessible to all but the nobility. This defense of aristocratic men’s consumption drew on a hierarchical social theory, royalist propaganda, Anglican theology, and mercantile economic policy to argue that men’s conspicuous consumption was properly masculine, politically necessary, socially useful, ethically neutral, economically beneficial, and consistent with aristocratic definitions of manliness. “APPAREL OFT PROCLAIMS THE MAN” Throughout Tudor-Stuart England, Phillip Stubbes and Robert Greene were joined by a chorus of voices who complained that social distinctions in male dress needed to be more apparent, more obvious, more conspicuous.6 In calling for conspicuous consumption,7 defenders of the old sartorial regime—from sermonizers to satirists, poets to playwrights—marshaled a whole array of revealing platitudes: “The outward carriage should promise what’s within a man”; 8 “clothes . . . are but like

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the sign over the door, which tell all men what kind of shop and mind there is within”; 9 “the body is the shell of the soul; apparel is the husk of that shell; the husk often tells you what the kernel is.”10 First impressions should be the truest. One should be able to judge a man by his clothes. The most famous of these sartorial clichés is Polonius’s advice to his son Laertes in Hamlet: Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy, For the apparel oft proclaims the man.11

No statement better articulates the ideology of the old sartorial regime, for “rich, not gaudy” clothing marked the status of a gentleman living within his means, as costly as his purse could buy. In calling for “apparel comely to every estate and degree,”12 old regime social critics worried that elite prerogatives to sumptuous dress were undercut by new wealth, destabilizing an ability to equate the display of wealth with a claim to elite status. While the royalist Henry Peacham argued in 1622 that gentlemen “may eat the best and daintiest meat that the place affordeth; they wear at their pleasure gold, jewels, the best apparel, and of what fashion they please,” he cautioned: “neither must we honor or esteem those ennobled, or made gentle in blood, who by mechanic and base means, have raked up a mass of wealth, or because they follow some great man, wear the cloth of a noble personage.”13 By destabilizing the social order, upstarts also disrupted the gender order. Like aristocratic men, aristocratic women were expected to live in sumptuary splendor, while upstart women were accused of mannishness.14 “Since the days of Adam women were never so masculine,” complained the author of Hic Mulier: Or, The Man-Woman, especially in “the monstrousness of deformity in apparel.”15 Emulation of higher status effeminated men and made women masculine: “How are our women (as it were) transformed into men,” bemoaned William Parkes in 1612, “by degenerating from their sex, and from the virtue, modesty, and civility thereof, by their mannish complements, and ruffianly attire: and how are our men (as it were) transformed into women, by their lascivious, effeminate, and wanton imitations, none being content with their own estates and conditions.”16 As Parkes here articulates, mannishness and effeminacy were created when women and men became discontented with their own estate. Both masculinity and femininity were socially defined: social emulation of aristocratic splendor created mannishness in upstart women and effeminacy in upstart men.

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In the old sartorial regime, then, effeminacy was defined as dressing out of place, as the affected misuse of sartorial signs by those who did not merit their noble significance. As Henry Peacham put it: “gold and silver, worn by martial men, addeth . . . courage and spirit unto them; but in others effeminacy, or a kind of womanish vanity.”17 By adopting dress unfit for their station, upstart men were engaging in effeminacy. Gold, silver, and other forms of “bravery” were only manly when worn by martial men. Thus aristocratic consumption, and aristocratic masculinity, relied on the trappings of war—armor, pikes, swords, and codpieces (figure 2). In figure 3, the earl of Dorset places his right hand not on the sumptuous tapestries and carpets surrounding him, nor on the delicate embroideries and lace adorning him, but on his helmet, with the remainder of his armor nonchalantly lying beside him.18 The court aristocracy justified its high levels of consumption by appealing to its role as an arms-bearing order: military bravery legitimated sartorial bravery. In effect, the old sartorial regime worked by a “hierarchy of analogies,” by the resemblance between one’s social standing and one’s level of expenditure.19 The Elizabethan poet Barnabe Barnes opined that “all garments should be . . . in worth and fashion correspondent to the state, substance, age, place, time, birth, and honest custom of those persons which use them.”20 In this hierarchy, dress was meant to make one’s social position visible by a one-to-one correspondence between one’s rank and one’s purse, by the analogy between one’s internal worth and external wealth.21 “Oh, how comely are good clothes to a good soul, when the grace within, shall beautify the attire without,” Thomas Adams wrote in 1614.22 In the old sartorial regime, good clothes corresponded with a good soul. Garment proclaimed status. Judging the soul by the attire was a key to social stability. Defenders of the old sartorial regime thus advocated “conspicuous consumption” in the most literal sense of the phrase: consumption that would make the social order conspicuous. This entailed an ideology that stated that the higher the status, the richer the fabric: silk and satin were noble, flannel and fustian humble. Thus “it would be as ridiculous for a wealthy noble man to draw on course cloth, as for the poorest of his tenants to swagger up and down in scarlet.”23 By purchasing the fine apparel of their superiors, then, wealthy upstarts were threatening the semiotic stability between fabric and rank, between material signifier and social signified. It was prideful upstarts, the playwright William Rankins complained, who “have no firmer virtue than a name. / But who so thinks the sign the substance is. / Errs, and his wit doth wander much amiss.”24

Figure 2. George Perfect Harding, George Clifford, earl of Cumberland, 1590s. George Clifford was made a Knight of the Garter in 1592. This portrait demonstrates his loyalty to the queen, since he wears her glove. While Clifford was known to be a spendthrift and gambler who wasted the income from his estates, he chose to have himself portrayed not as a domestic wastrel but as a knight abroad in armor, equipped with pike and helmet. Standing with arm akimbo, a standard gesture of command, his military posture went hand in hand with his sartorial display of plume, embroidery, and silk hose. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Figure 3. Isaac Oliver, Richard, earl of Dorset, 1616. Richard Sackville, the third earl of Dorset, was unabashed about his sartorial splendor, and visually linked that splendor with the military function of the aristocracy. V&A Picture Library.

Thus the correspondence between sign and substance, between material fabric and social fabric, was a one-way correspondence: apparel “proclaimed” the man, not “made” him, as it is often incorrectly quoted. In the old sartorial regime, rich clothing proclaimed gentility, represented it, manifested it, and made it conspicuous. “Proclaiming” is an act of attribution, representation, signification, ascription, while “making” is an act of creation, achievement, production. Sartorial proclamations thus

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did not make or create gentility, as unmannerly upstarts desired. Defenders of the old regime argued that high status merited fine fabrics, while they accused upstarts of believing that fine fabrics could create high status. Count Annibale Romei’s The Courtiers Academie, translated into English in 1598, praised “costly garments, precious jewels, sumptuous palaces, magnificent furniture” for aristocrats, yet warned that “neither riches, nor sumptuous vestments make a man noble.”25 The clothes did not make the man in the old sartorial regime.26 In this inegalitarian morality, modesty and sobriety were determined along a sliding scale rather than being absolute and universal standards of behavior. “To each according to his means” was the morality of the old sartorial regime: “Let every man clothe himself in such sober attire, as befits his place and calling,” the Anglican Richard Allestree advised.27 Sobriety meant living according to one’s station, rather than being the inherent attribute of any specific style, as it did for critics of the old regime. Though Philip Stubbes condemned “preposterous excess,” he qualified: “I would not be so understood, as though my speeches extended to any either noble, honorable, or worshipful: for, I am so far from once thinking that any kind of sumptuous or gorgeous attire is not to be worn of any of them, as I suppose them rather ornaments in them, than otherwise.”28 Similarly, Robert Greene criticized “not the weed but the vice, not the apparel when ‘tis worthily worn, but the unworthy person that wears it.”29 Sumptuous and gorgeous attire was an innocent ornament to nobility, meant to confirm the honor of the station. Old regime authors thus justified the liberal expenditures of England’s elite, considering them both a prerogative and an obligation. This justification applied not only to clothing but also to other goods. The privy councillor Thomas Wilson considered a gentleman’s “liberal using of his wealth” as a sign of “fortitude or manhood.”30 For defenders of aristocratic splendor, conspicuous consumption was not the aberrant behavior of nobles “usually unostentatious in their spending,” as Lawrence Stone has asserted,31 but rather was essential to aristocratic men’s social and gender identity, “perhaps the most vital component of this cultural definition” of the aristocracy in Tudor-Stuart England.32 Nor was this ethic of ostentation anything new, which is why defenders of the old sartorial regime condemned only the conspicuous consumption of nouveaux riches, not the long-standing ostentation of the aristocracy.33 They were less concerned that old-established families return to their “usually unostentatious” ways, than that upstarts return to their unostentatious ways. “To be vainly ostentative, then,” warned the author of

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The Gentleman’s Companion, “is greatly to be abominated, and shunned by a gentleman. But yet we must not here mistake; for in some cases ’tis of great use, nay, and is great discretion. As in all noble and high undertakings, the hope of glory and praise adds life to the enterprise . . . . A little vanity, and opinion (therefore) may be allowed.”34 Thus liberality and display were not part of a decline of true aristocratic values: conspicuous consumption among the English nobility did not signify a crisis of the aristocracy, a shift from truth to falsity, reality to appearance, substance to show, status to display.35 Rather, it was defenders of the old sartorial regime who sought to maintain a correspondence between sign and substance, precisely because high (and highly conspicuous) consumption was central to the “fortitude or manhood” of aristocratic men.36 Imported from Italian and French models of courtesy theory, like the very fabrics worn by English gentlemen, this courtly ideology considered apparel to be a manifestation of the internal worth of a gentleman. Since noble dress and noble status were naturally affiliated with each other, the noble courtier had to fashion a natural, unaffected attitude to dress. “Go as thou wouldst be met,” Lord Burleigh advised, “sit as thou wouldst be found, wear thy apparel in a careless, yet a decent seeming: for affectedness in any thing, is commendable in nothing.”37 In his decent seeming, then, the courtier needed to feel at ease with the sumptuous trappings of his station. Courtesy writers thus counseled unaffected moderation: “Men’s behavior,” Francis Bacon advised, “should be like their apparel, not too strait or point device [precise], but free for exercise or motion.”38 Distinguishing between sumptuousness and artificiality was a difficult task, especially since old regime courtesy literature argued that rules of apparel should not be too precise, but should conform to custom. In his advice manual, James I counseled his son Prince Henry to wear his clothes “according to the common form of the time, sometimes richlier, sometimes meanlier clothed as the occasion serveth, without keeping any precise rule therein.”39 The aristocratic gentleman could act nonchalantly, even carelessly, in his sartorial splendor precisely because such seemly apparel was natural to him. Such was the difference between a true aristocrat and an over-reaching upstart. Moderation was a “golden mediocrity,”40 the via media between covetousness and lavishness, the moral and economic virtue of living within one’s means. Moderation meant sumptuary stability: “Virtue is never extravagant and undetermined,” wrote the author of The Courtier’s Calling; “as being perfect, it derives its rules from mediocrity, and to

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take it rightly, it is mediocrity itself. Avarice and prodigality are two vicious extremes, liberality the medium is a virtue.”41 Moderation, of course, was a relative term, one that stood uneasily between modesty and prodigality, simplicity and extravagance. Effeminacy was found not in display and adornment, but in excess, in expenditure and display beyond one’s means. Properly used, the material sign should bring grace and dignity; improperly used, materiality might lead to debauchery and sensuality. There was thus a fine and invisible line—termed moderation—between the proper and improper use of signs. The difference between virtuous magnificence and vicious prodigality existed neither in the garment nor in the eye of the beholder, but in the station and attitude of the wearer. Thus moderation meant an ease with one’s social status, the unaffected, graceful correspondence between clothing and rank, a cultivated naturalness and careless nonchalance. Since the end of the old sartorial regime, this calculated appearance of unaffected nonchalance has often been seen as deceit and deception, extravagance and effeminacy. Outside of this regime, courtly display seems incompatible with masculinity. As Joan Kelly has written of the Renaissance courtier in general: “To be attractive, accomplished, and seem not to care; to charm and do so coolly—how concerned with impression, how masked the true self. And how manipulative . . . . In short, how like a woman— or a dependent, for that is the root of the simile.”42 For critics of the old sartorial regime, conspicuous consumption meant following the crown, and thus signified an aristocratic dependence incompatible with republican and Whig notions of masculinity (as the next chapter will demonstrate). But while anti-royalists argued for the “simile” between display, dependence, and debilitating femininity, royalists asserted that the ethics of attraction and the aesthetics of display were not inherently effeminate. Gender was certainly displayed in the old sartorial regime, but the act of self-display was not itself given a gender. “I hate an effeminate spruceness, as much as a fantastic disorder,” complained the Anglican and royalist Owen Felltham, yet added: “a neglective comeliness is a man’s best ornament.”43 To be sure, “neglective” nonchalance was self-consciously created, but it was a created naturalness—with all the instability and ambivalence that this implied for a relatively fluid social order.44 Affectation and artificiality were condemned in the old sartorial regime because they drew attention to the theatricality, the self-fashioning, the created image—not because the image was false, but because the immediacy of signification, the transparent affiliation between display and status, the

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one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, was lost. Artificiality was the misuse and dissemination of signs, the loss of their proper, noble significations. When upstarts purchased the trappings of nobility, signifiers lost their graceful relationship with what they signified. The signifier was worshiped for itself rather than for its reference. For old regime ideologists, clothes in themselves were innocent, insignificant, meaningless, arbitrary signs: it was only their connection with nobility that made them noble. “Let his attire be conformable to custom, and change with company,” wrote the M.P. Sir William Cornwallis. “In many things (as in this) custom is a thing indifferent, and things indifferent receiving their life from light grounds; every country hath some peculiar to itself by which when we are there, we ought to be ruled.”45 Clothing was a “thing indifferent,” arbitrary not in the sense of being random, but in the sense of being conventional, relative to contextual determination, relative to the wearer. To be sure, fine fabrics had intrinsic material qualities—softness, rarity, color, craftsmanship—but in the old sartorial regime these properties took on their social and gendered meanings only through convention. Clothes were arbitrary in the sense that there was nothing ahistorically or naturally fixed in their meaning.46 Worn by martial men, gold and silver were manly, but in others, effeminate. Effeminacy thus meant semiotic instability: signs lost their grace and moderation, the unaffected affiliation between clothing and status. If “rich, not gaudy” apparel proclaimed the man—proclaimed aristocratic masculinity, that is—then it did so according to historically specific definitions of masculinity, display, and the social order, ones that made masculinity compatible with aristocratic conspicuous consumption. THE CROWN PROCLAIMS THE APPAREL In the old sartorial regime, the aristocratic aesthetic of conspicuous consumption went hand in hand with the growth of English monarchical power, precisely because a central aspect of the growth of monarchy in Tudor-Stuart England was the emergence of the court as a patron of culture and arbiter of style.47 With the rise of court cultures throughout Europe, the “courtier” became a central ideal for defining aristocratic masculinity.48 If defenders of court culture considered conspicuous consumption as a rightful and manly honor bestowed upon aristocratic men by their noble status and position at court, they looked to the cultural and magisterial authority of the crown to regulate consumption and prevent “general disorder.” In royalist ideology, the crown was the source

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of social stability, the cultural center for the meaning and social circulation of signs: the crown determined what clothing meant, who was allowed to wear what, and how it could be purchased. Through the use of either sumptuary law or its own example, the crown attempted to determine how aristocratic masculinity would be displayed. If apparel proclaimed the man in the old sartorial regime, the crown proclaimed the apparel. “A king is as one set on a stage,” the future James I advised his son Henry in 1599, “whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly do behold: and therefore although a king be never so precise in the discharging of his office, the people, who seeth but the outward part, will ever judge of the substance by the circumstances, and according to the outward appearance.”49 Repeating a “true old saying,”50 James warned his son that royalty was inseparable from spectacle: in his eyes, managing the crown’s public image was central to governing the nation as a whole. Good government meant attending to the circumstances as well as the substance of power, for, as James saw it, the stability of the king’s rule lay in the negotiation of outward appearance: “if his behavior be light or dissolute, [the people] will conceive pre-occupied conceits of the king’s inward intention: . . . [and] prejudged conceits will, in the mean time, breed contempt, the mother of rebellion and disorder.”51 In James I’s eyes, then, contempt for the king’s outward appearance was the mother of rebellion—a concern not to be taken lightly in TudorStuart England, precisely because critics of increased monarchical power phrased their opposition in cultural terms.52 To maintain its cultural and political authority, then, the crown needed to control the means of consumption—the meaning and circulation of aesthetic codes, styles, and fashions. By regulating the symbolic practices of court life through patronage of the arts, pageantry, a system of manners, sumptuary law, and religious ceremony, the monarchy solidified its place atop a political, economic, religious, and social hierarchy. We must take seriously the trappings of power, precisely because political leaders like James I saw them as a central element in their rule.53 Studying the public symbols that clothed the naked facts of power, then, should help us better understand the assertion of royal authority in Tudor-Stuart England—as well as the rebellion and disorder that James rightly feared would undermine it. As contemporaries saw it, the construction and elaboration of a courtly aesthetic was not merely peripheral to the English monarchy: power was never undressed, the king never offstage. Rather, royalists

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saw the maintenance of the crown’s power as involving as much a control of the codes of civility as the control of arms and legislation.54 “Princes,” wrote Gerrard de Malynes, “do not only give laws unto their subjects, but also (as Plato hath noted) they do change by their example the manners of man.”55 Or as James I himself wrote to Prince Henry, “it is not enough to a good king, by the scepter of good laws well execute to govern, and by force of arms to protect his people; if he join not herewith his virtuous life in his own person, and in the person of his court and company; by good example alluring his subjects to the love of virtue, and hatred of vice.”56 To allure England’s subjects to the love of virtue, then, the monarchy needed to assert the cultural authority that underpinned its power, by tending to the “smallest actions and gestures.” Given this concern for outward appearances, it makes sense that the king of England would give fashion advice to his son. In his “fatherly love” for both son and country,57 James advised Prince Henry on how to “frame all your indifferent actions and outward behavior.” “In your clothes,” he counseled, “keep a proportion, as well with the seasons of the year as of your age: . . . But specially eschew to be effeminate in your clothes, in perfuming, preening, or such like: and fail never in time of wars to be galliardest and bravest, both in clothes and countenance” (figure 4).58 In everything from clothing to facial expression, James I understood that eschewing effeminacy was vital to the crown’s legitimacy, precisely because displaying bravery was so important to its cultural authority. Avoiding “the mother of rebellion” meant sustaining a fatherly image of the crown as manly and moderate. Masculine bravery was central to this patriarchal vision of political culture, where fathers brought order and mothers disorder. For royalists, an image of masculinity was a necessary element of monarchy and court culture.59 The crown, then, had to prevent two types of disorder, one that stemmed from upstarts’ undue emulation of aristocratic court culture, and another that stemmed from contempt for that same court culture. The crown needed to simultaneously reinforce the hierarchy of analogies that justified aristocratic consumption in the face of social emulators, and reassert the masculinity and legitimacy of that consumption in the face of political criticism. For royalists, the court’s splendor was “a part of majesty,”60 necessary to create reverence and awe, but its expenses had to remain moderate in order to avoid “the mother of rebellion.” Like the rest of society, the monarchy needed to live moderately, within its means—but no lower, since the court’s magnificence was seen

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Figure 4. After Isaac Oliver, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, c. 1610. In his lace ruff and embroidery, Prince Henry lives up to his father James I’s advice to be “galliardest and bravest, both in clothes and countenance.” Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

as essential to instilling political allegiance and social deference. Disputes over the court’s expenditures were of no small account in TudorStuart England, and the crown needed to balance its liberality with its exemplary moderation. As Francis Bacon had written, “bounty and magnificence are virtues, verae Regiae, but a prodigal king is nearer a tyrant, than a parsimonious [one].”61 Good government thus meant set-

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ting a sartorial example for the nation—not in the style of dress to be followed, but in the principle of moderation. The monarch was to be emulated not in fashion, but in the principle of dressing according to one’s station. George Puttenham put it bluntly: “a king and prince may use rich and gorgeous apparel decently, so cannot a mean person do.”62 “What is requisite and necessary for the service of a Prince,” wrote the author of The Uses and Abuses of Money, “is pride and lasciviousness in a Duke.”63 This is why English monarchs sought to balance temperance and magnificence in negotiating their “smallest actions and gestures.” Elizabeth I balanced a reputation for personal frugality with the ability to manipulate the chivalric codes that turned her into a “faerie queene.”64 James I was aware of the same need for balance, as he told Parliament in 1609: “a king’s expense must always be honorable, though not wasteful . . . in maintaining those ancient honorable forms of living that the former kings of England my predecessors have done, and his living [ought] to be ruled according to the proportion of his greatness.”65 Charles I sought to create an image of virtue and moderation at the same time that he emphasized courtly ceremony and splendor.66 Repeating the platitude that “the best pulse to discover the inward temper is by his outward actions,” the anonymous author “W. P.” portrayed his beloved martyr Charles I as “temperate and moderate in all things, as did ever appear in his recreations, expenses, apparel, diet, and the like.”67 Thus Sir Henry Wotton considered the moderate Charles I to be the perfect courtier: “in your gestures free from affectation; in your whole aspect no swelling, no rigidity, but an alluring and pleasing suavity” (figure 5).68 The public image of the court was thus of central concern to the English monarchy. A “pleasing suavity” brought deference but, if seen as affected, threatened insubordination. Moderation and the cultivation of nonchalance were essential to the crown’s outward appearance: “For if your mind be found occupied upon [clothes], it will be thought idle,” warned James I. An indifference to (though not adjuration of) fashion was essential to political authority: thus “be also moderate in your raiment,” James I advised Prince Henry, neither over superfluous, like a debauched waster; nor yet over base, like a miserable wretch; not artificially trimmed and decked, like a courtesan; nor yet over-sluggishly clothed, like a country-clown, not over lightly, like a candysoldier, or a vain young courtier; nor yet over gravely, like a minister. But in your garments be proper, cleanly, comely and honest: wearing your clothes in a careless, yet comely form: keeping in them a middle form.69

Figure 5. Daniel Mytens, Charles I, 1631. In this and other royal portraits, Charles displays the grace and nonchalance of a courtier while standing in a pose of authority. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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For James I, then, as for old regime courtesy writers in general, the morality of masculine bravery lay in the middle between simplicity and artificiality, between deprivation and sensuality, between gravity and indulgence. Such were the sins of prodigal debauchees and upstart courtesans, country clowns and miserable wretches, Puritans and Catholics. In royalist political culture, then, sartorial splendor was merely a court uniform to be donned without affectation, an “outward garment, whether it were gown, cloak, or mantle of estate, which they might be said to bear only,” as the Rev. John Williams, later archbishop of York, preached before the king in 1619.70 An arbitrary custom conferred upon nobles “by the favor of their Prince and their own deserts,”71 this court uniform should fit with ease and gracefully correspond to one’s station. The scarlet robes of the courtier, opined the author of England’s Vanity, “are rather hung upon them, than girt to them . . . that is so far from making its impression on his heart, that he knows it may be commanded away to another, and is perfectly at the pleasure of his prince.”72 Worn at the pleasure of the prince, clothes should not make an impression on a man’s heart, for that was affectation and vanity. Conformity to fashion signified nothing more than a man’s position at court, and his fidelity to the crown, which in turn legitimated his conspicuous consumption: “’Tis fit his dress should be gay, because embroideries are for the palaces of kings.”73 Properly used, gay dress was noble and manly; improperly used, it was affected, vain, and effeminate. For the courtier, donning sumptuous dress was, in theory at least, merely an act of political allegiance. In this equation between political and sartorial loyalty, ruling by example had its dangers: being followed in the wrong way. Allegiance to the court’s example was always threatened by upstart emulators who dressed the part in order to obtain the power, who mistook the one-way correspondence between sign and substance. For royalists, following the court’s exemplary virtue did not entail adopting its fashions, but living according to its principle, within one’s means. For ideologues of the old sartorial regime, then, the cultural authority of the crown needed to be enforced by its magisterial power. If culture could not sustain the social hierarchy, then the law courts would. To avoid the “general confusion” of estates, the crown needed to legally stabilize the equation between displaying wealth and displaying worth. It thus issued sumptuary laws regulating who could wear what, in order to legislate the correspondence between cultural and legal definitions of rank. The law stepped in when manners failed.

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Defining aristocratic men’s consumption by royal fiat was fraught with ambivalence. Maintaining a hierarchy of resemblances was complicated by the difficult maintenance of legal and cultural definitions of status and gender in an age of social and cultural change. It meant establishing a correspondence between two terms whose meanings were themselves highly fluid: aristocracy and masculinity. After all, what and who was a gentleman? Classical and medieval courtesy theory defined a gentleman by both culture and birth, a definition that continued into the eighteenth century.74 In this tradition, John Ferne defined the gentlemen by “a certain excellence as well of gentle blood, as of virtues and proper merits, shining in one and the self-same man.”75 With the growth of monarchy in England, however, courtesy writers looked to the crown to regulate the correspondence between cultural attributes and social status.76 As a legal status defined by the crown, gentility could not be purchased or affected. And as a cultural status also defined by the crown, gentility needed to be legitimately displayed. Sumptuary laws performed both tasks of definition, regulating a social hierarchy and its correspondent cultural attributes. They had the function of turning social station into legal status, defusing great confusion by incorporating new wealth into a politically regulated social order.77 Sumptuary laws thus were aimed not at ending social mobility, but at ending illegitimate social emulation. By constantly remapping the social order and selectively legitimating new wealth, the crown attempted to maintain control of social and cultural change. Like court culture, then, sumptuary laws were part and parcel of the growth of monarchy, part of its claims to be able to regulate the social order by controlling the means and meanings of consumption. Laws regulating crimes of fashion date from 1327 in England, part of the Tudor revolution in government; they were “under statutory control continuously between 1463 and 1604,” and reached their zenith under Elizabeth I.78 They were attempts to institute a hierarchy in dress that would, once and for all, end the new-fangling of styles and the intermingling of status symbols. A 1532-33 act “for the better repressing of the inordinate excess of apparel by some moderation, and for a reasonable order like to be observed, and performed in the wearing thereof,” was passed under Henry VIII, and was frequently renewed throughout the sixteenth century.79 Itself a great hierarchy of analogies, the Act proclaimed, for example, that no one under the rank of duke was permitted to wear imported wool. Summarized below,80 this Act provided the gen-

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eral framework for Elizabethan sumptuary policy and was praised throughout the old sartorial regime.

1532 –33 sumptuary law No one under the degree of:

Shall be permitted to wear:

king, queen, king’s mother, king’s brothers and sisters, king’s uncles and aunts

silk of purple; cloth of gold tissue

dukes and marquises

cloth of gold costing more than 50£ per yard

Order of the Garter

silk of purple

earl

cloth of gold, silver, or tinsled satin; silk of cloth mixed or embroidered with gold or silver

earl, viscount, baron, and Prior of St. Johns Jerusalem

fur of sable; cloth of gold, silver or tinsel in doublets

duke, marquise, earl and earl’s children, baron, or knight of the Company of the Garter

imported wool; velvet of crimson, scarlet or blue; fur of black genets or lusern

baron’s son or knight’s son, “except he [who] may expend yearly in lands or tenements, rents, fees, or annuities, to his own use for term of his life, or for term of another man’s life, or in the right of his wife, 202£ over all charges”

chain of gold, bracelet, onch, or other ornament of gold, except rings; velvet in gowns; “furs of libards”; gold, silver or silk embroidery, pricking or painting

knight no man expending under 100£ per year

“any color of gold named color S.” satin, damask, silk chamlet, or taffeta in gown; velvet

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except in sleeveless jackets and doublets; imported fur, except foines, genets, and bogy son and heir apparent of a knight, or of a man of charges of 200£ per annum

chamlet or silk in their gowns; any silk other than satin, damask, taffeta, or sarcenet in their doublets, and sarcenet, chamlet, or taffeta in the linings of their gowns; none of the above silks, or velvet in their coats, jackets, jerkins, caps, or purses; the color of scarlet, crimson or blue; fur of foins or genets; imported fur; buttons or chain of gold or silver

gentlemen as may dispend in land and tenements, fees, or annuities, as is aforesaid 200£ per year

silk, except satin, taffeta, sarcenet, or damask in his doublet; chamlet in his sleeved jacket; lace of silk in his points, or in girdles and garters made in England or Wales; furs of black cony or bogy

gentlemen as may dispend . . . 50£ per year

cloth of the colors of scarlet, crimson, or violet engrained; silk in doublets or jackets; nor any cloth above the price of 6s. 8d. per broad yard; imports other than chamlet in doublets and jackets

servingmen, yeomen taking wages, “or such other as may not dispend of freehold 120s. by year”

cloth in hose above 2s. the yard; any embroidery; embroidery; cloth in garments costing more than

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3s. 4d. per broad yard, except if it be his master’s livery; fur except gray cony fur, or fur of black or white lamb of English, Welsh, or Irish growth; silk, gold, or in his shirt, cap, collar, or hat; any of these things imported husbandmen

hose of cloth costing more than 2s. per yard; garments of cloth costing more than 4s. per broad yard; fur; imports other than fustian canvas

servingmen in husbandry; or journeymen in handicrafts, attendants of the king, queen, prince, or princess

garments of cloth costing more than 2s. 8d. per broad yard; in his doublet any thing but fustian, canvas, leather, or woollen cloth; fur

Sumptuary laws and proclamations were often issued, though poorly enforced.81 Since the frequency of their issuance and the lack of cases prosecuting infringements strongly suggest that the laws were futile, they should be seen as a testimony more to political and social thought about dress rather than to any actual sartorial practice. The increased frequency of royal proclamations against excessive dress under Elizabeth testifies both to the increase of new wealth during her reign, as is often suggested, and to the monarchy’s increasing role as the guardian of sartorial stability. As social mobility increased, so did the crown’s power to legitimate and regulate it as part of a legally defined social order. Royal sumptuary proclamations, then, bear witness to the increased royal attention to the “smallest actions and gestures.” As Wilfrid Hooper has written, the increase of sumptuary proclamations under Elizabeth can be attributed to “the queen’s passion for outward uniformity. . . . Politically and constitutionally also, her sumptuary policy is important as marking her dislike of parliamentary interference and her preference for personal rule.”82 The political regulation of the display of social distinctions, then, was primary in Elizabethan sumptuary policy. Sumptuary

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proclamations, in theory if not in practice, were the legal guarantee of the hierarchy of analogies, the royal arbiters of the social economy of signs. Sumptuary law ended in England in 1604, for reasons that will be discussed in the next chapter. One surely cannot argue, then, that Elizabethan sumptuary policy was characteristic of the entire old sartorial regime. Nonetheless, a significant body of opinion existed in seventeenthcentury England that supported the use of sumptuary law to maintain social distinctions. James I issued a proclamation in 1610 calling for “some politic order against excessive apparel.”83 Sumptuary laws with the explicit aim of maintaining social distinctions were introduced into the Commons in 1604, 1614, 1621, 1656, and 1662.84 Calls outside Parliament for the preservation of a sumptuary hierarchy by legal means were made throughout the seventeenth century.85 The royalist Edward Chamberlayne proposed in 1667 that “some sumptuary laws may be made, whereby the great excess, especially in the inferior sort of English, may be restrained, and most degrees and orders may be discerned by their habit.”86 “This fond humor” for fashion, Richard Head complained in 1684, “is a disease of the body politic; that deserves . . . a nipping penal statute to eat away this proud flesh, [so] that persons may suit their dresses to their qualities.”87 Throughout the entire old sartorial regime, royalists looked to the crown to control the means of consumption. As the product of an inegalitarian social ideology, sumptuary law helped define aristocratic status by a rather simple formula: “the finer and more expensive the fabric, the more restricted its use.”88 Without these royal restrictions, without the crown as an arbiter of signs, “womanish vanity” might lead to general confusion. For ideologues of the old sartorial regime, nothing was greater feared than polysemy: arbitrary signifiers, improperly regulated, might be misused arbitrarily; arbitrary signifiers thus needed a royal arbiter to regulate the relation between material fabric and social fabric. Through the declarative power of sumptuary proclamations, the crown attempted to legislate the nation’s habits of consumption and thereby regulate the general economy of signs, assuring a direct traffic between signifier and signified. Using a variant of Gresham’s law, the crown guaranteed that the noble value of signs would not be diluted by their overuse. Through both sumptuary law and an attention to its own “actions and gestures,” the crown sought to limit “bravery” to aristocratic men, preventing an outbreak of rebellion and disorder by instilling a reverence for and deference to courtly splendor. For defenders of the old sartorial regime, the maintenance of social order depended on the maintenance of a court of conspicuous consumers.

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COURT CAPITALISM The rise of royal power and court culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was in large part based on a rapid growth in world trade: like their European counterparts, English monarchs sponsored global competition for bullion, rare commodities, and export markets, while bullion from overseas enriched the crown’s coffers, and imported goods proclaimed the crown’s power. Seeing foreign trade as “a main pillar of this kingdom,”89 monarchs found it in their interest to incorporate great trading companies in order to regularize the customs from international commerce that financed their expanding governments, creating a mercantile elite with close connections to the crown.90 Aristocratic gentlemen acted as liaisons between traders and the crown, and merchants catered to the growing demands of the aristocracy. While foreign trade was the main source of the crown’s income, courtly consumption was the main stimulus to foreign trade: merchant capitalism meshed well with aristocratic court culture. This policy of court capitalism (more ad hoc pragmatism than coherent philosophy 91) was not without its critics, especially among English manufacturers who opposed imports and argued that England’s wealth derived from capital accumulation and sumptuary restraint. A debate between merchants and manufacturers about the role of luxury and consumption ran the course of the old sartorial regime.92 In the face of complaints that imported luxury had “disfashioned and effeminated the English nation,”93 merchant capitalists argued that imports brought continental civility to England. For English manufacturers critical of court capitalism, domestic trade was the source of manly sobriety and exemplary virtue, while for merchant capitalists, foreign trade brought gentility and the “pleasing suavity” necessary for political authority. Two ideals of culture, then, were used to contrast two economic theories. What both supporters and critics of court capitalism shared was the assumption that the state should regulate trade—an assumption that governed economic thinking and practice until the early years of the Industrial Revolution, when Adam Smith roundly condemned it at the same time that he gave it its modern name, “the mercantile system,” or mercantilism. Since Adam Smith, mercantilism often has frequently been defined— as a conception of the economy that saw government regulation of the balance of trade as the primary means of fostering economic well-being— in order to contrast it to the laissez-faire economic theory that Smith

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himself helped formulate.94 There is certainly merit to the contrast, but this definition of mercantilism glosses over the early modern debate between the bullionist (or monetarist) defenders of the old sartorial regime, who favored price controls as the solution to the balance of trade, and the manufacturing protectionists critical of that regime, who favored the promotion of export production and the limitation of import consumption. Much confusion has resulted when historians of economic thought—from Adam Smith to the present—have conflated the two camps, or used primarily one camp to describe the entirety of mercantilism.95 What I term mercantilism, or the ideology of “spokesmen [sic] of industrial rather than merchant capital,”96 will be discussed in the next chapter. Here, I will show the ways in which merchant capitalists promoted an ideology of conspicuous consumption compatible with the political and social goals of the old sartorial regime. The period from 1550 to 1688, England’s old sartorial regime, was the heyday of merchant capitalism, a period in which traders (rather than producers) dominated English commerce in both policy and practice. In court capitalism, the fortunes of aristocrats and traders were intermingled. Aristocratic expenditures rose (along with income) in the century preceding the Civil War,97 and this increased purchasing power of the aristocracy promoted the growth of overseas trade, as the demand for imported fabrics expanded dramatically. (Silk imports doubled in the 1590s alone, while demand for French and Flemish lace grew at an enormous rate.98) Prompted by influential courtiers, England’s gentry and nobility invested their wealth in colonial enterprises, especially the newly chartered joint-stock companies,99 while overseas traders were “the chief beneficiaries of the commercial policies of the Elizabethan government.”100 The crown thus protected this merger of aristocratic and mercantile interests. Fearing the harmful effects of over-competition, the crown restricted foreign trade to joint-stock corporations, and protected English trading companies from foreign competition. This process led to the “very great enrichment of the native mercantile elite,” with strong ties to the court aristocracy and crown.101 Merchants were knighted, and, despite some aristocratic disdain for commerce, trade itself became an honorable profession. “The estate is honorable,” gloated John Wheeler, secretary of the Merchant Adventurers; “it may be exercised not only by those of the third estate (as we term them) but also by the nobles, and chiefest men of this realm with commendable profit, without any derogation to their nobilities, high degrees, and conditions.”102 Ennobling and protecting merchants, the crown simulta-

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neously fostered and sought to control social change. English commerce thus owed its great expansion in large part to the social and political growth of the crown and aristocracy in Tudor-Stuart England. Yet the court was not only a protector of foreign trade; it was as well a consumer of foreign goods. In English court capitalism, the crown supported foreign trade over domestic industry (including England’s largest industry, wool), favoring the circulation rather than production of goods.103 The crown considered the source of national (and royal) wealth to be the high profit margins of international merchant monopolies trading in rare goods, rather than a high volume trade in lower quality, domestically produced goods. Court capitalists therefore justified imports—used with moderation by those whose status merited them—as beneficial: foreign imports provided employment and wealth for London merchants (who in turn lent money to the crown), and allowed the English court to demonstrate its power and continental civility. As its secretary Henry Parker argued, the Merchant Adventurers saw their imports as “ornaments of peace, as well as instruments of defense.”104 Just as courtesy writers favored the import of continental gentility, crown policy and mercantile interests favored the import of the fine fabrics that proclaimed that gentility. Thus economic policy came to the defense of conspicuous consumption in the old sartorial regime: as Lewes Roberts, a director of the East India Company, formulated it, “foreign commodities . . . benefit the merchant, the people, and the Prince.”105 Simply put, the court’s consumption promoted wealth. For merchant capitalists, then, defending court culture was tantamount to defending their own interests. As men of “experience, use and knowledge of foreign people, and their fashions, orders, and kind of dealing,” elite merchants could bring not only wealth to England, but culture as well, as John Wheeler argued. Culture brokers for their aristocratic clients, and discreet discerners of continental customs, merchants brought “great good to their states, honor, and enriching of themselves and their countries.”106 By importing fashions from abroad, foreign trade was the great civilizer, fostering domestic civility and international peace. Commerce brought friendly interactions between nations. Such, conveniently, was God’s design, argued the Company of Merchant Adventurers: God hath not blessed any nation with that universal product of its own country, as that it should not stand in need of something, whereof another may furnish it, and hath either given a superfluity to every nation, by commutation, to supply one another reciprocally, or else the quickness and industry

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The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity of spirit, invention and labor, to furnish their several wants and necessities otherwise.107

This “pacific vision” of international commerce was as old as the old sartorial regime.108 In 1586, John Ferne praised the civilizing function of international trade: by commerce and navigation, he wrote, “we communicate the benefits of other countries, we preserve civility, renew familiarity and league with foreign nations.”109 Promoting civility at home and among a league of nations, court capitalism would make the world safe for aristocracy. As mercantilist arguments emerged in the seventeenth century calling for restrictions on imports, English merchants were often accused of a lack of patriotism for importing foreign cultures: “finding us fantastical and voluptuous, they tempt us with all sorts of French toys, Indy and Japan trifles, stain’d calicoes, silks and such pleasant things, and fetch away our many and solid wealth,” complained Carew Reynell.110 Merchants defended themselves against this criticism by demonstrating their loyalty to the crown and country, portraying themselves as overcoming “great hazards both of person and estate” to serve England.111 Lewes Roberts boasted that the heroic merchant “refused not pain or toil with foreign trade to enrich their native soil, and (like discreet chameleons) can comply with each man’s humor for commodity.”112 Thomas Violet trumpeted his ardent support for Charles I in the Civil War, arguing that foreign trade served in “strengthening and enriching the kingdom, the increase of trade, his majesty’s honor, safety, and profit, and the enriching of the kingdom in general.”113 Threatening if excessive in either price or amount, the “importation of exotic commodities, if subtly managed, may become as great an improvement, as exportation is to others,” Henry Parker argued.114 If “subtly managed” by loyal merchants and wisely regulated by the crown, the merchant’s private profit was synonymous with the public’s gain. The merchant and the prince thus worked hand in hand: both the kingdom and the loyal merchant would profit from foreign trade. To subtly manage this trade and prevent it from ruining England, merchant capitalists called for controls on prices rather than restrictions on imports. In the “bullionist” theories of merchant capitalism, a shrewd monetary policy was the source of national wealth, and royal trade policies focused on controlling prices in order to preserve bullion and maintain the customs revenue.115 The Elizabethan Sir Thomas Smith considered bad monetary policy “to be the chief cause of all this dearth of

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things and of the manifest impoverishment of this realm.”116 The dearness of prices, not the consumption of imports, was threatening England’s social fabric. “Money doth rule the cause of commodities,” argued the influential merchant Gerrard de Malynes, whose views were supported in high circles.117 “We do not find so great an inconvenience in the wearing of foreign commodities,” Malynes wrote, “as we do in the price of them, being within this fifty years risen far otherwise than our home commodities are.”118 Measuring the balance of trade “in price, and not so much in the quantity,”119 merchant capitalists blamed the undervaluing of English money for the low price of exports and the high price of imports.120 In itself, then, the wearing of foreign goods was not inherently harmful to England’s economy, merely its misuse. For merchant capitalists, as for old regime political, social, and religious writers, sumptuous apparel was a thing indifferent, as Gerrard de Malynes wrote: Concerning the immoderate use of foreign commodities in wearing and wasting, by cutting and putting into several strange new-fangled fashions, we do refer the examination thereof unto those that have authority to reprehend men of their actions, wishing reformation where things are amiss. And albeit that gay and sumptuous apparel is a demonstration of pride, yet a country clown may be as proud in a frieze coat, as a gentleman in a velvet gown. For pride harboreth in the mind, and the difference is only in the giving of example unto others.121

With immoderation reformed by the proper authorities, foreign goods were compatible with, indeed necessary to, a healthy commercial society. Merchant capitalists thus legitimated aristocratic consumption by arguing that fine fashions and foreign commodities were arbitrary signifiers, with nothing inherently prideful about them: pride harbored in the mind, not in the clothes. For economic defenders of court culture, then, elite consumption of foreign fashions brought strength and civility to England. And if foreign fashions could civilize England and pacify the world, they might also provide employment.122 As English merchant companies took control of the import and export trades from foreign competition, overseas commerce became an increasing source of English employment. In the economic ideology of court capitalism, high demand for imported fashions drove the economy, whereas the demand for English cloth was held to be inelastic.123 From the sixteenth century on, defenders of the old sartorial regime argued that the economy was driven by aristocratic

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consumption, and that noble expenditures were a form of liberality to the poor.124 As early as 1592, Robert Greene believed that it was aristocrats wearing imported velvet, not yeomen wearing English cloth, who spurred trade: What drives the merchants to seek foreign marts, to vend their goods and hazard their lives? Not, if still the end of their travel were a pair of cloth breeches; no, velvet, costly attire, curious and quaint apparel is the spur that pricks them forward to attempt such danger.125

The economic doctrine of beneficial consumption went hand in hand with aristocratic political culture. The court was as beneficial to merchants as merchants were loyal to the crown. Thus many of the clearest proponents of this doctrine were royalists or Tories defending the “liberal supply of the occasions and expenses of the crown” and criticizing republicans and Whigs for seeking to impoverish the nation by limiting the court’s expenditures: “it will never be found that a poor exchequer made a rich country,” the Tory John Nalson argued.126 “He that thinks the wardrobe too fine, must traitorously fear the exchequer too full,” wrote the author of England’s Vanity, a self-proclaimed “compassionate conformist.”127 Though William Petty claimed to “profess no politics,”128 he supported the court’s “entertainments, magnificent shows, triumphal arches, etc. . . . The people often complain, that the king bestows the money he raises from the people upon his favorites: to which we answer, that what is given to favorites, may at the next step or transmigration, come into our own hands.”129 The reverence and deference created by “magnificent shows” was central to good government and social order in the ideology of the old sartorial regime. It was also good business. In court capitalism, then, merchants were “beholden to the nobility and gentry of the nation,”130 and thus understood that their own interests involved supporting a strong and splendid crown. It makes sense, then, that these Tory economic writers drew on the old sartorial regime’s old saws about dress in defense of their own economic interests. At the end of the old sartorial regime, the Tory economic writer Nicholas Barbon condemned “many grave and sober people” for misunderstanding what he saw as the nature of fashion: The following of the fashion is a respect paid to the Prince and his court, by approving his choice in the shape of the dress. . . . Those that exclaim against the vanity of the new fashion, and at the same time, commend the decency of the old one, forget that every old fashion was once new, and . . . it’s only use

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and custom by which habits become grave and decent, and not any particular convenience in the shape . . . and therefore since all habits are equally handsome, and hard to know which is most convenient: the promoting of new fashions, ought to be encouraged, because it provides a livelihood for a great part of mankind.131

Determined by a custom regulated by the prince, merchant capitalists saw “gay and sumptuous apparel” as essential to the livelihood of the English economy. Properly regulated by the state’s ability to balance income and expenditures, bullion and imports, the honor, glory, and splendor of the crown and court would advance and improve the interest of the country. For the defenders of merchant capitalism, noble liberality was both politically honorable and economically useful: aristocratic conspicuous consumption could bring civility, gentility, and economic well-being to England.

RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY TO FASHION The English Reformation was in large part a political Reformation, initiated and organized by the crown,132 and thus it is no surprise that the Church of England came to the defense of royal court culture in the old sartorial regime. As a compromise between Catholicism and Puritanism, the Anglican doctrines and practices established by Elizabeth I retained much of Catholic ceremony, yet gave control over those practices to the crown. Religious conformity to Anglican ceremony was thus tantamount to political loyalty, and membership in the Church of England was part and parcel of being a loyal English subject. Instruction in moral behavior, then, was instruction in good citizenship. Thus the argument that aristocratic conformity to court fashion was a sign of political allegiance was well grounded in the teachings of the Church of England. Like political writers, Anglican preachers defended the crown’s regulation of ceremonial conformity on the grounds that fine dress was merely a state-instituted uniform. In the face of Puritan fears that ceremonial splendor would “effeminate us all at home,” reducing England to Romish servility, as John Milton saw it,133 Anglicans writers justified ceremonial conformity by arguing that clothes were adiaphora, things indifferent to salvation, matters of theological insignificance, and thus properly under the purview of the crown.134 As the “corner-stone of Anglicanism,”135 this theory of things indifferent was used to defend church and crown from accusations of luxury and effeminacy. At once a theory of society,

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sacrality, and signs, the Anglican justification of ceremonial conformity went hand in hand with monarchical power and aristocratic society in the old sartorial regime. A dispute about the semiotic and political status of religious vestments was “the first unmistakable expression of what later were known as Puritan-Anglican tensions in the Church of England.”136 Begun in 1550, quarrels over “what some of the bishops held to be trivia, ‘that comical dress’, ‘these ridiculous trifles’”137 went to the heart of religious struggles in Tudor-Stuart England. At stake was the crown’s ability to regulate the “smallest actions and gestures” in religious affairs. As “the chief bone of contention” between Anglicans and Puritans, this vestments controversy spanned the course of the old sartorial regime.138 It is thus no overstatement to argue that the religious meaning of clothing signs was central to English church history throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Puritans and Anglicans debated the semiotic meaning of vestments, surplices, altarpieces, and church ceremonies in general. As contemporaries well understood, bringing a “uniformity of order” to “external, decent, and lawful rites and ceremonies” was a central concern of the Elizabethan settlement of religion.139 In the 1620s, Archbishop Laud’s revival of “the beauty of holiness”140 offended Puritan sensibilities and was “the most important single contributor to the cause of Puritanism in the early seventeenth century.”141 In the 1640 Root and Branch Petition, opponents of the crown’s High Church policies complained to the House of Commons of “the great conformity and likeness both continued and increased of our Church to the Church of Rome, in vestures, postures, ceremonies and administrations.”142 The Long Parliament removed surplices in May 1644, though the Restoration church restored them. Passed by a conservative Parliament in 1661, the “Clarendon Code” declared conformity to Church of England practices to be the basis for political office, since it was synonymous with membership in the commonwealth. Finally, fears of “popery” and its ceremonies were a large element in the ideology that opposed and ultimately expelled James II in the Glorious Revolution.143 At the intersection of the religious, the political, and the personal, the debate about the meaning of sartorial signs was more than a merely symbolic debate about power: it went to the heart of English political and religious history. The vestments controversy, to be sure, began as a debate only about religious dress, and historians have warned against confusing debates about clerical vestments with those about apparel in general.144 Cer-

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tainly the religious nature of clerical dress gave the vestments debate special significance, but this dispute did spill over into general discussions of clothing, morality, and social distinction. The debate about clerical vestments was not confined to some purportedly autonomous field of religion, especially since the same terms of debate—indifference, moderation, royal authority, reverence, and hierarchy—were used to discuss clothing consumption in general. The struggle between Anglican and Puritan definitions of clothing was thus a key component in defining the morality of consumption in the old sartorial regime. For Anglicans, conformity to fashion was as commendable as conformity in other forms of worship: majesty and distinction in dress helped maintain England’s moral and social order. The Tory Rev. John Evans defended conformity to church ceremony and decried those who, in the name of gravity and modesty, “set up against the King and State.”145 Vestments were allowable supplements to religious practice, aimed at edifying the laity and elevating the clergy. Though not seen as inherently holy, distinctive ecclesiastical garments were argued to be necessary to instill reverence for the clergy. In response to Puritan challenges, Elizabeth I’s proclamation of 1559 most clearly stated this policy of ceremonial splendor: Her majesty being desirous to have the prelacy and clergy of this realm to be had as well in outward reverence as otherwise regarded for the worthiness of their ministries, . . . willeth and commandeth that all archbishops and bishops, and all other that be called or admitted to preaching or ministry of the sacraments, . . . shall use and wear such seemly habits, garments, and such square caps as were most commonly and orderly received in the latter year of the reign of King Edward VI, not thereby meaning to attribute any holiness or special worthiness to the said garments.146

As things indifferent, church vestments were in themselves without any “holiness or special worthiness”—their worth and significance were established only by the royal proclamation itself, rather than by any intrinsic qualities of the garments. Likewise, Anglicans considered courtly splendor to be an innocent practice, necessary for instilling “outward reverence.” As the Rev. John Williams preached before King James, “soft clothing . . . are in their own nature, merely . . . things indifferent, without the least sin of excess or deficiency within themselves.”147 Like defenders of the old sartorial regime in general, Anglicans supported the notion that “soft clothing” was required by the conventions of court culture, and was thus an arbitrary, conventional sign, without any special worthiness to the garments them-

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selves. Though clothing distinctions were seen as essential to the moral order, the clothing itself was neither inherently good nor intrinsically evil. Fundamentally a theory of signs, then, the Church of England’s defense of ceremony as a thing indifferent had political as well as religious significance. The arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified was to be regulated by the state: “All ceremonies are in themselves indifferent,” wrote the Tory Thomas Sheridan, “but when commanded, are necessary in their use and practice.”148 The Erastian Heinrich Bullinger wrote in support of the English crown’s position in the vestments controversy: Neither do I see any cause, why we may not go as the papists do in apparel, which is not superstitious, but of policy, and for comeliness’s sake . . . The matter of apparel was never taken away at the beginning of reformation and is yet retained, not by the Pope’s law, but by the king’s commandment, as an indifferent thing of mere policy, . . . a mere civil thing, appointed for decency, seemliness, and for order, wherein is put no religion.149

Vestments were “mere civil things,” uniforms used for the decent serving of monarchs, and for the serving of God. Properly used as “a sign of some moral signification,” as Bishop Thomas Morton argued in 1618, they maintained their referentiality, they were used “without any superstition in a sign, and for an admonishment . . . of an honest life.”150 As long as they were not misused, they were neither ungodly nor unmannerly, and thus could be properly regulated by the crown. Anglican writers thus justified religious conformity to fashion precisely because it was a thing indifferent, variable with the times, “necessitated by the circumstances of time and place.”151 To dissent from customary fashion would be a sign of disloyalty, incompatible with Tudor-Stuart notions of masculinity. Calling on gentlemen to be “manly, moderate, seasonable, [and] lawful,” the Anglican and royalist Francis Quarles gave fashion advice typical of the old sartorial regime: “In thy apparel avoid singularity, profuseness and gaudiness; be not too early in the fashion, nor too late: decency is the half way between affectation and neglect.”152 In their sermons and writings, Anglicans preached against the host of vices that threatened the social and political order with great confusion: pride, envy, ambition, idolatry, affectation, immoderation, luxury, and effeminacy. The Anglican divine and courtesy writer Samuel Crossman counseled that the virtuous man “troubles not himself with a restless affectation and niceness about trifles.”153 Since clothing was a thing indifferent, too much attention to it was merely a sign of immod-

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eration and affectation, while conformity to it was a sign of moderation and manliness. Like affectation for courtesy writers, pride and vanity were for Anglicans found in the improper dissemination of signs, in their use by those who did not deserve them. Pride had simultaneously created gender confusion and semiotic confusion: “Garments are set down for signs distinctive between sex and sex, to take unto us these garments that are manifest signs of another sex, is to falsify, forge, and adulterate, contrary to the express rule of the word of God,” intoned the Anglican divine Stephen Gosson in 1596.154 The royalist divine Richard Allestree complained in 1673 of the “degenerate age we do now live in, that every thing seems inverted, even sexes; whilst men fall to the effeminacy and niceness of women, and women take up the confidence, the boldness of men, and this too under the notion of good breeding.”155 Pride had also disrupted the political order. In 1642, the Anglican preacher and royalist Thomas Fuller bewailed “the riot of our age, wherein (as peacocks are more gay than the eagle himself) subjects are grown braver than their sovereign.”156 Pride and envy in dress undermined the authority of the sovereign, which only piety and the long arm of the law might aright. In the religious arguments of the old sartorial regime, then, fashion sins were determined according to one’s social position, not by any inherent relation to material things. Pride was a sin of social climbers whose ambition and disobedience would create great disorder. “The seat of pride is in the heart, and only there; and if it be not there, it is neither in the looks, nor in the clothes,” argued the Restoration Lord Chancellor, the earl of Clarendon. Condemning “not the weed but the vice” (to use Robert Greene’s words), Clarendon’s dress code is the clearest Anglican defense of the old sartorial regime: The outward preservation of men’s dignity, according to their several qualities and stations they hold in the world, by their birth or office, or other qualification, is not pride. The peace and quiet of nations cannot be preserved without order and government; and order and government cannot be maintained and supported, without distinction and degrees of men, which must be subordinate one to the other: where all are equal, there can be no superiority; and where there is no superiority, there can be no obedience; and where there is no obedience, there must be great confusion. . . . The particular quality and condition of men may oblige them to some cost and curiosity in their clothes; and then the very affecting a neatness and expense of decent habit, (if it does not exceed the limits of one’s fortunes) is not only very lawful, and an innocent delight, but very commendable; and men, who most affect a gal-

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Like James I, the earl of Clarendon understood the importance of outward appearances to the old sartorial regime. Religious teaching about such trifling things indifferent as dress was a central element both in defining the practices of the Church of England and in defining the moral authority of court culture. For contemporary defenders of court culture, the “innocent delight” of “neatness and expense of decent habit” was necessary for preserving “the peace and quiet of nations”: controlling the means of consumption was central to preventing the great confusion that so vexed Tudor-Stuart England. In Anglican as well as royalist ideology, then, the court’s “cost and curiosity” not only symbolized, but helped maintain, a social, religious, economic, and political order. In this chapter, then, we have seen the interconnection between a social doctrine of aristocratic sartorial splendor, a political doctrine of royal bravery, an economic doctrine of beneficial consumption, and a religious doctrine of ceremonial conformity—an entire regime of masculine conspicuous consumption. Faced with accusations of effeminacy, old regime writers argued that display itself was neither inherently masculine nor inherently feminine: apparel merely proclaimed the man, not made him, while pride harbored in the mind, not in the clothes. Thus aristocratic conspicuous consumption in the old sartorial regime was defended as socially, politically, economically, and religiously necessary. Controlling the means and meanings of consumption meant preventing “rebellion and disorder”—a rebellion threatened by the critics of crown and aristocracy, and a disorder created by their upstart admirers. In the course of the seventeenth century, however, the crown and aristocracy lost control of the meanings of consumption, as Whigs and republicans, Puritans and mercantilists criticized the Stuart court’s consumer habits as luxurious, effeminate, tyrannical, popish, and uneconomical. As the next chapter will demonstrate, a new definition of aristocratic masculinity emerged to make the rebellion of court critics more of an immediate threat than the disorder of upstarts.

chapter 3

The Seventeenth-Century Fashion Crisis

Many crises shook seventeenth-century England. Its most politically turbulent century in the modern era saw Civil War, the execution of one king, the establishment of a republic, the restoration of another king, and the expulsion of a third, as various groups undermined the crown’s legitimacy. This political turmoil was mixed with a social crisis, as the rising political voice of country gentry, and the rising economic power of manufacturers, challenged the hegemony of the aristocracy. A religious feud between Puritans and the Church of England continued from the sixteenth century, fueling both the political and social crises. Repeated economic convulsions jolted England like surface tremors during its slow tectonic shift from a commodity-trading to a commodityproducing nation. Together these disturbances combined to challenge the basis of power, a crisis of political legitimacy that historians have called the general crisis of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most visually obvious aspect of that general crisis was the crisis of fashion in the seventeenth century, which was informed by political, social, religious, and economic events, and in turn helped give them shape. Contemporaries saw the crown’s conspicuous consumption as a threat to the moral, economic, and political well-being of the nation. A crisis in the public image of monarchy helped precipitate its fall in the English Civil War, helped redefine its meaning during the Restoration, and helped expel James II in the Glorious Revolution. The crisis in courtly display—a primary aspect of the court’s public image—was 51

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thus more than a mere symbol of the seventeenth-century crisis: undermining the moral authority of the crown by attacks on its character and appearance was one of the central ideological tools of seventeenthcentury critics. The seventeenth-century fashion crisis was one of the means by which English elites lost their cultural hegemony, lost control of the meanings of consumption, lost their ability to command respect and deference—and thus it was a key component in the outbreak of the Civil War. Portraying conspicuous consumption as inherently feminine undermined the old sartorial regime’s public image: there was no better assault on patriarchal authority than an attack on its masculinity. In attacking the court’s conspicuous consumption, political, social, religious, and economic critics undermined the cultural foundations of monarchy in seventeenth-century England, subverting the crown’s ability to pose as the arbiter of culture, the guarantor of a visible social order, the center of trade, and the moral regulator of ceremonial conformity. An attack on symbols went to the heart of the attack on the Stuart monarchy, since in the iconoclastic ideology of court critics, the use of symbolism itself was politically suspect.1 The fashion crisis thus not only symbolized the general crisis of the seventeenth century: the court’s public image was a focal point of criticism precisely because it was a focal point of contemporaries’ understanding of the political, social, economic, and moral order. If in the old sartorial regime monarchs had attempted to control the means and meanings of consumption, it was a control they lost throughout the course of the seventeenth-century crisis. “THE MODE IS A TYRANT” The language of clothes is a political language (we speak of fashion dictators and slaves to fashion), and in the seventeenth century that language took on its modern form. Seventeenth-century political history was dominated by a long struggle between two groups— or rather two sets of ideas—that at various times went by the labels crown and parliament, court and country, royalist and republican, or Tory and Whig. The ideological positions evolved over time, by no means remaining constant on all issues. They nonetheless carried with them two distinct attitudes to court culture, display, luxury, and consumption, attitudes that divided these groups as much as did issues of royal authority, the role of Parliament, or the right of resistance. Like defenders of the old sartorial regime, its critics linked fashion with royal authority, yet used republican and Whig ideas to condemn the “tyranny” of fashion. Op-

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ponents of the court and crown created an alternative political culture based on new ideals of upper-class masculinity, arguing that conspicuous consumption was a product of political corruption, aimed at debilitating and domesticating the manly independence of English aristocrats. “A king must be adored like a demigod,” warned John Milton, “with a dissolute and haughty court about him, of vast expense and luxury, masks and revels, to the debauching of our prime gentry.”2 For court critics, a vicious circle of vices threatened to debauch the commonwealth of England: tyranny fostered luxury, luxury fostered effeminacy, and effeminacy made men too weak to resist any increase of tyranny. “The mode is a tyrant,” as one anonymous author warned, “and too often ruins her best servants by engaging them into many other kind of expenses and inconveniences.”3 Oppositional ideology was not a systematic political theory, and opponents of the crown often differed on their preferred model of government.4 Precisely because opponents of the crown shared little more than an oppositional stance, the critique of the crown depended more on rhetorical strategies than on a alternative political program.5 Oppositional groups shared one thing above all: opposition. It was this shared rhetoric, this rhetorical debasement of monarchical culture, more than the appeal of any other form of government, that united opponents of the crown. For defenders as well as opponents of the Stuart monarchy, the court’s manners were central to its legitimacy. As the Whig John Philips warned in 1681: “Princes are to know, that at that time that they begin to break the laws and those ancient manners and customs under which the people have been long governed, they begin to lose their sovereignty.”6 Oppositional ideology was as much a moral critique of manners as it was a political ideology about rights and sovereignty: there was no “political science” in seventeenth-century England, no sense of the autonomy of politics.7 The critique of Stuart political culture thus operated as a critique of character, where “virtue was the principle of republics,”8 while luxury and effeminacy were the vices of tyrants.9 For contemporaries, the crown’s conspicuous consumption was therefore more than political symbolism: it was part and parcel of the public role that the court played in promoting or harming the moral well-being of the body politic. As Daniel Defoe put it in celebrating the Glorious Revolution: “to reward virtue, or discourage vice, . . . are the great ends for which civil government was at first instituted.”10 Like defenders of the old sartorial regime, crown opponents defined political legitimacy by the practices of everyday life, by the encouragement of virtue and the avoidance

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of vice, as much by the character of the prince as by the crown’s adherence to constitutional principles. “A nation is composed of private men, all brought up very near in the same customs, and instructed much by the same sort of teachers: the Prince must take them as he finds them,” wrote the author of The Character of a Prince.11 In betraying the ancient customs of private men, then, public men lost their political legitimacy. Throughout the seventeenth century, the court and its opponents struggled for control over definitions of luxury, consumption, and display. Even under Elizabeth, Parliament resisted royal attempts to control consumption through sumptuary laws, and sumptuary regulations had been the product of royal proclamation rather than parliamentary legislation. Most Elizabethan sumptuary bills after 1565 were introduced in the Lords but rejected by the Commons.12 Though crown and Parliament agreed about the need for sumptuary regulation, they disagreed over who should be empowered to carry it out.13 At the outset of James I’s reign, Parliament rejected attempts by the king to regulate apparel, fearing that sumptuary laws would increase royal authority.14 Increasingly throughout James I’s reign, however, sumptuary bills were introduced in 1610, 1614, 1621, and 1626, attacking aristocratic consumption of gold, silver, and imported luxuries, rather than being “penned after the old style” of attacking the luxury of upstarts, as the M.P. Christopher Brooke noted in 1614.15 Advocates of these bills saw court-sponsored conspicuous consumption “as a principle means” for the decline in aristocratic fortunes,16 though the bills were resisted by members of both houses, who saw them as an affront to their rightful privileges.17 Sumptuary stability was impossible amid the political instability of early Stuart England, as both crown and Parliament struggled for control of the means of consumption. Within and without Parliament, James I’s court became increasingly seen as a site of both financial and moral corruption.18 And in attacking James I’s sexual “favorites or minions” Buckingham and Somerset for “the effeminateness of their dressings,”19 court critics linked effeminacy with homosocial and homosexual practices in new and specifically modern ways. Critics of the presumed prodigality of James’s court contributed to the assumption that homosexual practices were incompatible with masculinity (and thus with political virtue),20 an assumption that, as chapter 5 will discuss more fully, the Glorious Revolution would legitimate. Under Charles I, royal expenditures were a key bone of contention between crown and Parliament: critics of taxes “vainly wasted” by the crown argued that “a prince that will not oppress his people, and yet be

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Figure 6. Roundhead and Cavalier, 1640s. The long-haired Cavalier is about to be executed by the short-haired and more modestly dressed Roundhead. By permission of The British Library. TT E.238 (21).

able to maintain his estate, and defend his right . . . must lay up treasure, and be thrifty,” living within the means provided by Parliament, as Thomas Mun warned in the late 1620s.21 In the eyes of court opponents, the crown’s venal practices were linked with its moral corruption, as Linda Levy Peck has noted.22 Thus criticism of the court’s conspicuous consumption was crucial to the “temporary but severe decline of aristocratic prestige,” the central social cause of the English Civil War, according to Lawrence Stone.23 As one defense of aristocracy saw it, the “gallantry” of courtiers had led to “the utter undoing of many good families,” as well as their loss of good reputation among “the basest Commons.”24 Sumptuous dress was not only a sign that the crown was living beyond its means: for contemporaries it actually eroded the authority of monarchy. Throughout the English Civil War, political allegiances were defined by cultural styles. “Cavalier” and “Roundhead” were as much ways of life as they were political positions (figure 6).25 Republicans argued that the Commonwealth had rid England not only of monarchy, but of the “toys and trifles” by which the nation had grown “effeminate by ease

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and vice.”26 As the royalist Sir John Reresby lamented in his memoirs, the Civil War had delegitimated aristocratic conspicuous consumption: “The citizens and common people of London had then so far imbibed the customs and manners of the Commonwealth, that they could scarce endure the sight of a gentleman, so that the common salutation to a man well dressed was ‘French dog.’” 27 If the Tudor-Stuart monarchy had clothed power in conspicuous consumption, then it was stripped of that power in the Civil War. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II attempted to redress accusations of luxury and effeminacy by instituting a more modest garb for men, an act that led to the birth of the three-piece suit, as the next chapter will show. In the 1680s, Whigs continued to condemn the presumed luxury and moral corruption of the court, undermining the legitimacy of James II.28 Finally, after a decade of debates about the “character” of political leadership,29 contemporaries understood the Glorious Revolution as having wrought a reformation of manners, as chapter 5 will demonstrate. Throughout the seventeenth-century crisis, then, defining masculine character was part of defining sovereignty, as defenders and opponents of courtly splendor struggled to control the means and meanings of consumption. Given the centrality of ideas of masculine character and manners to the views of seventeenth-century political writers, we can better understand their preoccupation with luxury and effeminacy. While defenders of the old sartorial regime had argued that the court’s conspicuous consumption was merely an innocent pleasure, opponents saw it as “a civil kind of idolatry,” to use John Milton’s words.30 For political iconoclasts, all fashion was luxury, an inherently unstable, capricious, and feminine vice. Following “Madame la Mode”31 was like submitting to a woman: it was unnatural, unmanly, and unruly. Fashion was an arbitrary ruler, a “supreme legislative . . . Laws, examples, rewards, punishments cannot enforce a uniformity in any other medium; while she [fashion] alone translates and alters the world at pleasure, making it solicitous to obey her.”32 If defenders of court culture had made conspicuous consumption compatible with aristocratic masculinity, critics saw it as inherently effeminating, tyrannical, and idolatrous. For both defenders and opponents of the old sartorial regime, the courtier’s observance of fashion was equivalent to his service to the prince. But what defenders saw as conformity, critics saw as servility: arbitrary signs were merely the visible face of arbitrary rule. “They are vain heads,” opined the Puritan bishop of Norwich Joseph Hall, “that think it an honor to be the founders of fashion: they are servile fools that seek only to follow the fashion once

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devised.”33 Like ancient Rome, England threatened to decline from a manly republic into the “sloth and effeminacy” of its despotic period.34 In oppositional political culture, then, an increase in royal power was concomitant with a decline in masculine virtue: “What madness is it,” asked John Milton, “for them who might manage nobly their own affairs themselves, sluggishly and weakly to devolve all on a single person; and more like boys under age than men, to commit all to his patronage and disposal, . . . how unmanly must it needs be . . . to hang all our felicity on him.”35 By defining court splendor as inherently feminine, then, critics undermined the Stuart crown’s patriarchalist claims to power, transforming father into fop. In oppositional ideology, nothing more corrupted English political culture than French modes of politics and fashion.36 Luxury and tyranny were seen as French vices contaminating English virtues. “Trust to virtue, not to a French doublet,” William Cornwallis warned English gentlemen.37 English emulation of French manners worried court critics, who feared that in following French modes, the English court was importing not only luxury goods but tyranny, viciousness, and effeminacy. The poet Sir Thomas Overbury worried that “vainglory, new fashions and the French disease are upon terms of quitting their country’s allegiance, to be made free denizens of England.”38 The French worshiped false idols in religion, fashion, and politics, effeminately following the whims and fads of a tyrannical monarch. In linking politics with fashion, then, court critics argued that introducing French modes was the first step toward introducing French rule: “it is a natural introduction, first to make the world their apes, that they may be afterwards their slaves,” lamented the influential court opponent Lord Halifax.39 As the source of absolutism and luxury fabrics, France was the great political and cultural rival to English definitions of masculinity. Historians have usually looked to the eighteenth century to understand the origins of English nationalism,40 yet seventeenth-century opponents of the seemingly continental manners of the court had already helped shape a specifically English identity around xenophobic fears of French culture. In contrast to manly English consumption, the French ate “dainty dishes” that were “foments to wanton affections,”41 suspicious delicacies like “gills, pallets, frogs, mushrooms, and such-like French kickshaws.”42 The French wore soft fabrics like silk and lace, and imbibed debilitating drinks like wine—all effronteries to English political culture: “wholesome and substantial food,” wrote the author of A Character of Popery and Arbitrary Government, was “unknown to any in an absolute monarchy.”43 A political defini-

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tion of consumption thus merged with a national definition. As the Whig Edmund Hickeringill put it, “men throw away wholesome food and physic agreeable to their constitutions, to browse upon French quelquechose, and venomous French mushrooms (mere toad-stools), dress them how you will.”44 French civility was disagreeable to English personal and political constitutions, as absolute monarchy deprived English gentlemen of their liberty, masculinity, and uncorrupted cuisine. Through this critique of conspicuous consumption, then, a new political culture took shape around a rhetorical denunciation of tyranny and idolatry, luxury and effeminacy. This ritual debasement of the crown helped create an image of the English monarchy as dissolute, corrupt, effeminate, subservient to France, and willing to impose slavery on its own people. Until the Glorious Revolution installed a new political culture based on this oppositional ideology, English monarchs were accused of “that hellish design of debauching the nation, in order to the promoting [of] popery and arbitrary government in the land, making the generality of the people effeminate and brutish, regardless of the knowledge and fear of God, and of the state of their immortal souls.”45 England’s seventeenth-century political crisis thus cannot be understood without taking into account this new political culture of masculinity. In calling for a reformation of manners and the restoration of “ancient virtue,”46 court opponents called for a new polity based on modesty and liberty rather than splendor and liberality. In oppositional political culture, maintaining a specifically English public image of sartorial sobriety would prevent “a frugal and self-governing democracy or Commonwealth”47 from succumbing to the temptations of foreign tyrannies and luxuries. Subservient to no one, freeborn Englishmen dressed soberly, spurning Madame la Mode: their personal self-control, demonstrated by sumptuary sobriety, was equivalent to their political self-control. Frugality went hand in hand with self-governance, manly simplicity signified freedom—freedom, that is, from both tyrants and femininity. It was into this new political culture of masculinity, as we will see, that the three-piece suit was born. “A TAILOR MADE THEE” In redefining political culture, opponents of the court also redefined the aristocratic gentleman, as the fate of the aristocracy was intimately linked with that of the crown. In condemning old regime political culture, critics undermined the social authority of the aristocracy: the crisis of the

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old regime was simultaneously a crisis of the aristocracy. Moreover, if England’s old regime was in crisis, critics saw aristocratic culture itself as the source of that crisis. It was the aristocracy whose recent supineness before the crown had led to the political and moral decline of the nation. “The signs of great personages do always make great noise in the world,” wrote the author of Counsel and Directions Divine and Moral, “and it is true are more heinous in the sight of God, because the greatest men have the greatest obligation to be good; and consequently the evil example of a court and courtiers (who are more than others exposed to public view) may above any other thing contribute to the corrupting and debauching of a nation, bringing vice into vogue.”48 To the critics of the old sartorial regime, court luxury was responsible for the rise of debauchery and the decline of the aristocracy’s political and economic fortunes. Critics waxed nostalgic for a mythical period when gentlemen defended the ancient constitution, lived on their estates, were hospitable to their tenants, and deserved the respect of the nation. Instead, the seductive attractions of court life had brought vice into vogue, causing aristocrats to abandon their traditional social functions and become dependent on the crown’s patronage and power: armsbearing gentlemen living on their country estates had been transformed into a society of gilded gallants invidiously out-consuming each other in London. In the eyes of critics, moral failure had led to social failure, a cultural transformation had brought on a social transformation of the aristocracy. Critics emphasized the importance of changing cultural habits in the formation of new social identities. “Monstrous prodigality in apparel,” Walter Cary lamented, was one of the three sources of the decline of the aristocracy (the others being the perennial favorites, drunkenness and lawyers).49 For contemporaries, cultural change did not merely reflect social change: it created it. The crisis of the aristocracy began as a cultural crisis. For defenders of the old sartorial regime, luxury was a threat from below, the vice of malapert upstarts. Critics of the old sartorial regime turned that language around, identifying aristocrats with luxury, ungodliness, corruption, and effeminacy.50 The hierarchy of analogies was replaced with a hierarchy of vice: “The more adorned, the more wicked,” was Thomas Adams’s simple formulation.51 Luxury was the inherently effeminate vice of a debauched nobility that lacked political courage, moral virtue, and public spirit. Luxury was associated with royal promotion of libidinous activities: blood sports, idleness, gambling, drinking, and courting fair ladies. In his War with the Devil, Benjamin Keach

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Figure 7. Benjamin Keach, War with the Devil, 1676. By permission of The British Library. PBMic 21756.

compared the God-fearing “youth in his converted state” to the “youth in his natural state” (figure 7). The latter Keach associated with women, the city, and all their vices: No sorrow shall, whilst I do live, come near me; Nor shall the preacher with his fancies fear me: At cards and dice, and such grave games I’ll play, And like a courtier, deck my self most gay; With periwig, and muff, and such fine things, With sword and belt, galoshes, and gold rings, Where bulls and bears they bait, and cocks do fight I do resort with speed, there’s my delight.52

Living in luxury, living in sin, and living at court, the evil example of courtiers had exposed English aristocrats to public derision. Whereas defenders of the old sartorial regime linked bravery in dress with bravery in battle, critics saw adornment as antithetical to martial virtue. And

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whereas defenders of conspicuous consumption argued that there was nothing inherent in luxury goods that conferred masculinity upon their bearer, critics turned this argument around: luxury goods were inherently effeminating. In giving in to the material temptations of the court, the warrior class had abandoned the armigerous ways that had originally defined its social position. The nobility had been pacified, effeminated, softened by luxury, as Sir T. L. warned: “Those who debauch and effeminate nations, may be pleasing, but they can never be wise and generous directors [in battle]. Nothing can be more the security and renown of just and excellent princes, than the manliness and gallantry of their subjects.”53 If the security of the prince rested upon the manliness of his subjects, then by returning to “the ancient virtue of the English,”54 aristocratic men could prevent the commonwealth from falling into tyranny or democracy.55 The moderate path of a balanced constitution depended upon the moderation of aristocrats. While the country was “the symbol of simplicity and wholesome pleasures based on religion and respect for tradition,”56 the court was a recent intrusion of vice. Critics called on courtiers to return to that vaguely defined “blessed age” so central to country ideology, when grandeur and riches were forsaken, when the aristocracy “chose and embraced a religion that stripped and divested them of the world,” as Richard Hawkins wrote in 1658.57 The golden age of unostentatious nobles was an inexhaustible trope for court critics, an invented tradition that was safely enough in the past to be frequently mourned. For a century and a half, the simple country gentleman always seemed to be just beyond the memories of all but those with a good sense of history. For Walter Cary, the plainly attired noble was but a generation older than the current cohort of conspicuous consumers. “Our fathers in apparel were very plain,” he claimed in 1626. “They did not ambitiously strive to get that which they could not compass . . . but [lived] quietly and neighborly with that they had.”58 Cary’s father must have been quite old, since already in 1555 the author of The Institucion of a Gentleman was complaining that her or his generation was filled with prodigality, as opposed to “times past”: “Then flourished the laudable simplicity of England, then we were conquerors, and not scholars applying our minds to learn every new trifle in wearing our apparel.”59 Serious scholars—those who understood history—understood the timeless truth of modesty, while trifling scholars merely followed fashions. The author of Essayes or Moral Discourses had to search even

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earlier for the golden age of laudable simplicity: “how much less were our ancient predecessors the Britons and Saxons given to excess in diet and apparel, than we appear to be in this age, which could not but be advantageous to their strength of mind and body.”60 In country ideology, the tyranny of fashion was ultimately part of the Norman Yoke, designed to weaken ancient constitutions and introduce imported hierarchy.61 When aristocrats had lived on their estates, they had earned the respect and deference of their tenants by offering them protection and hospitality. Long associated with liberality and generosity, hospitality was redefined in country ideology by “rejecting the artifice of self-fashioning, which was a part of the milieu of the court, in favour of natural patterns of behaviour that best suited the country.”62 Hospitality merged with presumably natural social relations, honest country living, and economic stability. “The right rule of economy,” suggested Thomas Manley, would allow gentlemen to “maintain a just hospitality and bid defiance to the usurer.” The social order was maintained by simple customs, and ruined by “ill conduct, excess, supineness, . . . and sure I am, nothing more argues a nation ripe for destruction, than intemperance, corruption of manners, and exorbitance of expense.”63 A hearty country of gentlemen had declined into a haughty city of fops. While Walter Cary’s forefathers “seldom or never went to London,”64 his contemporaries never left it. The country had been abandoned for London, the center of conspicuous consumption,65 the locus of the import trade, the place where vice came into vogue. The anonymous author “Sir T. L.” worried that by emulating the urban culture of France, England had become “the more trifling and effeminate nation of the two.” London’s Europeanization threatened the sovereignty of English masculinity. In London, “the life of a young gentleman led there is for the greater part vicious, sottish, and profane, and not only degenerated below the precepts of ancient gallantry and generosity; but beneath that prudence, sobriety, and discretion, which ought to be found in all who pretend to manhood.”66 England may have been part of an island, but foppish London was dangerously part of the continent. In the eyes of its proponents, country living offered inequality without disdain, hierarchy without arrogance. In the country, nobles lived peaceably with their tenants, while court culture had introduced divisiveness into the nation. Idolatrous fashion was merely elite contempt for the common and the humble, as Joseph Hall argued.67 George Eliott urged the nobility:

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O that the rich were pleas’d to lay aside Their scorning others, and their haughty pride! And condescend to men of low degree, And ’stead of silks, put on humility!68

In country ideology, what was dangerous to the social order was not inequality, but a too conspicuous inequality. Elite understatement was a much more effective means of maintaining deference. Modesty and hierarchy were not only compatible: indeed, modesty was necessary for hierarchy, since “bravery in apparel, rich attire, and fantastical fashions” among the elite threatened to provoke resentment and rebellion among the people, “when as so many poor creatures at the same time had not a good rag to cover them.”69 The visible trappings of aristocratic culture threatened to undermine aristocratic society itself. While country ways were “every day alike, one, and the same,”70 city and court were centers of inconstancy. The protean courtier who changed his clothes in order to conform to court custom was now seen as a spineless chameleon: constantly changing one’s fashion was a sign of superficiality and lack of strong character. “Every month he’s in a new mode,” complained one anonymous critic, “and instead of true gallantry (which once dwelt in the breasts of Englishmen) he is made up of complements, cringes, knots, fancies, perfumes, and a thousand French apish tricks, which render him only fit to be set on a farmer’s hovel to scare away crows. He placeth his very essence in his outside.”71 All that was solid had melted into air: by placing his essence in his outside, the aristocratic courtier (not the upstart) had broken down the correspondence between signifier and signified. The courtier was all signifier, no signified: a courtier to all men’s thinking is a man, and to most men the finest: all things else are defined by the understanding, but this by the senses; but his surest mark is that he is to be found only about princes. He smells; and putteth away much of his judgment about the situation of his clothes . . . He follows nothing but inconstancy, admires nothing but beauty, honors nothing but fortune.72

In losing their internal correspondence between material fabric and social fabric, signs became meaningless materiality. And by losing their reference, signs lost their innocence. No longer innocent delights, the very signs of great personages came under criticism. The old sartorial regime had called for aristocrats to place their essence in their appearance, to show a resemblance between

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internal worth and external wealth. Critics, however, called into question the signs of wealth themselves. And, despite its nostalgic tone, the critique of aristocratic culture was not a call for the restoration of the old sartorial regime, a call for a return to a social hierarchy in the display of wealth. Court criticism was an iconoclastic criticism, a critique of display itself, which was seen as inherently effeminating and luxurious. In this iconoclastic critique, all signs were politically suspect, which left only an anti-semiotic. Noble simplicity was, in essence, the absence of display, the absence of pomp and ceremony. Nobility did not correspond with appearance. It was independent of them, and therefore did not require them. The new political culture envisioned by court critics thus articulated a new definition of masculine nobility: gentlemen would lead the nation by their modest example rather than by their magnificence. In this ideology, as in the old sartorial regime, it was the aristocracy that was most on public view, that was considered most essential to the moral order, and that should most display the virtue of non-display. By their display of public virtue, gentlemen would maintain unity, wisdom, liberty, and industry in England: “surely,” opined Roger Ascham, “the misorder of apparel in mean men abroad shall never be amended, except the greatest in court will order and mend themselves first . . . Beside apparel, in all other things too, not so much good laws and strait commandments as the example and manner of living of great men doth carry all mean men everywhere to like and love and do as they do.”73 A new regime would be held together not by “good laws” and political proclamations, but by the moral example of “great men.” In Shakespeare’s King Lear, one of those “great men,” the earl of Kent, hurls a series of insults at the “glass-gazing” and “lily-livered” sycophant Oswald, among them the gibe: “A tailor made thee.”74 Like his ally Edgar, heroic Kent speaks the truth, remains loyal to Lear, and dresses in simple country clothes, a perfect contrast to Oswald, steward to Goneril, the villainous female co-usurper of patriarchal authority. Oswald supinely serves a corrupt and unmanly court, while Kent embodies the masculine virtues which ultimately lead to the restoration of legitimate order—a prophetic though dark foreshadowing of the crisis of legitimacy in seventeenth-century England. Yet given Shakespeare’s understanding of the theatrical nature of power,75 this simple contrast between the “base, proud, shallow” Oswald and the plain aristocrat Kent is never quite so simple, since Kent’s image of manly simplicity is a disguise strategically adopted to help restore political order. Banished

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from the court and thus from his traditional identity as an aristocrat, Kent wears a “garb quite from his nature,” as Cornwall points out: “these kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness / harbor more craft and more corrupter ends / than twenty silly-ducking observants / that stretch their duties nicely.”76 As Shakespeare seems to have understood, aristocratic simplicity was no more natural than foppishness, no less theatrical a costume donned on a very public stage, tailor made to fit the needs of aristocratic political culture. “POPERY AND FOPPERY” Like political opposition to the crown, Puritan criticism of the Church of England was based less on theological differences, and more on a moral critique of the church’s authority and use of ceremony—a critique which had its origins in a dispute about the meaning of “things indifferent.”77 Puritanism was nothing if not an oppositional doctrine of signs. In Anglican practice, things indifferent remained under the purview of the crown, which retained the right to regulate church rituals by fiat. For Anglicans, the Reformation ended with things indifferent. For Puritans, however, the Reformation began with a reformation of things indifferent, with a moral vigilance over the use of vestments, ceremonies, and rituals, and extended this vigilance beyond the church door to the habits and practices of everyday life. Puritans thus shared with Anglicans worries about idolatry, luxury, effeminacy, libertinism, and the general diffusion of vice. Yet Puritans added tyranny and popery to this list of evils, expanding their critique to include the habits and manners of the crown and church. Luxury and idolatry were impositions from above rather than threats from below. Puritanism thus undermined royal claims to moral authority and contributed to the creation of an alternative political culture. Like Anglicans, Puritans generally looked to the crown for moral leadership. Anglicans, as we have seen, expected the crown to defend elite prerogatives and sartorial conformity through sumptuary proclamations and its own example. Puritans saw the crown’s role differently.78 Puritans generally resisted the use of sumptuary law, arguing that sartorial reform should come from within the individual conscience rather than from the state magistrate.79 The crown would inspire rather than compel individual consciences to greater piety. For Puritans, the internalization of godly manners was preferable to the external imposition of sumptuary law. And while Puritans thus agreed with Anglicans that the crown should

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lead the nation through its moral example, they believed that the example should be one of modesty, not conspicuous consumption. At stake, then, was the public image of England’s elite: what began as a religious debate about vestments ended up challenging the moral legitimacy of the entire old sartorial regime. On theological grounds, Puritans agreed with Anglicans that clerical dress should be a thing indifferent to salvation. They differed, however, over the application of that theology. In order to institute truly indifferent dress, Puritans argued that formerly Catholic vestments needed to be eliminated, that they were no longer indifferent but instead had become inherently idolatrous. At the beginning of the vestments controversy, John Hooper refused the bishopric of Gloucester in 1550 because its “peculiar vestments . . . do not enjoy the sanction of God’s word; nor are they things indifferent in themselves. Therefore, they are not to be used.”80 While Anglicans saw vestments as arbitrary signifiers without any special holiness or worthiness, Puritan iconoclasts saw them as icons with fixed meanings, intrinsically associated with Catholicism. They were no longer innocent, but had been corrupted through evil historical use. By their long-standing association with the Church of Rome, vestments had become “polluted openly with popish superstition and idolatry,” as Anthony Gilby put it in his critique of “popish apparel.”81 Once abused by idolatry, indifferent ceremonies became “wicked significations,”82 with visible remnants of popery intrinsically attached to them: “these vestments be such remnants and call popery into remembrance, which is idolatry.”83 The ill use of vestments had made them semiotically overdetermined, wicked icons to be rooted out by iconoclasm. The clothes made the man. Historians since Max Weber have long characterized Puritan iconoclasm as a disenchantment of the lived world, but precisely the opposite was true. In order to purge the world of idolatry and luxury, Puritans invested objects with all the evil associations that their rhetoric could muster. Luxuries had an intense negative charisma for Puritans: “the contempt of pleasure was the greatest pleasure,” as Richard Hawkins pleasurably stated.84 It was iconoclasts who believed in icons, who denied the arbitrary nature of signs, who “enchanted” everyday objects with intrinsic meanings. The world of goods was animated with meanings, though ultimately, a godly society would live in a more disenchanted world. To rid the world of idolatry, an ever-vigilant semiotic purification would be necessary. It was this anxious doctrine of semiotic vigilance that Anglicans considered hypocritical. How could so much at-

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tention be paid to signs that were ultimately indifferent? For Anglicans, this was a zeal misplaced upon the “rites and appendages,” with little attention to “the soul and substance” of religion: “How highly they are concerned, and with what eagerness do they contend for mint, cumin, meats, drinks, times, pastures, habits, and such external forms and modes of worship,” complained the Anglican John Evans.85 Caught up in a debate about ceremony, Anglicans and Puritans traded accusations that their opponents were concerned more with superfice than with substance. Theologically in agreement, each side accused the other of lacking indifference to material signs. For Puritans, the use of symbols themselves was dangerous, since they were historical remnants of the Church of Rome, and seemed to inevitably lead to idolatry. Church of England ceremony, then, was by definition linked with the Church of Rome, since for Puritans Catholicism was a religion of ceremony and outward sensibilities, meant to attract “vulgar veneration”86 by “the false allurements of sense, . . . superinduced new fangles, diabolical inventions, unreasonable whimsies, and childish fopperies.”87 Religious ceremony was “the bastard-brood [that] popery and foppery begot in our Protestant Church; and which neither the laws of God, nor the King, does legitimate,” as the Whig Edmund Hickeringill put it. Popery and foppery were practically synonymous, both prizing ceremony over substance: “that man has neither worth nor honor in him, that does not truly love and honor a person of honor, and true virtue and worth; and so much the more, for the grandeur; but to idolize a mere image, because a great and golden image, and because the King set it up, what is it but popery, idolatry, or flattery or foppery?”88 In arguing that conformity to fashion was not an indifferent and innocent pleasure but was the idolatrous worship of inherently evil icons, Puritans undercut the old sartorial regime’s hierarchy of analogies, especially as they broadened their critique of religious ceremony to a general critique of conspicuous consumption. Whereas Anglicans approved of a due correspondence between signifier and signified, Puritan otherworldliness condemned the signifier itself: it was the clothes themselves that were the object of condemnation: “Good clothes are the embroidered trappings of pride,” warned Thomas Dekker.89 Richard Brathwait condemned silk as “this attire of sin, these rags of shame, these wormworks, which withdraw your eyes from contemplating that supreme bounty and beauty, purposely to fix them upon the base objects of earth.”90 In itself, rich attire led to all forms of “moral rickets:”91 luxury, sin, whoring, drinking, gluttony, libertinism and envy.92

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Above all, prideful dress led to effeminacy, that loss of manly virtue that so threatened to destroy England’s moral order. “Nice array” betrayed “an unmanly mind,” warned the Puritan Lawrence Humphrey.93 Richard Brathwait was influenced by this Puritan critique of idolatry when he condemned “this delicacy and effeminacy in apparel . . . wherein we idolatrize our own forms.”94 Harbottle Grimston linked luxury in dress with other unmanly consumer habits: “Pamper not thy flesh,” he commanded in truly biblical fashion, “soft raiment, drinking and dainty meat effeminate both mind and body.”95 It was the raiment itself which brought on effeminacy, undermining manliness. John Milton believed that Archbishop Laud’s promotion of High Church ceremony was meant “to effeminate us all at home. Well knows every wise nation that their liberty consists in manly and honest labors, in sobriety and vigorous honor to the marriage bed, which in both sexes should be bred up from chaste hopes . . . and when the people slacken, and fall to looseness and riot, then do they as much as if they laid down their necks for some wily tyrant to get up and ride.”96 Soft raiment and popish ceremonies were thus instruments of tyranny, inherently leading to effeminacy and political passivity. “Soft clothes introduce soft minds. Delicacy in the habit begets an effeminacy in the heart,” warned Richard Brathwait.97 How different this argument was from the earl of Clarendon’s defense of the “innocent delights” of fine clothing. In iconoclastic discourse, pride originated in the clothes, not in the heart. The clothes unmade the man. While vice could be found in the clothes themselves, virtue was for Puritans self-reliant, incompatible with display: “He has much better thoughts of virtue, than to hope his fine clothes may gain him a respect where that could not; nay on the other side, he knows that goodness is enough of itself.”98 Virtue was “enough of itself,” it existed independent of the dangerous supplement of dress, and thus transcended it. Whereas the old sartorial regime required that outward fashion correspond to inward virtue, in this Puritan “counter-aesthetic”99 modest clothing would call attention to the fact that inward virtue did not require outward display. For Clement Ellis, the godly gentleman “chooses rather to have his distinction from other men founded in his virtues than in his clothes,” which is (inexplicably) why “it is most certain (and the gentleman knows it as well) that the temper and disposition of the soul is no way better discernable than through the habit and garb of the body.”100 Puritans were thus as concerned about dress as defenders of the old sartorial regime—both repeated the clichés about discerning the soul through the clothes. And certainly the display of gentility was as impor-

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tant for Puritans as for any of the defenders of the old sartorial regime: throughout the seventeenth-century fashion crisis, Puritan writers aimed their addresses and sermons at the nobility and gentry, as they looked to traditional elites for sartorial reform.101 Yet Puritans turned the old sartorial regime’s aesthetic on its head: it was important for virtuous dress to be the negation of fashion, demonstrating that virtue did not need to be displayed. In defining virtuous clothing as the negation of fashion, Puritans sought to define a universal function of clothing that would escape a fashion system, a clothing style that would never change, since virtue was a habit that “can never be worn out of fashion.”102 While in the old sartorial regime indifference to arbitrary fashions was to be displayed by following them in a nonchalant manner, for Puritans, indifference was displayed by adopting a permanent fashion: “daily new fashion and changing of apparel betokeneth inconstancy,” wrote the anonymous author of The Institucion of a Gentleman, who prescribed that gentlemen “leaveth costly array, and useth comely apparel, well fashioned.”103 Puritans sought to define a new “institution” of a gentleman, one in which modesty and gentility were compatible. A gentleman should wear garments that were “well-fashioned” but were neither costly nor inconstant. Clement Ellis called simultaneously for “such a gravity as beseems a Christian,” and for “such a decency as becomes a gentleman.”104 In launching their critique of the ceremonies of church and court, then, Puritans were not levelers, but rather definers of a new image of upperclass masculinity, one which made comeliness compatible with antifashion. Modesty, not magnificence, was to be the new public image of England’s elite. THE MORAL ECONOMY OF MERCANTILISM The English clothing industry was in crisis in the seventeenth century. The 1617 failure of the Cockayne project (an import substitution scheme) disrupted the continental market for undyed cloth, England’s staple export.105 In the early 1620s, the Thirty Years War further damaged cloth exports to Germany and the Netherlands, England’s main markets.106 Domestic demand had grown steadily in the first three decades of the century, yet in the 1640s the Civil War diminished the purchasing power of traditional elites, as aristocratic families lost estates, fled to the Continent, or spent money on armaments. Throughout the first half of the century, demand steadily shifted away from traditional,

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heavier broadcloths toward imported fabrics and lighter, cheaper “new draperies.”107 In the process, traditional production and distribution networks were disrupted, as production increasingly shifted away from urban guilds to networks of rural cottage industries controlled by merchant clothiers. As these clothiers grew in number and increased their control over the rural economy, they gained a louder voice in discussions of economic policy, competing with traditional trading monopolies for the public ear. Beginning in the 1620s, clothiers added their voice to the debate about the causes of and potential solutions to the seventeenthcentury clothing crisis. In the 1670s and 1680s, “a flood of clothiers’ pamphlets” gave coherence and strength to these arguments.108 Although an oppositional ideology throughout most of the seventeenth century,109 the voice of these manufacturers would come to dominate economic thought and policy after 1688, creating a new political climate for discussions of the economy. By the mid- to late seventeenth century, then, a new conceptualization of the economy had emerged to promote new forces that might lead England out of crisis—a new understanding that we call mercantilism.110 The versatile writer Henry Peacham neatly captured the essence of mercantilist ideology: “Industry is fortune’s right hand, and frugality her left.”111 The nation’s fortune had two new visible hands: for mercantilists, the promotion of industry and frugality was more important than the regulation of bullion and prices for maintaining a healthy economy. Mercantilists tried to refocus economic theory and policy away from monetary regulation and toward the promotion of export production and the restriction of import consumption. Yet mercantilists promoted industry and frugality not only as economic factors of production and consumption, but as moral imperatives, virtues which would help rescue England from its economic woes.112 As much a moral critique as an economic critique of the court’s trade and consumer practices, mercantilism brought with it a new “spirit” of capitalism in its analysis of England’s economic crisis.113 This new moral economy of mercantilism thus undermined the old sartorial regime’s doctrine of the benefits of conspicuous consumption. While merchant monetarists called on the crown to regulate the price of gold and silver, in order to assure that England’s balance of trade remained positive, mercantilists argued that “industry, not money, is the life of . . . trade,”114 and therefore called for decreasing imports and increasing the export of British products to create a positive balance of trade. The mode of production replaced the means of exchange as the

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central focus for discussions of the balance of trade. Rather than regulating bullion, the goal of this new economic policy was “to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs,” as Thomas Mun simply put it.115 Mercantilists thus turned the monetarists’ argument on its head: a bad balance of trade caused a lack of bullion, not vice versa. It was “the vain and excessive wasting of the inhabitants, especially upon foreign growths and manufactures,” as John Hodges complained, that were “the true causes of the great want of money in these kingdoms.”116 Industry had taken over from bullion as the source of the wealth of nations. In seeking to abate what Sir Robert Cotton termed “the mighty indraught of foreign manufactures and unnecessary wares,”117 mercantilists shared with Puritans a disdain for luxury, ceremony, superfluity, and display, promoting modesty and sumptuary sobriety in order to reduce the level of imports. As the dissenting mercantilist Sir Peter Pett observed in 1688: “the greater part of persons engaged in trade . . . hate ceremonies in general, and what does unnecessarily take up time, and . . . persons who nauseate ceremonies in civil things, will loath them likewise in religious.”118 Puritanism was good for the balance of trade. The Whig author of A Discourse of the Necessity of Encouraging Mechanick Industry argued that “we are not ignorant, that Christianity in general, and more especially as profess’d in its ancient purity in this nation, does indispensably oblige all its votaries and adherents to a sober and laborious course of life.”119 The republican and dissenting trader Slinsby Bethel offered the stereotype that “there is a kind of natural inaptness in the popish religion to business, whereas, on the contrary, among the reformed, the greater their zeal, the greater is their inclinations to trade and industry, as holding idleness unlawful.”120 The ideological link between Puritanism, mercantilism, and anti-royalism was especially strong among clothiers, as various authors have noted.121 As Francis Brewster noted toward the end of the century, “no society of men in the kingdom are so generally affected with the strictest injunctions of our religion, as our people bred up in the woollen manufactories.”122 In their shared critique of luxury and graven images, both mercantilists and Puritans criticized what they saw as the false idols of the old sartorial regime. Sharing Puritan attitudes to consumption, mercantilism entailed a new conception of the link between morality and economics, one clearly at odds with merchants’ praise of conspicuous consumption in the old sartorial regime. “Virtue and industry [are] the true road to wealth and plenty,” as one anonymous author plainly stated.123

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Mercantilists saw frugality (the privileging of production over consumption) as the promotion of virtue, and virtue as the basis of economic well-being. They thus blamed the seventeenth-century economic crisis not on bad fiscal policy, but on bad manners: “The ruin of estates,” argued Thomas Manley, “is not (as is insinuated) primarily to be charg’d upon encumbrances of estates [taxes] . . . but to ill conduct, excess, supineness, and these other practices whereof we may justly be ashamed; to these we truly owe our debts.”124 The dissenting author of Omnia Comesta a Bello was more specific in linking economy and religion, blaming the “ruin of trade, and general consumption of comfort, settlement, and content,” on “the pomp, pride, luxury, exaction and oppressions of the prelates.”125 Moral economy was the basis of political economy. In linking economic decline to moral corruption, mercantilists understood the economy not as an autonomous sphere of activity, but as part of the larger political and social order. Here mercantilists were influenced by sixteenth-century “commonwealth” political and economic writers, with their humanist demands “not so much for a reformation of institutions, but rather for a change of heart.”126 Thus mercantilists understood economic practices as embedded in moral practices which had political implications: good manners were not only good for business, but vital to a healthy state. “Idle expenses,” wrote the author of The Uses and Abuses of Money, “are not only [the] cause of certain ruin to the parties themselves, who give themselves leave to gratify their pride, ambition, and other lusts, by misemploying their estates to such idle ends, but likewise of as certain destruction to their native country.”127 Like political opponents of the crown, then, mercantilists attributed the national malaise to luxury and corruption. “Nothing more argues a nation ripe for destruction,” wrote Thomas Manley, “than intemperance, corruption of manners, and exorbitance of expense in all degrees of men.”128 Like Whigs and republicans, mercantilists looked to a reformed crown, and to the crown’s ability to reform manners, as the source of economic and political recovery. In linking economic decline to political and moral corruption, mercantilism offered a political critique of seventeenth-century political culture, and it is in part for this reason that mercantilism did not become economic orthodoxy in England until after the Glorious Revolution had given legitimacy to a new political culture. In the patriarchal language that dominated seventeenth-century political culture, mercantilists argued that the crown should be like a re-

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sponsible father, assuring the proper balance between the family’s income and expenses. “A commonwealth is like unto a family,” wrote the merchant Edward Misselden, “the father or master whereof ought to sell more than he buyeth.”129 The king was “the royal merchant, the regal father of that great family of a kingdom,”130 and it was his duty not only to regulate the coinage but to watch over the manners and consumer habits of his people. In drawing on the gender ideology of English political culture, mercantilists accused the crown of a lack of masculine authority: in abandoning itself to effeminating expenses, the crown was failing to live up to its patriarchal duty. The foreign goods it imported “have suffered our nation to be invaded with foreign softnesses,” as one anonymous author wrote.131 Foreign luxuries were not only exotic and excessive, they were enervating and effeminate, bringing in idleness, supineness, and corruption. Thomas Mun complained that “the general leprosy in idleness and pleasure (contrary to the law of God, and the use of other nations) hath made us effeminate in our bodies, weak in our knowledge, poor in our treasure, declined in our valor, unfortunate in our enterprises, and condemned by our enemies.” Concerned to reinforce the link between morality and the economy, Mun continued: “I write the more of these excesses, because they do so greatly waste our wealth, which is the main subject of this whole book’s discourse.”132 The dissenter and economist Slinsby Bethel called for a renewal of earlier centuries’ sumptuary laws “to prevent riot and excess (the hectic fever of a state) both for apparel and diet, . . . whereby foreign superfluities were shut out, and home commodities only used. By this means these spreading evils, which have since disfashioned and effeminated the English nation, were prohibited.”133 In linking masculine manners with the balance of trade, mercantilists in effect gendered the national economy. In the abstract, of course, arguments about the balance of trade are not necessarily gendered. But political economy in the seventeenth century was argued not in the abstract, but at the level of everyday life, at the level of manners, sentiments, and consumer practices. “So visibly is this kingdom degenerated from the great achievements of virtue and industry,” worried the author of A Discourse of the Necessity of Encouraging Mechanick Industry, “into all the soft indulgences of sloth, and of an effeminate and luxurious course of life (the former the dignity and preservation, the latter the reproach and ruin of a state).”134 Luxury and effeminacy threatened the economic backbone of the nation, since the “natural disposition to industry is thereby emasculated,” as Sir Peter Pett argued.135 The Whig

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mercantilist William Petyt worried that while “we continue rolling in foreign silks and linens . . . like the blind sodomites groping after our filthy pleasures,” we will “grow generally more vicious, soft, effeminate, debauched, dispeopled, and undisciplined than before.”136 For mercantilists, recovering from an economic crisis meant recovering from a crisis of masculinity. If, as the economist William James suggested, “the great obstruction to the consumption of wool hath been our wearing great quantities of silks and other commodities from foreign parts,”137 nothing could better restore the balance of trade than the manly consumption of English wool. If imported silk and calico were superfluous, luxurious, and effeminate, English wool was useful, sober, and manly—England’s moral fiber. In calling on “the true-bred Englishman” to consume more wool and beef, George Clarke considered the 1670s decline in rents to be brought on by “many squeamish and outlandish stomachs, that cannot digest our English food; and many others that must wear finer cloth than can be made of their own wool.”138 Another author complained “how little did [the prideful fop] merit the happiness of our good cloth and beef, of our good laws and religion, of our native immunities and happy liberties, who declared he had rather be served by a French dog than by an English-man.”139 These moral arguments extended to a wide variety of consumer products: English beef and mutton were opposed to “dainty dishes”140 like imported sauces, while English beer and cider were opposed to imported wine.141 “And now we have a new sauce called Catchup, from East India,” complained William Petyt, worried that silks, spices, and sauces from the exotic East would undermine English masculinity.142 Mercantilism was not an abstract, amoral discussion of the balance of trade, but a gendered polemic about material practices, about the cultural and economic meanings of beer and wine, wool and silk, the virtues and vices of sauces and spices. In the increasingly protectionist atmosphere of the seventeenth century, and especially of the Restoration period,143 clothiers were able to link national identity with the promotion of English wool. For clothiers and mercantilists, wool was England’s “golden fleece,” the backbone of the textile industry, and of the economy as a whole. Wool was “the richest treasure in his majesty’s dominions, the flower, strength, and sinews of this nation; . . . the milk and honey to the grazier and country farmer; the gold and spices of the East and West Indies to the merchant and citizens, the continued supply of bread to the poor: and in a word, the exchequer of wealth,” as the not indifferent wool clothier William Carter

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wrote.144 Clothiers and mercantilists argued that wool was “the dowry of the kingdom,”145 providing the crown with more revenue than from any other source, more than from import customs, more “than all the Spaniard’s gold and silver mines in America.”146 Wearing English wool was not only manly, it was patriotic. Mercantilism thus contributed to the creation of a new image of male Englishness, as national identity was formed around the ethics of frugality, industry, and antipathy to things continental, especially French. Only the Dutch, whose “apparel is plain and manlike, always of one fashion,”147 were excluded from this xenophobia, as mercantilists called on the English to emulate the Dutch, not only in their “natural frugality, and indefatigable industry” but in their political freedom and religious tolerance.148 This merging of mercantilist discourse with national identity allowed manufacturers to link their interests with those of the state as a whole, and with those of landed gentlemen in particular. In England, the “capitalist spirit” was not the specific property of middle-class manufacturers, merchants, or artisans. Throughout the century, mercantilist ideas were advocated by landlords, especially those who espoused country and Whig ideology. The promotion of industry and frugality, they argued, was in their interests as well as the interests of manufacturers. As landlords paid more attention to improving their estates, and as rents on those estates began to decline (especially in the late seventeenth century), landlords cried “tax now our superfluous trade, and therein our luxury,” as the monetarist Thomas Culpeper noted with chagrin.149 Especially in the late seventeenth century, “the nation’s propertied classes were quick to close ranks around a strong mercantilist program.”150 Rather than creating a class-specific ideology that set land against capital, mercantilist discourse attempted to merge the concerns of the nobility and gentry with those of the manufacturer. William Carter argued that “the commerce of this nation doth for the value and bulk of it entirely depend upon the woollen manufacture, consequently it must be the interest of the nobility, gentry and farmer to uphold the woollen manufacture.”151 The “industrial spirit” triumphed in England much earlier than the triumph of the bourgeoisie: rather, it triumphed through assimilation, by grafting mercantilist discourse onto aristocratic interest. As estates were “improved,” industry and frugality were gentrified. As a consequence, then, mercantilists crafted a new image of the aristocratic gentleman, one of an improving landlord wearing English wool, eating English food, and drinking English ales. Nothing could be a more obvious sign of the moral values of the freeborn English gentleman than

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the consumption of English products. Edward Waterhouse considered “all exotic trifles as pestilent to the religion, gravity, veracity, hospitality, and common good of England: let other nations habit, live, and do as they think good; nothing is in my apprehension so commendable in an Englishman, as to love and prefer English laws, usages, customs, and fashions above foreign ones.”152 In sum, a new and gendered political economy was created throughout the course of the seventeenth-century crisis, one that relied as much on moral and political critique as on economic analysis. Mercantilist discourse mixed country and Whig ideas about the politics of virtue and corruption, with Puritan ideas about the morality of industry and frugality, and grafted them onto an economic analysis of production and consumption. As King Charles II himself would hear from many quarters in the years leading up to his introduction of the vest, the manly consumption of wool was good for England, good for the economy, good for liberty, and good for God.

chapter 4

The Three-Piece Suit

As we have seen, a cultural crisis shook seventeenth-century England’s political, economic, social, and moral fabric. The meanings of consumption were debated by Whig and Tory, country and court, Puritan and Anglican, mercantilist and bullionist. Through the course of this debate, a new ideology emerged to oppose and undermine the cultural and political authority of the Stuart court. Political critics of court luxury saw conformity to fashion as incompatible with traditional English liberties. Religious critics condemned the idolatry of “soft clothes” and called for the display of modesty. Economic critics promoted the consumption of manly English wool over presumably immoral and effeminate imports. Following fashion meant conceding to the absolutist claims of the crown, to the seductive attractions of the material world, and to the enervating lure of foreign luxuries. Together these critiques combined to create a new public image for England’s rulers, a new aesthetics of upper-class masculinity, a new image of the English gentleman centered around purportedly productive and virtuous consumer habits: the hardy beef-eater, the temperate ale-drinker, the wearer of wool. In oppositional ideology, England would be rescued by aristocratic gentlemen changing their consumer practices, changing their image from one of luxury and effeminacy to one of industry and frugality. The good example of the court would stop England from declining into tyranny, luxury, popery, and foppery. “Most of these evils would be easily prevented,” Privy Councillor Samuel Fortrey advised the restored Charles II in 1663, 77

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The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity if only his Majesty would be pleased to commend to his people, by his own example, the esteem and value he hath of his own commodities, . . . besides it seems to be more honorable for a King of England, rather to become a pattern to his own people, than to conform to the humors and fancies of other nations, especially when it is so much to his prejudice.1

Charles I had found the seventeenth-century crisis much to his prejudice. Samuel Fortrey hoped that Charles II, by his good example, would not share the same fate. Samuel Fortrey was not the only adviser of Charles II who warned him of the dangers of living in sartorial splendor. Like Fortrey, John Evelyn counseled that, rather than a new royal proclamation, a new, modest, and manly example should be the course of sartorial reform: when his Majesty shall fix a standard at Court, there will need no sumptuary laws to repress and reform the lux which men so much condemn in our apparel . . . . Doubtless, would the great persons of England but own their nation, and assert themselves as they do, by making choice of some virile and comely fashion, which should incline to neither extreme, and be constant to it, ’twould prove of infinite more reputation to us, than now that there is nothing fixed, and the liberty so exorbitant.2

Though the monarchy was restored in 1660, certainly nothing was fixed, as Charles II had inherited the instabilities and criticisms of his father’s reign, including criticisms of the lux which men so much condemned in the court’s apparel. In the eyes of contemporaries like Evelyn, sartorial stability was a first step toward political stability. “Let it be considered,” Evelyn advised the king in 1661, “that those who seldom change the mode of their country, have as seldom altered their affections to the Prince”—words not to be taken lightly one year after the Restoration.3 Six years after his restoration, Charles II did attempt to become a pattern to his own people, an attempt that led to the introduction of the modern three-piece suit. If, as we have seen, masculinist ideas about manners were a central ideological component of the seventeenth-century crisis, equally the seventeenth-century crisis was a central cause of the birth of modern men’s fashion. The three-piece suit has its origins in the political, economic, religious, and social crises that shook seventeenth-century England, as Charles II attempted to restore the Stuart crown to its role as arbiter of taste in the face of criticism of its arbitrary rule. Unlike the early Stuart court, however, after the Restoration the crown’s role as arbiter of taste would be defined in terms of inculcating new yet purportedly timeless virtues: thrift, modesty, economy, mixed with gentility, nobility, and

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politeness. Though, as we will see, the early modesty of the three-piece suit would be short-lived, and it would take the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to permanently install modesty as a marker of elite masculinity, the introduction of the three-piece suit was an attempt both to present a new masculine image of virtuous consumption and to reaffirm a monarchical political culture based on aristocratic cultural hegemony. In introducing the three-piece suit, Charles II attempted to appropriate an iconoclastic, oppositional ideology and use it to redefine court culture, thereby restoring the crown’s moral authority and political legitimacy. A style that he promised never to alter, the three-piece suit was to be Charles II’s permanent fashion statement, a style that attempted to teach the nobility thrift and put a stop to the seemingly constant alteration of styles, so disruptive of political stability, as John Evelyn believed. Whereas old regime sartorial policy had attempted to regulate fashion by limiting its diffusion, Evelyn counseled Charles to foster the diffusion of a fashion that would end all fashion change. As such the three-piece suit would be a new mode of sartorial sovereignty: cultural authority would be expressed by elite opposition to luxury, not by making conspicuous consumption the exclusive prerogative of the court. As a response to the seventeenth-century crisis, then, Charles II’s introduction of the three-piece suit turned political, religious, and economic criticisms of court culture into a new means of legitimating monarchical power. By redefining his cultural authority using the terms of the opponents of court luxury, Charles II made a fashion of anti-fashion. Charles II’s claim to sartorial sovereignty was thus part of his reassertion of political legitimacy. “’Tis not a trivial remark (which I have somewhere met with),” John Evelyn had written to the king in 1661 “that when a nation is able to impose and give laws to the habit of another, (as the late Tartars in China) it has (like that of language) prov’d a forerunner of the spreading of their conquests there.”4 ’Twas not a trivial remark that Evelyn had heard, but an oft-repeated trope about the tyranny of fashion, as we have seen throughout the previous chapter. Evelyn agreed with this oppositional critique of fashion, and yet remained loyal to the crown: “The mode is a tyrant,” Evelyn opined in a familiar refrain, yet qualified, “and we may cast off his government, without impeachment to our loyalty.”5 Opposition to the tyranny of fashion need not entail opposition to monarchy. The three-piece suit, which embodied the republican virtue of simplicity, thus marks a royalist appropriation of republican opposition to fashion. With a virile and

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comely monarchy, subservience to the effeminating tyranny of fashion could be eliminated without eliminating loyalty to the crown. Modesty just might be compatible with monarchy. The issue of crown expenditures had been the immediate cause of the outbreak of the Civil War, and when Charles II received his annual dispensation from Parliament in 1662, he made it clear that the court would no longer be a center of conspicuous consumption. In language that he would echo four years later, Charles expressed his desire to assert his sartorial leadership while simultaneously living within his means: I do assure you, and I pray assure your friends in the country, that I will apply all you have given me to the utmost improvement of the peace and happiness of the kingdom; and will, with the best advice and good husbandry I can, bring my expenses within a narrower compass. Now I am speaking to you of my own good husbandry, I must tell you that will not be enough: I cannot but observe to you, that the whole nation seems to me a little corrupted in their excess of living. Sure all men spend much more in their clothes, in their diet, in all their expenses, than they have used to do. . . . I do believe I have been faulty that way myself: I promise you I will reform; and if you will join with me in your several capacities, we shall, by our examples, do more good, both in city and country, than any new laws would do.6

For King Charles, a reformation of the court’s example would do more good than any sumptuary laws to reestablish “the peace and happiness of the kingdom,” and thus assure the political stability of the new regime. Royal and aristocratic example was economically and politically advantageous, more effective than any new laws in bringing about the happiness of the kingdom. On October 7, 1666, four years later, Charles II announced his intention to introduce a “vest” into court fashion, thereby inaugurating the era of the three-piece suit. The adoption of the vest has received deserved attention from costume historians, who have attributed its introduction to anti-French sentiment, Puritan concerns about modesty, and the theatrical uses of vests.7 The origins of the style itself are confusing: John Evelyn claims to have first seen a vest worn in Bologna by a Hungarian man, and suggested its adoption to the king.8 Andrew Marvell considered the vest Turkish, putting the following verse into Charles’s mouth: I will have a fine Tunick a sash and a vest, Tho’ not rule like the Turk yet I will be so drest, And who knows but the mode may soon bring in the rest? 9

John Evelyn and others also referred to the vest as “oriental” or “Persian clothing.”10 Whatever its stylistic origins, however, contemporaries

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also considered the vest as a distinctly English mode, one made of English wool, as we will see.11 The connections between the 1666 vest and the modern three-piece suit are equally cloudy, since various contemporaries noted a return to French modes in the 1670s (as will be discussed shortly), thus possibly breaking any link between the vest and the modern waistcoat. Yet by the 1670s the French court had apparently adopted a vest of its own, perhaps in imitation of the English.12 In an unconfirmed report, Samuel Pepys wrote that on November 2, 1666, Louis XIV “hath, in defiance to the King of England, caused all his footmen to be put into vests, and that the noblemen of France will do the like; which, if true, is the greatest indignity ever done by one prince to another.”13 It is these vague origins, and confusing lineage, that led one costume historian to consider the 1666 vest as a novelty item, “an ephemeral mode [with] little or no lasting influence.”14 Despite this lack of clarity, however, most historians agree with Penelope Byrde’s assessment that by 1670, “a three-piece suit, in the modern sense, had emerged.”15 Thus although the 1666 vest regained much of its sartorial splendor in the later Restoration period, we can nonetheless consider the introduction of the three-piece suit as a founding moment in the development of a new aesthetics of masculinity. The vest’s introduction was widely reported by contemporaries, precisely because it was not only a fashion statement but a political and economic policy statement as well. In October 1666, calls for fashion reform were being debated in the Commons, discussed in the Privy Council, disgorged by the pulpit, and demanded from the street. Panic, outrage, and paranoia over September’s Great Fire in London had prompted a roundup of the usual suspects: God, the French, and conspicuous consumers. On October 3, 1666, the M.P. John Milward recorded in his diary that two sermons had been preached before the Commons calling for a national reformation after the fire, and a parliamentary committee was formed to draft legislation “for the suppression of atheism, swearing, cursing, lying, profaneness and luxury.”16 On October 10, the Rev. William Sancroft, later archbishop of Canterbury, preached before the king, interpreting the Great Fire as a warning from God against English emulation of “French pride and vanity.”17 The fire was “a scourge from that nation or nations whose fashions they follow,” God’s “stinging and flaming check against all fashion-mongers,” as the Puritan divine Thomas Brooks later bellowed.18 If not the hand of God, a French agent was seen to be behind the great conflagration, and the fire spurred a wave of anti-French sentiment. On

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October 7, 1666, the Venetian ambassador to France reported a popular clamor for the removal of French fashions from the English court. In the wake of the fire, the ambassador wrote to the Doge, “the people shouted that they . . . desired that all commerce with France should be prohibited; that no one should dress after the fashion of this nation [France], but that Parliament should select some to devise a new form of clothes which should be peculiar to that country.”19 The populace may have appealed to Parliament, but the king was quicker to respond, declaring that same monumental day in world history, “his resolution of setting a fashion for clothes, which he will never alter,” as Samuel Pepys recorded in words worth repeating: “It will be a vest, I know not well how; but it is to teach the nobility thrift, and will do good.”20 The king had moved rapidly to assert his cultural leadership, introducing a modest, anti-French fashion before Parliament did, and teaching the nobility thrift before Parliament or “the people” taught him the same lesson. According to M.P. Milward, Parliament began a movement toward restraining the importation of French commodities on October 8, but, according to the Calendar of State Papers, it did not discuss sartorial reform until Thursday, October 11, when the Commons proposed a bill “prohibiting the import of all French manufactures, and requesting a proclamation to that effect. The nation having for several years aped the French too much in their fashions, especially at this season, the King, to avoid the like vanity, has specified that he will wear a vest not after that mode, but will not put it on till Monday, the Duke of York’s birthday.”21 Pepys witnessed the Duke of York try on his new birthday outfit on Saturday the 13th (“it is a fashion the King says he will never change”), while the next day Anthony Wood saw the king “put on his vest, which he intends to keep in the same fashion.”22 After a week of primping and preparing, then, the three-piece suit made its grand entry onto the world historical stage on Monday, October 15, 1666, as Pepys noted in his diary: this day the King begins to put on his vest, and I did see several persons of the House of Lords, and Commons too, great courtiers, who are in it—being a long cassock close to the body, of black cloth and pinked with white silk under it, and a coat over it, and the legs ruffled with black ribbon like a pigeon’s leg—and upon the whole, I wish the King may keep it, for it is a very fine and handsome garment.23

The earl of Sandwich was at court in late 1666, though apparently confused his dates, for he sketched in his journal “the habit taken up by the

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Figure 8. The 1666 vest as drawn by the earl of Sandwich. “The habit taken up by the King and Court of England November 1666 which they call a vest.” By permission of The British Library. 10807.e.9.

King and Court of England November 1666 which they call a vest” (figure 8).24 Writing his diary years later, John Evelyn takes some deserved credit for the new fashion, but records that October 18 was the first time of his Majesty’s putting himself solemnly into the Eastern fashion of vest, changing doublet, stiff collar, and cloak, etc: into a comely vest, after the Persian mode, . . . resolving never to alter it, and to leave the French

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The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity mode, which had hitherto obtained to our great expense and reproach: upon which diverse courtiers and gentlemen gave his majesty gold, by way of wager, that he would not persist in this resolution: I had some time before indeed presented an invectique against that inconstancy, and our so much affecting the French fashion, to his Majesty in which [I] took occasion to describe the comeliness and usefulness of the Persian clothing in the very same manner his Majesty clad himself; this pamphlet I entitled Tyrannus, or the Mode, and gave it his Majesty to read; I do not impute the change which soon happen’d to this discourse, but it was an identity, that I could not but take notice of.25

The earl of Danby also noted the king’s new clothes, as well as his wager that he would persist in this new habit, “which is intended for good husbandry.”26 As Pepys, Wood, Evelyn, and Danby made clear, the king believed he had found a fashion that would never change—a sartorial stability that would signify the restoration of political stability. Equally important, however, were economic considerations: good husbandry, as Charles himself understood, was a key to the peace and happiness of the kingdom. Economic as well as political rivalry with France was clearly central to the introduction of the three-piece suit: the abandonment of French styles, as Lord Halifax wrote, was an attempt to “throw off their fashion, and put on vests, that we might look more like a distinct people, and not be under the servility of imitation.”27 In his 1669 edition of Anglia Notitia, Edward Chamberlayne recorded that since the Restoration of the King now reigning, England never saw, for matter of wearing apparel, less prodigality, and more modesty in clothes, more plainness and comeliness, than amongst her nobility, gentry, superior clergy; only the citizens, and country people, and the servants, appear clothed for the most part above and beyond their qualities, estates or conditions; since our last breach with France, the English men (though not the women) quitted the French mode, and took a grave wear, much according to the oriental nations.28

In the Restoration atmosphere of protectionism and “muscular patriotism,”29 good husbandry was equivalent to promoting a positive balance of trade with France. Good husbandry thus meant wearing English wool. Samuel Newton noted in May 1669 that “the then English mode” was “an ordinary stuff vest and tunic of a saddish color,”30 or made of “black cloth,” as Pepys reported—“cloth” in the seventeenth century being synonymous with wool. As the author of The Ancient Trades Decayed noted, “no person can be offended at [the wearing of wool], because his majesty, (for the encouragement of the trade of his own people)

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is graciously pleased to wear nothing but what is of the English make.”31 As we have seen, Privy Councillor Samuel Fortrey was among the mercantilists who urged the king to wear English cloth. Like Fortrey, John Evelyn looked to Charles II to restore the balance of trade through his own example: how glorious be to our Prince, when he should behold all his subjects clad with the production of his own country, and the people universally enrich’d, whilst the species that we now consume in lace, or export for foreign silks, and more unserviceable stuffs, would by this means be all sav’d, and the whole nation knit as one to the heart of their sovereign, as to a provident and indulgent father? 32

In the eyes of royalist reformers like Evelyn, the moral example of patriarchal authority would remove from the court “insignificant triflers, whose brains are as transparent as their clothes,” while simultaneously restoring the “nerves of the state,” enriching the nation and securing allegiance to the crown.33 To this extent, the king’s adoption of the vest paralleled his mercantilist-inspired Act for Burial in Woollen of the same year: if the nation’s consumers had not worn English wool while alive, they would at least be buried in it.34 Charles II thus inaugurated a reign in which England would be led by the modest example of crown and court, “without much show and with little ceremony,” as Jorevin de Rocheford described the Duke of York’s three-piece suit.35 The Restoration court at least temporarily reversed the relation between power and display: by renouncing show and ceremony, the crown could reclaim its moral and masculine authority in the face of political and economic opposition to royal splendor. Through the introduction of the three-piece suit, the Restoration court turned the anti-royalist critique of aristocratic culture to its own advantage to redefine and relegitimate aristocracy and monarchy. Modesty had become a claim to power. With the three-piece suit, a counterculture became court culture. Although it is difficult to trace the use and transformation of the vest throughout England, anecdotal and visual evidence hint at a relatively rapid diffusion beginning in 1666. John Evelyn notes that he first wore a vest on October 30, 1666, when “his majesty had brought the whole court to it.”36 Samuel Pepys was in his new three-piece suit by early November,37 while Anthony Wood was wearing a vest by the end of the year.38 Samuel Sturmy is pictured in the frontispiece of his Mariner’s Magazine wearing a vest in 1669 (figure 9). Vests were worn by some of those attending the funeral of the duke of Albemarle in 1670, the

Figure 9. Samuel Sturmy, The Mariner’s Magazine (London: G. Hurlock, W. Fisher, E. Thomas and D. Page, 1669), frontispiece. By permission of The British Library. C.13.m.17.

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Figure 10. John Ogilby, Brittania (London: John Ogilby, 1675), plate following p. 174. By permission of The British Library. 192.f.1.

vests often covered with mantles rather than overcoats, due to the formality of the occasion.39 In 1675, John Ogilby pictured men in vests in his Brittania, a cartographic guide to the island (figure 10). By 1676, vests were apparently worn at Cambridge, as David Loggan depicts in his illustrated guide to the university (figure 11). By the 1670s, then, it appears that England’s male elite had followed the king’s example. Yet the new modest masculinity established by Charles II was shortlived, as the crown abandoned its effort to “teach the nobility thrift” in the 1670s and 1680s. Introduced as part of the Restoration crown’s attempt to restore its legitimacy, the three-piece suit was intrinsically linked with the political state of the nation. In the face of revolutionary criticism of the court’s presumed luxury and effeminacy, a politically unsure crown had stabilized itself in part by instituting a fashion that Charles literally wagered he would never alter. Three centuries’ hindsight tells us that the modest three-piece suit was a safe bet, but in the short run, given the status of the Restoration court, it was quite a gamble: as the Restoration crown gained stability and renewed its links with France, the male modesty of 1666 was gradually left behind. By the 1670s, the political state of the nation was changing. A more confident court began to adopt the aesthetics that had dominated the old sartorial regime, gaining its still current image as a site of sexual intrigue and private vice, rakes and masquerades, luxury and debauchery. The three-piece suit participated in this restoration of splendor. Various authors noted that at some point in

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Figure 11. David Loggan, Cantabrigia Illustrata (1676) (London: David Loggan, 1690), plate 7, “Habitus Academici in Universitate.” By permission of The British Library. 129.h.3.

the 1670s the English court returned to the mode of France, itself adopting a more ornate version of the three-piece suit. The marquis of Halifax linked a return of French fashions to the 1670 Treaty of Dover, which secretly restored religious and political ties between England and France. The return to French splendor, Halifax regretted, “gave a very critical advantage to France, since it looked like an evidence of our returning to their interest, as well as to their fashion.”40 Edward Chamberlayne’s 1672 edition of Anglia Notitia repeated his lines about “the grave mode” introduced since the Restoration, but added: “but that is now left.”41 In his 1674 edition, Chamberlayne added that “the French mode again [was] taken up.”42 In 1677, Elkanah Settle wrote that “vests, your seven years love, grew out of fashion,” thus dating the return to splendor to 1673.43 Though these authors disagree on dates, they agree in their portrayal of a Restoration court returning to the conspicuous consumption of the

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Figure 12. The Courtier’s Calling (London: Richard Tonson, 1675), frontispiece. The frontispiece displays an elaborate and ornate three-piece suit. By permission of The British Library. S410.b.24.

pre-Civil War court. The old sartorial regime was not dead, as Restoration courtiers returned to their cavalier fashion of defending elite prerogatives to be finely dressed. The author of The Courtier’s Calling of 1675 counseled against too much gravity and seriousness, since “comeliness has great charms to bewitch hearts . . . To know how to dress himself advantageously is not an unprofitable science”44 (figure 12). Conspicuous consumption was merely an “innocent delight,” as Charles’s

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chief minister the earl of Clarendon had put it in the late 1660s. Throughout the 1670s and 1680s, the aesthetic of conspicuous consumption, with its positive associations of magnificence and liberality, and its negative connotations of luxury and effeminacy, dominated court culture. In the history of the Restoration court, then, the modest vest of 1666 may have been merely a brief act of contrition and humility by an unstable crown worried about its cultural authority. Its memory, however, was kept alive by reforming royalists who regretted the return to regal splendor. The royalist author of England’s Vanity struck a note of nostalgia in 1683, praising the incomparable tunic and vest, so very comely in itself, so very advantageous to the drapers of the kingdom, perhaps the most grave and manlike dress that ever England saw, which had the unhappiness to be brought in too late, and the hard fate to be sent out again too soon . . . But we can never hold when it is well, such an influence hath the French pipe to make us caper after them, in all their follies, to our own dishonor and ruin.45

Late in life, John Evelyn lamented that the vest was “a comely and manly habit: too good to hold, it being impossible for us to leave the monsieurs’ vanities in good earnest long.”46 For Evelyn, the vest had been “the most graceful, virile and useful mode that ever appeared at court.”47 Despite its decline, then, the 1666 vest remained as a symbol of a new model of court culture, one which redefined upper-class men as graceful, virile, and useful: graceful, because their new social identity was formed around a practice of refined simplicity rather than sartorial splendor; virile, because they were able to deflect criticism of being effeminate fops; and useful, because they were wearing garments which were “advantageous to the drapers of the kingdom.” Ultimately, dressing in the innocent delights of the old sartorial regime brought only dishonor and ruin to the Restoration court, and, as the next chapter will explore, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 would return the three-piece suit to the modest form that Charles II had originally vowed he would never change.

chapter 5

Masculinity in the “Age of Chivalry,” 1688 –1832

A century after the Glorious Revolution, in 1790 Edmund Burke reflected on the French Revolution, writing from the perspective of an “Old Whig” defender of the revolution principles of 1688 (figure 13). Like seventeenth-century Whigs, Burke placed manners and morals at the center of his conception of political order, and so bewailed the subversion of aristocratic moral authority by the “New Whigs,” who opposed France’s old regime and aristocratic rule at home. What the Glorious Revolution had established, the French Revolution threatened to tear asunder. It is no wonder, then, that Burke turned to ideas about manners, manliness, and womanliness to defend upper-class society during its greatest crisis of the eighteenth century. Burke considered the “manly sentiment” of aristocratic men, and the “delightful vision” of elite women, to be the keys to maintaining aristocratic cultural and political authority. His “most memorable passage,”1 the one that received the greatest attention from his contemporaries, was his lament for the tragic, fallen beauty of Marie Antoinette: surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! . . . But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission,

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Figure 13. Studio of Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, 1771. Wearing a plain, uniform three-piece suit, Burke embodies the aesthetic values he outlined in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, as well as the “manly sentiments” outlined in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. By Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone! 2

Given the centrality of gender ideals to aristocratic political culture, it should come as no surprise that the “centrepiece of the Reflections” 3 revolved around notions of “loyalty to rank and sex.” In Burke’s Whig ideology, the “manly sentiment” nursed by the delight and splendor of the queen “kept alive” aristocratic hegemony in eighteenth-century political culture. In celebrating the delightful splendor of women, then, Edmund Burke trumpeted the masculinist aristocratic political culture that triumphed

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in 1688 and reigned until the extension of suffrage to middle-class men in 1832. In expelling James II for his Catholicism, absolutism, and court culture, the Glorious Revolution made oppositional culture the dominant culture, establishing a new and more limited monarchy according to the terms used by court opponents throughout the seventeenth century. In the long eighteenth century, masculine modesty helped symbolize and define this new political culture: the more limited crown no longer played a role as leader of fashion, or even as arbiter of English culture.4 New definitions of masculinity were thus part of the consolidation of power by the English aristocracy, one means by which it asserted its political authority against the claims of the crown, and reestablished its cultural hegemony against opponents of aristocratic culture. A newly triumphant Whig political culture thus made the moral and aesthetic tastes of aristocratic gentlemen central to sustaining aristocratic hegemony in the age of chivalry. For Old Whigs like Burke, then, the maintenance of the “spirit of a gentleman”5 was necessary to defend a political order created in 1688 against what he saw as the rationalist leveling tendencies of 1789. Masculinity was central to the age of chivalry. “THE MANNERS OF A REPUBLIC” As we have seen in chapter 3, seventeenth-century opponents of absolutism resisted not only a system of government—they criticized an entire way of life. When the Glorious Revolution transferred power from James II to William and Mary, then, it expelled a political culture of conspicuous consumption and installed a new regime which embraced the opposition principles of modest masculinity. At his inauguration, King William “probably wore a simple cinnamon-colored suit” for the reading of the Declaration of Rights, and “presented a rather modest, certainly civilian, surely benign picture” of royalty.6 Contemporaries thus credited William and Mary with encouraging “a disuse of exotic modes,”7 and “discouraging that course of trade which exhausted our bullion to support our pride and luxury,”8 thereby creating a more distinctly English style. In 1691 the admittedly partisan author of The Character of a Bigotted Prince (a reference to James II) welcomed the attempt by William and Mary “to rescue the glory of the English nation from that stupidity, that luxury, and effeminacy of the late reigns.”9 The Glorious Revolution was more than a revolution in the balance of power between crown and Parliament: it was a revolution in character. The age of luxury and effeminacy was gone.

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As contemporaries saw it, then, the Glorious Revolution had spawned a revolution in manners, sentiments, and gender ideals, replacing the presumed effeminacy of absolutism with a masculinist culture of aristocratic simplicity.10 In the post-revolutionary climate, defenders of the Revolution castigated Restoration monarchs for their excessive refinement of manners, and praised the Revolution for expelling a court where “all thoughts of military glory and extension of dominions seemed wholly to be laid aside, and all the severity of the preceding times, daily degenerate[d] to the luxuries of an effeminate reign,” as the Whig historian David Jones put it in 1697.11 This was not a specifically Whig interpretation of recent history: in 1699 the Tory Charles Davenant agreed that the Revolution had “wrought a general reformation in our manners,” having “banish’d flattery and corruption from the court.”12 The Glorious Revolution took place through the combined opposition of Whigs and Tories to the reign of James II, and though they disagreed over how the Revolution happened, over why William and Mary replaced James II, and over the terms of that replacement, they shared a “general tendency to conflate personal and political corruption,”13 and thus shared a common cultural analysis of the Revolution itself. In the new political stability achieved by the Revolution,14 parties and factions certainly flourished, but all sides agreed that the Revolution had wrought a general reformation of manners. To its defenders, the Glorious Revolution was glorious precisely because it was “a conservative revolution . . . carried out under the auspices of the aristocracy,”15 a political revolution without a social revolution, a revolution that preserved monarchy and aristocracy by relegitimating its cultural and constitutional foundations. In expelling popery and foppery, tyranny and luxury, and all the degeneracies of “an effeminate reign,” the Revolution of 1688 instituted a political culture that contemporaries felt could defend itself against attacks on its masculinity. English aristocratic men felt they could maintain their political power by donning an everyday image of manly modesty and noble simplicity. Monarchy and aristocracy could be preserved by shifting the terms of political debate, co-opting oppositional ideology and presenting the modest male aristocrat as the moral and political backbone of the nation. Long the language of opposition, modest masculinity had become the language of the status quo. Republicanism thus preserved monarchy, as Bishop Berkeley suggested in 1721: “it might be no ill policy in a kingdom, to form itself

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upon the manners of a republic.”16 Great Britain in 1721 was a kingdom, not a republic, and Bishop Berkeley was no republican. As an Anglican supporter of passive obedience to the crown, Berkeley helped restore a conservative political, social, economic, and cultural order after the crises of the seventeenth century. Yet like Whigs and dissenters, Berkeley gave great political weight to the symbols of everyday life— “of how great consequence therefore are fashions to the public . . . of so great influence” that they should not be left “to the management of women and fops and tailors”—and thus recognized in republican, masculine manners the new source of the kingdom’s political legitimacy.17 Writing after the collapse of runaway stock speculation during the South Sea Bubble, Berkeley looked to simplicity and manly virtue as a way to prevent the artificial desires, speculations, and luxuries that could potentially “enervate and dispirit the bravest people.”18 Berkeley’s fear that luxury would enervate England was a recurrent theme throughout the eighteenth century. Along with tyranny, corruption, rebellion, and anarchy, luxury was one of the central concepts of eighteenth-century political culture,19 precisely because English liberties were defined in characterological terms: “moral depravity,” asserted the anti-Jacobin John Bowles, created a people “disqualified for freedom.”20 After the Revolution of 1688, embodying public virtue was of prime concern to England’s political elite, who feared that encouraging luxury would lead to England’s moral and political decline. In an age when the crown could no longer claim the political prerogative to dictate English style,21 aristocratic men’s public virtue signified independence from the presumably effeminating effects of both royal pomp and middle-class luxury.22 Ritualized denunciation of enervating luxury was thus a prominent refrain in the ideology that attempted to legitimate aristocratic rule from 1688 to 1832, serving to define politics as a masculine sphere controlled by virtuous aristocrats rather than by royal fiat. Modest dress proclaimed the new political principle of limited monarchy established by the Revolution settlement: though a kingdom, England had the manners of a republic. In the Burkean ideology that dominated eighteenth-century political culture, then, manners were given more importance than laws in sustaining national unity and aristocratic rule.23 “Our nobles,” as one anonymous author put it, maintain their authority “not by force, but by respect; not by fear, but by attachment; not by necessity, but by inclination.”24 An elite example of sumptuary restraint would reduce the pop-

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ular discontent and envy that came from conspicuous class distinctions, thus making the populace “orderly, tractable, and easily governed,” as John Bowles none-too-subtly put it, especially given the relative weakness of a limited monarchy and a quiescent Church. Manners were seen as more important, because more effective, than laws: “having such powerful restraints within, they will require fewer restraints from without.”25 In an age when sumptuary laws were seen as improper for “a free people, tenacious of our liberty in every particular,”26 and “at best but bad instruments for the reformation of manners,”27 political authority was based not on royal prerogative or magisterial authority but on cultural hegemony.28 Political governance and social solidarity were thus maintained by a shared set of moral attitudes and practices—practices that were informed by political ideologies, but were articulated at the level of personal behavior. It is precisely because the Anglican divine and ardent Whig Rev. John Brown believed that “the manners and principles of those who lead, not of those who are led . . . will ever determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the continuance or dissolution, of a state,” that he identified aristocratic effeminacy as the prime threat to national security.29 Political legitimacy was based on aristocratic disinterest, the independent judgment and rational sensibilities created by the permanent wealth of a landed estate, the ability to stand above the world of private vices. Thus fashionability was incompatible with manly independence. With the decline of court culture, the world of luxury was no longer compatible with the world of politics. “The fashionable world,” wrote an anonymous defender of England’s oligarchy, is “so much in love with their own stupidity, that, though they were capable, they could not command time for disinterested reflection,” and thus they were incapable of governance.30 Aristocratic men’s modesty was thus more than a mere symbol of the reconsolidation of aristocratic patriarchy: for contemporaries, “corruption of manners” led to “the ruin of states,”31 while the masculine renunciation of luxury would “secure this kingdom from ruin,” as Brittania Expirans argued.32 If England was to avoid a fate similar to Rome’s fall from the “manly pride” of its republican era to the “effeminacy” and “vanity of the East” under its emperors, as Edward Gibbon narrated it, then it needed to abandon “that feeble, sumptuous and licentious effeminacy of royalty by which the eastern nations have been degraded in almost every age,” as the anti-Jacobin John Tinney argued.33 After the Glorious Revolution, a new relationship be-

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tween masculinity and consumption enacted and performed the triumph of the aristocracy: it was a means by which men of the landed nobility recognized themselves, defined their boundaries, and legitimated their rule. If, in the newly dominant Whig ideology, “an effeminate and luxurious course of life [was] . . . the reproach and ruin of a state,” virtue and industry were its “dignity and preservation.”34 But in the post-revolutionary consensus over political culture, Whigs had no monopoly on virtue, as Tories like Charles Davenant argued that “observing the rules and dictates of virtue . . . is the best way of securing to a people in general prosperity, peace, safety, power, and happiness in this present world.”35 The Tory John Dennis considered that “the restoration of public spirit” must begin with “the refraining of luxury,” since “removing the moral and the natural causes” of political decline was more important than any “immediate political occasions.”36 Writers across the political spectrum argued that refraining from luxury was a key to political stability, which is why accusations of luxury and effeminacy were so freely launched at one’s social or political enemies. Whigs, Tories, and Jacobites used a language of manly simplicity and public spiritedness in their pursuit of political and moral high ground, accusing each other of encouraging luxury and effeminacy through political corruption and despotic rule.37 In a political language that crossed party lines, luxury and effeminacy were linked with both tyranny and anarchy—the threat from above and the threat from below. There may have been no shared consensus about the basis of government or who should lead it, but there was a shared consensus that decrying effeminacy and luxury was an effective political strategy in a culture that equated political virtue with masculine simplicity. What before the Glorious Revolution was clearly associated with Whig, republican, and country ideology was now a shared language used by all parties for their own ends. And as the aristocracy gained a “growing stake in the countryside,”38 country ideology moved closer and closer to aristocratic ideology. Among the many variants of argument in eighteenth-century political culture— country Tory, country Whig, independent Whig, country Jacobite, Whig Jacobite, court Whig, court Tory, to name a few— one consensus stood out: masculinity was a prerequisite to political legitimacy. As we have seen, in the 1670s and 1680s Whigs and Tories were divided over the cultural role of the court and crown: Tories saw sumptuous court dress as an arbitrary prerogative that promoted trade, while Whigs saw it as the visible face of tyranny that only promoted lux-

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Figure 14. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Robert Walpole (no date). As leader of the court Whigs, Sir Robert Walpole—a Norfolk country gentleman in origin—was a central figure in England’s commercial expansion, devising mercantilist trade policies to promote English industries. Despite his “big wig” and a reputation for promoting luxury and tyranny—at least as his opponents charged—Walpole had himself portrayed in the modest style of the country gentleman. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

ury. Even in power, and even alongside their promotion of economic growth, court Whigs continued to denounce luxury, associating Tories with Jacobitism, popery, French fashions, and French absolutism—all incompatible with Whig ideals of industry and frugality, liberty and property (figure 14).39 “Trade is the great supporter of liberty, and liberty is as inconsistent with Torism, as moderation is with popery, or vice with virtue,” wrote the anonymous author of Torism and Trade Can Never Agree.40 Likewise, Whigs associated Jacobites with all the vices of the old regime, since Jacobites “aim at nothing but affectation, and smart repartees, and value themselves chiefly upon their clothes.”41 Like

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Tories, Jacobites had made “the badness of trade a party cause,” as Claudius Rey charged.42 In the post-revolutionary era, however, all sides made the denunciation of luxury a party cause: what had been a Whig ideology in the seventeenth century was now a general trope within aristocratic culture. Antipathy to conspicuous consumption knew no political boundaries in the eighteenth century. Tories thus used the same rhetoric of manly simplicity for their own political promotion.43 Tories could accuse the “senseless, upstart, Whig country gentleman” of dressing in a “a fine silk waistcoat and breeches.”44 Luxury, “the chief source of our present parties and divisions,” as John Dennis put it, remained the bugbear of the Tory opposition.45 The Tory leader Lord Bolingbroke called for sumptuary laws to combat the luxury and corruption which he thought would ensue from Walpole’s economic policies,46 while Charles Davenant complained that Whig courtiers had “laid aside all their former sobriety and gravity of manners, and are become as expensive and vicious as we are, who never so much as made any professions of godliness.”47 To Tories, Whigs were “Tom Doubles,” hypocrites who preached masculine virtue yet practiced effeminate vice. In this political struggle for the breeches, Tories could return the insult of luxury. Even Jacobites, especially Whiggish Jacobites like Jeremy Collier, adopted country rhetoric.48 The Scottish Jacobite Sir George MacKenzie shared the Whig and Tory emphasis on the importance of masculinity to political stability. Still loyal to James II, he nonetheless wrote in 1691 that under those monarchies, which have degenerated into tyrannies, care is taken to have those who get the public pay, spend it luxuriously. . . . The luxurious are not only useless, but enemies to the commonwealth wherein they live, useless because they become effeminate and soft, unable to defend and improve their native country.49

Faced with accusations of treason, Jacobites sought to demonstrate their patriotism by asserting their masculinism: in 1746, one year after the Jacobite rebellion, the Jacobite National Journal warned that “luxury and effeminacy have ever been the daughters of extravagance and profusion, those in their nature make way for corruption, which will . . . determine in downright slavery and the overturning of the Constitution.” 50 In this shared consensus over the dangers of luxury and effeminacy, modest masculinity became synonymous with the English national character. Throughout the eighteenth century, both an English nationalism

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and a more inclusive British nationalism developed primarily in opposition to the politics, religion, economy, and culture of its great other, France.51 Thus eighteenth-century political ideology linked manly modesty with national identity: “temperance and patriotism go hand in hand,” reflected Nathaniel Lancaster, writing in response to the 1745 Jacobite rebellion: What is so pernicious to the common weal as vice? And what vice, so much as luxury? . . . We think no lot so vile as that of subjection to a despotic Lord; and yet we crouch under the most abject of all servitude, the servitude of weak and effeminate passions . . . We can, without a blush, squander away immense sums upon foreigners, and barter . . . the sinews of war for an effeminating delicacy, which would ill become us even in times of peace, and is perhaps as unsuitable to our genius and climate, as it is inconsistent with the care and solicitude which danger awakens in the patriot’s breast.52

In the growing nationalism of English political ideology, then, the purportedly gender-free national character was defined in masculinist terms: throughout the eighteenth century, gender and nation were mutually defined. “Never did the masculine spirit of England display itself with more energy,” Edmund Burke blustered in 1796, “nor ever did its genius soar with a prouder pre-eminence over France, than at the time when frivolity and effeminacy had been at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character, by the good people of this kingdom.”53 From the beginning to the end of the long eighteenth century, France was the great political and cultural foil to English definitions of masculinity. “For a very long time,” declared the anti-Jacobin John Bowles, “French principles and French manners have been the bane of English religion and English morals,” thus threatening England with “luxurious habits and dissolute manners.”54 “All Europe to their fashions bends the knee,” regretted the anonymous author of A Satyr against the French; “In that they’ve gain’d the universal monarchy.”55 France was the source of tyranny, anarchy, and luxury, despotic Lords and effeminating delicacies, “frogs fricasseed and coxcomb-pies.”56 Precisely because of the masculinism of this political culture, political relations between men were solidified in homosocial and sometimes homoerotic terms. Yet the “homocentrism”57 of this masculinist culture in turn amplified anxieties about effeminacy, precisely because the Glorious Revolution had legitimated an oppositional political culture that considered homoeroticism and homosexual practices to be inherently effeminate, and thus a danger to the state.58 Unlike in TudorStuart England, in “the modern relationship between sexual behavior

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and gender”59 which emerged in the eighteenth century, homosexual practices were incompatible with masculinist political culture, which led to increased state repression of “mollies” in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.60 Instigated by the crown-sponsored Societies for the Reformation of Manners, prosecutions of homosexual practices (and executions of men committing them) doubled after 1688, since homosexual practices were seen as inherently associated with effeminacy, and since effeminacy was seen as such a danger to the welfare of the state.61 Ned Ward, a key promoter of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, felt that mollies “imitat[e] all the little vanities that custom has reconciled to the female sex, affecting to speak, walk, tattle, curtsy, cry, scold, and to mimic all manner of effeminacy.”62 The new masculinist political culture which associated homosexual practices with effeminacy thus made these practices a new political threat.63 It is this new—and essentially modern—political homophobia, as much as the growth of a permanent homosexual subculture, that explains the “pogroms of the eighteenth century.”64 In creating modern political anxieties about homosexual practices, the new political culture extended the liberties of true-born Englishmen only to those it considered true-born men. At the heart of English political culture, then, guarding the boundaries of the aristocratic polity meant donning the image of noble simplicity, presenting the landed gentlemen as true-born Englishmen and the moral backbone of the nation. In the political culture of the long eighteenth century, contemporaries saw the manners of a republic as essential to defending the rule of aristocratic men, and thus to the national welfare as a whole. “It behooves all,” intoned the author of Enquiry into the Melancholy Circumstances of Great Britain, “even in private as well as public stations, to be frugal, upon which depends the liberties of their country.”65 Aristocratic political rule was legitimated by an ideology of masculine disinterest from the fashionable world, and in turn, a polity limited to aristocratic men would help maintain England’s masculinity: There are a variety of causes which operate in forming the disposition of the people, and perhaps none more than the Constitution and form of Government under which they live. Thus the English Character has acquired a vigor and manliness from the Constitution.66

It is only an understanding of the mutually defined relationship between gender construction and political ideology that allows us to comprehend John Bowles’s enigmatic statement that English manliness derived from

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the Constitution, since men of the eighteenth century saw their own manliness as a political construct. GENTLEMANLY CAPITALISM Throughout the eighteenth century and until the triumph of free-trade ideology in the mid-nineteenth century, English economic thought and policy were dominated by mercantilist attempts to protect English industry from the apparent luxury that threatened to be imported from abroad. The Glorious Revolution turned a seventeenth-century economic ideology from opposition into orthodoxy, as industry and frugality became for economic writers what liberty and property were for political writers. In legitimizing the seventeenth-century mercantilism of Mun and Manley, Carter and Culpeper, eighteenth-century economists also retained its moral economy. Rejecting arguments that private vices were public benefits, the mercantilists who dominated economic debate and policy argued that England’s profit was based on personal virtue: “Moral virtue promotes trade, and aggrandizes a nation,” Archibald Campbell believed, while luxury led to effeminacy, dissipation, idleness, and the ultimate ruin of political society.67 It was in part this cultural resonance of mercantilist rhetoric that made protectionism so appealing in the eighteenth century: if the long eighteenth century was the heyday of English protectionism, it was because mercantilism made as much political and cultural sense as it made economic sense to England’s economic policymakers. Mercantilism appealed not only to the administrative and financial requirements of a rapidly growing fiscal-military state,68 but to the political, social, cultural, and gender sensibilities of the aristocratic gentlemen who determined eighteenth-century economic policy. Mercantilism made the economic values of industry and frugality compatible with the moral hegemony of aristocratic men. Capitalist ideology was thus not necessarily bourgeois ideology: rather, eighteenth-century economic theory and policy created a “gentlemanly capitalism” that set the stage for an industrial society dominated by the manners and morality of aristocratic gentlemen. From 1688 to the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, mercantilists saw moral order as the basis of the wealth of the nation: “secure but the virtue of a nation and you make it rich,” Matthew Heynes preached in 1700.69 Of course, making a nation rich made it susceptible to luxury and effeminacy, as England’s increasing wealth posed a threat to the political

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elite’s notions of virtue. Eighteenth-century mercantilists and economic policymakers thus tried to make aristocratic political culture compatible with economic growth: “How can the military spirit of a people, and the spirit of trade, be preserved at the same time?” asked the anonymous author of Of Commerce and Luxury, who worried that it was “impossible for courage and the military spirit to be allied with effeminacy.”70 As in eighteenth-century political culture, eighteenth-century mercantilists saw history as operating on a Polybian cycle, moving from necessity to convenience to luxury, from want to health to degeneracy, from idleness to industry to effeminacy. As late as 1845, the protectionist Albert Williams argued in his defense of the Corn Laws that the business cycle could easily become a Polybian one: in its first stages [commerce] supplies mutual necessities, prevents mutual wants, extends mutual knowledge, eradicates mutual prejudices, and spreads mutual humanity. In its middle and more advanced period, it provides conveniences, increases numbers, coins money, gives birth to arts and sciences, creates equal laws, diffuses general plenty, and general happiness. If we view it in its third and highest stage, we shall see it change its nature and effects. It brings in superfluity and vast wealth, and begets avarice, gross luxury, or effeminate refinement, together with general loss of principle.71

Throughout mercantilist ideology, effeminacy was the highest stage of capitalism, and government intervention was therefore necessary to protect trade from this general loss of principle. Maintaining a healthy economy meant maintaining the kingdom’s “military spirit” as well as its “general happiness.” In the heyday of both mercantilism and aristocracy, aristocratic virtue was seen as central to the maintenance of England’s industrial growth, while “wealth, population and power” were only valuable if they simultaneously improved “virtue and happiness.”72 Trade and virtue were mutually necessary, and thus effeminacy was a threat to both wealth and nation. Fears of effeminacy, then, were stimulated less by a growing consumer capitalism,73 and more by the triumph of the economic and political ideologies that accompanied the Glorious Revolution. Fears of the luxury of upstarts were not unique to the eighteenth century; what was new was the mercantilist political economy that achieved a new legitimacy after 1688. Eighteenth-century political economy merged with Whig political culture, founding economic and political well-being on the manly manners of an aristocratic republic. “Even commerce and trade and manufactures” depended on aristocratic morality, wrote the Old Whig

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Edmund Burke, for a nation “destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride” was a nation where “commerce and the arts should be lost.”74 It is one of the “peculiarities of the English” that eighteenth-century aristocratic men “made up a superbly successful and self-confident capitalist class,”75 having expelled an old regime driven by court-sponsored conspicuous consumption and replaced it with an economic culture based on masculinist conceptions of industry and frugality. Historians have often portrayed eighteenth-century England as a period of struggle between a conservative, quasi-feudal aristocracy hostile to bourgeois capitalism and an insurgent consumer economy undermining aristocratic moral authority.76 For eighteenth-century conservatives, however, capitalism did not undermine aristocratic culture: rather, capitalism and aristocracy went hand in hand. While economic growth depended upon aristocratic cultural hegemony, landed aristocrats profited from industrial development.77 Economic expansion certainly challenged aristocratic ideals, on two different fronts: productive, refined consumption might easily degenerate into effeminating luxury, as many authors feared, and a growing middle-class political consciousness would challenge aristocratic hegemony, as the next chapter will discuss. In eighteenth-century England, however, industrial capitalism and the inculcation of aristocratic manners were not necessarily separate spheres or competing interests: “good taste,” as Bishop George Berkeley considered, would “greatly conduce” to the economic well-being of the nation.78 England’s aristocracy played as revolutionary a role as its bourgeoisie in fostering the culture of modern capitalism, by making economic growth compatible with aristocratic political culture. Mercantilist moral economy did not go unchallenged in the eighteenth century, to be sure. From a variety of ideological perspectives, an often vocal minority of political economists opposed the hegemony of industry and frugality. Disenchanted with the new Whig supremacy, “predominantly Tory economic writers” kept alive the old sartorial regime’s defense of conspicuous consumption.79 Early promoters of free-trade ideology,80 these Tories perpetuated the doctrine of beneficial luxury, arguing that “the stock of a nation [is] infinite, and can never be consumed; for what is infinite, can neither receive addition by parsimony, nor suffer diminution, by prodigality,” as the Tory free-trader Nicholas Barbon put it.81 Dudley North, a Tory M.P. and merchant in the Turkey Company, argued in 1691 that “the main spur to trade, or rather to industry and ingenuity, is the exorbitant appetites of men.”82 For these

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and other writers, “imaginary wants and the consumption of exotics” were the main stimulants to industry, without which “universal sloth and insolence . . . might end in barbarism.”83 Rather than promoting disorder, luxury might be a guardian against barbarism. Even effeminacy, argued the anonymous author of The Prosperity of Britain, was a source of economic and political well-being. This author agreed with the Rev. John Brown’s analysis that England was infected with effeminacy, yet saw in this infection the spread of economic growth: “That the English are effeminate I take from you . . . but far from drawing your conclusion, I shall prove that the kingdom is therefore prosperous.”84 Later in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, some defenders of aristocracy made the argument that luxury promoted trade, “so long as the prevalence of luxury is confined to a few of elevated rank,” as the early Utilitarian William Paley believed. Middle- and lower-class luxury, however, “checks the formation of families, in a degree that ought to alarm the public fears.”85 Though no supporter of free trade, Thomas Malthus took up Paley’s population theory, arguing that without “a body of unproductive consumers,” overproduction and unemployment would occur.86 Reversing the Whig language of manly virtue, this minority voice of Tory economists constructed an alternative political economy, one that saw luxury rather than frugality as the source of prosperity. A more serious threat to Whig political economy came from within, from independent Whigs skeptical of the ability to balance trade and virtue. The most famous—then and now— of these independent Whigs was Bernard Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees directly challenged post-revolutionary ideology by arguing that private vices were public benefits.87 Though less an economic theory than a moral polemic, The Fable of the Bees nonetheless challenged the economic assumptions of the new political culture. Turning mercantilist morality on its head, Mandeville denied the possibility of “enjoying all the most elegant comforts of life that are to be met with in an industrious, wealthy and powerful nation, and at the same time be bless’d with all the virtue and innocence that can be wish’d for in a Golden Age.”88 Reformulating the old sartorial regime’s defense of “the economic role of the old aristocracy,”89 Mandeville rejected as “a mean starving virtue” the new aristocratic simplicity promulgated by writers such as Shaftesbury, Addison, and Steele.90 Rather than seeing Mandeville as a percipient prophet who understood “the values implicit in the new socioeconomic order” and

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its emerging consumer capitalism, as many have been wont to do,91 we should understand Mandeville’s Fable as an independent Whig’s political argument for the “incompatibility or discordance of national wealth and virtue,” as Richard Whately understood him in 1832.92 It was Mandeville, not his opponents, who was the cultural reactionary against the new political economy. As an independent Whig, Mandeville clearly comprehended the link between the ideology of public virtue and the claim to political legitimacy, but saw this ideology as the product of “the skillful management of wary politicians” who separated the vicious governed, “wholly incapable of self-denial,” from the virtuous governors, “free from sordid selfishness.”93 As Mandeville properly understood Whig ideology, men were qualified for political leadership by their ability to put moral chains upon their appetites, to paraphrase Burke’s formulation. Mandeville asserted, however, that as a claim to power, self-denial was merely an inverted form of self-interest: “it is possible that [a man] only sacrifices the insipid outward part of his pride, which none but silly ignorant people take delight in, to that part we all feel within, and which the men of the highest spirit and most exalted genius feed on with so much ecstasy in silence.”94 For Mandeville, Whig public virtue was nothing but private vanity properly dressed. Equally hypocritical to Mandeville, however, was the old sartorial regime argument that rich apparel was merely a “thing indifferent” or an “innocent delight.” Though Mandeville defended the aristocracy’s conspicuous consumption, he agreed with iconoclasts that fashion was inherently vicious vanity, not an arbitrary custom. Clearly rejecting the old sartorial regime’s defense of conspicuous consumption, Mandeville believed that pride was in the clothes as well as in the heart: It may be objected, that many people of good fashion, who have been us’d to be well dress’d, out of custom wear rich clothes with all the indifference imaginable, and that the benefit to trade accruing from them cannot be ascribed to emulation or pride. To this I answer, that it is impossible, that those who trouble their heads so little with their dress, could ever have wore those rich clothes, if both the stuffs and fashions had not been first invented to gratify the vanity of others, who took greater delight in fine apparel than they.95

Though beneficial, luxury was still a vice. Mandeville thus took the strict iconoclastic morality of Whig opponents of the old sartorial regime, and combined it with the old sartorial regime’s economic defense of luxury to devise his formula of “private vices, public benefits.”96

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Rather than marshaling a Tory free-trade defense of the innocence of beneficial luxury, or promoting a broader definition of healthy consumption, this “unusually austere moralist”97 and “thoroughgoing mercantilist”98 merely reversed the iconoclastic language of public virtue, turning the moral condemnation of luxury into mock praise. Mandeville agreed that luxury “effeminates and enervates the people,” yet denied that it led to political decline: “what is put to the account of luxury belongs to mal-administration, and is the fault of bad politics.”99 Breaking the link between moral economy and political culture, then, Mandeville took an extremely austere version of the political discourse of luxury and turned it on its head. It was this reversal that so outraged English political culture and political economists, precisely because Mandeville took the strictest, most stoic definition of luxury and turned it against the proponents of industry and frugality. And it was exactly this reversal that led Mandeville to become “a silent reference point for much of the social thought of the eighteenth century,”100 stimulating further articulation of the relationship between political culture and political economy. “Private abuses, public grievances,” grumbled Daniel Defoe in dismissing Mandeville.101 Mandeville was the perfect foil for eighteenth-century mercantilists, as a majority of Whigs and Tories defended aristocratic culture by arguing that “no prince ever enlarged his territories by effeminacy, luxury and ease,” as George Blewitt put it.102 The Tory John Dennis agreed with Mandeville’s assertion that mal-administration was the source of national decline, but countered that luxury was the source of Whig mal-administration.103 Asserting that “private vices cannot be public benefits,” the mercantilist author of An Enquiry into the Melancholy Circumstances of Great Britain condemned gentlemen who, “in bare compliance to the fair sex, imitate their taste.” “Virtue is the support of every state”; 104 “it is virtue alone, which can make a nation flourish,” ran the constant refrain of defenses against the “absurdity” of The Fable of the Bees.105 Mandeville’s opponents have often been portrayed as merely anticapitalists blind to the prophetic insights of The Fable of the Bees, reactionaries who produced “a re-vindication of the traditional, moralist—whether humanist or Christian—view.”106 Yet Mandeville not only provoked self-righteous condemnation of his “scandalous libertinism.”107 In rejecting Mandeville, his critics developed a greater theoretical elaboration of the relation between production and consumption. If there was a new, positive evaluation of consumer spending in eighteenth-

Figure 15. L. P. Boitard, The Imports of Great Britain from France, 1757. Great Britain eagerly welcomes a shipment of French cheeses, wines, cambricks, gloves, muffs, ribbons, flowers for hair, “and other such material bagatelles,” accompanied by “swarms of milliners, tailors, mantua-makers, frisers, tutoresses for boarding schools, disguised Jesuits, quacks, valet de chambre, etc. etc.” By permission of The British Library. F. C. Stephens and M. D. George, eds., British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires. 2083.e.

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century political economy, it was of the mercantilist, not Mandevillian, variety, as political economists developed a distinction between the productive consumption that facilitated “honest commerce,” and the enervating luxury that fostered effeminacy and ruin, as Bishop Berkeley wrote.108 Though no advocate of modesty, even the skeptical Whig David Hume sought to correct Mandeville’s “libertine principles [that] bestow praises even on vicious luxury” by arguing that “wherever luxury ceases to be innocent, it also ceases to be beneficial; and when carried a degree too far, is a quality pernicious, though perhaps not the most pernicious, to political society.”109 Accusing Mandeville of sophistry,110 political economists from Berkeley to Malthus disagreed with his definition of luxury as all consumption above the level of necessity. “He has confounded the notions of luxury and wealth, and defined the one for the other,” argued George Blewitt.111 Claiming that Mandeville’s definition of luxury was “too rigorous,”112 moral and economic writers attempted to situate “temperance, as a virtue,”113 between luxury and want, relying on a gentleman’s aesthetic refinement and economic education to help him find the balance between too much and too little consumption. Throughout the eighteenth century, then, political economists sought to counter Mandeville’s skepticism by more clearly defining the boundary between hurtful luxury and productive consumption. Often, that boundary was the cliffs of Dover (figure 15). In legitimating seventeenth-century mercantilism, political economy in the long eighteenth century made the balance of trade of central concern to economic policy. Distinguishing between harmful luxury and productive consumption meant defining luxury as the inherent attribute of foreign imports that could be substituted by English manufactures. As in the oppositional ideology of seventeenth-century mercantilists, eighteenthcentury economic writers drew on the moral rhetoric of manly industry and frugality to prevent or at least lessen the importation of French and Italian silks, Indian calicoes, continental velvets, and all other rivals to English wool, the “Golden Fleece,” “the flower and hopes of the Nation,” and the backbone of the economy.114 In all trades, protectionist legislation would maintain England’s “moral character and material welfare,” wrote Archibald Alison, precisely because in contrast free trade would make England dependent on foreign luxuries.115 Since national wealth came “from an internal source,” “evanescent” luxuries from abroad tended “only to impoverish, debase and debilitate the consumers of them,” John Almack argued in his defense of the

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Corn Laws.116 In an age when England’s economy was held to be selfsufficient in its needs, nationalist arguments for protective legislation merged easily with economic and moral ones: “the consumers of French manufactures in Great Britain,” wrote Thomas Mortimer, should be considered as petty traitors, and punished severely; for they enrich our natural rivals, who can make us no returns of the money sent out of the kingdom for this needless article of luxury, in compliance with the vitiated taste of our people, whom the demon of fashion tempts to injure their country in so tender a point as her commerce.117

Whereas the old sartorial regime had defined luxury primarily according to one’s social station, in the long eighteenth century the balance of trade became the main measure for differentiating between needless luxury and productive consumption. “If our importations in such commodities, thro’ our luxury, should exceed our exportations,” argued the author of An Enquiry into the Melancholy Circumstances of Great Britain, “foreigners will over-balance us in trade.”118 In mercantilist political economy, it was the protective system, not free trade, that would defend the interests of “the productive classes” against the “idle consumers who buy labour and its products so cheaply as free trade now enables them to do,” the Tory John Bell argued in 1839.119 Since free trade was “sapping the moral character of our people,”120 mercantilist protectionism was necessary to guard productive masculinity from “the luxuries and effeminacies” that an unregulated economy might create.121 As mercantilism merged with aristocratic political culture, it made its way into the commonsense platitudes of courtesy manuals: “a good economist,” counseled The Young Gentleman and Lady Instructed in . . . Politeness, “will often recommend our own manufactures.”122 These good economists thus appealed to the good taste of aristocratic culture, calling upon the aristocratic elite to support the nation’s moral fiber: “as the balance of England lies in land, so the balancing of trade lies in landed men,” wrote board of trade member John Pollexfen, who warned that “modes and fashions, . . . hath proved the ruin of many ancient families.”123 As Bishop Berkeley understood it, precisely because “the current of industry and commerce” was determined by the “prevailing will” of fashion, fashion needed to be regulated by aristocratic politeness, since “good taste in a people . . . greatly conduce[s] to their thriving.”124 With a new, positive form of consumption compatible with the anti-luxury discourse of aristocratic political culture, mercantilists in the eighteenth century felt confident encouraging emulation of aristocratic

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consumer habits. By adopting English modes, aristocrats could simultaneously continue in their role as fashion leaders, and yet not be accused of undermining English industry and frugality. Aristocrats could bring “the sober and frugal living of their ancestors . . . in fashion again among us; and this alone wou’d contribute to keep and increase our wealth, and greatly to enrich our land.”125 Without resorting to Mandevillian cynicism, then, mercantilists had come to their own understanding of the positive effects of consumer demand: aristocratic frugality was not only compatible with political culture, but with fashion itself. Thus economic writers who continued to worry about the debilitating effects of luxury could nonetheless promote higher wages, an increase in population, and the domestic production of inexpensive consumer goods as stimulants to trade.126 To this extent, then, the old sartorial regime had been turned on its head: while its defenders had argued that aristocratic luxury would benefit traders and workers, eighteenth-century mercantilists argued that “gentlemen are with the first to feel the benefit of trade, by the addition to their estates,” due to the increase in consumption of modest, domestically produced goods.127 Aristocratic modesty not only made good political sense; it made good business sense as well. In mercantilist ideology, then, encouraging productive consumption through aristocratic example would have the effect of inculcating the values of industry and frugality, not by law or work discipline, but by social emulation. Emulation of the sober fashions of aristocratic men itself became “a means to civilize numbers of idle people, and dispose them to peace, by accustoming them to industry.”128 Eighteenth-century political economists thus constructed a new culture of “industrial” capitalism not by subverting an aristocratic social and moral order, but by using aristocratic example itself as a means of maintaining both economic growth and the political and industrial “peace” that came with civilization. As the protectionist John Barnard Bayles assumed, it was “the aristocratic tendency of the English nation” that had “the immense stimulus . . . for exertion” in manufacturing.129 In mercantilist thought, political and economic stability depended on turning virtue into habit, inculcating the values of industry and frugality, while in turn the inculcation of those values depended on aristocratic society itself. “The science of political economy bears a nearer resemblance to the science of morals and politics than to that of mathematics,” Thomas Malthus asserted.130 Mercantilist political economy in the long eighteenth century had made the values of industry and frugality compatible

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with the cultural hegemony of aristocratic men—which was precisely why economic policymakers found mercantilist rhetoric so attractive. The interests of gentlemen were linked with the interests of trade, polite society was united with commercial society into a new vision of aristocratic rule.131 In the long eighteenth century, defenders of aristocracy constructed an image of the nation based on “perpetual liberty, plenty, and the spirit of elegance and politeness which need not then be deriv’d from foreign nations, but will be the natural and genuine product of our own.”132 Based on the manly manners of a republic, English liberty and aristocratic hegemony were compatible with both politeness and plenty. SUBLIME MASCULINITY In both political culture and political economy, defenders of postrevolutionary society turned what had been ideologies in opposition into political and economic orthodoxy, legitimating seventeenth-century arguments that grounded political hegemony and economic well-being in industry, modesty, and manly virtue. In turn, then, sartorial refinement became a new means for aristocratic men to claim social superiority and political authority. Along with transforming political culture and political economy, the new masculine modesty involved a redefinition of the grounds of social status, as an aesthetics of refined “politeness” became the dominate image of the English gentleman. In the eighteenth century, “politeness” was the continuation of politics by other means: politeness personalized the political, grounding political principles in aesthetic sensibilities—in sensibility itself—as new aesthetic theories and practices relegitimated aristocratic rule in the eighteenth century. Politeness thus codified the social order according to the categories of taste, gender, and morality, creating a new “aristocracy of culture.”133 As a “politics masquerading as an aesthetics,”134 then, possessing taste “signified the fitness of its possessors to rule,” creating a new “cultural unification of the upper ranks of society.”135 “At the height of its power” after the Glorious Revolution,136 the English aristocracy no longer relied on the monarchy as the source of social stability: the crown no longer proclaimed who was a gentleman. In the context of a quiescent Church and a limited monarchy, the eighteenthcentury gentleman was above all a man of taste, defined by personal sensibilities and aesthetic judgment rather than sumptuary law or royal authority.137 Taste and politeness thus allowed England’s elite to form

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a cultural identity independent of “the proffer’d luxury of palaces, and pomp of courts,”138 based instead on the sensibilities of the land-owning gentleman rather than the absolute monarch, and defining taste as the purview of the “public” rather than the court.139 The Glorious Revolution transformed the definition of aristocratic social status from the conspicuous consumption of an arms-bearing courtly nobility to the habits and manners of landed gentlemen educated in the refinement of the senses. Eighteenth-century aesthetic and courtesy writers thus co-opted the seventeenth-century critique of aristocratic manners, absorbing its iconoclastic condemnation of fashion into a redefinition of aristocracy. In eighteenth-century theories of taste, spurning luxury was a way of expressing one’s disinterestedness, one’s independence from the world of fashion, one’s ability to stand above the world of private interest, debilitating passions, and venal desires.140 Elite taste discriminated between the virtuous and the vicious, the manly and the effeminate, the noble and the common, the productive and the unproductive, the sublime and the beautiful.141 A Burkean aesthetics of sublime masculinity thus corresponded with a Burkean political culture. By developing an aesthetic ideology based on the values of aristocratic men, a theory of taste codified the political, economic, and moral ideologies of the post-revolutionary era. In this personalization of the political, then, aesthetic ideologies and practices helped reestablish aristocratic hegemony after the cultural dislocations of the seventeenth-century crisis: the development of taste was a response to a “crisis of symbolism” spurred not only by increasing middle-class wealth in the eighteenth century,142 but more directly by the new political culture of the Glorious Revolution. The aristocracy had preserved itself constitutionally in 1688, but still needed to legitimize itself culturally. As the cultural accomplice of the Glorious Revolution, aesthetic discourse in England was a product of the cultural upheavals of the late seventeenth century. Developed in the new political climate of the post-revolutionary era, aesthetic discourse was fraught with instability, since it emerged directly out of the semiotic crisis of the seventeenth century. Lord Shaftesbury, one of its founders, wrote in 1709: “’Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these . . . unnatural and without foundation in our minds. Virtue according to Mr. Locke has no other measure, law or rule, than fashion and custom.”143 John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690 had struck at the belief in innate ideas, thus undermining the old regime argument that signs might naturally correspond to their ref-

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erents.144 This revolutionary iconoclasm “had profoundly ideological implications,”145 since it destroyed the old sartorial regime’s hierarchy of analogies: by removing the arbiter of signs, signs lost their “law or rule.” Taste, aestheticians were fond of bemoaning, could not be legislated, and thus order and virtue threatened to dissolve into fashion and custom. “Taste,” Common Sense complained, “is now the fashionable word of the fashionable world, everything must be done with taste— that is settled; but where and what that taste is, is not quite so certain.” With no quality inherent in a material object that made it intrinsically or innately beautiful, taste was a highly uncertain category, threatening to become an arbitrary system, without “any certain rules,”146 which jeopardized its possessor’s ability to claim elite status. Throughout the eighteenth century, then, aesthetic writers attempted to create an anti-absolutist aesthetics which “preserve[d] our taste unconfined,”147 a standard of taste not legislated by the crown, but equally not left to arbitrary fashion. Aestheticians sought to understand “the influence of custom and fashion upon our notions of beauty and deformity,” as Adam Smith put it,148 and thus sought to develop a universal standard of taste, one that would bring order and virtue back to the relationship between signifier and signified, between aesthetic form and aristocratic function.149 In order for it to reinforce and reinscribe elite status, universal standards of beauty needed to exist independent of changing fashions, individual perceptions, and the possession of material objects. Eighteenth-century writers on taste thus distinguished “modes purely arbitrary” from “regulated” and “reasoned” styles.150 Whereas in the old sartorial regime arbitrary custom was something to be followed with nonchalance, precisely because it signified allegiance to the crown, in eighteenth-century political culture changeable custom was opposed to timeless truth, the fashionable opposed to the virtuous. Taste was ineffable, a matter of judgment, an immaterial sensibility independent of representation. “The beautiful, the fair, the comely,” Lord Shaftesbury proclaimed, “were never in the matter, but in the art and design; never in body it-self, but in the form or forming power.”151 Aesthetic relations thus helped define social relations: sublimity was “a higher and nobler pleasure”152 than mere corporeal pleasure. “Men of pleasure,” Lord Shaftesbury wrote, “admire the thing it-self,” while “others, more generous, . . . introduce a justice, and an order in their pleasures . . . a regularity of conduct, and a consistency of life and manners.”153 Through the cultivation of good taste, or what Sir Joshua Reynolds called “ha-

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bitual reason,”154 the social order was grounded in what Francis Hutcheson called an “internal sense.”155 Virtue had been rendered into habit, duty had become second nature. By considering aesthetic taste to be an internal sense, aesthetic writers were able “to preserve imagistically the spontaneity of natural sensation,”156 thus regrounding a social order in a presumed natural order. By internalizing taste without relativizing it, a new instinct was cultivated, a new aristocratic nature was nurtured by the education and refinement of the senses, and thus a new “republic of taste” was formed based on the inculcation of the virtuous manners of a republic.157 Aesthetic ideology was not only a theory of art, but a philosophy of life, one that was applied “in painting, gardening, or architecture, as well as in dress or in language,” as Lord Kames asserted.158 Taste regulated the everyday life of aristocratic gentlemen, “not only in his judgment of the fine arts, but in his house, his furniture, his equipage; and in short, throughout the whole conduct and economy of his life,” Nathaniel Lancaster wrote.159 And as an ideology that ranged from art to dress, from the sublime to the ridiculous, aesthetic theory was also a theory of moral behavior, one that found its way from aesthetic treatises to the platitudes of courtesy manuals.160 Good taste, Nathaniel Lancaster believed, was “an abhorrence of whatever is gross, rustic, or impure, of unnatural, effeminate, and over-wrought ornaments of every kind. It is, in short, the graceful and the beautiful added to the just and the good.”161 Thus, like political writers (as many of them also were), aestheticians linked the moral state of the nation with its political state, arguing that the arts “will excite both public and private virtue,”162 while “depravity of taste for arts and sciences and natural beauty, has ever attended a national corruption of morals.”163 The linking of the good and the beautiful with a manly disdain for both gross rusticity and effeminate ornamentation rendered gender distinctions central to this political and moral definition of taste. Thus politeness eschewed the “mere corporeal beauty” that would “effeminate the mind and promote luxury,” as John Turnbull wrote in his Treatise on Ancient Painting.164 Looking for the moral causes of political turmoil, John Dennis found them in the inability to distinguish between the manly and the effeminate, the rational and the carnal, the sensible and the sensual: “Manly pleasures are rational pleasures,” he wrote in his Essay upon Publick Spirit, “mere sensual pleasures are common to beasts with men, . . . which he who gives or he who receives in a supreme degree, must be alike unmann’d.”165 In this “mas-

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culine aesthetic mode,”166 manliness was essential to good taste: as Thomas de Quincy noted in 1846, “the sublime . . . in contraposition to the beautiful, grew up on the basis of sexual distinctions.”167 Like the masculinist language of eighteenth-century political culture, aesthetic discourse was iconoclastic, criticizing display by arguing that manly virtue was the absence of display. Thus in its opposition to material beauty as luxurious, effeminating, immoral, and politically corrupting, eighteenth-century aesthetics was essentially an anti-aesthetic: “Grandeur and beauty in the soul itself are not objects of sense,” asserted James Usher in his Discourse on Taste, “colors cannot paint them, but they diffuse inexpressible loveliness over the person.”168 It was the role of good taste to discover the immaterial beauty that did not reside in objects, ornaments, or luxuries, but that nonetheless diffused an inexpressible loveliness over the person. Whereas the old sartorial regime constructed an art that concealed its artifice, eighteenth-century politeness displayed its lack of display: “A man that is truly humble, does not desire to be talk’d of. He rather affects to be concealed.”169 If the old regime concealed affectation, the new regime affected concealment. This new anti-aesthetic thus constructed a form of display that disdained display, a fashion that denied its fashionability, a custom that spurned custom, a virtuous aesthetics that stated that virtue was unstatable, a form of representation that “presents the fact that the unpresentable exists.”170 This anti-aesthetic was inherently contradictory, precisely because it was still an aesthetic. Since they were still pleasures, manly pleasures always threatened to become mere sensual pleasures. Good taste still depended on an appreciation of “the presence of external objects,”171 and thus timeless beauty might turn out to be nothing more than a passing fancy.172 In this anti-aesthetic, “corruptions of taste can be avoided only be establishing within ourselves an exact standard of intrinsic excellence,”173 and thus sublime masculinity could easily be led astray, into effeminating luxury, corrupting sensuality, or homoerotic desire.174 Given this anti-aesthetic rhetoric, what was the good gentleman actually to wear? In practice, simplicity is as much a style as splendor, but it retains more rhetorical and moral force when it is defined as the opposite not just of splendor, but of style, fashion itself, worldly pleasure itself. Simplicity was a universal, timeless truth, not subject to the whims of fashion. It was precisely because of the fears of the effeminating and debauching effects of sensual pleasures that eighteenth-century aesthetic trea-

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tises and courtesy manuals offered only negative fashion advice: “Good breeding,” argued The Spectator, “shows itself most, where to an ordinary eye it appears the least.”175 Though “there be a genius to dispose the habit according to its proper attributes,” wrote John Harris in his Treatise upon the Modes, nonetheless “it is impossible to describe.”176 Unlike the old sartorial regime, eighteenth-century theories of taste made gentility inconspicuous, impossible to describe or demonstrate. True beauty, the “real beauty in attire that does not depend on the mode,”177 was not arbitrary, but timeless, authentic, and “independent from all . . . outward show,” as The Gentleman’s Library put it. “Virtue alone, though least in fashion, will be able to survive time.”178 The old sartorial regime thus had been turned upside down: whereas seventeenth-century courtesy manuals justified sumptuous male display as the “glorious shrine of honorable favor,”179 eighteenth-century manuals considered that a young gentleman . . . could not recommend his understanding to those who are not of his acquaintance, more suddenly than by sobriety in his habit, as this is winning at first sight; . . . his outward garb is but the emblem of his mind; it is genteel, plain, and unaffected; he knows that gold and embroidery can add nothing to the opinion which all have of his merit, and that he gives a lustre to the plainest dress; whilst it is impossible the richest should communicate any to his person or behavior.180

Repeating old clichés that dress expressed status—the garb was the emblem of the mind 181— courtesy writers in the eighteenth century nonetheless overturned the correspondence between inward honor and outward beauty. Thus nothing—and everything—had changed. If, as Adam Smith pronounced, the renown of “the man of rank and distinction . . . consists in the propriety of his ordinary behavior,”182 that renown rested on demonstrating that “fine clothes will signify nothing in the value of a man.”183 Winning at first sight required not making a show. Aristocratic men’s status and virtue were still demonstrated by outward distinctions and ordinary behavior, yet the means of expressing that status and virtue had changed. “In this deceitful age of ours,” complained the Whiggish Jacobite Jeremy Collier, “there is not arguing from an outside.”184 In an age of the increasing economic strength of Britain’s middle classes,185 in an age when increasing importation and domestic production of textiles made fashionable dress more widely available, a one-to-one correspondence between social status and levels of con-

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sumption was less possible than ever. The old sartorial regime strategy of outspending upstarts was no longer a guarantee of nobility. The complaints, of course, were nothing new. But after 1688 a new tack of sumptuary renunciation would be adopted. Spurning the materiality and seeming effeminacy of fine fabrics made it more difficult for nouveaux riches to purchase a gentleman’s values by emulating his style of dress. Since beauty did not inhere in objects, it could not be purchased by middle-class upstarts. Jeremy Collier again: Richness of habit is not only unnecessary to keep up the distinction of degrees, but insufficient: for where there are no sumptuary laws to confine the condition of persons, and ascertain the heraldry of the wardrobe, every one has the liberty of being as expensive, and modish as he pleases.186

Sumptuary renunciation, rather than sumptuary law, was the new means to maintain distinctions of degrees. Whereas defenders of the old sartorial regime had called for upstarts to return to their modesty, the new regime’s elites claimed modesty as their own. Thus aristocratic modesty was a new means of social distinction. Adopting what The Spectator called “noble simplicity” allowed upperclass men to lead society by refined taste rather than sumptuary expense.187 Masculine modesty became respectable—became respectability itself. The renunciation of “show and ceremony” restored good breeding to “its natural good sense and beauty,” as one courtesy writer argued.188 It is this new definition of aristocratic masculinity that explains eighteenth-century anxieties about luxury and effeminacy (figure 16). Denunciations of “the pride and luxury of the middle class of people”189 were by no means unique to the eighteenth century, as we have already seen, and thus should not be used as inverted evidence for the birth of a consumer society in eighteenth-century England.190 We should see eighteenth-century denunciations of the effeminacy of fashion not as aristocratic responses to a rampant consumer capitalism, but as a redefinition of aristocratic masculinity in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. What was new in the eighteenth century was not condemnations of “the rapid increase of luxury and dissipation” among “the middling and lower classes of society,”191 but the aristocratic response to these anxieties: luxury and fashion were renounced by aristocratic men. “Men of quality,” observed William Shenstone, “never appear more amiable than when their dress is plain. Their birth, rank, title, and its appendages, are at best invidious; and as they do not need the assistance of dress, so, by their disclaiming the advantage of it, they make their supe-

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Figure 16. The Compleat Beau, in An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London: A. Roper and E. Wilkinson, 1696), frontispiece. The caption reads: “This vain gay thing, sets up for man, / But see what fate attends him. / The Powd’ring barber first began, / the barber surgeon ends him.” By permission of The British Library. 1081.E.17.

riority sit more easy. It is otherwise with such as depend alone on personal merit.”192 While “the more polite and reasonable spirits will always distinguish betwixt merit and mere fashion,” fashion itself became associated with “the weaker class,”193 synonymous with a lack of judgment, stooping to the irrational whims of the crowd, submitting to “the

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Figure 17. The Beau Monde in St. James Park, c. 1750. The caption reads: “The Ruling Passion, be what it will / The Ruling Passion conquers Reason still” (Pope). By permission of The British Library. F. C. Stephens and M. D. George, eds., British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires. 2083.e.

ruling passion” (figure 17). “It is not persons of the first magnitude, as in former ages that now introduce a fashion,” Sir Francis Brewster observed, “but such who carry their fortunes about them, and are always in the midst of their estates, these have no ways to distinguish themselves, but by despising their own manufactory.”194 Thus English gentlemen sought to display their social leadership not through their leadership of the world of fashion—understood as a changeable world of nouveaux

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riches poseurs—but through a style which inspired others by example to renounce fashion. Anti-fashion would become the new fashion. “Men are not awed by clothes, but by virtue,” advised William Darrell in his A Gentleman instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life. Written for the Instruction of a Young Nobleman.195 Darrell captured the new aesthetics of aristocratic masculinity, making aristocratic social distinction compatible with the masculinist political culture that triumphed in 1688. “Build not your reputation on silks, nor your worth on stuffs,” Darrell advised. “Put on a good humour, a fine behavior, a noble disposition, and you’ll keep the mob at a distance; but whosoever pretends to dazzle men into respect, merely with scarlet and gold lace, will fall short of his pretensions.”196 Silk, scarlet, and gold lace were the stuff that old regimes were made of; the new regime had reconciled nobility with simplicity. Whereas the old sartorial regime had argued that social deference and cultural authority were maintained by the magnificence of sartorial splendor, in eighteenth-century aristocratic ideology, a more inconspicuous form of consumption was central to keeping the mob at a distance: “When virtue is at any time sublime, virtue becomes more commanding, the sublime more engaging.”197 Or as the Whig M.P. and poet Isaac Browne summed it up, “the true sublime attains the noblest purposes by the simplest means.”198

THE FEMINIZATION OF FASHION While traveling in France in 1752, the Englishman Arthur Murphy complained of the formality and stiffness of French dress, and longed for the liberty and propriety of his English coat: “I frequently sighed for my little loose frock which I look upon as an emblem of our happy Constitution, for it lays a man under no uneasy restraint, but leaves it in his power to do as he pleases.”199 Just as Englishmen understood their political arrangements in cultural terms, so they understood their little loose frocks in political terms. It should come as no surprise, then, that new sartorial practices among aristocratic men would emerge as emblems of the constitutional changes of 1688. After the Glorious Revolution, court observers and foreign visitors noticed the increasing tendency among upper-class Englishmen (though, significantly, not Englishwomen) to return to the “grave wear” of the original three-piece suit of 1666. After 1688, as Penelope Byrde has observed, “the fanciful, extravagant style of dress in the Restoration period, with its yardage of material and rib-

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bons and oozing out of shirts, gradually gave way to a more stately, sober and classic taste in clothing which was to be characteristic of the earlier eighteenth century.”200 In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a distinctively English and conspicuously modest style of dress seems to have emerged among upper-class Englishmen, one which observers linked with the new political and cultural identity of aristocratic men. In 1691, the chronicler Guy Miege observed that plain woollen cloth “amongst men is the general, and almost the only wear. And that with so much plainness and comeliness, with so much modesty and so little prodigality, that the English, formerly so apish in imitating foreign nations in their garb, might go now for a model.”201 The sentiment was repeated three years later by Edward Chamberlayne, who noted that men had abandoned “extravagance in attire,”202 and the French traveler Béat Louis de Muralt, who recorded that upper-class Englishmen have no great opinion of finery or dressing . . . They have too good an opinion of themselves, to imitate other people; and, in a word, they are such great enemies to every kind of slavery (which is of more consequence than all the rest) that they depend but very little upon custom.203

A masculine renunciation of splendor after 1688 thus was associated with the presumed triumph of English men’s liberty over the slavish imitation of custom. Aristocratic men attempted to put into practice the rhetoric which stressed that virtue could not be displayed, yet called for the display of virtue. They abandoned a more conspicuous display of wealth, even though their dress continued to be of higher quality material, better tailoring, and greater expense than the dress of commoners, belying hyperbolic claims by some observers that gentlemen now dressed like their servants.204 Thus aristocratic men tried to balance the political needs of dressing in a modest English fashion with the social needs of aristocratic cultural hegemony. The Scot John Macky journeyed through England in 1714 and found that “the dress of the English is like the French, but not so gaudy; they generally go plain, but in the best cloths and stuffs, and wear the best linen of any nation in the world; not but they wear embroideries and lace on their clothes on solemn days, but they do not make it their daily wear as the French do.”205 English aristocratic men’s dress was of the best cloths and stuffs—which differentiated it from lower-class dress—yet it avoided the taint of association with French gaudiness. Though English gentlemen might continue to wear formal, French-influenced fashion “on solemn days,” especially to court, court

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dress ossified into ritual allegiance to the court costume of Louis XIV and failed to influence daily wear.206 For good reason: “When the people see a well-dressed person in the streets,” the French traveler César de Saussure noted in the 1720s, “especially if he is wearing a braided coat, a plume in his hat, or his hair tied in a bow, he will, without doubt, be called ‘French dog.’” “Very plainly dressed” Englishmen avoided the trappings and thus criticisms of continental aristocracies: “they scarcely ever wear gold,” de Saussure reported, and “no swords.”207 Throughout the eighteenth century, observers like de Saussure noted the class and gender basis for the new practices of consumption: while aristocratic men generally wore “plain cloth and drugget,”208 women and lower-class men wore finer fabrics, either imported from the Continent and Asia or produced by the recently established English silk industry. “These silks and stuffs,” Charles Davenant wrote in 1712, “seem rather a commodity for the middle rank of people; they are too vulgar to be worn by the best sort, and too costly for the lowest rank.”209 César de Saussure made the oft-repeated observation that the clothes of English women “are made according to the season either of rich silk or of cotton from the Indies. Very few women wear woollen gowns.”210 Despite men’s adoption of plainer English wool, Guy Miege noted, women “go still in rich silks, with all the set-offs that art can possibly invent from time to time.”211 Aristocratic men’s modesty meant relegating fashion not only to lower- and middle-class men, but to women, who “appear particularly in rich and sumptuous habits, the women of London having taken great care to beautify themselves,” as the Venetian ambassadors to England reported in 1697.212 A vulgarization and feminization of fashion was the flip side of this aristocratic men’s renunciation of splendor in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A new social and gender hierarchy of fabrics corresponded with this new masculine aesthetic: silk was no longer the noble fabric it had been in the old sartorial regime. Rather, the Glorious Revolution ended the one-to-one correspondence between sumptuous fabric and high status, as plain wool cloth was associated with gentility, and fine fabrics with vulgarity—and with femininity. By the early eighteenth century, then, a new social and gender hierarchy of clothing was clearly visible to contemporaries: in adopting “plain cloth,” English aristocratic masculinity was newly defined in opposition to the luxury fabrics worn by women, the French, and social upstarts. A social identity was defined in relation to a gender identity and a national identity. It is, of course, difficult to assess the perva-

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siveness of this sartorial revolution; the observations made by Arthur Murphy, Guy Miege, César de Saussure, and others are somewhat sweeping in scope, and certainly anecdotal in nature.213 There was certainly at least some resistance and “some few fops only excepted” from this general trend, as A New Present State of England qualified in 1750.214 De Muralt noted that “in a country free from custom or general folly, there’s at the same time a great number of particular errors.”215 Despite this “cultural revolution,” as G. E. Mingay has written, “of course there remained numerous eccentrics.”216 Throughout the eighteenth century, sumptuary sobriety was resisted by skeptics like Bernard Mandeville and by more cosmopolitan aristocrats who used the language of the old sartorial regime to argue that “virtue and learning, like gold, have their intrinsic value; but if they are not polished, they certainly lose a great deal of their lustre,” to quote the rather anachronistic letters of the most famous exception, Lord Chesterfield.217 And “fancy dress” could function as a form of subversion of normative gender roles.218 In the 1760s and 1770s, “macaronis” challenged the display of republican virtue by self-consciously adopting extravagant and foreign modes, to the dismay and condemnation of many a satirist.219 And, despite their role as exceptions, the fops, the gallants, the “particular errors” and conspicuous exceptions received the bulk of attention both from their contemporaries and from fashion historians.220 The contemporary attention to these sartorial extravaganzas demonstrates not their cultural preeminence, but the contrary: they were objects of rapt attention precisely because they scandalized, and thus confirmed, the dominant culture. Fops abound in eighteenth-century literature, for example, but their dramatic function is more one of deplored foil than of admired protagonist. In the new aristocratic culture that emerged after the Glorious Revolution, the overdressed male played the role of social foil; renunciation of luxury was central, and it marked elite men off from social upstarts, from the effeminate French, and from women. At the same time, “fashion” as a social category was feminized and vulgarized, while simplicity—the central feature of the rhetoric of anti-fashion— was nationalized, gentrified, and legitimized as a new prerequisite of social distinction and political culture. Understanding the feminization of fashion allows us to better understand aristocratic ideology in the eighteenth century, while understanding aristocratic men’s claims to cultural hegemony helps us understand the new construction of women as “the fair sex”—itself a term whose diffusion seems to date from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-

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Figure 18. Arthur Devis, Robert Gwillym and his family, c. 1745 – 47. Dress for gentlewomen embodied a simultaneous empowerment and disenfranchisement. Eighteenth-century fashions not only symbolized the restriction of women from the sphere of production and politics, they actualized that restriction, literally aggrandizing the wearer at the same time as they made her nonfunctional, practically immobile. While the men stand in traditional poses of authority, looking directly at the observer, the females are seated, look askance, and are associated with both children and sartorial splendor. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

turies. The aristocratic ideology of modest masculinity required its negative of feminine luxury in order to function: the male sartorial revolution of 1688 was impossible without this companion feminization of fashion. Modest masculinity only made sense as a claim to social leadership when femininity and effeminacy threatened England with social chaos. With the post-1688 modesty of aristocratic men, the Glorious Revolution had produced a new sexual division of luxury (figure 18). In their critique of conspicuous consumption, promoters of the new male ideology tended to see sartorial modesty as a masculine attribute, and therefore applied different standards to women. “Whilst I seem to reprove . . . excess in men,” confessed John Evelyn, “I am so far from disobliging the brighter

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sex.”221 While Dudley North generally praised “wise and frugal people” who eschewed “the bravery of their habit,” he made an exception for married and marriageable women: “they may please their husbands . . . From this it followeth, that these may assume some liberty to dress and adorn their persons, as also to exercise themselves in music and other courtly entertainments.”222 Unlike male liberty, female liberty was based on adornment rather than renunciation. Naturally associated with beauty, the fair sex had a special license to sartorial splendor. As John Gregory simply told his daughters in 1774: “The love of dress is natural to you, and therefore it is proper and reasonable.”223 Aristocratic status for women thus continued to be articulated around the values of the old sartorial regime—apparel proclaimed the woman— newly legitimated by an emerging ideology of separate spheres and female domesticity.224 “The female sex is not concerned in business, or any of the difficult actions of life,” John Harris argued; therefore women could legitimately concern themselves with fashion and adornment.225 “Female virtues are of a domestic turn,” echoed The Spectator; thus it was proper that “English women excel those of all nations in beauty.”226 Jeremy Collier criticized “richness of habit” in men, but he defended women’s splendor, drawing on separate spheres ideology to explain the difference: [Women] are by custom made incapable of those employments by which honor is usually gained. They are shut out from the pulpit and bar, from embassies, and state negotiations, so that notwithstanding (as I believe it often happens) their inclinations are generous, and their abilities great to serve the public; yet they have not an opportunity of showing it . . . Therefore it’s allowable for them to set a value upon their persons, for the better disposal of them. And further if they have a mind to it, they may please themselves, because they are acceptable to others, which is a generous satisfaction.227

While men could exercise their abilities in the political sphere, females needed to achieve honor by other means. For women, “outward splendor, riches and ornament” were still “ensigns of civil honor . . . to conciliate hereby from the vulgar something of majesty and reverence to their superiors,” as the Anglican bishop Jeremy Taylor asserted.228 In this construction of femininity, conspicuous consumption still corresponded with social worth, precisely because of the trade-off between disempowerment in “state negotiations” and the “generous satisfaction” of being leaders of fashion. Barred from the formal world of politics and production, in this ideology women of the landed elite became the guardians of consumption.229

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Figure 19. L. P. Boitard, Taste-a-la-mode, 1745. By permission of The British Library. F. C. Stephens and M. D. George, eds., British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires. 2083.e.

Yet advice to women to dress in splendor competed with the promotion of female modesty for the dominant definition of femininity. Just as two models of masculinity competed with each other in the seventeenth century, throughout the eighteenth century women negotiated between two conflicting standards of dress, a “double message” to adorn oneself in finery and yet avoid immodesty in dress.230 Certainly women read or heard similar exhortations to dress simply and modestly, from sermons, satires, courtesy manuals, and political tracts (figure 19).231 As in the seventeenth century, female modesty was linked with chastity, domesticity, household economy, and other forms of women’s subordination. Though for promoters of female modesty, modesty itself was not necessarily gendered, the reasons for it were. Richard Steele, for example, stated simply that “a woman’s chief praise consists in domestic industry, and in simplicity, rather than variety of dress.”232 F. Nivelon’s Rudiments of Genteel Behavior advised “becoming modesty” for both men and women, yet modesty for men was associated with “manly boldness,” while for women it was a sign of “humility and respect”233 (figures 20 and 21). There was a difference, then, as one eighteenth-century courtesy

Figure 20. Bartholomew Dandrige, illustration for Francis Nivelon, Rudiments of Genteel Behavior (London: n.p., 1737), plate 1 for men. “As the exterior part of the human figure gives the first impression, it will be no unpleasing task to adorn that with the amiable qualities of decency and genteel behavior, which to accomplish, it will be absolutely necessary to assist the body and limbs with attitudes and motions easy, free and graceful, and thereby distinguish the polite gentleman from the rude rustic.” By permission of The British Library. 1812.a.28.

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Figure 21. Bartholomew Dandrige, illustration for Francis Nivelon, Rudiments of Genteel Behavior (London: n.p., 1737), plate 1, for women. “Let the eyes (being downcast, as this figure describes) discover humility and respect, whilst bending not too much, but moderately, you make the curtsy properly; then rising from it gradually raise the eyes so too, and look with becoming modesty.” By permission of The British Library. 1812.a.28.

manual noted, “between the modesty of women, and that of men,” based on “our different ways of life . . . It is the woman’s province to be careful in her economy, and chaste in her affections; it is the man’s to be active in the improvement of his fortune, and ready to undertake whatever is consistent with his reputation for that purpose.”234 “Different ways of life” thus determined that, though female modesty was similar to male modesty, it was nonetheless compatible with subservience to men. Just as promoters of female consumption appealed to a separate spheres ideology, so did advocates of female modesty.

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But arguments for female modesty drew on more than domestic ideology. They were often as explicitly political as arguments for male modesty: reasons of national economy, public morality, social identity, patriotism, liberty, and Protestantism.235 While for Bishop Berkeley the “fine gentleman” was “a public nuisance,” “a woman of fashion” was “a public enemy.”236 James Bramston’s Man of Taste was immediately followed by The Woman of Taste, which complained of French fashion among English women.237 In arguing that “neither virtue or beauty consists either in a silk gown, or in foreign linen,” David Black hoped that women “wearing the product of their own country” might improve the balance of trade,238 while the author of An Enquiry into the Melancholy Circumstances of Great Britain blamed much of that melancholy on the vanity of “gay ladies, who sparkle in foreign laces and silks,” fearing such French diversions would “give us popery and slavery in exchange for liberty.”239 Women’s dress, like men’s, was politicized, and femininity, like masculinity, was an explicitly political construct in the eighteenth century. It is precisely because femininity was a political construction that the predominant image of women remained one of luxury and splendor: proposals for women’s sartorial modesty threatened the all-male political world that made masculine modesty a prerequisite to political legitimacy. If women adopted modesty, it would lose its gender specificity; luxury would no longer be associated with effeminacy. Thus modesty would lose its moral weight in an all-male political world. Like the male modesty that emerged after the Glorious Revolution, female modesty could be a claim to political participation, and thus threatened to undermine the masculinist nature of eighteenth-century political culture. If displaying modest masculinity was used to claim political legitimacy, then in a world that identified femininity with luxury, women were by definition delegitimized as political agents. A new political culture helped create a new construction of femininity around concepts of luxury and display, and in turn this new construction of femininity was used as a justification for continuing the exclusion of women from political institutions. The feminization of fashion served to exclude women from public power: “Politics belong to the men,” wrote the Lady’s Magazine in 1784, “and to hear a woman talk with virulence of one party or the other, is as unbecoming as to hear one of us declaim against the particular cut of a pair of ruffles.”240 A political ideology of consumption was used to separate the sphere of masculine politics from the sphere of feminine fashion.241 Defined against each other, politics and fashion in the

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eighteenth century were incompatibly separate spheres. Women were thus excluded from political institutions both by the equation between political legitimacy and masculine renunciation, and by the equation between femininity and luxury. It was this double exclusion that posed such great obstacles to women’s claims to political participation: early feminists had to both denaturalize this feminization of fashion and degender virtue.242 Early English feminists thus adopted the political language of modesty and public virtue for their own, often diverse, purposes. “Fetters of gold are still fetters” protested the late seventeenth-century Whig author of An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, who blamed female frivolity on “the usurpation of men, and the tyranny of custom.” Whiggish opposition to tyranny was appropriated by early feminists for their own purposes: since “all souls are equal,” it was only tyrannical custom and a lack of education that led women into extravagance.243 Like her Whig contemporary, the Jacobite Mary Astell argued that female indulgence in fashion “is acquired not natural, . . . to be ascribed to the mistakes of our education.”244 Astell asserted that women “should not be imposed on with tinsel ware,” and considered women as capable of modesty as men were. In seeking to denaturalize this construction of women as “the fair sex,” Astell linked luxury not to nature but to corruption, just as male political writers had. For Astell, a love of dress was not inherent in women’s nature: “pride and vanity” were “nothing else but generosity degenerated and corrupted.”245 Thus women could equally gain political power by eschewing “tinsel ware.” Precisely because political power was now articulated as antipathetic to conspicuous consumption, Astell’s proposed seminary would allow women to “exchange the vain pomps and pageantry of the world . . . for the true and solid greatness of being able to despise them.”246 For both women and men in the eighteenth century, despising pomp and pageantry might be a claim to power—which explains why masculinists used the luxuriously dressed image of the fair sex both to define the aristocratic woman and to exclude her from public power. When women such as Catharine Macaulay sought to gain access to political culture, masculinists considered this to be political cross-dressing, the “affectation of manliness.” In 1791, the author of A Vindication of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke took aim at Catherine Macaulay’s defense of the French Revolution.247 This anonymous pamphleteer challenged not only Macaulay’s arguments, but the very appropriateness of

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a woman engaging in rational political debate. Condemning her with faint praise, the author argued that a woman’s “natural and delightful” strength was not to reason and convince, but to enchant and captivate: There is in the female character a certain je ne sais quoi that few men of any soul are able to resist. It is the peculiar and enchanting privilege of the sex, that their weakness is their strength . . . When this natural and delightful peculiarity is superseded by an affectation of manliness, the female character loses all its charms, it loses all its lustre: our former vanquishers become our equals.248

For this defender of the age of chivalry, women lost their aesthetic lustre when they affected manliness in using political reasoning. By this logic, Catherine Macaulay forfeited all the “enchanting privilege of her sex” when she sought to acquire a convincing rationality. Feminists thus wrongly sacrificed their supposedly natural aesthetic power in the pursuit of masculine political power. By naturalizing women as the fair sex, male political writers denied women a political voice precisely because they saw women as too beautiful for words—a renewal of patriarchy went hand in hand with the reconsolidation of the aristocracy in eighteenthcentury political culture.

chapter 6

The Making of the Self-Made Man, 1750 –1850

Three years before passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832 expanded English suffrage to middle-class men, one of its leading advocates, William Cobbett, felt it necessary to give these same men some fashion advice: “Let your dress be as cheap as may be without shabbiness,” he wrote in 1829, warning that no one “with sense in skull will love or respect you on account of your fine or costly clothes.”1 Cobbett’s nineteenth-century advice should not be surprising. Just as John Evelyn had sought in 1661 to design a male costume that could be useful yet graceful, Cobbett desired a fashion that could be cheap but without shabbiness: balancing economy with taste by promoting an aesthetic of inconspicuous consumption had long been the stock-in-trade of courtesy writers. Likewise, Cobbett’s reasons for recommending modesty should sound equally familiar, since decrying “luxury” had long been standard fare in political criticism. For Cobbett, this seeming digression from politics to fashion was no digression at all, since Cobbett considered this purported outbreak of costly clothes to have been produced “like almost all our other evils, by the Acts of our Septennial and Unreformed Parliament.”2 For Cobbett, the personal was explicitly political: an unreformed Parliament had created an enormous debt, encouraged stock speculation, allowing “a race of loan-mongers and stock-jobbers” to amass great fortunes, and everyone else “to think himself entitled, if not to title and great estate, at least to live without work.” Sobriety had been overwhelmed by an onrush of conspicuous consumption: “In such a 133

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Figure 22. Unknown, possibly George Cooke, William Cobbett, c. 1831. Despite his critique of aristocratic political culture, Cobbett dressed in the relatively modest style of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

state of things, who is to expect patient industry, laborious study, frugality and care.”3 In his “personalisation of politics,”4 Cobbett embodied as well as advocated a long-standing definition of English masculinity. His contemporary Samuel Bamford observed Cobbett “dressed in a blue coat, yellow swansdown waistcoat, drab jersey small-clothes, and top boots . . . He was the perfect representation of what he always wished to be—an English gentleman-farmer.”5 Critical of “the incessant efforts of cant and effeminacy to eradicate every manly sentiment,”6 Cobbett followed his own fashion advice, dressing “as was the custom for the gentlemanfarmers of the last century,” as William Hazlitt wrote.7 (figure 22). It was precisely such unoriginality that made Cobbett so influential among

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political radicals in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rather than defending the interests of the landed gentleman, Cobbett merely dressed like one, taking a familiar image of the eighteenth-century aristocratic gentleman-farmer and grafting it onto a new political movement. Having grown up politically in Burkean circles, the Tory-turned-radical Cobbett had absorbed the aristocratic language of the “age of chivalry” and used it to promote the interests of an expanded male suffrage.8 In his call for parliamentary reform, Cobbett used the seventeenth-century political language that the Glorious Revolution had turned from oppositional to legitimating discourse, yet instead of defending aristocratic society, Cobbett returned this language back into an oppositional one: England had abandoned the manners of a republic because of the venality and restricted franchise of an aristocratic Parliament. Cobbett thus well understood the strategic importance of donning an image of modesty for middle-class political culture. As Cobbett’s own life makes clear, by the early nineteenth century English aristocratic men were no longer the sole proprietors of “republican” ideology, as middle-class reformers appropriated the language of manly virtue for their own ends. Like their mid-seventeenth-century counterparts, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English aristocrats lost control of the meanings of consumption, as political, economic, and clothing reformers succeeded in portraying aristocratic men as prodigal parasites living off of a virtuous and industrious nation. From 1750 to 1850, middle-class reformers transformed the meanings of consumption—transformed the relation between class, gender, and consumption—in order to transform political culture and economic policy. Showing how middle-class men appropriated an aristocratic ideology of masculinity in their attempts to gain access to the formal institutions of power will allow us to demonstrate how this middle-class ideal of masculinity was an explicitly political construct, in order to rehistoricize ideals of masculinity that are taken for granted to be middleclass in origin. Since the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class men have been seen as “the genuine depositories of sober, rational, intelligent, and honest English feeling,” as Lord Brougham put it in 1832.9 Despite Brougham’s characterization of these ideals of sobriety and rationality as “genuinely” middle class, as in some way authentically, timelessly bourgeois, this class attribution of “honest English feeling” was a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century invention, the result of political, economic, and social changes in which Brougham himself, a leading

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parliamentary advocate for middle-class men’s suffrage, played an active part. As Cobbett himself displayed, the middle-class image of the selfmade man—rational, frugal, and industrious—was not a self-made image, but rather a hand-me-down from an earlier generation, having its roots in an eighteenth-century aristocratic ideology of masculinity. Describing the making of the self-made man, then, means retracing the process by which middle-class men came to be defined as “middleclass,”10 and the process by which they came to see themselves as the genuine depositories of sober English feeling. These two processes were interrelated: the very term “class” was given prominence and definition by the political and economic struggles that enfranchised and enriched the people who came to be seen as middle-class men. Political culture and political economy defined “class” in terms that legitimated the voices and interests of these very men: “Class” was constructed in the terms of English political culture—a virtuous, sober class of producers was pitted against an idle, parasitical class of consumers—and thus reflected the masculinist biases of that political culture’s attitudes toward production and consumption. This chapter, then, is not about how middle-class men came to find their common interests by using and living a gender ideology that set them off from aristocrats and workers (a description of the rise of their class consciousness),11 but rather about how middleclass men came into existence as a social category, how the self-made man was made. In turn, understanding this making of the self-made man should help us better understand the links between political, economic, and cultural changes in early Victorian England. Historians have often characterized this period as a struggle between an “entrepreneurial ideal” and an “aristocratic ideal,”12 or as a struggle between thrusting self-made men and feudal aristocrats disdainful of capitalism—a portrayal whose function is often to condemn (or at least comprehend) middle-class men’s assumed “belated capitulation”13 to aristocratic values in the later Victorian era.14 For historians from both left and right, the assumed autonomy of middle-class men’s culture prior to 1850 is the presupposition of an assumed post-1850 “subordination of the bourgeois manufactures” to aristocratic culture,15 or of a “cultural domestication of the industrial revolution.”16 This account is one that often embraces the class and gender ideology of the age: in one account, the “tough, crude, assertive” John Bull was “softened” by his assimilation into the aristocracy; in another, “the old virile, ascetic and radical ideal of active capital was submerged in the still older, supine, hedonistic and conservative

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ideal of passive property.”17 The “decline of England,” according to this story, has been consonant with its emasculation. Yet this story—and the polemics that arise from it—is based on the assumption of a greater independence of middle-class men’s culture from aristocratic culture, and on rather fixed class associations of masculine character. Embracing middle-class men’s image of themselves— as virile, ascetic, and self-made—rather than historicizing this image as the product of a process of appropriation, has led to misunderstandings of the nature of class and gender relations in the early Victorian era. To be sure, this period was an era of great debate over definitions of class, yet these class struggles were themselves less struggles between fixed and self-made ideal types than struggles over the class association of a shared cultural and gender discourse, one that separated middleclass from aristocratic men as much as it united them against the rest of the nation: against women, working-class men, and against other versions of political culture and political economy. Middle-class reformers attacked aristocratic political culture, yet they attacked it in the very language aristocrats used to defend it—the gendered condemnation of luxury, corruption, and venality—and did not create an alternative political culture based on a different set of social and commercial values. Classes struggled, but they struggled using a common masculinist political language. Middle-class men thus only became middle-class men by adopting and transforming the aristocratic political culture to which they sought inclusion. There was nothing “genuine” about middle-class masculinity. “CHARACTER IS POWER” Despite their claims to moral authority, by the late eighteenth-century aristocratic Englishmen were no longer the sole proprietors of “republican” ideology, since political reformers had appropriated the language of manly public virtue for their own political ends. As in the seventeenth century, the condemnation of luxury and effeminacy was as much as a critique of power as it was a justification of power. And like their seventeenth-century predecessors, late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury reformers and radicals by no means constituted a singular, unified movement. Certainly a sentiment that Parliament needed a degree of reform was not held exclusively by promoters of middle-class men’s suffrage. Nor was enfranchising middle-class men the unanimous aim of all radicals: working-class radicals, especially the Chartists, used

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a similar language of manly virtue and independence in their struggle for universal male suffrage.18 William Cobbett himself slowly came to embrace universal male suffrage as a political goal. Republicanism was not the property of any class. Though the language of radicalism helped shape both working-class and middle-class ideologies, radicalism itself was not synonymous with any class ideology.19 It was the very traditional nature of English “republican” ideology that made it accessible to so many different groups, since all could claim to be defending traditional English liberties and reclaiming “the manly simplicity of the ancient commonwealths” from an aristocracy “emasculated by hereditary effeminacy.”20 In their attempts to expand the English electorate, then, reformers and radicals adopted and expanded (rather than rejected) the masculinist language of the political culture to which they sought inclusion, thereby giving historical legitimacy to their claims. Tracing their notions of a healthy body politic to seventeenthcentury Whig principles, reformers saw themselves as guardians of same “correct and manly” principle that had preserved English liberties in 1688, the principle “that the security of a revolution of government can only arise from a revolution of character.”21 Radicals and reformers shared with conservatives the interpretation of 1688 as a revolution of masculine character, yet sought to recover the manners of the republic from their aristocratic depredations. As Samuel Smiles summed up the new political culture of the self-made man: “If every one would see to his own reformation, how very easily you might reform a nation.”22 To both critics and defenders of aristocracy, manners and “manly principles” were key to establishing or undermining political legitimacy.23 Radicals took the public nature of aristocratic claims to public virtue and turned them against the aristocracy itself. Claiming to embody public virtue meant exposing oneself to unwanted publicity: as the radical Charles Pigott saw it, it was precisely because “the conduct and example of their superiors (both men and women) continue to have such vast influence in vitiating or reforming the morals of society” that “the people cannot be too well informed of the manners and habits of these superiors, in order that they may be enabled to judge what degree of faith is due to the opinion of such persons, and how far they are worthy of respect, or objects of emulation.”24 If in aristocratic political culture manners were the source of political stability, then for radicals they might also be the source of political corruption. James Burgh warned:

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“Upon you, my Lords and gentlemen, who hold the first ranks in the nation, whether sharers in the legislative power, or not; upon you it lies to begin the general reformation, by your superior example and influence, which, you know, cannot fail to lead the nation.”25 Thus reform rhetoric drew heavily on the politics of manly character to advance middle-class men’s suffrage.26 With its ever-present companion “effeminacy,” aristocratic “luxury” was for radicals “the principle grievance of the people,” as the influential Major John Cartwright asserted in 1776. It was “the principal source of all the oppression, ignorance and guilt which infest the face of the earth,” as William Godwin saw it, precisely because it “unnerves and debases the men that practise it.”27 Middle-class reformers and radicals thus took an aristocratic critique of luxury and effeminacy and turned it against the aristocracy itself. The self-made man made himself out of centuries-old ideals, tailored to fit the needs of a new political culture. This is not to deny, however, the novel contributions to English political culture made by radicals, like Thomas Paine, who adopted the Enlightenment language of natural rights. Inspired by the French Revolution, the argument for suffrage based on natural rights was new to England and ran seemingly at odds with arguments based on the historical rights of English men. (This, at least, was the charge Edmund Burke leveled in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which many historians have also emphasized.28) Arguments from nature were certainly not arguments from virtue. Yet we should not overstate the distinction between pre- and post-1789 radicalism: most radicals and reformers were intent on restoring ancient rights rather than innovating new ones;29 they interpreted the French Revolution as a reenactment of the Revolution of 1688, and withdrew support for it when it failed to live up to such a “glorious” model.30 Equally, we should not overemphasize the incompatibility of arguments from historical and from natural rights, especially among writers more interested in advancing a political cause than in outlining a political theory. Even an abstract radical theorist like William Godwin could use both Paineite and historical arguments.31 Natural rights radicals, including Paine, could draw on historical arguments, including ideas of the Norman Yoke and the ancient constitution, as well as arguments about virtue, corruption, artifice, and dissimulation.32 The Paineite author of The Catechism of Man argued for the “rights and duties of every rational being,” though was certainly willing to call on the example of “luxurious and effeminate” Rome to demonstrate that free-

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Figure 23. Auguste Millière, Thomas Paine, after an engraving of 1793 by William Sharp, after George Romney, inscribed c. 1880. Showing no foppery in his character, Paine nonetheless dressed not unlike his aristocratic opponents. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

dom depended not upon natural rights, but upon manly virtue.33 Despite his eschewing of historical arguments, Thomas Paine could use a similar denunciation of aristocratic effeminacy: an aristocratic title “marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it. It reduces man into the diminutive of man”34 (figure 23). For their part, more traditional radicals “grafted [natural rights] onto the older stem of English radical traditions.”35 What brought the two strains of radicalism together was a shared opposition: an aristocracy portrayed as corrupt, luxurious, and effeminate by constitutionalist radicals, and as artificial, luxurious, and effeminate by natural-rights radicals. The combination of these two arguments resulted in the grafting of a historical construction of masculinity onto nature, creating what the radical Joel Barlow called

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“the manly rights of nature.”36 Contemporary with the rise of scientific discourses which naturalized gender distinctions,37 radical discourse created a naturalized and universalized definition of masculinity which merged all too easily with its historically and nationally based construction. In their opposition to a common enemy commonly portrayed as luxurious, foppish, and illegitimate, radicals did more to naturalize, expand, and sustain traditional definitions of masculine citizenship than they did to devise a radically new language in which to conceive of political rights and responsibilities. The new language that did emerge out of radicalism was the language of class. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the “middle ranks” became the “middle classes,” as “class” became a predominant category for social analysis and political struggle, defined as much in cultural terms as in economic and property terms.38 While aristocrats were reluctant to use the language of class, it was radicals who foregrounded it in English politics. Radicals defined class in the cultural and masculinist terms of English political culture. As “a political concept,”39 class was in large part defined by political culture, and since that political culture was itself defined by cultural ideals of masculine character, class was as much a cultural category as a socioeconomic one, contributing to a “masculine conception of class.”40 From the beginning, class was a discursive category, the result of transformations in political culture, rather than transformations in political culture merely being the result of class struggles.41 Thus when radicals defended “the productive classes” against an aristocratic “consumer class,” they defined class by one’s relation as much to the means of consumption as to the means of production.42 As a cultural and political construction, the middle class was precisely that: in the middle between two forms of corruption, an effeminate aristocracy and a vicious working class, the “middle state between the savage and the refined, or between the wild and the luxurious state,” as Richard Price put it.43 While aristocrats were profligate, the working class was dissolute, and thus both were tempted by political venality. Aristocratic men had portrayed the middle class as vain, venal, and vicious; middle-class reformers reversed this by pitting “prodigal luxurious landlords” against middle-class proponents of virtue and liberty.44 For reformers, luxury and effeminacy originated not from below, but in the “hereditary honors and titles of nobility [that] produce a proud and tyrannical aristocracy,” as Richard Price intoned.45 Radicals por-

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trayed aristocrats as England’s prodigal sons, “gratified with baubles and splendor,” as William Godwin put it.46 Praising “that simplicity of character, that manliness of spirit, that disdain of tinsel” displayed by American colonists,47 Richard Price argued that it was “not in the high ranks of life, or among the great and mighty, that we are to seek wisdom and goodness . . . They are to be found chiefly in the middle ranks of life.”48 Political reformers thus reversed eighteenth-century aristocratic claims to masculinity and political legitimacy by ascribing these virtues to middle-class men, “the most rational, the wisest, the best portion of mankind,” possessing what Jonathan Dymond called “a manly and discriminating judgement.”49 Unlike the virtuous middle classes, those above and those below were “creatures of habit and impulse,” driven to vulgarity either by necessity or by luxury.50 As the leader of the Society for Constitutional Information Christopher Wyvill saw it, universal manhood suffrage was as dangerous as a strictly aristocratic constitution: both were susceptible to corruption by luxury, since both aristocrats and working men lacked the “well-regulated spirit of manliness and humility” so necessary for defending English liberty.51 Defining class as much by consumption as by production was central to the triumph of middle-class men’s suffrage movement. In radical rhetoric, both middle-class and working-class men were members of “the industrious classes,” which united them against “the burdensome class of unproductive inhabitants,” as the Jacobin Thomas Cooper put it.52 This unity as producers between middle- and working-class men allowed middle-class reformers to lobby for a more moderate middle-class suffrage by threatening a more radical (and perhaps violent) union among “the productive classes.” United as producers against aristocratic consumers, middle- and working-class men were nonetheless divided as consumers. In middle-class radical rhetoric, it was habits of consumption, rather than the relation to the means of production, that ultimately distinguished middle-class men from working-class men.53 It was middleclass men’s sober relation to the means of consumption—in contrast to the luxury and indulgence of both aristocrats and workers—that defined the middle class as a class. Absorbing the masculinist productivism of aristocratic political culture into a language of class, radicals and reformers thus cut middleclass masculinity from the same cloth as aristocratic masculinity. For middle-class reformers, as in aristocratic political culture, virtue was still the basis for political participation: “A parliament whose seats, through

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the universality of freedom, . . . shall be attainable only by public virtue, must to all parties, be equally favorable, equally acceptable,” wrote one anonymous political reformer.54 As before, citizenship was defined by public virtue, but now, while “undue influence” had enabled aristocrats “to riot in luxury and sensuality, out of the hard earnings of impoverished industry,”55 public virtue became the attribute of middle-class industry. “Those who possess much,” Joseph Towers argued, are often too much enervated by luxury to be influenced by any principles of patriotism. Whilst, on the other hand, men of lower circumstances, of more moderate views and expectations, and of more regular and temperate manners, though they enjoy less property, often possess more independence of mind, and are more influenced by a virtuous affection to their country.56

In middle-class discourse, as in aristocratic discourse, temperance and patriotism still went hand in hand, and were still threatened by luxury and enervation. Although they agreed with aristocratic men that luxury and effeminacy undermined claims to unprejudiced disinterest, reformers turned that argument into a critique of landed wealth. Political legitimacy rested in the hands “of those disinterested and independent men, who are chiefly to be found in the middle classes of mankind,” rather than with either the profligate aristocracy or the “submissive and venal” populace, argued Christopher Wyvill.57 Independence and disinterest—the manly disdain for profligacy and venality—were still prerequisites for political legitimacy, but the class associations had been transformed. Reformers made “that manly sense of independence”58 independent of landed property,59 upholding the “character” necessary for citizenship yet extending it to middle-class men.60 It was in these moral and masculinist terms that radicals attacked an unreformed Parliament as the source of moral corruption. As Major John Cartwright saw it, Parliament was “filled with idle school-boys, insignificant coxcombs, led-captains and toad-eaters, profligates, gamblers, bankrupts, beggars, contractors, commissaries, public plunderers, ministerial dependents, hirelings, and wretches.”61 “Splendid government makes state-coxcombs,” George Dyer quipped.62 Like defenders of the age of chivalry, radicals defined personal character in political terms: “What do you suppose produced the manly character of this country?” asked John Thelwall, a leader of the London Corresponding Society. He answered: “If you would trace the real sources of National Character, seek them in the institutions and political maxims of the country.”63

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Condemning “the luxury and splendor of political plunderers,” Thelwall agreed with the anti-Jacobin John Bowles, cited in the previous chapter, that the English character had acquired its manliness from the Constitution.64 As in the seventeenth century, then, England had entered a vicious circle of vices: political corruption caused moral decay, which led to further political corruption.65 If “laws make manners,” as the Jacobin Thomas Cooper asserted,66 so too mannered men made good laws: “good government,” Jonathan Dymond considered, “depends upon the character and the virtue of those who shall conduct it.”67 Because the “virtuous, sober, frugal, and industrious . . . will choose honest representatives in parliament,” frequent elections and an expanded suffrage were necessary to hear the voice of the virtuous.68 Otherwise, a corrupt electoral system of “rotten boroughs” would continue to be “the root of all the corruption that exists.”69 Corrupt electoral practices placed bad characters in Parliament, “sportsmen merely, and spendthrifts, gamblers and usurers . . . To estimate the value of the present system of election, by . . . the character of those who are actually returned to parliament is a ‘damning proof’ that there must be an inherent vice in the structure of that body.”70 Once again, radicals agreed with aristocratic conservatives: the English character was as much a product of the English Constitution as the Constitution was a product of English character. Changing definitions of masculine character cannot be understood independently of those transformations in political culture, and vice versa: the changing character of politics cannot be understood separately from the changing politics of character. Of course, political reform was not necessarily synonymous with modest manliness, since “manliness” might have different definitions.71 Though radical masculinity was generally associated with industry and frugality, attitudes toward masculinity among radicals and reformers were by no means unanimous. The moderate Whig M.P. and reformer Charles James Fox enjoyed a reputation in Parliament as leading “the party of fashion.”72 Yet when Fox opposed freedom of the press, his more radical opponents portrayed him in the familiar stereotype of the “macaroni,” linking his extravagant lifestyle with tyranny and political corruption (figure 24).73 And while John Wilkes agreed on the importance of manliness to political reform, he disagreed on the definition of manliness. From his cell in King’s Bench prison, Wilkes wrote in 1769 to the Westminster electors who time and again returned him to his seat in Parliament, praising the “manly spirit you have exerted this day in direct opposition to every art and intrigue of a corrupt Administration.”74

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Figure 24. The Young Politician, c. 1772. Charles James Fox uses the Magna Carta to curl his hair in macaroni fashion. By permission of The British Library. F. C. Stephens and M. D. George, eds., British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires. 2083.e.

Yet for Wilkes manliness was not incompatible with conspicuous consumption. Writing from Bath in 1778, Wilkes described his suit to his daughter Polly: I have a new coat and it is all blue and it has a fine edging, and I have a fine silk waistcoat and it is all ribbed and is blue and has likewise a gold edging. And I have small clothes all blue, and fine mother of pearl buttons in every one of which you might see your pretty face. I am undoubtedly the greatest fop in Bath.75

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Figure 25. Richard Earlom, John Wilkes, no date. Despite his claiming to be a fop, Wilkes’s dress is still relatively modest compared to the splendor that would be expected of his daughter Polly. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Like more traditional radicals, Wilkes personalized politics, and a large part of Wilkes’s appeal lay precisely in his defiance of political morality (figure 25).76 Yet being the greatest fop in Bath had its political liabilities. Wilkes’s brand of radicalism enjoyed success in the 1750s and 1760s, but failed to merge with more traditional radicalism 77 or to develop into the sustained movement that more traditional radicals created by adopting rather than

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abandoning the modest manners and dress of aristocratic masculinity. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there continued to exist an underground of “unrespectable radicalism,”78 one that linked liberty with libertinism rather than with self-restraint. Rather than dismissing personal behavior as irrelevant to political conduct, these underground radicals instead attempted, like Wilkes, to redefine political morality. Personal and political were not separate spheres for these radicals, though mainstream radicals saw libertinism and foppery not as alternative definitions of political morality, but as merely private vices incompatible with public virtue. “I cannot reconcile myself to the idea of an immoral patriot, or to that separat[ion] of private from public virtue, which some think to be possible,” Richard Price asserted in 1788.79 For neither mainstream nor underground radicals were public and private separate spheres. But rather than redefining political morality, mainstream radicals merely adopted the familiar language of manly modesty. Despite challenges from alternative definitions of masculinity, modesty remained the dominant language of radicalism. But just as not all radical masculinity was based on modesty, neither was it inherently a middle-class ideology. Middle-class men had no more monopoly on the language of manly virtue than did aristocratic men, as the arguments of radicals such as Cobbett and Cartwright could be easily embraced by working-class radicals.80 After the Reform Act of 1832 divided middle- and working-class radicals by enfranchising middleclass men to the exclusion of the working-class men who often saw themselves as their allies, Chartists quickly adopted the same radical arguments for working-class suffrage.81 Working-class radicals used the “manly language” of republican ideology to distinguish “the industrious laboring population” from factory owners and London merchants who “consume your production in luxury and extravagance,” as the Chartist John Campbell wrote in 1842.82 Of course, adopting the masculinist language of republicanism to decry the exclusion of working-class men from politics in turn excluded the working-class women who often saw themselves as the allies of expanded suffrage.83 The ideology of masculine sobriety thus remained for all classes of men the terms of political legitimacy. Aristocratic, middle-class, and working-class men all agreed that politics was for men; they disagreed only on the class associations of that masculinity. In continuing the eighteenth-century aristocratic association between masculine modesty and political virtue, radical political culture perpetuated the exclusion of women from political participation by relying on

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a construction of women as frivolous followers of fashion. Such was the difficulty confronted by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century feminists, who sought to extend to women the “rights of men.” Such feminists found the radical claims of middle-class men inspiring, but were rebuffed by the masculinist biases of not just conservatives, as we saw in the last chapter, but also radical men.84 Like middle-class radical men, Mary Wollstonecraft appropriated “republican” ideology for her own ends, taking the middle-class critique of aristocracy and applying it to middle-class women, whom, as we shall see, continued to be defined as the arbiters of dress. Wollstonecraft defined both aristocratic men and middle-class women as idle, parasitical, artificial, vicious, and frivolous.85 Feminist radicals found little difficulty in interspersing the constitutionalist language of civic virtue with arguments based on natural rights. Wollstonecraft’s denunciation of “weak, artificial beings . . . [who] undermine the very foundation of virtue” sounds as much like her radical critique of aristocratic men as her feminist critique of middleclass femininity.86 In “extend[ing] the Commonwealth analysis of male corruption and program for male reform to women,”87 Wollstonecraft denounced fashion and luxury, yet defeminized them: “fashion . . . is but a badge of slavery,” she argued, but also noted that “the attention to dress, . . . which has been thought a sexual propensity, I think natural to mankind.”88 By defeminizing fashion and thus degendering virtue, the republican Wollstonecraft sought to give to women the virtue necessary for citizenship: “it is time to effect a revolution in female manners— time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labor by reforming themselves to reform the world,” she wrote in language that by now should be rather familiar.89 For late eighteenth-century feminists, a revolution in female manners was central to women’s political empowerment, since women’s “effeminacy” was a central impediment to their patriotic virtue: “the effeminate mode of educating young ladies” had made women “inadequate to the noble energies of patriotism and virtue.”90 This adoption of radical language was a double-edged sword: that Wollstonecraft could both denounce aristocratic men as “emasculated by hereditary effeminacy” in her Vindication of the Rights of Men, and critique the “prejudices that give a sex to virtue”91 in her Vindications of the Rights of Woman, points out the dilemmas that republican feminists faced. A radical critique of aristocratic effeminacy—predicated on the presumption that modest manliness conferred political legitimacy—was incompatible with women’s claims to participate in politics.92 Thus feminists were dis-

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missed not only by the anti-Jacobins, who saw them as “a female band despising nature’s law,”93 but also by the very masculinist language that they sought to appropriate: among male political reformers, femininity itself was by definition reason enough to deny women suffrage: “Women are excluded” from politics, William Cobbett believed, “because the very nature of their sex makes the exercise of this right incompatible with the harmony and happiness of society.”94 Like aristocratic conservatives, then, middle-class male reformers continued to exclude women from political culture by naturalizing them as frivolous slaves to fashion, a phenomenon of which the late eighteenth-century feminist Mary Robinson was acutely aware: “Why are women excluded from the auditory part of the British senate? . . . Man makes woman a frivolous creature, and then condemns her for the folly he inculcates.”95 Women’s full participation in political life was thus impossible without a degendering of the essential “character” that defined political culture. As Maria Edgeworth aptly summed up the feminist argument in 1795 (though she disagreed with it): “the manners of society must totally change before women can mingle with men in the busy and public scenes of life.”96 “Character is power,” quipped Samuel Smiles in his Self-Help (figure 26).97 Changing notions of the relation between class, gender, and consumption were crucial elements in the birth of a new political culture in nineteenth-century England. By the mid-Victorian era, Samuel Smiles could celebrate the manliness and heroism of the English, but his heroes were self-made men, industrious inventors, producers, and captains of industry. Based on a new relationship between class, consumption, and masculinity, a new nation was fashioned by a new political culture. In the new politics of character, political legitimacy was determined by manliness, modesty, and industry—now the attributes of the self-made man. In redefining aristocrat men as effeminate fops, middle-class men claimed sobriety and “honest English feeling” as something “genuinely” their own. As historians have long acknowledged, England avoided revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in large part because of “the deep constitutionalism” of radicalism.98 England’s middle-class men gained a stake in the political nation not by overthrowing an old regime and replacing it with an entirely new political culture. Rather, they gained access to the formal institutions of power by assimilating an aristocratic language of manly virtue and cultural hegemony into middleclass masculine identity. In its struggle for political power, England’s bourgeoisie did not play a most revolutionary role in history—merely a

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Figure 26. Sir George Reed, Samuel Smiles, no date. Smiles emulated Burke not only in his rhetoric but also in his lack of sartorial splendor. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

reforming one. It did not put an end to all patriarchal, idyllic relations, leaving no other bond than naked self-interest and callous cash payment. It instead replaced one age of chivalry with another: “Trade has now a chivalry of its own,” gloated Henry Dunckley, celebrating “the nobility and dignity of industry and commerce.”99 Chivalry was now an attribute of the self-made man. “Notwithstanding the wail which we

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occasionally hear for the chivalry that is gone,” Samuel Smiles was proud to declare that “our own age has witnessed deeds of bravery and gentleness— of heroic self-denial and manly tenderness—which are unsurpassed in history.”100 Middle-class radicals could attack Edmund Burke’s defense of the age of chivalry as merely a “feminine lamentation [over] the loss of a nick-name or a gewgaw,”101 yet simultaneously appropriate the masculinism which Burke defined as essential to political culture. Political reformers replaced aristocratic cultural hegemony with a middle-class version, appropriating aristocratic discourse and using it to redefine public virtue and the national interest. As contemporaries saw it, middle-class reform came about by a redefinition of masculine character, a reformation in the meanings of consumption, a revival of chivalry in middle-class garb. “On what trifles,” the Toryturned-Radical and all-round masculinist William Cobbett firmly believed, “turn the great events in the life of man.”102

THE LANGUAGE OF CAPITAL Like political reformers, free-trade advocates were also concerned with such trifles. Although Adam Smith’s advocacy of free trade is well known and often invoked, his advice on men’s fashions is less frequently consulted, though more consistently followed. Sharing the “republican” sensibilities of his Augustan predecessors,103 Smith wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that the most perfect modesty and plainness . . . ought to be the chief characteristic of the behavior of a private man. If ever he hopes to distinguish himself, it must be by more important virtues [than manners and dress] . . . Probity and prudence, generosity and frankness, must characterize his behavior upon all ordinary occasions.104

Ever the eighteenth-century Whig, Smith criticized court societies, where “the external graces, the frivolous accomplishments of that impertinent and foolish thing called a man of fashion, are commonly more admired than the solid and masculine virtues.”105 And sounding like the eighteenth-century mercantilists he so opposed, Smith condemned Bernard Mandeville’s “licentious system” of private vices, worrying that, under the wrong conditions, excessive trade would undermine those masculine virtues. One “bad effect of commerce,” Smith wrote in his Lectures on Justice, is that “it sinks the courage of mankind, and

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Figure 27. Sir Daniel Macnee, John Ramsey McCulloch, before 1840. McCulloch was an influential follower and popularizer of Smith and Ricardo. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

tends to extinguish martial spirit. By having their minds constantly employed on the arts of luxury, they grow effeminate and dastardly.”106 Like political reformers, economic reformers cross-dressed as traditional English gentlemen (figure 27). And just as William Cobbett drew on traditional English political culture in linking personal and political reforms, Adam Smith borrowed from mercantilism its moral economy of masculinity: for advocates of free trade like Smith, “luxury” and “ef-

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feminacy” were still impediments to the wealth of nations. Yet like political writers, economic reformers redefined the social meanings of luxury and effeminacy, articulating a new relationship between class, consumption, and economic growth in order to legitimate free trade as economic orthodoxy. From Adam Smith to the 1847 repeal of the Corn Laws, cultural and gender attitudes helped give shape and legitimacy to laissez-faire “capitalism,” as an ideology of the self-made man—whose natural frugality and manly industry were essential to capital accumulation—helped legitimate the arguments for free trade by painting aristocratic political economy as contrary to the well-being of the nation. Classical economists constructed a new moral economy, one that wrested economic policy from aristocratic control and legitimated the interests of middle-class men. The triumph of free trade was by no means inevitable or effortless, precisely because it involved the redefinition of political, social, and moral ideologies. As Adam Smith and his acolytes understood, free trade was as much a cultural, political and social ideology as it was an economic one, since the triumph of free trade would “not only affect the immediate and material interest of the manufacturers and merchants here, but its moral benefits will be felt throughout the whole world,” as the leading free-trade advocate Richard Cobden wrote.107 The triumph of free trade involved more than the acceptance of a new economic paradigm, and thus was resisted, revised, and renegotiated by a variety of interest groups over the course of three quarters of a century. The repeal of the Corn Laws was only the most dramatic moment in the triumph of free trade, one that followed the repeal of wage and apprenticeship regulations in the 1810s, the reduction of excise taxes, the relaxation of the Navigation Acts, the end of prohibitions on joint stock companies in the 1820s, and the reform of the Poor Laws in the 1830s.108 Slow to triumph, free trade was only gradually (and not at all self-evidently) embraced by the merchants and manufacturers enriched by the new industries typically associated with the Industrial Revolution, itself a much slower and more gradual process than traditionally conceived.109 Lacking aristocratic political patronage and therefore unprotected by the mercantilist legislation of an aristocratic parliament, captains of the newer industries did not by definition gravitate toward free trade, since many of them merely called for an extension of protection to the new industries, while more traditional merchants and manufacturers continued to call for protective legislation.110 Nor was there any close connection between the leading manufacturers and the leading economists.111

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There was nothing inevitable, then, about manufacturers embracing free trade, nor any inevitable link between the Industrial Revolution and the triumph of free-trade ideology. Though there was nothing new about manufacturers and merchants defending their economic interests, what was new was the language in which those interests were understood and expressed, and it is as a language that we can best understand the growing appeal of free-trade ideology to middle-class men. Like their mercantilist predecessors, free traders saw the moral values of industry and frugality as essential to the wealth of the nation. “The amount of the riches of every country, and their distribution,” noted the free-trader John Cazenove, “very much depend upon its locality, its institutions, its customs, habits and fashion, its government, and the disposition of its people.”112 Mercantilists and classical economists agreed on ends, but differed on means. “Our immediate forefathers,” wrote the author of New and Old Principles of Trade Compared, had the right idea of spurring industry, but used the wrong methods: “thus their love of commerce stifled commerce, as their love of lucre always betrayed them into profuse expenses.” For free traders, monopolies merely encouraged corruption, “prodigality, favoritism, and necessary mistakes,” while “the system of free trade, on the other hand, preferring abundance to ostentation, would force nothing but a disposition to industry.”113 Like political reformers, economic writers who touted “the political and moral benefits of absolute freedom of commerce” appropriated the dominant discourse they sought to transform.114 Rather than constituting opposing ideals, then, what united “gentlemanly capitalists” and “industrial capitalists” was their shared notion of masculine character, their shared notion of the basis of the wealth of nations, their agreement on the relation between capitalism and culture.115 What divided them was a disagreement about the trade policies that might best sustain a healthy culture of capitalism. Since Adam Smith, capital accumulation has been of central concern to political economy, and it is thus worth underscoring that for classical economists the accumulation of capital was driven as much by cultural habits as by economic structures, since in classical political economy capital accumulation was defined more by habits of consumption (thrift) than by relations of production (the division of labor). “Parsimony, and not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase of capital,” Adam Smith thought. “Industry, indeed, provides the subject which parsimony accumulates. But whatever industry might acquire, if parsimony did not save and store up, the capital would never be the greater.”116 Thus clas-

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sical economists looked to productive habits of consumption as fundamental to the wealth of nations. “The great question relative to the prosperity of the country,” as Jane Marcet saw it, “is, how far that consumption takes place productively, and how far unproductively.”117 Like their mercantilist predecessors, free-trade advocates argued that “the advancement or decline of every nation is dependent”118 on the balance between productive consumption and “sterile consumption,” which included “magnificent apparel, splendid equipages, and sumptuous entertainments.”119 “Some modes of expense,” Adam Smith opined, “seem to contribute more to the growth of public opulence than others,” and least productive, “most trifling of all,” is “amassing a great wardrobe of fine clothes.”120 As in mercantilist discourse, establishing productive habits of consumption was essential to public opulence in free-trade ideology, making capital accumulation both a moral virtue and an economic concept. “Every man ought, therefore,” concluded Jane Marcet, “to consider it as a moral duty, independently of his private interest, to keep his expenditure so far within the limits of his income that he may be enabled every year to make some addition to his capital.”121 Capital accumulation was not the only moral duty codified as an elementary aspect of the economy: as a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century invention, “capital” itself is a term whose origins are cultural and political rather than abstractly scientific. “Capital” was defined at the intersection of culture and “political arithmetic.” In a period that saw great debate over the origin of economic value, classical economists looked to “capital” as the basis for determining wealth and criticized arguments that saw either land or bullion as the basis of value.122 Land and bullion, in classical political economy, were merely forms of capital.123 Classical political economy thus shared with mercantilism the iconoclastic critique of intrinsic-worth theories of value: bullion and money were merely measures of value, not value itself.124 Likewise, classical economists commodified land, treating it as a part of the production process rather than as the basis of the economy.125 In turn, then, “capital” had no intrinsic value, but was wealth productively employed. As in Marx’s classic formula, classical economists defined capital as wealth in circulation, wealth in the process of reproducing itself, rather than being merely consumed or stored.126 Capital was only distinguished from money in that capital was by definition productively used, “consumed by industrious persons, who work whilst they are consuming it,” as Marcet put it.127 “That which is productively consumed is always capital,” James Mill asserted in 1826. “This is a

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property of productive consumption, which deserves to be particularly remarked.”128 Defining “capital” thus depended on the time-honored though admittedly “extremely difficult” distinction between productive consumption and wasteful luxury.129 As the Smithian Thomas Hodgskin wrote in 1827, “the single and only circumstance which gives to any portion of the produce of labor the relation understood by the term Capital, is, that it be made, employed, or consumed, not for the sake of any enjoyment it affords its owner, in either the making, employing, or consuming of it, but for the sake of some ulterior profit.” Capital, Hodgskin argued, was “every species of wealth, except that which serves merely for ornament.”130 Distinguishing between capital and non-capital was thus an aesthetic distinction embedded in the abstract language of science, a distinction that divided ornament from utility, pleasure from profit. Using the triad of land, labor, and capital, political economists defined capital in moral terms: as the first Oxford Professor of Political Economy Nassau William Senior saw it, “abstinence” was the “third productive principle” after labor and “the agency of nature.” “By the word abstinence, we wish to express that agent, distinct from labor and the agency of nature, the concurrence of which is necessary to the existence of capital.”131 As Senior’s definition makes clear, the “spirit of capitalism” was built into the definition of “capital” itself. By definition, luxury consumption remained the greatest impediment to capitalism in early Victorian political economy. The language of “capital” thus became the new language in which cultural attitudes to consumption were encoded, allowing nineteenth-century political economists to claim scientific legitimacy by speaking abstractly about capital accumulation rather than about the cultural infrastructure that made it possible.132 Even during “the great transformation” of political economy, when the market presumably came to be disembedded from political, cultural, and social forces, capital itself was culturally defined.133 As the productive consumption of wealth, “capital” was a moral and cultural term couched in scientific language. Yet “capital” was also a political term. Like the political reformers with whom they were often allied,134 free traders grafted the traditional language of moral economy onto the newer language of class, painting their movement as a struggle between “capital” and “land,” between the productive classes and an unproductive consumer class of aristocratic parasites whose protective legislation emasculated the manly industry of the nation. In the moral economy of free trade, cultural relations to the

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meanings of consumption helped define class positions. Pitting land against capital in defining the source of the wealth of nations involved pitting landlords against “industrious capitalists” in deciding who represented the national interest.135 Unlike aristocratic mercantilists, classical economists used the distinction between productive and unproductive forms of consumption to distinguish “between the productive and the unproductive classes, the proportion between which, as it may be more or less great, and preponderating in favor of the unproductive class, is, in our humble opinion, the test and the measure of national prosperity.”136 The humble opinion of free-trade advocates was that protectionist legislation placed an unproductive class of aristocrats against the nation as a whole, those “clothed with purple and fine linen” against the “pining millions, who are half covered with rags,” “the pampered few and the starving many.”137 In middle-class political economy, class distinctions were (conveniently) “not . . . exactly between the rich and the poor, but between the drones and the workers, whether rich or poor; between privileged and titled idleness, and unprivileged, plebeian industry.”138 Landed gentlemen were associated with luxury, while “the nation” was defined as industrious and frugal. While middle-class productive consumers accumulated capital, pampered aristocrats merely consumed wealth. Contrasting the “feudal spirit and the industrial spirit,”139 the new political economists shared with political radicals a cultural construction of class, defined as much by the means of consumption as by the means of production. Yet classical economists redefined the meanings of consumption by making modes of consumption the intrinsic attributes of class positions. Just as capital was by definition productively consumed wealth, aristocrats were by definition a “leisureclass” of “respectably dressed” conspicuous consumers who by living off rent produced no value of their own.140 Political economists took a cultural language of virtue and transformed it into a social analysis of class, making landed luxury “incompatible with the welfare of the body politic,” and thereby undermining aristocratic men’s claims to be productive citizens.141 In pitting land against capital, consumer class against producer class, effeminate idlers against manly toilers, the new political economy made aristocratic society by definition a drain on the wealth of the nation. Landlords were no longer the moral and economic backbone of the nation, and therefore no longer deserved protective legislation. Like radicals, free traders embedded class-coded definitions of masculine character in their critique of aristocratic protectionism. Free traders considered protective legislation a form of tyranny and luxury,

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familiarly linking these terms with “the decline of freedom and of the national character . . . and of every manly virtue,” as the Smithian contributor to the Edinburgh Review David Buchanan wrote in 1817.142 Meant to protect the “senseless sybaritish follies” of the aristocracy,143 mercantilist legislation was the ideology of “the unreasoning follower of fashion.”144 The editor of the Kelso Chronicle bemoaned the apparent fact that English industry “grows sickly and enervated” when “nursed in the artificial atmosphere” of protective legislation,145 while the freetrader W. Field thought that “manly sentiment” would lead men to industry, “comfortable competence and happy independence.”146 As the leading Tory free-trader William Huskisson considered, “unmanly appeals” for protective legislation served only to undermine “the sober habits and the moral feelings of the community, which confounds honest industry with unprincipled gambling.”147 John Bright felt that the freetrade movement was supported by “a manly and united expression of public opinion,”148 while his parliamentary ally Richard Cobden both criticized aristocratic protectionism as incompatible with “manly vigor” and belittled aristocratic notions of free trade as merely a free trade “in silks and ribbons, French lace, and the like”149 (figure 28). From Adam Smith to Richard Cobden, then, free traders used the language of manly virtue in their critique of protectionist legislation. Following fashion was inconsistent with manly vigor and capital accumulation. The attack on the Corn Laws, then, was framed as a cultural critique of aristocratic society as a whole. The Corn Laws were merely the “selfish class legislation”150 of “aristocratic vampires, . . . gentlemen swindlers and black guards, proud imbeciles, wholesale seducers and heart breakers of the loveliest women, church and devil supporting infidels, self-seeking and self-idolizing monopolists, gaudy, grandiloquent, but idle, superficial, useless butterflies, or rather gay and destructive wasps, consuming nearly all of, without contributing the least portion to, the national hive,” wrote the somewhat impassioned Rev. Henry Edwards in 1842.151 Living “in a style of luxury superior to their neighbors . . . at the expense of the community,”152 aristocrats passed protective legislation that hampered the pursuit of national well-being. The national interest was synonymous with the interests of capital, while land was merely another commodity that deserved no special privileges. It was free trade that would defend English liberty, making England “the example of the most perfect freedom which mankind is capable of enjoying,” as W. W. Whitmore saw it. “Shall it be that this prospect shall be blighted by the prejudices of a class who alone stand in the way of

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Figure 28. Lowes Cato Dickinson, Richard Cobden, 1870. Despite Cobden’s worries about the ascendancy of feudalism in political life, Cobden himself adopted the pose of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

this consummation, and who are thereby really undermining the wealth and stability of the very interest they profess to represent?”153 As opposed to the artificial imposition of “a system of surveillance and restriction,” only free trade was able to “render a man industrious” and “wean him from extravagance.”154 Like their mercantilist predecessors, free traders wanted to design trade policies that would encourage the culture of capitalism, but unlike mercantilists, free traders con-

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sidered industry and frugality to be natural attributes. Free traders redefined the relation between culture and capitalism by naturalizing this historically constructed definition of men’s conduct. Rather than “artificial regulation” and state surveillance, only “the natural current of industry and capital”155 could promote virtuous and profitable conduct. In classical economics, if there was no need for the state to restrain luxury, there was equally no need for it to promote thrift. Sumptuary law, protective legislation, and the moral example of Britain’s elite were no longer necessary to encourage “the natural prevalence of prudence over imprudence,” as Jeremy Bentham put it.156 Luxury was merely a passing fancy, “only momentary and occasional,” as Adam Smith wrote, while natural ambition “comes with us from the womb,” and thus would naturally lead to thrift. If frugality was natural, neither the state nor aristocratic example were needed to inculcate it. The state should merely encourage capital accumulation by establishing the best conditions for the free expression of the natural inclination to amass capital: In the midst of all the exactions of government, . . . capital has been silently and gradually accumulated by the private frugality and good conduct of individuals, by their universal, continual, and uninterrupted effort to better their own condition. It is this effort, protected by law and allowed by liberty to exert itself in the manner that is most advantageous, which has maintained the progress of England towards opulence and improvement in almost all former times, and which, it is to be hoped, will do so in all future times.157

Free traders thus undermined the need for aristocratic control of the economy by naturalizing industry and frugality as “part of the original constitution of man.”158 For classical economists, the frugal and industrious man was a selfmade man, driven not by political admonition or elite example but by natural self-interest. Social control had been replaced by self-control: what was once considered “second nature” had become nature pure and simple, and thus the state could leave nature alone. Free-trade ideology not only shifted masculine virtue onto middle-class identity, it naturalized it, depoliticized it—to the point where, by the mid-nineteenth century, some political economists, following “Say’s Law,” no longer even considered consumption an important issue.159 Just as political radicals naturalized a historical construction of the “rights of man,” classical economists naturalized a cultural construction of masculinity by embedding it deep within the language of capital. Free trade, then, does not mark the demoralization of economic relations, as is usually asserted, but rather a naturalization of that morality, a naturalization that made

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unnecessary explicit moralization, and that made possible economists’ claims to scientific objectivity. Only by moralizing nature and naturalizing morality could economics be de-moralized. Of course, there were many more varieties of political economy in early Victorian England than just aristocratic protectionism and a middle-class free trade. A thriving working class political economy often used the same critique of aristocratic luxury consumption, yet extended it to a critique of middle-class “monopolisers and forestallers, plundering nabobs, slave traders, corrupt statesmen, traitors, and all sorts of griping miscreants,” as the Paineite egalitarian Thomas Spence put it.160 Though supportive of repealing the Corn Laws, the Chartist John Campbell prophetically warned that a working-class alliance with the Anti-Corn Law League would have the same result as the Reform Act of 1832: the “industrious laboring population” would be betrayed by a middle-class that “consume[s] your production in luxury and extravagance.”161 Likewise, early socialists such as William Thompson fused traditional English moral economy with Ricardo’s labor theory of value in their critique of capitalism.162 To be sure, middle-class free traders had no monopoly on either moral economy or free trade, as working-class advocates used it for their own ends. Equally, Tory radicals used a “republican” critique of middle-class capitalism while nonetheless defending free trade. Piercy Ravenstone supported free trade, denounced the Corn Laws, and yet complained of “this growth of property, this greater ability to maintain idle men, and unproductive industry, that in political economy is called capital,” linking this capitalist class to the pernicious growth of luxury consumption.163 Aristocrats and their supporters used free-trade arguments for their own ends as well. An important group of liberal Tories promoted free trade as compatible with aristocratic political hegemony. Taking up Malthus’s “theory of gluts,” these liberal Tories worried more about overproduction than overconsumption. The Tory sympathizer Thomas Chalmers opposed the Corn Laws and argued for “the intimate alliance which obtains between the economic and the moral.” Yet Chalmers also criticized the “splendid extravagance” of middle-class speculators and defended the landlord’s “luxuries of life” as necessary for stimulating industry.164 The Oxford professor of political economy Richard Whately also defended aristocratic luxury consumption against the doctrine “that national wealth is morally mischievous as introducing luxury, (in the worst sense of the word,) effeminacy, profligacy of manners, and depravation of principle.”165 These pro-aristocratic and pro-

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luxury free traders nonetheless constituted a minority voice in the debate over economic policy,166 and we should not easily conflate the triumph of free trade with a Mandevillian end to moral qualms about luxury. Though much, for example, has been made of Adam Smith’s sometimes positive consideration of consumption, Smith praised ordinary consumption rather than luxury consumption.167 In the main, freetrade political economists condemned aristocratic luxury and considered middle-class “industry and frugality” as the moral infrastructure of England’s economy. If, therefore, “the success of the middle-class challenge to aristocratic leadership was as clear in standard masculine appearance as it was in the repeal of the Corn Laws,”168 it was because they were part of the same gendered political economy. The evil to be eradicated in both instances was an aristocratic monopoly of the means of consumption—in the form of luxury and the distribution of corn. “Cherishing the means of production,”169 free trade would liberate masculinity from the corrupt manners of the land-owning consumer class. Rather than promoting a “fabulous nobility,” free trade would promote “honest means of industry,” preventing the nation from sinking “into a kind of proud, effeminate sloth.”170 Gender ideology informed both family fortunes and the wealth of nations, since in early Victorian England these were by no means separate spheres. Lecturing on “The Economics and Morals of Free Trade,” Philip Harwood argued that there is in truth no separating these. The free-trade morality is good economy; and the free-trade economics, when taken in connection with the happiness and the misery of those millions of human beings whose physical, social and moral well-being is contingent on wise and honest commercial legislation—the economics of free trade, thus viewed, assume a profound moral interest.171

Beginning with Adam Smith, then, free-trade ideologists articulated a new relationship between moral economy and political economy, one that turned a mercantilist masculinity into a laissez-faire masculinity. “THE GREAT MASCULINE RENUNCIATION” Given the reliance in political and economic reform movements on masculinist conceptions of consumption and manners, it is no wonder that a reformation in men’s consumer habits was simultaneous with the great transformations in political and economic culture in the late eighteenth

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and early nineteenth centuries. These transformations were mutually influencing: changing habits and ideals of consumption spurred a transformation in political and economic relations, while changing political and economic relations and ideals influenced a reform in men’s consumer behavior. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, contemporaries witnessed this reform in men’s consumption, what costume historians have long termed “the great masculine renunciation.” Yet costume historians have too easily given middle-class origins to this tendency for men to adopt increasingly modest and uniform dress.172 John Carl Flugel, the original author of the term, wrote in 1930: “as commercial and industrial ideals conquered class after class, until they finally became accepted even by the aristocracies of all the more progressive countries, the plain and uniform costume associated with such ideals has, more and more, ousted the gorgeous and varied garments associated with the older order.”173 Attributing this rise of sartorial modesty to the increasing acceptance of “the bourgeois moral virtues of industry, discipline, thrift and sobriety,” and to the subsequent bourgeoisification of the aristocracy, is the common consensus among historians of costume and manners.174 Certainly aristocratic and middle-class men’s clothing became darker and simpler beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century, concomitant with a larger reformation of manners. And certainly political, social, and economic change gave impulse to this renunciation, as contemporaries themselves noted.175 Yet by now it should be clear that the ideology and practice of masculine modesty began in an earlier era, and for a different class, and that a “plain and uniform costume” was not inherently or ahistorically a middle-class ideal. Having outlined the ways in which political and economic reformers adopted and transformed aristocratic ideals of masculinity, we will be able to better understand how the great masculine renunciation was the result of a middleclass adoption of ready-to-wear aristocratic notions of masculinity. As we have already seen in the previous chapter, the ideology of masculine renunciation began in an earlier era at a different social level, and was important in fashioning the social, political, and gender identity of eighteenth-century aristocratic men. The late eighteenth-century “great masculine renunciation” has its origins in a much older political and social process than historians have considered—an aristocratic response to new ideas of manliness legitimated by the culture that emerged after the Glorious Revolution. The middle-class adoption of the ideology of

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inconspicuous consumption merely extended a process begun in the late seventeenth century, one that first found expression in the modest threepiece suit. In continuing the association between masculinity and simplicity, then, the “great masculine renunciation” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was merely an extenuation of a century-old process. When the American-born engraver James Malcolm observed Englishmen’s clothing in 1808, he testified to a gradual yet profound transformation: “male dress changed almost insensibly from formality to ease. This was effected merely by altering the cut of the clothes: the materials are the same as they were an hundred years past; the colors however are more grave.”176 Relative to the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century men’s dress was clearly graver. Yet the process that led to this new gravity was itself almost insensible, since in 1808 renunciation as a process was nothing new. What was new was a political and social dynamic that propelled masculine renunciation even further. While the early eighteenthcentury renunciation was propelled by an aristocratic political, social, and economic disdain for the presumably effeminating effects of unregulated consumer culture, the “great masculine renunciation” from 1750 to 1850 was propelled by a struggle between aristocratic and middleclass men for political, social, and economic superiority, for the moral high ground that allowed them to claim to speak for the nation. Well before the Great Reform Act and the repeal of the Corn Laws, the self-made man had already donned a new image. Whether in praise or condemnation, a variety of contemporary observers noted that by the 1820s and 1830s, men’s clothing had become graver and simpler. The German visitor Christian Augustus Gottlieb Goede noted in 1821 the “natural and unaffected simplicity” of English modes, despite some conspicuous exceptions: “They have uniformly rejected all those extravagant and overcharged ornaments, by which the modish coxcombs of other countries so frequently attract our observation.”177 After an extended stay in Paris, in 1828 Hermann, Furst von Puckler-Muskau felt like one of those conspicuous exceptions, complaining of the “overstrained simplicity” that left him feeling like a fop in his Parisian costume.178 Americans felt more at home: Heman Humphrey, the Anglophilic president of Amherst College, toured England in the 1830s, and praised the new modesty. “The English,” he observed in 1838, “are less addicted to show and tinsel, I believe, and more studious of real comfort than any other nation.”179 On his own tour, Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the “studied plainness” of English dress as a manifestation of republican

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self-cultivation: “pretension and vapouring are once for all distasteful. They keep to the other extreme of low tone in dress and manners.”180 Like foreign visitors, domestic observers were also divided over the triumph of this increase in plainness. The political economist Nassau William Senior was pleased to see the general practice of his “productive principle” of abstinence among men of the capitalist classes. Critics of conspicuous consumption had long complained that what had once been a luxury was now only a decency; in 1836, however, Senior observed just the opposite: “The dress which in England was only decent a hundred years ago, would be almost extravagant now.”181 In 1839, the essayist William Hazlitt applauded the fact that “a very striking change has . . . taken place in dress of late years, and some progress has been made in taste and elegance,” whereby “the monstrous pretensions to distinctions in dress have dwindled away by tacit consent.”182 Lovers of courtly splendor were less enthused by the new modesty. The royalist fashion writer Elizabeth Stone lamented that “the days of velvet and embroidery were irrecoverably flown,” complaining that among “even the most dressy of our men of fashion,” the “style has been plain, almost to scrupulosity.”183 By the mid-nineteenth century, then, defenders of aristocratic splendor looked back to the eighteenth century as the bygone days of velvet and embroidery, reversing the seventeenth-century cliché that the past was a period of usually unostentatious nobles. With some reservation, Alexander Andrews saw the eighteenth century as a golden age of sartorial splendor: “In the particulars of costume we have often thought that our grandfathers displayed more taste than we have been able to infuse into many of our modern fashions. There was something grand, commanding, even dignified, in the broad and embroidered coat, the long waistcoat, the full wig; the mere cock of the hat could be made to convey a dozen different impressions to the beholder; the lace ruffles were, perhaps, dandified and effeminate, but there was something rich even in them.”184 Just as early eighteenth-century commentators saw the Restoration as a reign of “luxury and effeminacy,” early nineteenth-century commentators looked through their own period of male sartorial reform to view their immediate past, for good or bad, as a “dandified and effeminate” age. While contemporaries were certain that a sartorial reform had occurred, they were less clear when it had begun. “Of late years” was as specific as William Hazlitt could be.185 While Elizabeth Stone dated the decline of “gaudy trimmings” to the 1760s, Alexander Andrews believed that a more sober coat appeared “about the year 1780,” though in gen-

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eral he could be no more specific than to say that “towards the close of the [eighteenth] century we may find the fashions of gentlemen’s dress gradually verging into what we may call modern costume.” For Andrews, this late century shift to “modern costume” was itself the antecedent of a gradual reform throughout the century: “without any violent changes, the dress of 1720 may be traced to have almost imperceptibly glided into that of 1800; the various trimmings and trappings being abandoned, and the showy colors and rich materials giving place to more sober and less costly ones.”186 Contemporaries such as Andrews and James Malcolm thus saw the “great masculine renunciation” as a gradual revolution, one where men’s dress glided almost insensibly throughout the eighteenth century from richness to gravity, from formality to ease. It is precisely the gradual nature of this reformation of male manners that illustrates the social dynamic propelling the great masculine renunciation. The self-made man only gradually emerged out of an aristocratic closet, appropriating aristocratic ideals and naturalizing them as inherently middle class. Certainly something was perceptibly new in the early nineteenth century: a “studied plainness,” as Emerson called it. Yet the cultural ideals of masculinity that this renunciation embodied were all too familiar. For their part, nineteenth-century etiquette books retained eighteenth-century aristocratic prescriptions for gentlemen’s dress, whether writing for middle-class or aristocratic audiences.187 Critical of “the effeminacy of the age,” this “age of refinement and luxury,” with its “extensive system of luxurious competition in our mode of living,” late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century courtesy literature saw fashion and luxury as “totally inconsistent with the solidity and manliness of disposition peculiar to the people of England.”188 And since it was inconsistent with manliness, fashion was equally incompatible with gentility: “Fashion and gentility are very distinct things,” wrote Charles Day in 1836, “for which reason, people really of the highest rank are too proud to become martyrs to any prevailing mode.”189 By separating fashion from manliness and gentility, courtesy writers like Day prescribed anti-fashion for men. Inconspicuous consumption was the common cliché of courtesy literature: “let your costume be as unostentatious as possible, lest people only remark that ‘your dress is as course as your mind’”; men’s dress “will naturally be winning and attractive if we think not of them, but lose their force in proportion to our endeavour to make them such”; “the dress of a gentleman should be such as not to excite any special observation, unless it be for neatness and propriety.”190 Or as one anonymous courtesy writer aptly summed

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it up: “The great art in dressing well is to do so without making yourself conspicuous.”191 This ideal of inconspicuous consumption was based on an unchanged politics of gender: manly virtue was essential to English liberty. As the late eighteenth-century professor of rhetoric Hugh Blair understood it, “order, frugality, and economy . . . are the basis on which liberty, independence, and true honor must rise.”192 Like early eighteenth-century aristocratic courtesy theory, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century courtesy writers argued that “the only effectual means to preserve the spirit of liberty, is to cherish a manly temper,” as John Andrews put it in 1782,193 or that “the worth and strength of a state depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men,” as Samuel Smiles put it in 1859. An aristocratic discourse on manners had become a middle-class discourse. Edmund Burke had been transformed into Samuel Smiles: “Morals and manners,” Smiles wrote in a direct paraphrase, “ . . . are of greater importance than laws, which are but one of their manifestations. The law touches us here and there, but manners are about us everywhere, pervading society like the air we breath.”194 Manliness, then, continued to be defined in opposition to effeminacy and luxury (“a manly spirit loves simplicity, and does not mind trifles,” wrote the Scottish moral philosopher James Beattie 195), and thus continued to be defined in opposition to a feminized consumer culture. Though certainly amplified by new social and economic relations, Victorian separate spheres ideology grew out of an older aristocratic tradition that predated the Industrial Revolution, and that defined men as productive citizens against a purportedly unproductive, feminized sphere of consumption.196 It was this separate spheres ideology that confirmed and reinforced aristocratic ideologies of taste. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury treatises on manners and taste, “the beauty of each sex [was] seen only through the medium of the virtues belonging to each,” as the painter and aesthetician Frances Reynolds put it in 1789.197 Courtesy literature thus continued to define women as the fair sex, “the arbiters of dress, and also of reputations in the fashionable world.”198 Women came to be seen as “vicarious consumers,” to use Veblen’s formulation of this patriarchal ideology, one which defined women’s role as a purely vicarious one, defining their husband’s status without reference to the ways in which they might conceive of class or status outside the confines of their husband’s social or economic position.199 As the Quarterly Review in 1847 described women’s dress: “The responsibilities of a wife in this department are very serious. In point of fact she dresses for

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two . . . Nature has expressly assigned her as the only safe investment for his vanities.”200 Of course, this notion of women as “vicarious consumers” was fraught with dangers for a patriarchal culture, since it gave women agency that could potentially disrupt her economic unit by a too eager engagement in the very luxury consumption she was asked to perform.201 Containing this agency created by separate spheres ideology was central to early nineteenth-century discussions of femininity.202 Thus women continued to negotiate the conflicting demands “of being supremely beautiful, and equally modest.”203 Though John Burton concluded that “modesty is the brightest ornament of the female sex,” he also considered that “to improve the natural beauties of your person, by a graceful attire, is your peculiar privilege.”204 This condemnation with faint praise often lacked even the faint praise: “The sweetest flowers,” William Cobbett opined, “when they become putrid, stink the most; and a nasty woman is the nastiest thing in nature.”205 In this century-old double message to women, “beauty” continued to be “that fatal ornament of the fair sex,” as William Dodd put it.206 Constructing women as consumers yet seeking to contain the potentially dangerous agency created by that construction, courtesy literature continued to condemn luxury at the same time that it feminized it. If courtesy writers called upon women to “esteem the frivolous, though often troublesome arts of dress, but as a tax you are in some sort obliged to pay to the folly of the age,”207 it was also the folly of the age to condemn this prescribed frivolity as politically and economically disruptive. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English culture, however, gender roles were attributed not only to a sense of the English political and social order, as in the early eighteenth century, but were ascribed to a universal natural order. “The idea of equality of the sexes is truly ridiculous,” John Corry bellowed in 1803. “Man is the natural protector of woman; and the shade of subordination is so delicate as to be almost imperceptible. Let the fair-sex meekly enjoy their privileges, and leave imperial man in possession of his prerogatives.”208 In this imperial appeal to nature, women were “an animal fond of dress,” “inclined by an inherent bias”209 and “a natural desire . . . to please and to captivate.”210 Grafting English culture onto a universalized nature, courtesy literature by the reign of Victoria had concluded that “the love of dress is natural to woman.”211 By attributing gender distinctions to a universal human nature, courtesy writers removed English “character” from its historical roots: “An Englishman has a natural modesty,” thought John Reeves, “which is not unmixed with a quiet, reserved, unassuming

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pride.”212 As William Hazlitt understood it, despite “the vices of softness and effeminacy [that] sink deeper with age . . . by means of luxury and civilization,” nonetheless one’s character is “born with us and never quits us . . . This internal, original bias, remains always the same, true to itself to the very last.”213 “Natural taste” tended toward simplicity, while artificial tastes produced deformity and vulgarity.214 Luxury and effeminacy, then, were not only contrary to the “innate dignity”215 of English character, but contrary to nature itself: “most of the absurdity and ridicule we meet with in the world,” John Hamilton Moore complained in 1802, “is generally owing to the impertinent affectation of excelling in characters men are not fit for, and for which nature never designed them.”216 Universalizing and naturalizing masculine simplicity made traditionally aristocratic ideals of masculinity available to middle-class men. The aristocratic origins of middle-class masculinity could be erased. The “original character” of men was transported out of its political origins and into a mythical timeless past to be recovered.217 By universalizing male gentility, courtesy writers redefined it, allowing them to claim that the behavior of middle-class men “was not less firm and manly than that of our nobility and gentry.”218 Gentility was no longer class specific: “good-breeding,” opined Thomas Carlyle, has “no special connexion with wealth or birth; . . . it lies in human nature itself.”219 By the midnineteenth-century, universalizing gentility was standard ideological work for courtesy writers: “True nobility resideth in the soul; . . . there is no dignity but in virtue”; “Riches and rank have no necessary connection with genuine gentlemanly qualities”; “Gentility is neither in birth, manner, nor fashion—but in the mind”; “true grandeur consists not in birth nor titles, but in virtue alone.”220 Nineteenth-century courtesy writers thus retained eighteenth-century aristocratic ideals of gentility, yet redefined the social status of “the gentleman” to make it accessible to a middle-class audience. Grounded in human nature itself, the appellation “gentleman” took on its modern definition, no longer referring to a man of gentle birth, a man of the gentry, but to purely characterological traits. This appropriation and transformation of aristocratic masculinity allowed middle-class men to be simultaneously genteel and self-made, thereby both gaining the legitimacy associated with aristocratic cultural values and distancing themselves from the aristocracy itself. Unlike aristocratic gentility, middle-class gentility was acquired not through birth, title, or university education, but through “those inborn qualities

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of nature, which alone can be relied on as determining the destiny of men.”221 Middle-class gentility was authentic, natural, self-made, the result of “self-respect, self-help, application, industry, [and] integrity” rather than the product of artificial social institutions,222 and thus “gentleman” was no longer synonymous with “aristocrat.” After noting that the term gentleman could be applied “in any class” since it was not “applied exclusively to birth,” Auguste Louis, baron de Stael-Holstein, well understood that “gentleman” and “aristocrat” were not synonymous: “If a man of the highest birth depart in his conduct or merely in his manners from what his situation requires of him, you will soon hear it said, even by persons of the lowest class, ‘Though a Lord, he is not a gentleman.’”223 One could be both a gentleman and a critic of aristocracy. Thus we should not consider this middle-class adoption of gentlemanly status as a “gentrification” or feudalization of middle-class men, as an abandonment of presumably authentic middle-class values, as has often been argued,224 since middle-class gentility continued to be defined in opposition to its aristocratic version. Middle-class men adopted the aristocratic language of gentlemanly antipathy to fashion while turning it against the aristocracy itself, and thus were able to claim masculine virtue as a middle-class trait. Yet courtesy manuals were by no means anti-aristocratic in tone, since they were not directed solely to the middle class. The vast majority were socially conservative, calling for the preservation of “that first principle of order and subordination, on which the very existence of society depends.”225 The social order envisioned by courtesy manuals was by no means a democratic one, nor one that even saw the middle class as the predominant class. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century courtesy literature took the radical middle-class language of “industrious simplicity”226 and removed its radical implications by defining simplicity as an aspect of gentility—by now a century-old recuperative procedure in English aristocratic culture. Though courtesy books criticized “the gay part of our nobility” as “the arbiters of fashion,”227 they nonetheless maintained the eighteenth-century notion of an aristocracy based on superior taste, a “natural aristocracy . . . to be found in that superior fineness of the sense.”228 Courtesy writers stressed “the great value of sober example in eminent station,” precisely because of radical critiques of aristocratic manners and birth: “example is every thing, because opinion is every thing,” as the evangelical Tory William Roberts intoned in his Portraiture of a Christian Gentleman. Given the middle-class challenge, projecting an image of the aristocratic gentleman as “frank, nat-

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ural, and simple—shall we say manly?” was essential to the preservation of aristocracy in England.229 In a polity that lacked a separation between public and private, as Roberts saw it,230 “public men” were always on stage, and thus aristocratic men were quick to understand the need to respond to the radical challenge. As the conservative John Bowdler wrote in his 1797 Reform or Ruin: Take your Choice!, “Let them reform, first themselves, their expenses, their wives and children, their servants and dependents; and then exert all their influence, as landlords, as magistrates, as friends, and as neighbours; encouraging and protecting the sober and industrious; discouraging and punishing, with candour, but with vigor, the lawless and profligate.”231 If radicals had originally wrested the condemnation of luxury and effeminacy from aristocratic culture in order to critique aristocracy itself, aristocratic men could easily reappropriate it to justify their own position. “Among other modes of restoring lustre to the peerage,” the Anglican preacher and loyal establishment Whig Vicesimus Knox opined in the wake of the French Revolution, “ . . . care should be taken, in early youth, to prevent the body from being weakened by excess or effeminacy.” Conceding that “the fancied advantage of patrician blood flowing in their veins . . . does the public no service,” and wary of the example of the French nobility, Knox sought to create “a nobility of virtue and merit, superadded to the nobility of civil institution.”232 “Let us profit by the example of France” was a common refrain among late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers on manners, who often saw “opposition to the luxurious pleasures and ostentatious magnificence of the rich and great” as the origin of the French Revolution.233 Clearly this was a lesson the English aristocracy had already learned in their own aristocratic crisis in the seventeenth century, and the French Revolution merely added new impetus to the “reform or ruin” sentiment already active in aristocratic culture. By claiming “to promote virtue by their example,”234 then, nineteenth-century aristocratic men could reclaim cultural hegemony in the face of radical critiques of aristocratic luxury. The familiarity of this recuperative strategy—appropriating a radical critique of aristocratic luxury in order to justify aristocratic moral superiority—should explain why aristocratic men saw masculine renunciation as being in their own class interest. And understanding this renunciation as a recuperative strategy should also warn us against interpreting aristocratic renunciation as “embourgeoisement” or “taking on a bourgeois hue,” since aristocratic men retained their own class identity while nonetheless modifying their manners.235 Just as middle-

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class men had appropriated an originally aristocratic critique of luxury and effeminacy in order to help define middle-class masculine identity, aristocratic men used that middle-class critique of aristocratic luxury and effeminacy to redefine their own class and gender identity. Thus aristocratic and middle-class men used a common language of masculinity for divergent ends. Driven by this struggle for political and economic power, aristocratic and middle-class men competed to display ever greater degrees of modesty, furthering a fashion system of inconspicuous consumption that had been, with the exception of the later Restoration, central to men’s fashion change since the origins of the three-piece suit. The great masculine renunciation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was thus less the triumph of middle-class culture; rather, it was the result of middle-class men’s appropriation of an earlier aristocratic culture, of aristocratic men’s appropriation of radical critiques of aristocracy, and of a combined attempt by aristocratic and middle-class men to exclude working-class men and all women from the increasingly shared institutions of power. It is this common language—the ideal of “the gentleman”—that has led scholars to interpret the early Victorian era as a period of “cultural convergence” between two opposing class ideals, a period of class compromise, an age of equipoise.236 Yet this process of appropriation and competitive modesty was neither one of middle-class gentrification nor one of the embourgeoisement or capitulation of aristocratic men. Rather, the social dynamic that propelled the “great masculine renunciation” was an ongoing struggle between middle-class and aristocratic men for what the radical James Burgh had called “superior example,” or what the conservative Vicesimus Knox called “virtuous emulation,”237 a struggle for control of the means and meanings of consumption, a struggle to claim authentic ownership of English masculinity— a struggle, in the end, that was never fixed, never stable, never reached a point of equipoise or compromise, precisely, as we will see, because it rested upon an unfixed and unstable definition of masculinity. Simply stated, the great masculine renunciation occurred as a result of this struggle for “superior example” in a culture where, as William Cobbett well understood, “superior sobriety, industry and activity, are a still more certain source of power.”238

chapter 7

Inconspicuous Consumption

“Superior example” is fundamentally an oxymoron: once the example is followed, it is no longer superior. “Superior example” only works if there is a temporal distinction between leaders and followers, a time lapse between superiors setting the example and their inferior emulators. It is the temporal instability within this definition of elite masculinity that gave the great masculine renunciation its central dynamic. Changes in male fashion were driven not by a social dynamic of conspicuous consumption, but by a dynamic of inconspicuous consumption, elite understatement, superior example in manly modesty. Once the example of masculine renunciation was followed, it lost its ability to define a social and political elite. And once renunciation became fashionable, it lost its claim to being masculine opposition to fashion. As William Hazlitt rhetorically asked in 1821: “Suppose public spirit to become the general principle of action in the community—how would it show itself? Would it not then become the fashion, like loyalty, and have its apes and parrots, like loyalty? The man of principle would no longer be distinguished from the crowd.”1 To regain distinction from its apes and parrots, a greater degree of “public spirit” needed to be shown, furthering this compulsion to renunciation. It was invidious indistinction that drove men’s clothing changes. Opposition to luxury and effeminacy promoted, rather than inhibited, fashion change. As a political statement, then, elite men’s disdain for fashion was itself the motivating dynamic of men’s fashion change. Writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Bernard Mande173

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ville affronted English political morality by arguing that encouraging “private vices” rather than “public virtue” would bring greater public benefits. Mandeville criticized the recently triumphant Whig notion of the compatibility of manly virtue with economic well-being: only by encouraging luxury could England’s economy grow—a compellingly cynical “doctrine of beneficial luxury” that has dominated accounts of English consumer culture.2 Yet this Veblenite theory of conspicuous consumption cannot account for changes in men’s fashion, since they were motivated not by Mandevillian private vices but by the invidious pursuit of public virtue. The great masculine renunciation reveals a new consumer dynamic at work, at least among upper- and middle-class Englishmen: in an “age of mosaic, gold and other trash,”3 when the ability of elites to maintain social distinction by conspicuous consumption was no longer guaranteed,4 elite men’s fashion was defined as opposition to luxury, and thus was driven not by a sociology of conspicuous consumption and invidious distinction (the attempt to keep up with, or ahead of, the Joneses), but by a dynamic of inconspicuous consumption and invidious indistinction (the attempt to keep away from, hidden from, and superior to, the Joneses). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was competition for social distinction—fashion itself—that motivated the anti-fashion movement of the great masculine renunciation. It was English fashion, under the guise of anti-fashion, that “diffused the taste for plain substantial hats, shoes, and coats, through Europe,” as Emerson observed.5 Despite all their efforts, English gentlemen were now seen as fashion leaders, standard bearers of European taste. “This uniformity in externals,” Christian Auguste Gottlieb Goede well understood, “is not a little effected by the dominion of fashion, which no where exercise such tyrannic sway.”6 In establishing the “tyrannic sway” of inconspicuous consumption, then, the great masculine renunciation solved little: in opposing the tyranny of fashion, it nonetheless failed to remove men from the instabilities, impositions, inauthenticities, and artificialities of fashion. As Mary Wray observed as early as 1722: ’tis impossible for all to avoid the fashion, for if all avoided it, how could anything be the fashion? And that which all or most agree in, and consent to, will be necessarily the fashion: so all peoples avoiding the fashion would be only setting up another fashion.7

Elite understatement was still a fashion statement; inconspicuous consumption still a form of consumption, however inverted or opposed to

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luxury it may have been. And once renunciation became fashionable, it lost its social cachet. Identified as a fashion, anti-fashion lost its occult status, its ability to stand outside and above the world of fashion. Not only was the “man of principle” indistinguishable from the crowd, he was equally indistinguishable from the “man of fashion.” Indeed, what marks the great masculine renunciation is that fops dressed like men of principle. “The beaux, indeed,” confessed John Corry, “are not altogether so effeminate as they appeared last winter. . . . They have not, however, divested themselves of that ridiculous severity of look, which they assume in order to appear men of spirit and consequence.”8 It was now possible to be both a man of spirit and a complete beau. “Even Brummell their fop was marked by the severest simplicity in dress,” Emerson conceded; “even the foremost votaries of fashion rarely display a sumptuous wardrobe,” Christian Augustus Gottlieb Goede noted.9 Even the dandy had become the sincerest man of principle (figure 29).10 Despite two centuries of sartorial reform, despite the fact that Victorian men dressed little like their Elizabethan counterparts, men still complained that the man of principle could not be distinguished from the fops of the fashionable crowd. Indeed, precisely because of the success of sartorial reform, the modest three-piece suit failed to resolve upperand middle-class men’s anxieties about stabilizing their class and gender identities. Effeminacy might appear in a three-piece suit. In the new confused mingle mangle of apparel, then, the adoption of “studied plainness” had made it no easier to trust appearances. Indeed, with the great masculine renunciation it was now even more difficult to distinguish between men of principle and men of fashion. As early as 1711, Lord Shaftesbury had worried that “true gravity” could be too easily affected: We can never be too grave, if we can be assur’d we are really what we suppose. And we can never too much honor or revere any thing for grave; if we are assur’d the thing is grave, as we apprehend it. The main point is to know always true gravity from the false.11

It was just as easy to affect gravity and plainness as to affect extravagance—perhaps even easier. “There cannot be greater vulgarity than an affectation of superior simplicity,” grumbled the author of Habits of Good Society.12 No more than conspicuous consumption, inconspicuous consumption failed to convey “superior example.” “Hence it is, that what is called gravity in many situations of life deserves so little respect,” complained John Aiken; “ . . . gravity of demeanor, as opposed to levity, is merely the dress of a dignified station, and may easily be assumed

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Figure 29. Adam Buck, Thomas Hope and his family, 1813. Thomas Hope descended from a family of bankers whose wealth enabled him to purchase the London mansion of the countess of Warwick. Interested in architecture, furniture, and clothing design, Hope had himself and his family portrayed in neo-classical style, his daughter indirectly reproducing the maternal tasks of her mother while the soberly dressed father stands partially removed from them. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

along with the robe, the chain, and the peruke, by the most insignificant tool of office, who has just sense enough to avoid playing the fool out of season.”13 Gravity could not be trusted to connote virtue, precisely because it was equally a fashion susceptible to affectation. Modest masculinity was no less performative, and no more authentic, than luxury and effeminacy, since there was little sartorial difference between “studied plainness” and “the frivolous man [who] . . . studies the dress and not the characters of men.”14 “The difference,” Arthur Freeling asserted, “between a gentleman and a fop is, that the latter values himself on his

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dress; the former laughs at, while at the same time he knows he must not neglect it.”15 In an age of uniformity, the difference was no longer what one wore, but whether one took one’s clothing seriously. In the end, then, as the author of Advice to a Young Gentleman well understood, “modesty is an appearance assumed to gain an object.”16 Despite defining masculinity in opposition to affectation, appearance, and performativity, then, courtesy manuals (almost by definition) undermined themselves by teaching how to assume an appearance of masculine modesty. If the “frivolous man” had been condemned for studying dress and not character, courtesy manuals nonetheless prescribed that “the utmost care should be exercised to avoid even the appearance of desiring to attract attention,” thus collapsing the distinction between plainness and frivolity, modesty and affectation.17 Respectable masculinity still needed to be maintained with “the utmost care,” precisely because “the respectable man is one worthy of regard, literally worth turning back to look at”—authenticity was still based on manipulating appearances.18 As William Hazlitt warned in a timeless platitude, “first impressions are often the truest.”19 From the old sartorial regime to the great masculine renunciation, the same clichés applied. Since the introduction of the three-piece suit, then, Englishmen may have renounced sartorial splendor by defining masculine modesty as natural and timeless, but they did not gain independence from “Madame la Mode,” from the studied artificiality, inauthenticity, and affectation of a fashion system. In 1850, the three-piece suit certainly was cut of different cloth than the Elizabethan courtier’s doublet and hose (and ruffs and lace). But Englishmen had not escaped the anxious attention to dress which they so condemned as the vain pursuit of women. Indeed, as foreign observers felt firsthand, the compulsion to inconspicuous consumption merely installed an inverted fashion system, one that equally demanded uniformity. “Although there is not much of studied parade,” Joshua White testified, “or useless ceremony in the ordinary intercourse with the English, yet it is necessary to comply with some of their custom, to shun the appearance of singularity . . . It is, then, almost indispensable for foreigners to adopt the prevailing fashion in dress.”20 Even in “this simple style of dress,” the English still “show[ed] the tyranny of their fashions. An Englishman, from early habit, submits to it with the greatest reverence, and considers every instance of rebellion against it as absurd. This apparently trivial circumstance is followed by the most important consequences.”21 The “tyranny of their fashions” now instilled simplicity rather than splendor, even though simplicity was meant to

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signify independence from the tyranny of fashion. Attempting to create an image of masculinity compatible with ideals of liberty and property, the three-piece suit merely reproduced a fashion tyranny in inverted form. Despite the great masculine renunciation— or indeed, because of it—English upper- and middle-class men still lived by codes of behavior that perhaps appeased anxieties about their liberty, but which nonetheless left them always susceptible to the tyranny of fashion. Even in 1833, after over 150 years of fashion renunciation, Puckler-Muskau could still observe: “Where fashion speaks, the free Englishman is a slave.”22

Notes

1.

CONSPICUOUS CONSTRUCTIONS

1. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1972), 7: 315. In the interests of readability, I have modernized spelling and punctuation throughout this book. 2. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 3: 464 – 465. 3. Even in his Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen’s presumed scientific analysis of consumer behavior was tinged with moral condemnation. Veblen used the term “conspicuous consumption” to distinguish between “the fluctuating styles of modern civilised apparel,” with an “essential ugliness” which was “offensive to native taste,” and the “relatively stable styles” of “homogenous, stable and immobile” societies whose costume was “more becoming, more artistic,” since based on principles of “sound taste” (Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1934], 175, 177, 176, 175, 175, 175, 178. 4. As Pierre Bourdieu has put it, “the ‘unconscious’ is never anything other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces [in] . . . second natures” (Outline of a Theory of Practice [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977], 78 –79). This is Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, or “history turned into nature” (78). 5. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; reprint, Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), 99. 6. Edmund Burke, “Letters on a Regicide Peace,” in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (1796; reprint, London: Thomas McLean, 1826), 3: 172; Edmund Burke, An Abridgement of English History, cited in W. J. T.

179

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Notes to Pages 3– 6

Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 140. 7. John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 2d ed. (London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1757), 52. Then as now, the core meaning of “effeminacy” is womanly behavior in men. Because of the historically constructed nature of both womanliness and manliness, however, what constituted “effeminacy” changed over time, as we shall see throughout this book. Throughout the period under study, however, “effeminacy” was almost always associated with its perennial companion “luxury.” What constituted “luxury,” and who practiced it, were of course under much debate. 8. Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 52, 53. 9. For the eighteenth-century political reformer James Burgh, there was “no grosser error, no deficiency more fatal, no abuse more shameful, than a nation’s losing the proper delicacy of sentiment with regard to right and wrong, and deviating into a general corruption of manners” (Political Disquisitions [Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1774], 3: 1). This text was originally published in London. 10. See, among others, David Castronovo, The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in Literature and Society (New York: Ungar, 1987), 94; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 165; and Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780 –1880 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 218 –251. 11. In English historiography, Veblenite theories of emulation are central motifs in G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982), and Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780 –1880 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). 12. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 103. 13. It is no wonder that Veblen’s critique of conspicuous consumption has crept into everyday parlance, since the moral disapproval of conspicuous consumption has long been itself a form of social distinction, separating elite males from men who, as Veblen saw it, “in their blind zeal for faultlessly reputable attire, transgress the theoretical line between man’s and woman’s dress, to the extent of arraying themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to vex the mortal frame” (Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 183). For a rather different critique of Veblenite theory, see Colin Campbell, “Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Action Approach,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993), 40 –57. 14. Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 3: 11. 15. For an analysis of the “public sphere” which lacks a consideration of gender, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). For a feminist critique of Habermas, see Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For

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a cogent attempt to work out the gender implications of Habermas’s work, see Lawrence E. Klein, “Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” in Michael Worton and Judith Still, eds., Textuality and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 100 –115. I thank Larry Klein for permission to read this article in draft form. For a study of the political semiotics of women in public, see Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1987). 16. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 87. 17. “Politics is always represented,” as Gordon Schochet has put it (in his The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in Seventeenth-Century England: Patriarchalism in Political Thought [New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988], xxii). For influential discussions of political symbolism, see Michael Walzer, “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly 82, no. 2 (June 1967): 193–94; and Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 121–146. 18. For a discussion of other forms of “visual history,” see Roy Porter, “Seeing the Past,” Past and Present 118 (February 1988): 186 –205. 19. I use the word “semiotic” advisedly, and in its original sense. The term was introduced into modern English in 1690 by John Locke, who proposed “to consider the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others.” For Locke, the study of signs “would afford us another sort of logic and critic than what we have been hitherto acquainted with” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690; reprint, New York: Meridian Books, 1964], 443). Modern semiotics, as the study of the way in which signs and symbols generate and transmit meanings, was born at the end of the seventeenth century, part of Locke’s general critique of the belief in innate ideas. In criticizing innate ideas, Locke disrupted the belief that signs inherently corresponded to preexisting, fixed ideas. Signs were no longer obvious, no longer transparent. Locke thus upset an entire social hierarchy of signs, inaugurating a modern debate about signs, display, aesthetics, and sensibility. A new sort of logic was needed in order to understand the relation between empirical sign and social meaning. Parallel to and simultaneous with a sartorial revolution, this semiotic revolution entailed a redefinition of the relationship between outward representation and inward idea, between base materiality and abstract truth, between signifier and signified—a relationship which, like the sartorial revolution, was “radically anti-semiotic” (John Deely, “Idolum: Archeology and Ontology of the Iconic Sign,” in Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld and Roland Posners, eds., Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture [Tubingen: Stauffenburg-Verlag, 1986], 37). It is in this (seventeenth-century) sense that I use the word “semiotic.” Thus this work relies on recent semiotic analysis of fashion only to a very limited extent, other than for general inspiration. Especially important, though somewhat inappropriate for historical analysis, are Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Jean Baudrillard, Le Système des

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objets (Paris: Denoël, 1968); and Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981). 20. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 91. See also Roger Chartier, Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 169. 21. For two attempts at defining “political culture,” see Keith Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1: xii, and Eckhart Hellmuth, “Towards a Comparative Study of Political Culture: The Cases of Late EighteenthCentury England and Germany,” in Eckhart Hellmuth, ed., The Transformation of Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 7–10. 22. Joan Landes has outlined how a masculinist symbolic politics dominated the bourgeois public sphere after the French Revolution. Similarly, Dorinda Outram has credited the French Revolution with creating a new political culture based on the victory of the autonomous, neo-stoic male “over both the feminine and the carnivalesque.” And Lynn Hunt has argued that literary attacks on Marie Antoinette were informed by increasing fears of rampant femininity and the effeminization of the court. See Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution; Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 16; Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 108 –30. 23. See, for example, Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England 1680 –1714 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999). 24. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 3. See also Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988); Christine di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Kathleen B. Jones, Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Linda Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 25. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 26. See especially John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). 27. Paul Kléber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 269. 28. John Pocock’s influential The Machiavellian Moment contains no discussion of concerns about “effeminacy” in neo-Machiavellian discourse— concerns that Hanna Pitkin found to be a “persistent preoccupation” in Machia-

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velli’s own writing (J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975]); Hanna Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 25). James Vernon’s Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) is a welcome exception, though the attention to gender is not sustained throughout his analysis. 29. Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 3: xxiii, 59. 30. Edmund Burke, A Letter from Mr. Burke, to a Member of the National Assembly; In Answer to some Objections to his Book on French Affairs, 4th ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1791), 68 – 69. Or as Judith Butler has argued in a similar vein: “the qualifications for being a subject must first be met before [political] representation can be extended” (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990], 1–2). 31. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 152. 32. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 106. 33. It was only modern English historiography which “elevat[ed] the ‘public’ man as the object of study while entirely submerging his gender identity,” as Michael Roper and John Tosh have observed in their “Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity,” in Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1. For general summaries of English masculinity in the early modern period, see Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, eds., English Masculinities, 1660 –1800 (New York: Longman, 1999); and Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England (New York: Longman, 1999). 34. Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 3: 17. 35. As Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen have noted, “the concept of effeminacy highlights the crucial ways in which the ‘other’ to manliness in the eighteenth century was not simply the feminine, but also the effeminate” (“Introduction,” 5 – 6). For a more general statement of how gender functions both as “a constitutive element of social relationships” and as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power,” see Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1067. Like the term “luxury,” then, “effeminacy” is used in this work to refer to cultural anxieties rather than to any actual sartorial practices. 36. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 98. 37. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 38. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 39. See, for example, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith’s

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System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); and Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 40. For studies of the relation between political economy and English culture, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, World’s Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550 –1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); and Jacob Viner, Religious Thought and Economic Society (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978). 41. [Robert Torrens], “Mr. Owen’s Plans for Relieving the National Distress,” Edinburgh Review, no. 64 (October 1819): 453– 454. John Pocock has used the term “political economy” “to denote a more complex, and more ideological, enterprise aimed at establishing the moral, political, cultural, and economic conditions of life in advancing commercial societies” (J. G. A. Pocock, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution,” Historical Journal 25, no. 2 [1982]: 332). 42. Edward Misselden, The Circle of Commerce. Or, The Ballance of Trade, in Defence of Free Trade (London: Nicholas Bourne, 1623), 17. 43. Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade, From England unto the East Indies: Answering to Diverse Objections which are Usually made against the same (London: Nicholas Oakes, 1621), 2. 44. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 90. 45. For general studies of consumer society in England, see Grant MacCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society; Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978); and Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660 –1760 (London: Routledge, 1988). 46. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 11. See also John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680 –1768 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 47. In addition to the studies of taste and material culture mentioned above, see also Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660 –1770 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); Jules Lubbock,

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The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 1550 – 1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Table in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985); and the essays collected in Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods. 48. James Burgh, Britain’s Remembrancer (London: Thomas Lumisden, 1746), 43. 2.

THE OLD SARTORIAL REGIME, 1550 –1688

1. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), C.ii. 2. For recent accounts, see Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580 –1680 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982); J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550 –1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1987); and Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, however, argue that from the 1540s, the English aristocracy became increasingly a closed elite (An Open Elite? England 1540 –1880 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986]). 3. Robert Greene, “A Quip for an Upstart Courtier: Or, A Quaint Dispute between Velvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches,” in Harleian Miscellany (1592; reprint, London: T. Osborne, 1745), 5: 373, 379. 4. Nor, for that matter, were these anxieties particularly English. For parallel worries about the breakdown of an old regime of French clothing, see Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Richard Bienvenu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 15 ff. 5. [Richard Allestree?], The Whole Duty of Man (London: T. Garthwait, 1659), 203–204. 6. For further instances of this frequent refrain, see Sir William Vaughan, The Golden Fleece (London: Francis William, 1626), a5; Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profane State (1642; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 2: 164; Edward Waterhouse, The Gentleman’s Monitor; Or, A Sober Inspection into the Vertues, Vices, and Ordinary Means, of the Rise and Decay of Men and Families (London: R. Royston, 1665), 261–262; Angliae Speculum Morale; The Moral State of England (London: Henry Herringman, 1670), 18; Humphrey Brooke, The Durable Legacy (London: M. White, 1681), 128; and [Richard Head], Proteus Redivivus (London: T. D., 1684), 298. 7. I am using the term “conspicuous consumption” only in Veblen’s traditional sense of consumption for the purposes of demonstrating the social position of the consumer. Different levels of consumption were meant to correspond to different social levels, thus legitimating the elaborate display of aristocrats. 8. William Scott, An Essay of Drapery or the Compleate Citizen Trading Justly, Pleasingly, Profitably (London: Stephen Pemel, 1635), 85. 9. Samuel Crossman, The Young Man’s Monitor (London: n.p., 1664), 143.

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10. Francis Quarles, Encyridion, Containing Institutions Divine and Morall (London: Thomas Cotes, 1640), (no pagination) century 1, chap. 79. 11. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark (1600 –1; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1963), 51. Of course, it is the perfect courtier Laertes who kills the virtuous Hamlet, thus revealing Shakespeare’s ambivalence toward court culture. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s complex relation to the court, see Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 12. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (1531; reprint, London: Everyman’s Library, 1907), 102. 13. Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman (London: Francis Constable, 1622), 14, 3. 14. Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 11. See also Ann Rosalind Jones, “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyrics,” in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds., The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality (New York: Methuen, 1987), 53. 15. Hic Mulier: Or, The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to Cure the Coltish Disease of the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines of our Times (London: I. E., 1620), A3, A4. As Constance Jordan has stated, “Hic Mulier ties privileges of rank to sex and gender” (Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990], 303). I thank Constance Jordan for her comments on my work. See also Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 150 –174; Mary Beth Rose, “Women in Men’s Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl,” in Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins, eds., Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 223–247; and Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540 –1620 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 139 –151. 16. William Parkes, The Curtaine-Drawer of the World (London: Leonard Becket, 1612), 29. 17. Henry Peacham, The Worth of a Penny, or, A Caution to Keep Money (1647; reprint, London: William Lee, 1669), 28. 18. Though “the ‘gentleman’ supplanted the ‘knight’ as a social ideal,” as Arthur B. Ferguson has argued, “the gentleman absorbed all that remained relevant to the realities of Renaissance society in the concept of knighthood” (The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England [Washington: Folger Books, 1986], 58). 19. Michel Foucault has remarked that “up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. . . . It was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.” He later refers to this Renaissance semiotic as a “hierarchy of analogies” (The Order of Things [New York: Vintage Books, 1970], 17, 55). Like much of the Renaissance, this semiotic regime ended later in England, buttressing court

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culture throughout most of the seventeenth century. See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 22. 20. Barnabe Barnes, Foure Bookes of Offices: Enabling Privat Persons for the Special Service of all Good Princes and Policies (London: George Bishop, T. Adams, and C. Burbie, 1606), 15. 21. Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (New York: Pinter, 1989), 15. 22. Thomas Adams, The Gallants Burden (London: Clement Knight, 1614), 54. 23. England’s Vanity: Or the Voice of God Against the Monstrous Sin of Pride, in Dress and Apparel. By A Compassionate Conformist (London: John Dunton, 1683), 15. 24. William Rankins, Seven Satires (1598; reprint, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948), 5. 25. Count Annibale Romei, The Courtiers Academie (1598; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 246, 187. 26. Critics of the old sartorial regime held precisely the opposite view, as the next chapter will discuss. 27. [Allestree], The Whole Duty of Man, 204. 28. Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, preface to the reader. 29. Greene, “A Quip for an Upstart Courtier,” 371–372. For further instances of this inegalitarian morality, see John Forde, Honor Triumphant. Or The Peeres Challenge (London: Francis Burton, 1606), epistle dedicatory; Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life: Containing the Ethike Part of Morall Philosophie. Fit for the Instructing of a Gentleman in the Course of a Vertuous Life (London: Edward Blount, 1606), 223; and Francis Osborne, Advice to a Son (Oxford: Henry Hall, 1655), 17. 30. Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique (1553; reprint, New York: Garland, 1982), 87. For the importance of liberality to the social identity of aristocratic men, see George C. Brauer Jr., The Education of a Gentleman: Theories of Gentlemanly Education in England, 1660 –1775 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1959), 37; and Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1929), 89. 31. Stone has argued that conspicuous consumption was both cause and effect of the breakdown of English society prior to the Civil War: “Overconsumption led to sale of land, which generated social mobility and psychological insecurity among the purchasers; in its turn insecurity caused a struggle for status, exacerbated by the inflation of honors, which found expression in competitive consumption” (Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1965], 185). 32. Sharpe, Early Modern England, 167. See also Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 168. 33. Marvin Becker has argued that “pride, pomp and self-display were part of the repertoire of aristocratic status” in his Civility and Society in Europe, 1300 –1600 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 89. For a discussion of sartorial splendor among the medieval British aristocracy, see David Crouch,

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The Image of the Aristocracy in Britain, 1000 –1300 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 247–251. For a different male aesthetic among Italian nobles, see Susan Mosher Stuard, “Gravitas and Consumption,” in Jacqueline Murray, ed., Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West (New York: Garland, 1999), 215 –242. 34. The Gentlemans Companion: or, A Character of True Nobility, and Gentility (London: Thomas Sawbridge, 1676), 63. 35. For Frank Whigham, “symbolic purposes came to dominate, or at least tint, substantive ones in all aspects of everyday life” (Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 36). 36. As Laura Levine has noted about anti-theatricalists: “the more worried [they] became about the possibility of effeminization, the more dogmatically they turned to an epistemology of signs, a faith in a pure referentiality” (Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 4). 37. William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, Certain Precepts, or Directions, for the Well Ordering and Carriage of a Mans Life: As also Oeconomicall Discipline for the Government of his House (London: Richard Meighen, 1617), 17. 38. Francis Bacon, Essays and New Atlantis (1597; reprint, New York: Walter J. Black, 1942), 215. 39. James I, “Basilikon Doron. Or, His Majesties Instructions to his Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince,” in Henry Morley, ed. A Miscellany (1606; reprint, London: George Routledge and Sons, 1888), 45. 40. Humphrey Browne, A Map of the Microcosme, or, A Morall Description of Man (London: T. Harper, 1642), 164. 41. The Courtier’s Calling: Shewing the Ways of Making a Fortune, and the Art of Living at Court, According to the Maxims of Policy and Morality ([London?]: Richard Tonson, 1675), 67. For further instances of the praise of moderation, see Barnes, Foure Bookes of Offices, 15; Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life, 223; and James Cleland, Hero-paidea: Or The Institution of a Young Noble Man (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1607), 215 –216. 42. Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in her Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 45. 43. Owen Felltham, Resolves Divine Moral and Political (1620; reprint, London: Pickering, 1840), 275. 44. For the classic discussion of early modern English anxieties about the constructed nature of identity, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). I thank Stephen Greenblatt for his comments on my work. 45. William Corne-Waleys [Cornwallis], Essayes ([London:] Edmund Mattes, 1600), (no pagination), essay 24. 46. My analysis differs here from Michel Foucault’s account of sixteenthcentury theories of the sign, which for Foucault were considered as part of a natural system, as icons whose signifying power “resides in both the mark and the content in identical fashion” (The Order of Things, 30). This for Foucault is the basis of the “resemblance” between signifier and signified, a resemblance which

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was natural, inherent in the sign (35), a view shared by Grant MacCracken in his analysis of Elizabethan consumption (MacCracken, Culture and Consumption, 32). In the old sartorial regime, icons may have natural properties intrinsic to them, but the relation to their referents must be established by convention. For a discussion of conventional icons, a concept alien to traditional semiotics, see Paul Bouissac, “Iconicity and Pertinence,” in Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posners, eds., Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture (Tubingen: Stauffenburg-Verlag, 1986), 193–213. As we will see in the next chapter, critics of the old sartorial regime argued that not all signs were arbitrary, but that some sartorial signs were inherently corrupting and immoral. 47. See A. G. Dickens, ed., The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage and Royalty, 1400 –1800 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977); and Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England. 48. The ethic of the courtier was “an art of conduct tailored to the social and political exigencies of Renaissance despotism” (Daniel Javitch, “Il Cortegiano and the Constraints of Despotism,” in Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand, eds., Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 17). 49. James I, “Basilikon Doron,” 43. 50. James I, “Basilikon Doron,” 43. Indeed, in 1586, Elizabeth had stated to Parliament: “We princes are set upon stages in sight and view of all the world” (cited in Christopher Hill, A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England [New York: Routledge, 1990], 106). For a discussion of theatrical metaphors in political thought, see Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 37–58. I kindly thank Eileen McWilliam for this reference. 51. James I, “Basilikon Doron,” 43. 52. “The first allegation wherewith people keep their tongues in action, and amuse themselves into wonder, is the exorbitance of array and attire,” bemoaned a defender of the Restoration court (L. G., The Court’s Apology. Containing a Short Vindication of the Courtiers from the Common Aspersions and Misreports of Ignorance and Envy [London: n.p., 1663], 7). 53. As Arthur Ferguson has argued, “historians, accustomed to dealing with the naked facts of power in Renaissance history, have not always taken seriously the trappings, the images and symbols, that clothe those facts for presentation to the public” (The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England, 46 – 47). 54. For a fuller elaboration of the relation between codes of civility and state power in France’s old regime, see Norbert Elias, Power and Civility: The Civilizing Process, vol. 2, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1982). Elias’s thesis of the “civilizing process” needs to be modified for England, however, given its different political and cultural practices, as David Starkey has argued (“Castiglione at the Court of Henry VIII: Was There a Renaissance Court after All?” in Gordon J. Schochet, ed., Reformation, Humanism, and “Revolution” [Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1990], 181.) 55. Gerrard de Malynes, Englands View, In the Unmasking of 2 Paradoxes: With a Replication unto the answer of Maister John Bodine (London: Richard

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Field, 1603), 33. It was, Kevin Sharpe has stated, “a contemporary truism that subjects followed the example set by sovereigns” (Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England, 171), while political writers had seen the crown’s exemplary virtue as essential to the political stability of the commonwealth (Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529–1559 [London: Athlone, 1970], 184). See also Raymond Lurie, “Some Ideas of the Commonwealth in Early Tudor England,” in Gordon J. Schochet, ed., Reformation, Humanism, and “Revolution” (Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1990), 293–306. 56. James I, “Basilikon Doron,” 29. 57. James I, “Basilikon Doron,” 27. James I was responsible for the diffusion of patriarchal metaphors in royalist ideology (Schochet, The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes, 87). See also Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 85 –112. For a broader discussion of patriarchalism as a gendered ideology, see Weil, Political Passions, 22 – 49. For a discussion of the impact of patriarchalism on family life, see Amussen, An Ordered Society, 34 – 66. 58. James I, “Basilikon Doron,” 43, 45 – 46. 59. Despite this assertion of masculinity, historians have often linked James I’s sexual preferences to both effeminacy and luxury consumption. Lawrence Stone has speculated: “It was the Court that led the fashion, and a philandering queen followed by a homosexual king no doubt gave an added incentive to the movement [of conspicuous consumption]: both Elizabeth and James had an eye for the well-dressed young man” (Crisis of the Aristocracy, 564). According to Stone’s argument, homosexual promotion of conspicuous consumption was an added cause of the crisis of the aristocracy in seventeenth-century England. Fashion historians have followed Stone’s lead: Diana de Marly, for example, has asserted that “King James I of England and VI of Scotland was a homosexual and this changed the character of the court considerably,” leading England into an “effeminate and wanton age,” while Christopher Breward has maintained that “the melancholy effeminacy that had typified late Elizabethan ideals of beauty translated easily into the aesthetic and sexual milieu of the Jacobean Court. James I, in his adoption and promotion of a succession of tall, young, beautiful male favourites, ensured the continuation of a fashionable court style for men” (Diana de Marly, Fashion for Men: An Illustrated History [London: B. T. Batsford, 1985], 45; Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995], 78). Yet Stone, de Marly, and Breward assume a relationship between homosexual practices, conspicuous consumption, and effeminacy that defenders of royalist culture did not. James I certainly defended the elaborate dress of his noble courtiers, but this defense was not specifically linked with sexual preferences, and was specifically defined against effeminacy. In the old sartorial regime, promotion of masculine bravery was independent of sexuality, while, as we have seen, fears of effeminacy were linked with the presumed immoderation and luxury of upstarts rather than with the separate fears of sodomy. As Alan Bray has cogently argued, in Renaissance England “homosexuality had no distinctive social characteristics of its own beyond the immediately sexual,” while effeminacy “lacked the specifically homosexual connotations it was later to acquire”

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(Homosexuality in Renaissance England [London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982], 78, 13). See also Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 3–23; and Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 106 –143. For a contrary view, see Michael B. Young, King James and the History of Homosexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 69 – 84. For defenders of the old sartorial regime, homosexual practices were not by definition “markedly effeminate,” as Randolph Trumbach has contended (“London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Social History 11, no. 1 [fall 1977]: 11), and effeminacy was not by definition linked with sexual practices at all. In contrast, however, homophobic critics of the court’s conspicuous consumption viewed homosexual practices as inherently effeminate (though effeminacy was still not by definition linked with sexuality at all), and equally looked upon the court’s consumption as “effeminate and wanton”—as the next chapter will discuss. Yet what critics saw as wanton weakness, royalists saw as an assertion of power, a symbol of “fortitude or manhood.” To James I and supporters of monarchy, donning “the galliardest and bravest” apparel was crucial to asserting the masculinity of court culture. 60. Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, 102. 61. Francis Bacon, An Essay of a King (London: Richard Best, 1642), 3. 62. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 285. 63. The Uses and Abuses of Money, and the Improvements of It (London: Allen Bancks and Charles Harper, 1671), 6. 64. Neville Williams, “The Tudors: Three Contrasts in Personality,” in Dickens, ed., The Courts of Europe, 147–167. For Elizabeth’s attitude to consumption, see also Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 92; and MacCracken, Culture and Consumption, 11–12. For Elizabeth’s ability to manipulate the codes of chivalry, see Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 3–27. And for a gender analysis of Elizabethan chivalry, see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (New York: Routledge, 1989). 65. James I, “A Speach to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-Hall,” in Charles Howard McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I (1609; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 320. 66. See Brian Manning, “The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I,” in Brian Manning, ed., Politics, Religion and The English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 37– 80; Kevin Sharpe, “The Image of Virtue: The Court and Household of Charles I, 1625 –1642,” in David Starkey, ed., The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (New York: Longman, 1987), 226 –260; and Peter W. Thomas, “Charles I of England: The Tragedy of Absolutism” in Dickens, ed., The Courts of Europe, 191–211. 67. W. P., The Character of That Glorious Martyred King, Charles I (London: T. B., 1660), 1.

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68. Sir Henry Wotton, A Panegyrick of King Charles; Being Observations upon the Inclinations, Life, and Government of our Soveraign Lord the King (London: Richard Marriot, [1649?]), 111. Restoration dress will be considered in chapter 4. 69. James I, “Basilikon Doron,” 45. 70. Rev. John Williams, A Sermon of Apparel, Preached before the Kings Majestie and the Prince his Highnesse at Theobalds, the 22. of February, 1619 (London: John Bill, 1620), 24 –26. 71. Greene, “A Quip for an Upstart Courtier,” 377. 72. England’s Vanity, 5 – 6. 73. Angliae Speculum Morale, 18. 74. See Sydney Anglo, “The Courtier: The Renaissance and Changing Ideals,” in Dickens, ed., The Courts of Europe, 37; and Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman, 13. 75. John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (London: Toby Cooke, 1586), 23. Robert Greene agreed: “gentility grew not only by propagation of nature, but by perfection of qualities” (Greene, “A Quip for an Upstart Courtier,” 376). 76. The very term “gentleman,” Fritz Caspari has argued, emerged with the spread of humanism and the rise of the gentry under the Tudor monarchs: “Humanistic ideas thus became powerful elements in the predominant sixteenthcentury belief in a social hierarchy which it was the duty of the ruler and of the aristocracy to maintain” (Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954], 6). And as David Crouch points out, the idea of levels of expenditure corresponding with social levels only emerged in the fourteenth century (The Image of the Aristocracy, 250). 77. For brief discussions of the relation between sumptuary laws and the Tudor social order, see J. C. K. Cornwall, Wealth and Society in Early SixteenthCentury England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), 10 –14; and Joyce Youings, Sixteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1984), 110. 78. “Between 1516 and 1597 the Acts of Parliament were supplemented by no fewer than nineteen royal Proclamations” (N. B. Harte, “State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial England,” in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John, eds., Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976], 135). See also Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926), 248; and Wilfrid Hooper, “The Tudor Sumptuary Laws,” English Historical Review 30, no. 119 (July 1915): 436. 79. Act of 24 Henry VIII, cap. 13, in A Collection in English, of the Statutes Nowe in Force, Continued From the Beginning of Magna Charta, Made in the 9. Yeere of the Reigne of King H.3 Untill the Ende of the Session of Parliament Holden in the 23. Yeere of the Reigne of our Gratious Queene Elizabeth (1532; reprint, London: Christopher Barker, [1583?]), 13–16. Ten proclamations were issued from 1550 to 1600 strengthening or calling for the enforcement of the 1532⁄3 statute. See Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964 – 69), Proclamations 420 (1555), 464 (1559), 493 (1562), 494 (1562), 495 (1562), 496 (1562), 542 (1566), 610 (1574), 646 (1580), and 697 (1588).

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80. Frank Whigham offers a more complex chart of earlier sumptuary laws in his Ambition and Privilege. See also the tables in Reed Benhamou, “The Restraint of Excessive Apparel,” Dress 15 (1989): 27–37. 81. Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation, 238. 82. Hooper, “The Tudor Sumptuary Laws,” 436 – 437. 83. “A Proclamation Signifying His Majesties Pleasure Touching Some Former Proclamations; And Some Other Things,” in James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 1: 253– 257. 84. See Journal of the House of Commons, I, VI, and VIII. Economic and religious arguments often buttressed calls for sumptuary regulation of the social order, though those “economic motives . . . were secondary ones,” as N. B. Harte has noted (“State Control of Dress,” 138). And although the majority of demands for sumptuary law in the seventeenth century came from economic writers concerned to protect English industries rather than promote social distinction, the two concerns were often intermixed. Trade bills regulating clothing consumption frequently provided for exceptions for the court and nobility (Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 47 and passim), and laws promoting social distinction were mixed with protectionist sentiments. Equally, religion often came to the aid of social inequality in the old sartorial regime: religious condemnation of pride, vanity and envy supported social arguments for “some politic order” in apparel. 85. See, for example, William Sheppard, England’s Balme (London: n.p., 1657); Short Notes and Observations Drawn from the Present Decaying Condition of this Kingdom in Point of Trade (London: n.p., 1662), 10; Thomas Manley, A Discourse Shewing that the Exportation of Wool is Destructive to this Kingdom (London: Samuel Crouch, 1677), 10; [Slinsby Bethel], An Account of the French Usurpation upon the Trade of England (London: n.p., 1679), 20; and England’s Vanity, 54. 86. [Edward Chamberlayne], Englands Wants: Or Several Proposals Probably Beneficial for England, Humbly Offered to the Consideration of all Good Patriots in Both Houses of Parliament (London: Thomas Martyn, 1667), 29. 87. [Head], Proteus Redivivus, 298 –299. 88. Harte, “State Control of Dress,” 139. 89. James I, “A Speach to the Lords and Commons,” 324. 90. Alan K. Smith, Creating a World Economy: Merchant Capital, Colonialism, and World Trade, 1400 –1825 (Boulder: Westview, 1991), 114. 91. B. A. Holderness, Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society, 1500 – 1750 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976), 180. The term “capitalism” is of course an anachronism, as is every term (“mercantilism,” for example) which tries to identify and separate out an economic system (whatever “ism” one calls it) from its political and cultural context, especially for a period which did not separate issues of trade, money, production, and consumption from their larger, presumably “non-economic” context. For a brief discussion of the term “capitalism,” see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth-Eighteenth Century. Volume II: The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 237–239.

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Notes to Pages 39 – 42

92. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, passim; and Tim Keirn and Frank T. Melton, “Thomas Manley and the Rate-of-Interest Debate, 1668 – 1673,” Journal of British Studies 29, no. 2 (April 1990): 147–173. 93. [Bethel], An Account of the French Usurpation, 20. The next chapter will discuss economic opposition to the old sartorial regime. 94. D. C. Coleman has rightly noted that “the Smithian origin of the concept has left its mark on all subsequent development and use” (“Editor’s Introduction,” in D. C. Coleman, ed., Revisions in Mercantilism [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969], 6). 95. Charles Wilson and Michel Foucault have both warned against the conflation of mercantilism with bullionism (Charles Wilson, Mercantilism [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958], 17; Foucault, The Order of Things, 166. 96. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1946), 209. 97. C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500 – 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2: 39 – 41. 98. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500 –1700, 2: 39 – 41. 99. Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 35, 39. 100. Robert Ashton, The City and the Court, 1603–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 15. See also Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 58. 101. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change, 2: 183. See also W. E. Minchinton, “Editor’s Introduction,” in W. E. Minchinton, ed., The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Methuen, 1969), 47. 102. John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce (London: John Harrison, 1601), 7. 103. “Domestic trade . . . was held to be irrelevant as far as the interests of the community were concerned,” since it did not increase the bullion supply (Karl Pribram, A History of Economic Reasoning [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], 46). 104. Henry Parker, Of a Free Trade (London: Robert Bostock, 1648), 2. “Free trade” here meant merchant monopolies’ freedom from import quotas. 105. Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike or a Discourse of Forraigne Trade (London: Nicholas Bourse, 1641), 61. See also The Character and Qualifications of an Honest Loyal Merchant (London: Robert Roberts, 1686), 4 –5. 106. Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce, 8, 7. 107. [Company of Merchant Adventurers], The Advantages of the Kingdome of England, Both Abroad and at Home, by Managing and Issuing the Drapery, and Woollen Manufacturers of this Kingdom, Under the Ancient Government of the Fellowship of Merchants-Adventurers of England ([London:] n.p., 1662), 1. 108. Joyce Appleby dates this “pacific vision” to the mid-seventeenth cen-

Notes to Pages 42 – 43

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tury, and sees it declining in the Restoration (Economic Thought and Ideology, 120 –121), while Albert Hirschman attributes it to the eighteenth century (Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, 60 ff.). 109. Ferne, Blazon of Gentrie, 74. 110. Carew Reynell, The True English Interest (London: Giles Widdowes, 1674), 12. 111. William Smith, The Golden Fleece: Wherein is Related the Riches of English Wools in its Manufactures (London: I. Grismond, 1656), A3– 4. 112. Lewes Roberts, The Map of Commerce (London: n.p., 1638), 1. 113. Thomas Violet, A Petition against the Jewes Presented to the Kings Majestie and the Parliament (London: n.p., 1661), aa3. This anti-Semitic tract sought to transfer the accusation of economic treason onto Jews, readmitted into England by Oliver Cromwell in 1656. 114. Parker, Of a Free Trade, 2. 115. Lynn Muchmore, “A Note on Thomas Mun’s ‘England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade,’” Economic History Review 23, no. 3 (December 1970): 498; and Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 58. 116. Sir Thomas Smith, A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (1549; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1969), 69. 117. Malynes, Englands View, 189. For Malynes’s influence, see J. D. Gould, “The Trade Crisis of the Early 1620’s and English Economic Thought,” The Journal of Economic History 15, no. 2 (1955): 122. 118. Gerrard de Malynes, A Treatise of the Canker of Englands Commonwealth (London: Richard Field, 1601), 45. 119. Gerrard de Malynes, The Maintenance of Free Trade (London: William Sheffard, 1622), 22. 120. Gerrard de Malynes, Consuetudo, Vel Lex Mercatoria, or, The Ancient Law-Merchant (London: Adam Islip, 1622), 60, 65. For other old regime authors who measured the balance of trade in money, rather than in levels of production and consumption, see Thomas Roe, Sir Thomas Roe his Speech in Parliament (London: John Aston, 1641); Francis Cradock, Wealth Discovered: Or, an Essay upon a Late Expedient for Taking Away all Impositions, and Raising a Revenue without Taxes (London: A. Seile, 1661); Sir Thomas Culpeper Jr., The Necessity of Abating Usury Re-asserted (London: Christopher Wilkinson, 1670); and The Uses and Abuses of Money, and the Improvements of It. 121. Malynes, Englands View, 93. 122. Recent historians of economic ideas have dated the origins of this presumably “new moral attitude towards consumer spending” to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, linking it to the presumed birth of an English consumer society (Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 23). See also Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology; and Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 101–125. Yet this “doctrine of beneficial luxury” (McKendrick, “The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England,” in McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 19) found greater favor in the period before 1688, and was roundly criticized by the

196

Notes to Pages 43– 46

majority of economic writers after the Glorious Revolution, as chapter 5 will discuss. 123. Gould, “The Trade Crisis of the Early 1620’s,” 128. See also Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 40 – 41, 49. For a contemporary view, see Malynes, Englands View, 65 – 66. 124. George Brauer has noted that Renaissance courtesy writers often considered liberality as charity (Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman, 37). 125. Greene, “A Quip for an Upstart Courtier,” 377. Dudley Digges, a shareholder in the East India Company, made a similar argument in his The Defence of Trade (London: John Barnes, 1615), 2, 41. See also Henry Peacham, The Truth of our Times (London: James Becket, 1638), 62 – 63; and Fuller, The Holy State, 2: 165 –166. 126. [ John Nalson], The Present Interest of England; or, a Confutation of the Whiggish Conspirators (London: Thomas Dring, 1683), 25 –26. 127. England’s Vanity, 4. 128. Cited by Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 82 129. [William Petty], A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions (London: N. Brooke, 1662), 15. For a similar argument, see Thomas Culpeper Jr., A Discourse Shewing that Many Advantages which will Accrue to this Kingdom by the Abatement of Usury (London: Christopher Wilkinson, 1668), 20; and Et à Dracone: Or, Some Reflections upon a Discourse called Omnia à Belo Comesta (London: n.p., 1668), 8. 130. Et à Dracone, 2. 131. [Nicholas Barbon], A Discourse of Trade (London: Thomas Milbourn, 1690), 65 – 67. Joyce Appleby has seen Barbon as the happy harbinger of “a new society of buyers and sellers” (Economic Thought and Ideology, 173, an argument repeated in Joyce Appleby, “Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought,” in Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods, 162 –173), while Christopher Berry has seen Barbon participating in a new “demoralization of luxury” (The Idea of Luxury, 111). Barbon’s Tory views, however, summed up the arguments of a bygone regime rather than foreseeing the economic orthodoxy of a presumably new Whig era of getting and spending. 132. “From the first, the coherence of Anglicanism depended upon the State” (A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2d ed. [London: B. T. Batsford, 1989], 204). 133. John Milton, “Of Reformation, Touching Church-Discipline in England: And the Causes that Hitherto Have Hindered It,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1641; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 1: 588. 134. For a full discussion of adiaphora in early English reformation thought, see Bernard J. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977). 135. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 27. 136. John Henry Primus, The Vestments Controversy: An Historical Study of the Earliest Tensions within the Church of England in the Reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth (Amsterdam: J. H. Kok N. V. Kampen, 1960), v.

Notes to Pages 46 – 48

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137. Cited by Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 71. 138. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 68. For further discussion of the importance of the vestments controversy to the English Reformation, see Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); T. M. Parker, “The Problem of Uniformity, 1559 –1604,” in The Archbishop of Canterbury et al., The English Prayer Book, 1549–1662 (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1963), 31–56; and A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism 1535– 1603 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966). 139. Matthew Parker, Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. John Bruce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1853), 223–227, cited in Leo F. Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 83. 140. Hill, A Nation of Change and Novelty, 69. 141. Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 128. 142. Cited in John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 176. 143. Gerald R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution 1660 –1688 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957), 245; W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 27. 144. Primus, Vestments Controversy, xii; Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation, 236. 145. John Evans, Moderation Stated; in a Sermon Preached Before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor and Alderman of the City of London (London: Walter Kettilby, 1682), 40. 146. Hughes and Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, Proclamation 460. 147. Williams, A Sermon of Apparel, 14 –15. 148. [Thomas Sheridan], A Discourse of the Rise and Power of Parliaments (N.p.: 1677), 78. 149. Henry Bullinger, “To the Reverende Fathers in Christe D. Rob. Horne Bishop of Winchester. D. Ed. Grindal Bishop of London. D. Ioh. Parcuste B. of Norwiche, His Honorable Lordes, and Most Deare Brethren in England,” in Whether it be Mortall Sinne to Transgresse Civil Lawes, Which be the Commaundementes of Civill Magistrates. The Judgement of Philip Melancthon in his Epitome of Morall Philosophie. The resolution of D. Hen. Bullinger, and D. Rod. Gualter, of D. Martin Bucer, and D. Peter Martyr, Concernyng the Apparrel of Ministers, and Other Indifferent Things ([London?]: 1566), 34 –35, 37. 150. Thomas Morton, A Defence of the Innocencie of the Three Ceremonies of the Church of England (London: William Barret, 1618), 203, 206 –208. Morton was successively bishop of Chester, Lichfield, and Durham. 151. Williams, A Sermon of Apparel, 24.

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Notes to Pages 48 –53

152. Quarles, Encyridion, Containing Institutions Divine and Morall, century 1, chaps. 80 and 79. 153. Crossman, The Young Man’s Monitor, 143. 154. Stephen Gosson, Pleasant Quippes for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen (London: Richard Johnes, 1596), E3. 155. [Richard Allestree], The Ladies Calling. By the Author of the Whole Duty of Man (Oxford: n.p., 1673), 12. 156. Fuller, The Holy State, 164. 157. Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, “Reflections upon Several Christian Duties, Divine and Moral, By Way of Essays,” in A Collection of Several Tracts (1668 –70; reprint, London: T. Woodward, 1727), 114 –116. 3.

THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FASHION CRISIS

1. Seventeenth-century political writers “intended to call into doubt not merely the old images and analogues, but the very process of symbolization itself” (Walzer, “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” 198). 2. John Milton, “The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1660; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 7: 425. 3. Short Notes and Observations, 11. 4. One can certainly divide “classical republicans” from Whigs, as Zera Fink has done in The Classical Republicans [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1945], passim). One can also find that “country” ideologists were not necessarily from the country, as R. Malcolm Smuts has argued (Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England, 74 ff.), and that often country ideologists shared many ideological views with their court opponents (Kevin Sharpe, Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History [Oxford: Clarendon, 1978], 3; and Conrad Russell, Parliament and English Politics, 1621–1629 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1979]). 5. J. G. A. Pocock has written that republicanism was “a language, not a programme” (“Introduction,” in James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977], 15). 6. [ John Philips], The Character of a Popish Successor, and What England may Expect from Such a One. Part the Second (London: Richard Janeway, 1681), 2 –3. Philips later helped draft several bills for the reformation of manners in the late 1690s (David Hayton, “Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons,” Past and Present 128 [August 1990], 58). 7. “However much [English republican] writers may have learned from Machiavelli, they had none of the Florentine’s sense of the moral autonomy of politics” (Blair Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 229). 8. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 349, citing Montesquieu.

Notes to Pages 53–55

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9. For a discussion of the links between effeminacy and tyranny in TudorStuart drama, see Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 63– 69. 10. [Daniel Defoe], Reflections upon the Late Great Revolution (London: Richard Chiswell, 1689), 37. 11. The Character of a Prince (London: Randall Taylor, 1689), 4. 12. Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation, 215. 13. Joan Kent, “Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the Regulation of ‘Personal Conduct’ in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 46, no. 113 (May 1973): 42. 14. Hooper, “The Tudor Sumptuary Laws,” 448 – 449. The rejection of a bill in 1604 to regulate apparel, and the simultaneous passage of a bill repealing all prior legislation, had the unintended consequence of ending sumptuary law in England, since no further bills gained a majority. The lack of sumptuary regulation was thus caused more by government inability to gain a consensus over the character and enforcement of sumptuary laws than by a shift toward free trade ideas, as historians have often suggested (G. D. Ramsay, “Industrial Laissez-Faire and the Policy of Cromwell,” Economic History Review, 1st ser., no. 16 [1946], 108; and Harte, “State Control of Dress,” 155). 15. Debates in Commons (London: n.p.), April 13, 1614. 16. “Sir . . . Awdeley moveth, that the Lords may be also included; for that his ancestors, by that, as a principal means, have, with the rest of the nobility, fallen” (Debates in Commons, April 13, 1614). 17. Debates in Commons, May 5, 1614, and Journal of the House of Commons (London: n.p.), vol. 1, April 21, 1621. 18. Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 5. As Jonathan Goldberg has written, “The king’s prodigality, at first the subject of rejoicing, especially in comparison to Elizabeth’s tight-fistedness, soon became the object of invidious comparisons” ( James I and the Politics of Literature, 247–248). 19. Francis Osborne, Traditional Memoyres on the Raigne of King James (1658), cited in Robert Ashton, James I By His Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 113–114. For a cogent discussion of James I’s sexual practices, see Caroline Bingham, James I of England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981). 20. Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 37; and Trumbach, “London’s Sodomites,” 11. 21. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London: J. Flesher, 1669), 136, 144. This tract was written in the late 1620s, according to J. D. Gould, “The Date of England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade,” The Journal of Economic History 15, no. 2 (1955): 160 –161. See also Henry Robinson, Certain Proposalls in Order to the Peoples Freedome and Accommodation in Some Particulars (London: M. Simmons, 1652), 3. 22. Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England, 161– 162.

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Notes to Pages 55 –57

23. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642, 30. 24. Short Notes and Observations, 12. 25. See Tamsyn Williams, “‘Magnetic Figures’: Polemical Prints of the English Revolution,” in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, c. 1540 –1660 (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 86 –110. 26. Richard Hawkins, A Discourse of the National Excellencies of England (London: Henry Fletcher, 1658), 178, 233. 27. John Reresby, Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. Andrew Browning (Glasgow: Jackson, Son, 1936), 21–22. 28. See Richard L. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–1689 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); and Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 29. See, for example, Philips, The Character of a Popish Successor; The Character of a Good Man, neither Whig nor Tory (London: Jonathan Robinson, 1681); The Character of a Modern Whig, or An Alamode True Loyal Protestant (London: John Smith, 1681); The Character of a Rebellion, and What England may Expect from One. Or, The Designs of Dissenters (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1681); A Character of Popery and Arbitrary Government ([London: n.p., 1681]); [Elkanah Settle], The Character of a Popish Successour, and What England may Expect from Such a One (London: T. Davies, 1681); The Character and Qualifications of an Honest Loyal Merchant; George Savile, marquis of Halifax, The Character of a Trimmer (London: n.p., 1688); The Character of a Prince, The Character of a Williamite (London: Randall Taylor, 1689); Edmund Hickeringill, The Ceremony-Monger, His Character (Edinburgh: n.p., 1689); The Character of a Jacobite (London: n.p., 1690); and The Character of a Bigotted Prince; and What England may Expect from the Return of Such a One (London: Richard Baldwin, 1691). 30. John Milton, “Eikonoklastes,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1649; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 3: 343. For a discussion of Milton’s political iconoclasm, see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1977), 171–186. 31. [Bethel], An Account of the French Usurpation, 20. 32. An Address to the Hopeful Young Gentry of England. In Some Strictures on the Most Dangerous Vices Incident to their Age and Quality (London: G. Walbanke, 1669), 33. 33. Joseph Hall, “The Fashions of the World: Laid Forth in a Sermon at Gray’s Inn, on Candlemas-Day,” in The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall, D.D. (1624[?]; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1863), 5: 286. 34. John Evelyn, Navigation and Commerce, their Original and Progress (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1674), 13. The poet Richard Brathwait also attributed Rome’s decline to “those vices which usually effeminate men the most, to wit, delicacy in fare and sumptuousness in attire” (The English Gentleman [1630; reprint, London: John Bawson, 1641], 10). For further parallels between classical culture and contemporary England, see A Discourse of the Necessity of

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Encouraging Mechanick Industry (London: R. Chiswell, 1690), 5; and [ James Halsey], The Vanity of Honor, Wealth, and Pleasure (London: J. Magnes and R. Bently, 1678), 53. The history of Rome was the usual context for the discussions of luxury (John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977], 297, note 5). 35. Milton, “The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth,” 7: 427. As Lois Potter has perceptively written, Milton’s attack on the crown was “part of a larger attempt to invert the sexual imagery of kingship in order to replace the husband-father figure with an effeminate one” (“Royal Actor as Royal Martyr: The Eikon Basilike and the Literary Scene in 1649,” in Gordon J. Schochet, ed., Restoration, Ideology and Revolution [Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1990], 227). 36. For the links between French politics and fashion more specifically, see Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the “Ancien Regime,” trans. Jean Birrel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Jennifer Jones, “‘The Taste for Fashion and Frivolity’: Gender, Clothing and the Commercial Culture of the Old Regime” (Ph.D. diss, Princeton University, 1991). 37. [Cornwallis], Essayes, no pagination. 38. Sir Thomas Overbury, A Wife now the Widdow (London: Lawrence Lisle, 1614), G. 39. Halifax, The Character of a Trimmer, 32. Similar fears of the French “universal monarchy” of fashion were expressed by Sir T. L., Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the Town (London: Allen Banks, 1673), 97–98. 40. See, for instance, Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1787; Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 41. Brathwait, The English Gentleman, 182. 42. [George Clarke], A Treatise of Wool and Cattel (London: William Crook, 1677), 33. 43. A Character of Popery and Arbitrary Government, 2. 44. Edmund Hickeringill, The History of Whiggism (London: E. Smith, 1682), 16. 45. A Memorial of God’s last Twenty Nine Years Wonders in England, from its Preservation and Deliverance from Popery and Slavery (London: J. Rawlins, 1689), 1. 46. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1698), in David Wooton, ed., Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (London: Penguin, 1986), 433. For a discussion of Sidney’s masculinism, see Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 147, 163. 47. Milton, “A Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth,” 7: 427. 48. Counsel and Directions Divine and Moral (London: Robert Clavell, 1685), 136 –137.

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Notes to Pages 59 – 64

49. Walter Cary, The Present State of England, Expressed in this Paradox, Our Fathers were Very Rich with Little, and Were Poore with Much (London: William Shefford, 1626), 3. 50. John Sekora incorrectly dates this reversal to the eighteenth century, when the earlier, status-based concept of luxury was “losing by degrees the religious and political sanction it had possessed since antiquity” (Sekora, Luxury, 2). 51. Adams, The Gallants Burden, 4. 52. B. K. [Benjamin Keach], War with the Devil: Or the Young Mans Conflict with the Powers of Darkness (London: Benjamin Harris: 1676), 6. 53. Sir T. L., Remarques on the Humours, 65 – 66. 54. Sir T. L., Remarques on the Humours, 66. 55. The use of this masculinist language by more democratic groups, such as the Levellers and Diggers, has yet to be explored. 56. Perez Zagorin, The Court and The Country (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 34. 57. Hawkins, Discourse of the National Excellencies, 199. 58. Cary, The Present State of England, 3. 59. The Institucion of a Gentleman (London: Thomas Marshe, 1555), I.iiii. 60. Essayes, or Moral Discourses on Several Subjects. Written by a Person of Honour (London: Thomas Proudlove, 1671), 43. 61. For a discussion of the notion of the Norman Yoke in anti-court ideology, see Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in his Puritanism and Revolution (New York: Schocken, 1958), 50 –122. 62. Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 108. 63. Thomas Manley, Usury at Six Percent Examined, and Found Unjustly Charged by Sir Tho. Culpeper, and J. C. [Josiah Child], With Many Crimes and Oppressions, Whereof ’tis Altogether Innocent. Wherein is Shewed, the Necessity of Retrenching our Luxury, and Vain Consumption of Forraign Commodities, Imported by English Money (London: Thomas Ratcliffe and Thomas Daniel, 1669), 30. 64. Cary, The Present State of England, 11. 65. F. J. Fisher, “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 30 (1948), passim. 66. Sir T. L., Remarques on the Humours, 1–3. 67. Hall, “The Fashions of the World,” 5: 299. 68. George Eliott, Londons Looking-Glass (London: n.p., 1665), broadside. 69. Samuel Rogers, The Poore’s Pension: A Sermon (London: Edward Brewster, 1644), 23. 70. Nicholas Breton, The Court and Country, or a Briefe Discourse Dialogue-wise Set Downe Betweene a Courtier and a Country-man (London: John Wright, 1618), 177. 71. The Character of a Town-misse (London: W. L., 1675), 3– 4. 72. Overbury, A Wife now the Widdow, D2. 73. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570; reprint, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 58.

Notes to Pages 64 – 68

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74. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear (1603– 6[?]; reprint, New York: Signet Classics, 1963), 82 – 83. 75. See especially Orgel, The Illusion of Power. 76. Shakespeare, King Lear, 82, 85. Of course, Cornwall is a villain in Lear, and thus cannot be said to represent Shakespeare’s own views, yet no one ever responds to Cornwall’s critique of the Machiavellian use of plainness. I thank Ben Bertram for our discussions of King Lear. 77. Patrick Collinson has written that the difference between Anglicans and Puritans was a “difference of degree, of theological temperature so to speak, rather than of fundamental principle” (Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 26 –27). 78. There were exceptions, of course. Philip Stubbes and Thomas Adams, quoted in the previous chapter, were among the early Puritans who supported the old sartorial regime and its arbitrary signifiers. 79. Hooper, “The Tudor Sumptuary Laws,” 448 – 449. 80. Cited by Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 72. 81. Anthony Gilby, To My Lovynge Brethren that is Troublyd abowt the Popishe Aparrell, Two Short and Comfortable Epistels (N.p., [1566]), 451. 82. Martin Bucer, “The Answere of M. Bucer to the Foresayde Letters,” in Whether it be Mortall Sinne to Transgresse Civil Lawes, Which be the Commaundementes of Civill Magistrates . . . ([London?]: n.p., 1566), 53. Bucer’s opinions were cited by both Anglicans and Puritans, especially since his “Answer” made both arguments. He generally agreed with the Puritan position, but was willing to temporize, since he was eager to heal divisions within European Protestant ranks. 83. An Answer for the Tyme (1566), cited in Primus, The Vestments Controversy, 122. 84. Hawkins, Discourse of the National Excellencies, 198. 85. Evans, Moderation Stated, 24 –25. 86. Address to the Hopeful Young Gentry, 37. 87. Sheridan, A Discourse of the Rise and Power of Parliaments, 86 – 89. 88. Hickeringill, The Ceremony-Monger, His Character, 4, 16. 89. Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-book (London: Richard Sergier, 1609), 13. This tract was reprinted as Samuel Vincent, The Young Gallant’s Academy (London: R. Mills, 1674). 90. Brathwait, The English Gentleman, 182. 91. William Sancroft, Lex Ignea: Or The School of Righteousness (London: Timothy Garthwait, 1666), 8. 92. Sir George MacKenzie, Moral Gallantry (Edinburgh: Robert Brown, 1667), 125. For a similar argument, see Adams, The Gallants Burden, 33. 93. Lawrence Humphrey, The Nobles, or Of Nobility (London: Thomas Marshe, 1563), t.9. 94. Brathwait, The English Gentleman, 9. Though no Puritan, Brathwait was very popular in Puritan circles, according to Homai J. Shroff, The Eighteenth Century Novel: The Idea of a Gentleman (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1978), 22.

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95. Harbottle Grimston, A Christian New-Year’s Gift (London: n.p., 1644), 104. 96. Milton, “Of Reformation, Touching Church-Discipline in England,” 1: 588. 97. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman and Gentlewoman (London: John Bawson, 1641), 278. 98. Clement Ellis, The Gentile [Genteel] Sinner, or, England’s Brave Gentleman (Oxford: Edward and John Forrest, 1660), 110. 99. Phillips, The Reformation of Images, xii. 100. Ellis, The Gentile [Genteel] Sinner, 109, 112. 101. Puritanism was not the private property of an insurgent middle class, but equally appealed to significant numbers of the gentry (J. T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry: The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984], 51–55). 102. Address to the Hopeful Young Gentry, 35v. 103. The Institucion of a Gentleman, I.iiii. 104. Ellis, The Gentile [Genteel] Sinner, 109. See also Brathwait, The English Gentleman, 10 –11. 105. L. A. Clarkson, The Pre-Industrial Economy in England, 1500 –1700 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1971), 125. 106. Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (London: Longman, 1984), 60 – 61; and Gould, “The Trade Crisis of the Early 1620’s,” passim. 107. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500 –1700, 2: 26, 40. 108. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 123. See also Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, v, 141. 109. Influenced by the “commonwealth” school of thought, the state at times supported projects aimed at promoting English manufactures as early as the late sixteenth century, though these import substitution schemes did not become mainstream economic policy until a century later (Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, v). A real shift in focus from overseas trade to home production did not begin until the 1670s, as Thirsk admits (8, 141). “Only very slowly,” as D. C. Coleman has written, did seventeenth-century writers come “to look upon the industry that fed trade as an economic plant to be cherished, a source of wealth in itself” (The Economy of England, 1450 –1750 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 70). 110. Despite its name, mercantilism in England appealed more to manufacturers than to merchants. Mercantilism is not synonymous with merchant capitalism, except to the extent that it was often former merchants (especially “merchant clothiers”) who made the shift from trade to manufacture. 111. Peacham, Worth of a Penny (attributed to Peacham by the printer in advertisement to reader, no pagination). 112. Until the late eighteenth century, “industry” remained a characterological attribute rather than a mode of production, as Raymond Williams has noted in his Culture and Society 1780 –1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), xiii. See also Keith Tribe, Genealogies of Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1981), 105.

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113. In tracing the origin of abstract, “scientific” economics, historians have undervalued the moral categories which informed mercantilist thought. Joyce Appleby, for example, has argued that with mercantilists like Thomas Mun, “for the first time economic factors were clearly differentiated from their social and political entanglements” (Economic Thought and Ideology, 41). This argument is also taken up in Agnew, World’s Apart, 55 –56). Although Appleby has paid admirable attention to “the very powerful religious character of all Calvinist ideas [which] inhibited the freeing of economic activities from social control” (Economic Thought and Ideology, 14), mercantilism should be understood within its own context, not as an ideological perversion that prevented the liberation of later economic thought and activity from social control. For further review of Appleby’s interpretation of history, see Donald Winch, “Economic Liberalism as Ideology: The Appleby Version,” Economic History Review 38, no. 2 (May 1985): 287–297; and J. G. A. Pocock, “To Market, to Market: Economic Thought in Early Modern England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10, no. 2 (autumn 1979): 303–309. 114. Richard Haines, A Breviat of Some Proposals . . . For the Speedy Restoring the Woollen Manufacture (London: Langley Curtis, 1679), 9. 115. Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, 11. A similarly succinct argument was made by Privy Councillor Samuel Fortrey in his often cited Englands Interest and Improvement. Consisting in the Increase of the Store, and Trade of this Kingdom (Cambridge: John Field, 1663), 21–22. 116. John Hodges, The True and Onely Causes of the Great Want of Moneys in these Kingdoms; and the Remedies Mentioned, in these General Assertions in Order to more Particulare Demonstrations, how these Kingdoms may Grow Rich, and Powerful (London: J. H., 1666), broadside. 117. Sir Robert Cotton, “The Manner and Meanes Howe the Kings of England have from Time to Time Supported and Repaired their Estates,” in Cottoni Posthuma. Divers Choice Pieces of that Renowned Antiquary Sir Robert Cotton (1609; reprint, London: Henry Seile, 1651), 197–198. 118. Sir Peter Pett, The Happy Future State of England (London: n.p., 1688), 79, cited in Viner, Religious Thought and Economic Society, 176. 119. A Discourse of the Necessity of Encouraging Mechanick Industry, 17. 120. Slinsby Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated (London: D. B., 1671), 24. See also “St. Paul the Tentmaker. A Discourse Shewing how Religion has in all Ages been Promoted by the Industrious Mechanick, Printed about the year 1690,” in A Collection of State Tracts, publish’d during the Reign of King William III (London: n.p., 1706), 2: 146. 121. There was a “close connection between English Puritanism and the clothing industry,” George Caspar Homans has argued in “The Puritans and the Clothing Industry in England,” in his Sentiments and Activities: Essays in Social Science (Oxford: Transaction Books, 1988), 183. See also Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin, 1975), 23. 122. Sir Francis Brewster, Essays on Trade and Navigation (London: Thomas Cockerill, 1695), 22. Jacob Viner has noted that early modern writers, like those quoted above, often remarked upon the link between Puritanism and these “inclinations to trade and industry” (Religious Thought and Economic Society,

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176). Since Max Weber, however, historians have long looked for this link within the psychological makeup and accumulative habits of its adherents, either at an individual level, in the notion of a “calling,” or at the collective level, seeing Puritanism as “the moral basis of class consciousness” (Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983], viii). See also Christopher Hill, “Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,” in Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974], esp. 94). Historians have not looked at the level of attitudes to consumption, however. Here, Puritanism and “industrial” capitalism shared a similar “spirit,” to use an old-fashioned word. 123. J. F., a Well-wisher to Industry, The Golden Fleece: Or, Old England Restored to its Old Honest Vocation (London: Langley Curtis, 1679), 3. 124. Manley, Usury at Six Percent Examined, 30. 125. Omnia Comesta a Bello. Or, An Answer out of the West to a Question out of the North. Wherein the Earth is Opened, and the Napkin Found, in which the Trading Talent of the Nation hath been Tyed up, and Lyen hid for some Years Last Passed; for Want of Which, All Persons in England, from the Tenant to the Landlord, from the Weaver to the Merchant, have Languished of a Deep Consumption (N.p.: 1667), 5. 126. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1: 228. Sir Thomas Smith, whose work strongly influenced seventeenth-century mercantilists, had asked in 1549: “what commonweal can be well ordered or saved upright, where none of the rulers or counselors have studied any philosophy, specially the part that teaches of manners?” (A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, 29). See also Joan Thirsk’s discussion of Smith in her Economic Policy and Projects, passim. 127. The Uses and Abuses of Money, 8. 128. Manley, Usury at Six Percent Examined, 30. 129. Edward Misselden, Free Trade. Or, The Meanes to Make Trade Flourish. Wherein the Causes of the Decay of Trade in this Kingdome are Discovered (London: John Legatt, 1622), 12. This phrase was quoted by Manley, Usury at Six Percent Examined, 66. 130. Misselden, The Circle of Commerce, 130 –131. See also Josiah Child, A Discourse about Trade (1669; reprint, London: A. Sowle, 1690), 149. 131. Angliae Speculum Morale, 13. 132. Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, 157–158. 133. [Bethel], An Account of the French Usurpation, 20. 134. A Discourse of the Necessity of Encouraging Mechanick Industry, a2. “Luxury also makes a man so soft, that it is hard to please him, and easy to trouble him” (Sir George MacKenzie, The Moral History of Frugality, With its Opposite Vices, Covetousness and Prodigality, Niggardliness and Luxury [London: J. Hindmarsh, 1691], 78). 135. Pett, The Happy Future State of England, 157. 136. [William Petyt], Brittania Languens, or a Discourse of Trade (London: Thomas Dring, 1680), 302, 140. Like political critics, economic critics of the old

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regime linked homosexual practices and effeminacy, both incompatible with the privileging of production, as Henry Abelove has suggested (“Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in England,” Genders 6 [fall 1989]: 125 –130). 137. William James, England’s Interest: Or, Means to Promote the Consumption of English Wool, to Populate the Nation, and Raise the Value of Lands (N.p., 1689), 3. 138. Clarke, Treatise of Wool and Cattel, 2. 139. England’s Vanity, 129. 140. Brathwait, The English Gentleman, 182. 141. See The Ancient Trades Decayed, Repaired Again (London: Dorman Newman and T. Cockerel, 1678), 16. 142. Petyt, Brittania Languens, 285. 143. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 123. 144. William Carter, England’s Interest Asserted, in the Improvement of its Native Commodities; and more especially the Manufacture of Wool (London: Francis Smith, 1669), 2. 145. Misselden, Free Trade, 40. 146. Joseph Trevers, An Essay to the Restoring of our Decayed Trade (London: Giles Widdowes, 1675), 12. 147. The Dutch Drawn to the Life (London: Thomas Johnson, 1664), 56. 148. Evelyn, Navigation and Commerce, 64. Further instances of English mercantilists’ praise of the “natural frugality” of the Dutch are too numerous to mention. Joyce Appleby has written that the “sustained demonstration of this Dutch commercial prowess acted more forcefully upon the English imagination than any other economic development of the seventeenth century” (Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 73). 149. Culpeper, The Necessity of Abating Usury, 15. 150. Agnew, World’s Apart, 156. 151. [William Carter], The Proverb Crossed (N.p., 1677), 6 –7. 152. Waterhouse, The Gentleman’s Monitor, 361–362. 4.

THE THREE-PIECE SUIT

1. Fortrey, Englands Interest and Improvement, 25 –26. 2. John Evelyn, Tyrannus or the Mode: In a Discourse of Sumptuary Lawes (London: G. Bedel and T. Collins, 1661), 14 –15. Unless otherwise stated, I have chosen to use this edition of Evelyn’s Tyrannus. According to his Diary, Evelyn “presented my little trifle of Sumptuary Laws intitled Tyrannus” to the king on December 4, 1661 (Evelyn, Diary, 3: 306). 3. Evelyn, Tyrannus, 15. 4. Evelyn, Tyrannus, 4. 5. Evelyn, Tyrannus, 29. 6. “His Majesty’s most gracious Speech, together with the Lord Chancellor’s, to the Two Houses of Parliament, at their Prorogation, on Monday the 19th of May, 1662,” in Walter Scott, ed., A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts [Somers Tracts] (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1812), 7: 547. The

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very tone of this speech demonstrates why the king of England cared about the court’s public image. 7. de Marly, Fashion for Men, 56; Penelope Byrde, The Male Image. Men’s Fashion in Britain 1300 –1970 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1979), 76; and de Marly, “King Charles II’s Own Fashion: The Theatrical Origins of the English Vest” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): 378 –382. For a brief review of the secondary literature, see my “‘Graceful, Virile, and Useful:’ The Origins of the Three-Piece Suit,” Dress 17 (1990): 118 –126. 8. John Evelyn, “Adversaria,” unpublished manuscript cited by the editor in John Evelyn, Tyrannus or the Mode, ed. J. L. Nevinson (Oxford: Luttrell Society Reprints, 1951), xv–xvi. 9. Andrew Marvell, “The Kings Vowes,” in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth ([1670s?]; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 167. 10. Edward Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia: or the Present State of England, 3rd ed. (London: J. Playford, 1669), 59; Evelyn, Diary, 3: 465. Aileen Ribeiro also wonders whether the vest didn’t have French origins, though given the antiFrench sentiments expressed in introducing the vest, this seems unlikely (Dress and Morality [New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986], 87). 11. There is no evidence to support Beverly Lemire’s assertion that Charles II was “promoting England’s trade with the Orient” by adopting the vest (Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660 –1800 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 10). 12. Esmond S. de Beer, “King Charles II’s Own Fashion: An Episode in Anglo-French Relations 1666 –1670,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2 (1938 –39): 105 –115. For further discussion of the French use of vests, see Richard Heath, “Studies in English Costume: A Charles the Second Military Coat,” The Magazine of Art 11 (1888): 11–15. 13. Pepys, Diary, 7: 379 –380. 14. Francis M. Kelly, “‘A Comely Vest after the Persian Mode,’” The Connoisseur, no. 88 (1931): 96. 15. Byrde, The Male Image, 75. Doreen Yarwood has argued that the shift “from beribboned doublets and jackets to more dignified, though dull, coats and waistcoats” was “a change so lasting that today men still conform to the latter garments, though in a modified form” (English Costume [London: Batsford, 1961], 159). 16. John Milward, The Diary of John Milward, ed. Carole Robbins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 14. 17. Sancroft, Lex Ignea, 21, 8. 18. Thomas Brooks, London’s Lamentations: Or, A Serious Discourse Concerning that Late Fiery Dispensation that Turned our (Once Renowned) City into a Ruinous Heap (London: John Hancock and Nathaniel Ponder, 1670), 56. Henry Peacham linked concerns about modesty with the fire (Peacham, Worth of a Penny, 26 –27). Without presenting evidence, Diana de Marly has also suggested a link between the fire and fashion reform (de Marly, Fashion for Men, 56).

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19. Allen B. Hinds, ed., Calendar of State Papers—Venetian (London: HMSO, 1935), 35 (1666 –1668): 100 –101. 20. Pepys, Diary, 7: 315. 21. Milward, Diary, 17; Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles II. 1666 –1667 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864), 174, no. 139 (1666). In accordance with Parliamentary wishes, the king in November 1666 issued “a proclamation prohibiting the importation of all sorts of manufactures and commodities whatsoever, of the growth, production, or manufacture of France,” an act which was renewed on May 18, 1689 (Catalogue of the Collection of English, Scottish and Irish Proclamations in the University Library [London: University of London Press, 1928], Proclamations 251 and 404). 22. Pepys, Diary, 7: 320 –321; Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632 –1695, Described by Himself (Oxford: Clarendon, 1891–1900), 2: 90. Unlike some of Wood’s diary, this passage was written contemporaneously. 23. Pepys, Diary, 7: 324. 24. Cited in John Drinkwater, Mr. Charles, King of England (London: Hudder and Stoughton, 1926), plate 5. 25. Evelyn, Diary, 3: 464 – 465. Evelyn gave his Tyrannus to the king in December 1661 (Evelyn, Diary, 3: 306). Evelyn repeated his claim in a final note to his unpublished second edition of Tyrannus: “Note that this was publish’d two years before the vest, cravat, garters and buckles came to be the fashion, and therefore might happily give occasion to the change that ensued in those very particulars” (Tyrannus, 30). It is unclear when Evelyn made these notes, but his claim that the vest emerged in 1663 (two years after the original publication of Tyrannus) suggests that many years had passed before Evelyn attempted a second edition. 26. Thomas Osborne, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds, 1632 –1712, ed. Andrew Browning (Glasgow: Jackson, Son, 1944), 2: 16 –17. As one of the vices castigated by Puritans, gambling that he would keep his resolution was not a good sign of Charles’s resolve, as later events would reveal. 27. Halifax, The Character of a Trimmer, 32. 28. Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia: or the Present State of England, 3rd ed., 58 –59. The telling exception of women, noted here, will be discussed in chapter 5. 29. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 123. 30. The Diary of Samuel Newton Alderman of Cambridge (1662 –1717; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1890), 43. 31. The Ancient Trades Decayed, 17. 32. Evelyn, Tyrannus, 22. 33. Evelyn, Tyrannus, 23. 34. R. Steele, ed., Tudor and Stuart Royal Proclamations, 1485–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), 18 and 19 Car. II, c.4 (1666). This act was renewed and strengthened in 1678 and 1680. 35. Jorevin de Rocheford, “Description of England and Ireland, In the Sev-

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enteenth Century: By Jorevin,” in The Antiquarian Repertory: A Miscellaneous Assemblage of Topography, History, Biography, Customs, and Manners, ed. Francis Grose (London: Edward Jeffery, 1809), 4: 564. From internal evidence, this tract was written between 1667 and 1672. 36. Evelyn, Diary, 3: 467. 37. Pepys, Diary, 7: 353. Diary entry for November 4, 1666. 38. Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 2: 98. Diary entry for January 1, 1667. 39. Francis Sandford, The Order and Ceremonies Used for, and at the Solemn Internment of the Most High, Mighty and most Noble Prince George Duke of Albemarle ([London:] Francis Sandford, 1670), plate 5. 40. Halifax, The Character of a Trimmer, 32 –33. 41. Edward Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia: or the Present State of England, 6th ed. (London: J. Playford, 1672), 52. 42. Edward Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia: or the Present State of England, 8th ed. (London: J. Playford, 1674), 54. 43. [Elkanah Settle], Pastor Fido: Or, The Faithful Shepherd (London: William Cademan, 1677), 67. 44. The Courtier’s Calling, 70. 45. England’s Vanity, 124 –125. Nostalgia for the “manlike” vest of 1666 continued in the early eighteenth century. See Laurence Echard, The History of England (London: Jacob Tonson, 1707– 8), 3: 177; John Dennis, An Essay upon Publick Spirit; Being A Satyr in Prose upon the Manners and Luxury of the Times, The Chief Source of our Present Parties and Divisions (London: Bernard Lintott, 1711), 6, and the many editions of Edward Chamberlayne’s Anglia Notitia and Guy Miege’s The Present State of England. 46. Evelyn, Diary, 3: 467. Diary entry for October 30, 1666, written years later. 47. Evelyn, “Adversaria,” xv–xvi. 5.

MASCULINITY IN THE “AGE OF CHIVALRY,” 1688 –1832

1. James Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 98. 2. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 86. This passage was often criticized for its theatricality and emotional display, which for critics compromised its claims to masculinity (Christopher Reid, “Burke’s Tragic Muse: Sarah Siddons and the ‘Feminization’ of the Reflections,” in Steven Blakemore, ed., Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992], 1–27). See also Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity (London: Macmillan, 1999), 31– 65. 3. Boulton, The Language of Politics, 98. 4. For the clearest argument on the decline of court culture, see R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). See also John Brewer, The Pleasures of the

Notes to Pages 93–95

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Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997). 5. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 89. 6. Lois G. Schwoerer, “The Glorious Revolution as Spectacle,” in Stephen B. Baxter, ed., England’s Rise to Greatness, 1660 –1763 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 133. For a discussion of William and Mary’s not always successful attempts to construct an image of a virtuous court, see Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91–100. 7. [ John Harris], A Treatise upon the Modes: or, a Farewell to French Kicks (London: J. Roberts, 1715), 6. 8. [ John Blanch], The Naked Truth, in an Essay upon Trade (London: n.p., 1696), 1. 9. The Character of a Bigotted Prince, 18 –19. 10. For an analysis of the impact of the Revolution of 1688 on gender ideals and practices, see Weil, Political Passions. 11. David Jones, The Tragical History of the Stuarts (London: n.p., 1697), 375 –376. David Hayton has argued that there was “an obsessive belief” in postrevolutionary England “that the corruption of English society and institutions originated with King Charles II” (“Moral Reform and Country Politics,” 89). 12. Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade (London: James Knapton, 1699), 217. 13. Hayton, “Moral Reform and Country Politics,” 86. See also Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1982), 24. 14. For the classic account, see J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967). 15. John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 157. 16. George Berkeley, An Essay Towards Preventing the Ruine of Great Britain (London: J. Roberts, 1721), 11. 17. George Berkeley, The Querist, Containing Several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public (Dublin: R. Reilly, 1726), 21–22, 5. 18. Berkeley, An Essay Towards Preventing the Ruine of Great Britain, 11. 19. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 3– 4. 20. John Bowles, Thoughts on The Late General Election. As Demonstrative of the Progress of Jacobinism, 2d ed. (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1802), 33. 21. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 12. 22. Susan Dwyer Amussen has referred to independence as “the central characteristic of manhood in early modern England” (“‘The Part of a Christian Man’: The Cultural Politics of Manhood in Early Modern England,” in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky, eds., Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 214. 23. “The central place—it is not too much to say—in Whig ideology between the English and French Revolutions was occupied by the concept variously expressed as manners, politeness or taste” (Pocock, “The Political Econ-

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Notes to Pages 95 –96

omy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution,” 333). For the best discussion of the idea of “manners” in political ideology, see Lawrence Klein, “Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” The Historical Journal 32, no. 3 (September 1989): 583– 605. 24. Hints to Radical Reformers, and Materials for True (London: J. Hatchard, 1817), 153. 25. Bowles, Thoughts on The Late General Election, 33. 26. [Daniel Defoe], An Essay, on Ways and Means for the Advancement of Trade (London: T. Warner, 1726), 17. This sentiment was shared by An Essay, or Modest Proposal, of a Way to Encrease the Number of People, and Consequently the Strength and this Kingdom; to Improve the Woollen Manufacture (N.p., 1693), 3. 27. Nathanial Forster, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions (London: J. Fletcher, 1767), 47. 28. E. P. Thompson, “The Patricians and the Plebs,” in his Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991), 43. See also Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 558. From a different perspective, J. C. D. Clark also analyzes aristocratic claims to cultural hegemony, though he assumes that those claims were generally accepted throughout English society. Thus Clark conflates “an examination of its [the aristocracy’s] selfimage” with a portrait of English society as a whole (English Society, 1688– 1832. Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 4). Given the extensive work demonstrating a lively popular culture not deferential to aristocratic hegemony, my argument does not assume the general acceptance of these claims to hegemony outside aristocratic political culture. See, among others, Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics; Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 347–389; and Kathleen Wilson, “A Sense of the People”: Urban Political Culture in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). (I would like to thank Nick Rogers for his comments on my work.) For a critique of Clark’s thesis, see James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 417. 29. Brown, Estimate of the Manners, 25. 30. An Address to the Associated Friends of the People (Edinburgh: printed for the author, 1792), 29 –30. 31. Mary Wray, The Ladies Library (London: Jacob Tonson, 1722), 48. For another classic statement, see Hannah More, Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1808). This text was originally published in London. 32. Brittania Expirans or, A Brief Memorial of Commerce (London: n.p., 1699), 23. 33. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776; reprint, London: Methuen, 1912), 2: 159; John Pern Tinney, The Rights of Sovereignty Vindicated (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1809), 44. See also George Berkeley, The English Revolution Vindicated from the Misrepre-

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sentation of the Adherents of the House of Stuart (London: Elliot and Kay, 1789), 30. 34. A Discourse of the Necessity of Encouraging Mechanick Industry, a2. 35. Davenant, Essay upon the Probable Methods, 227. 36. John Dennis, An Essay upon Publick Spirit; Being A Satyr in Prose upon the Manners and Luxury of the Times, The Chief Source of our Present Parties and Divisions (London: Bernard Lintott, 1711), iv. 37. For an overview of the theme of “public virtue” in eighteenth-century political rhetoric, see Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714 –1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Monod, Jacobitism and the English People. 38. G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 50. 39. For the use of the anti-luxury language of court Whigs, see M. M. Goldsmith, “Liberty, Luxury and the Pursuit of Happiness,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 225 –251. 40. Torism and Trade Can Never Agree (London: A. Baldwin, 1713), 1. 41. The Character of the Beaux. To which is added, The Character of A Jacobite (London: n.p., 1696), 42 – 43. 42. Claudius Rey, The Weavers True Case (London: W. Wilkins, 1719), vii. For further associations between Jacobitism and rampant commercialism, see Paul Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise: Smuggling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in Southeast England, 1690 –1760,” Journal of British Studies 30, no. 2 (April 1991): 154. 43. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 447; H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977), 91; and Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, 28 –29. These historians rightly note that the Tory use of this rhetoric differed from its Whig version, though none look at their shared attitudes to gender. 44. The Character of a Whig, Under Several Denominations. To Which is Added, the Reverse, or the Character of a True English-man, in Opposition to the Former (London: n.p., 1700), 62, 70. 45. Dennis, An Essay upon Publick Spirit, title page. 46. Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 74 – 75. 47. Charles Davenant, Tom Double Return’d Out of the Country: Or, The True Picture of a Modern Whig, Set Forth in a Second Dialogue (London: n.p., 1702), 5. For Davenant’s critique of commercialism, see Charles Davenant, The True Picture of a Modern Whig, Set forth in a Dialogue between Mr. Whiglove and Mr. Double (London: n.p., 1701), 4. 48. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 23, 28. 49. MacKenzie, The Moral History of Frugality, 79 – 81. 50. National Journal, no. 34 (June 7, 1746), cited in Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 36. As Paul Monod has ably demonstrated, not all Jacobites

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shared these attitudes, as a Jacobite underworld emerged in mid-century which flouted the neo-puritan values of the dominant political culture (Jacobitism and the English People, 95 –97). 51. Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31 (October 1992): 302 –329; Kathleen Wilson, “The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Politics of Identity in Georgian England,” in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture 1600 –1800: Image, Object, Text (New York: Routledge, 1995), 238; Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 87–92; and Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism. Newman overstates the Francophilia of the English aristocracy; Newman and Wilson attribute English nationalism to middle-class culture; and Newman and Colley understate the influence of gender ideology on English and British national identity. For a discussion of the development of a masculinist nationalism in theories of polite conversation, see Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1996), esp. 98 –110. 52. Nathaniel Lancaster, Public Virtue: Or, The Love of Our Country (London: R. Dodsley, 1746), 25, 21–24. 53. Edmund Burke, “Three Letters addressed to a Member of the present Parliament, on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1796; reprint, London: F. and C. Rivington, 1801), 8: 12. 54. Bowles, Thoughts on the Late General Election, 36 –37. 55. A Satyr Against the French (London: Randall Taylor, 1691), 5. 56. J. Bramston, The Man of Taste (London: Lawton Gilliver, 1733), 14. 57. G. S. Rousseau, Perilous Enlightenment: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses. Sexual, Historical (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 121. 58. As Richard Davenport-Hines has noted, “there were increasing efforts to depict sodomites as effeminate” throughout the course of the eighteenth century (Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain since the Renaissance [London: Collins, 1990], 75). While Randolph Trumbach argues that “effeminacy . . . came to be identified with the effeminacy of the then emerging role of the exclusive adult sodomite” (“The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660 –1750,” in Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past [New York: Meridian Books, 1989], 134), the reverse is more accurate: sodomy became increasingly associated with effeminacy, as Trumbach also argues, yet effeminacy was not seen as inherently sodomitical, since non-sodomites continued to be the objects of attacks on effeminacy as well. As George E. Haggerty has written, “the effeminate man of any class as often as not defies an automatic sexuality designation, and no amount of cultural coding makes it possible to read effeminacy as an absolute marker of sexual object choice” (Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999], 44). 59. Randolph Trumbach, “Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London,” Journal

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of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 2 (October 1991): 187. See also DavenportHines, Sex, Death and Punishment, 65 ff.; and Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 60. I thank Tom King for sharing with me his excellent discussion of “mollies” (Thomas Alan King, “The Mollies’ Occupation[s]: Performativity and the Masculinization of the Eighteenth-Century Political Nation,” delivered at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, Harvard University, March 1995). See also Laurence Senelick, “Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the EighteenthCentury London Stage,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (July 1990): 45 – 47. 61. For a general discussion of the Whiggish associations of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, see Dudley W. R. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 92; and T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck, “The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform,” Literature and History 3 (March 1976): 45 – 64. See also Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700 –1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 70 –72. 62. [Edward Ward], The History of London Clubs (London: n.p., 1709), 284, cited by Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 86. For a discussion of Ned Ward’s anxieties, see especially Haggerty, Men in Love, chap. 2. 63. As Randolph Trumbach has argued, homosexual aristocrats “whose effeminacy was too obvious . . . were very likely to be excluded from a share in real political power by those aristocratic men whose taste was now exclusively for women” (“Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture,” 188). 64. Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 99. Bray argues that the doubling of prosecutions of homosexuals is not related to any increased fears of homosexual practices, but to the birth of “a continuing [homosexual] culture to be fixed and an extension of the area in which homosexuality could be expressed and therefore recognised: clothes, gestures, language, particular buildings and particular public places—all could be identified as having specifically homosexual connotations. In contrast, the socially diffusive homosexuality of the early seventeenth century was far less obtrusive” (92). Equally, Trumbach argues that “transvestite adult men who clearly possessed male genitalia and whose bodies showed no ambiguity were classified as part of a larger group of effeminate men” (“Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture,” 190). Yet Bray’s and Trumbach’s evidence for the cultural associations of this homosexual subculture is not from that subculture itself, but from the very Societies and “the public mind” (Trumbach, “Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture, 190) which produced the connotation of homosexual practices as effeminate in the process of repressing those who practiced them. Without denying the existence or the sartorial practices of this subculture, one must conclude that the modern connotations of homosexual practices cannot be understood outside the very process of their repression. For the best discussion of mollies’ relation to political culture, see King, “The Mollies’ Occupation(s).” 65. An Enquiry into the Melancholy Circumstances of Great Britain: More Particularly in Regard to the Oeconomy (London: W. Bickerton, 1740), 1. 66. John Bowles, Dialogues on the Rights of Britons, between a Farmer, a

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Sailor, and a Manufacturer (London: T. Longman, 1792), 20 –21. For a similar sentiment, see [ John Reeves], Thoughts on the English Government (London: J. Owen, 1795), 4. 67. [Archibald Campbell], Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (Westminster: B. Creake, 1728), 99. 68. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 169. 69. Matthew Heynes, A Sermon for the Reformation of Manners Preach’d in St. Paul’s Church in Bedford (London: n.p., 1701), 7. 70. Of Commerce and Luxury (Philadelphia: T. Lang, 1791), 2, 32. This tract was originally printed in London. 71. Albert Williams, Facts upon Facts (Chiefly Historical) against the League (London: John Ollivier, 1845), 85. 72. Thomas Malthus, Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws (London: J. Johnson, 1814), 29. 73. This is the argument in Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 104 – 153. 74. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 90. As C. B. Macpherson has written, “there is nothing surprising or inconsistent in Burke’s championing at the same time traditional English hierarchical society and the capitalist market economy. He believed in both, and believed that the latter needed the former” (Burke [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980], 63). See also Pocock, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution,” 331– 349; and Donald Winch, “The Burke-Smith Problem and Late EighteenthCentury Political and Economic Thought,” Historical Journal 28, no. 1 (1985): 231–247. 75. E. P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” in his The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 250. See also Keith Tribe, Genealogies of Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1981), 35 – 100; and R. S. Neale, Writing Marxist History: British Society, Economy and Culture since 1700 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 78, 85. 76. With different emphases, this view is shared by Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility; Clark, English Society, 1688–1832; Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman; and McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society. 77. For this argument, see J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660 – 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 78. Berkeley, The Querist, 5. 79. Thomas A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 57. The majority of eighteenth-century Tories, as we have seen, were not proponents of luxury. 80. See William J. Ashley, “The Tory Origins of Free Trade,” in his Surveys Historic and Economic (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1966). 81. Barbon, Discourse of Trade, 5. See T. Cowen, “Nicholas Barbon and the Origins of Economic Liberalism,” Research in the History of Economic Thought 4 (1987): 67– 83.

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82. [Sir Dudley North], Discourses Upon Trade (London: Thomas Basset, 1691), 14. As early as 1826, Alexander McDonnell considered North to be one of the founders of free-trade ideology (Free Trade [London: John Murray, 1826], viii). As the next chapter argues, however, the majority of nineteenth-century free-trade advocates did not defend prodigality and exorbitant appetites, but rather promoted “the moral influence of free trade” (Edward Baines, On the Moral Influence of Free Trade, and its Effects on the Prosperity of Nations [London: Ridgway, 1830], title page). 83. A Vindication of Commerce and the Arts; Proving that They are the Source of Greatness, Power, Riches and Populousness of a State (London: J. Nourse, 1758), 58. 84. The Prosperity of Britain, Proved from the Degeneracy of its People (London: R. Baldwin, 1757), 5. This is the only eighteenth-century defense of effeminacy that I have encountered. It is, of course, an anonymous tract. 85. William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London: R. Faulder, 1788), 2: 359. 86. Thomas Malthus, Principles of Political Economy (1820; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 463. This is part of Malthus’s “theory of gluts,” articulated in his controversy over the Corn Laws with David Ricardo. For a brief discussion, see Jacob Oser and William C. Blanchfield, The Evolution of Economic Thought, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 110 ff. 87. For an analysis of Mandeville as an independent Whig, see H. T. Dickinson, “The Politics of Bernard Mandeville,” in Irwin Power, ed., Mandeville Studies (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 80 –97. 88. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 6. 89. W. A. Speck, “Mandeville and the Eutopia Seated in the Brain,” in Power, ed., Mandeville Studies, 75. 90. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 104. On Mandeville’s relation to Addison and Steele, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, Shaftesbury, the French moral tradition, and mercantilist thought, see Curtis and Speck, “The Societies for the Reformation of Manners”; M. M. Goldsmith, “Public Virtue and Private Vices: Bernard Mandeville and English Political Ideologies in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth Century Studies 9, no. 4 (summer 1976): 477–510; Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville; Louis Schneider, Paradox and Society: The Work of Bernard Mandeville (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987), 84 ff.; and Donald Winch, “Adam Smith’s ‘Enduring Particular Result’: A Political and Cosmopolitan Perspective,” in Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue, 265. 91. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, 203. This is also the argument of McKendrick, “The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England”; Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville; and M. M. Goldsmith, “Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Journal of British Studies 17, no. 1 (fall 1977): 63– 81. We should not mistake as verisimilitude the cynicism of Mandeville’s rhetoric, however refreshing it is in contrast to the moralizing cant of “public virtue.”

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92. Richard Whately, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (London: B. Fellowes, 1832), 49. Joyce Appleby argues that Mandeville “merely advertised the hypocrisy of the eighteenth-century moralists’ praise of contentment and frugality” (Economic Thought and Ideology, 258). 93. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 51, 43– 44. As Christopher Berry has noted, it is Mandeville’s understanding that virtue was the product of skillful politicians that upset his contemporaries (The Idea of Luxury, 134 –135). 94. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 79 – 80. 95. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 130. 96. “Mandeville was in fact a strict moralist, condemning commercial society by an ascetic standard of virtue,” as Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff have astutely argued in their “Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations: An Introductory Essay,” in Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue, 11. 97. Hector Munro, The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1. 98. Harry Landreth, “The Economic Thought of Bernard Mandeville,” History of Political Economy 7, no. 2 (summer 1975): 195. On Mandeville’s opposition to free trade, see Nathan Rosenberg, “Mandeville and Laissez-Faire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24, no. 2 (April /June 1963): 183–196. 99. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 104, 115. This argument was repeated by the skeptical Whig David Hume in his “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in his Writings on Economics (1752; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1955), 26; and by Whately, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, 54 –55. 100. Thomas A. Horne, “Envy and Commercial Society. Mandeville and Smith on ‘Private Vices, Public Benefits,’” Political Theory 9, no. 4 (November 1981): 559. 101. [Daniel Defoe], Every-body’s Business, is No-Body’s Business; Or, Private Abuses, Publick Grievances (London: T. Warner, 1725), title page. 102. [George Blewitt], An Enquiry whether a General Practice of Virtue tends to the Wealth or Poverty, Benefit or Disadvantage of a People (London: R. Wilkins, 1725), 58. 103. John Dennis, Vice and Luxury, Publick Mischiefs: Or, Remarks on a Book Intituled, The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices Publick Benefits (London: W. Mears, 1724), 56 –57. 104. Enquiry into the Melancholy Circumstances, 34, 40. 105. Josiah Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which Respectively Attend France and Great Britain, with Regard to Trade (London: T. Trye, 1750), 126. See also the protectionist James Carrick Moore’s Freedom of Trade (London: John Murray, 1826), vi. 106. Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 126. 107. Berkeley, Essay Towards Preventing the Ruine, 4. 108. Berkeley, Essay Towards Preventing the Ruine, 11. 109. Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 20. For analyses of Hume’s politics, see Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); and Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). James Steuart agreed with Hume that one “must distinguish lux-

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ury as it affects our different interest, by producing hurtful consequences; from luxury, as it regards the moderate gratification of our natural or rational desires,” while John Rae differentiated between “the consumption of utilities” and “the consumption of pure luxuries” (Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy [London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1767], 2: 307; John Rae, Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy, Exposing the Fallacies of the System of Free Trade, and of Some Other Doctrines Maintained in the “Wealth of Nations” [Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1834], 292). This text was originally published in London. 110. John Thorold, A Short Examination of the Notions Advanc’d in a (late) Book, intituled, The Fable of the Bees (London: Wm. Langley, 1726), 11. 111. Blewitt, An Enquiry whether a General Practice of Virtue tends to the Wealth or Poverty, table of contents. Sir James Steuart and Thomas Malthus also believed that Mandeville had merely misused words (Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, 2: 307; Schneider, Paradox and Society, 57). 112. Campbell, An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue, 103. 113. Dennis, Vice and Luxury, Publick Mischiefs, 53. 114. Simon Smith, The Golden Fleece: Or, The Trade, Interest, and WellBeing of Great Britain Considered (London: n.p., 1736), 5. 115. Archibald Alison, Free Trade and Protection (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1844), 18, 42. Of course, English silk manufacturers might use the same nationalist arguments to promote their industry, much to the chagrin of wool clothiers and merchants. For a defense of English silk, see James, England’s Interest, 4. James was a silk weaver who sought to stop Parliament from banning the wearing of domestically produced silk, and instead to ban only imported silk. For silk’s critics, see John Cary, An Essay on the State of England, in Relation to its Trade (Bristol: W. Bonny, 1695); [ John Blanch], The Beaux Merchant: A Comedy. Written by a Clothier (London: R. and J. Bonwick, 1714); [Daniel Defoe], The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers Truly Represented (London: W. Boreham, 1719); Richard Steele, The Spinster: In Defense of the Woollen Manufactures (London: J. Roberts, 1719); and J. G., An Appeal to Facts; Regarding the Home Trade and Inland Manufactures of Great Britain and Ireland (London: George Woodfall, 1751). 116. John Almack, Character, Motives and Proceedings of the Anti-Corn Law Leaguers, with a Few General Remarks on the Consequences that would Result from a Free Trade in Corn (London: John Ollivier, 1843), 76, 75. 117. Thomas Mortimer, The Elements of Commerce, Politics and Finances, in Three Treatises on those important Subjects, 2d ed. (1774; reprint, London: R. Baldwin, 1780), 124. 118. An Enquiry into the Melancholy Circumstances of Great Britain, 4. See also J. G., An Appeal to Facts. 119. John Bell, A Vindication of the Rights of British Landowners, Farmers and Labourers, Against the Claims of the Cotton Capitalists to a Free Trade in Corn (London: Hatchard and Son, 1839), 22. See also John Bell, The Usurer versus the Producer; or Free Trade Illustrated (London: J. Ollivier, 1850).

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120. Joseph Pinsent, Conversations on Political Economy (London: J. M. Richardson, 1821), 85. 121. The Economist (London: J. Smeeton, 1801), 13. 122. The Young Gentleman and Lady Instructed in Such Principles of Politeness, Prudence, and Virtue (London: Edward Wicksteed, 1747), 2: 104. 123. John Pollexfen, Of Trade (London: John Baker, 1700), 159 –160. 124. Berkeley, The Querist, 4, 5. 125. George Coade, A Letter to the Honourable the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, Wherein the Grand Concern of Trade is Asserted and Maintained (London: Jacob Robinson, 1747), 87– 88. 126. See Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 168 ff. 127. [Daniel Defoe], A Plan of the English Commerce (London: Charles Rivington, 1728), 18. For similar attitudes, see James C———l, A Second Letter from a Hawker and Pedlar in the Country, to a Member of Parliament in London (London: T. Reynolds, 1731), 4; Malachy Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved (London: D. Browne, 1757), 1: 13; and Thomas Tryon, Some General Considerations Offered, Relating to our Present Trade (London: J. Harris, 1698), 7. 128. J. G., An Appeal to Facts, v. For the classic article on the internalization of industrial culture, see E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” in his Customs in Common, 352 – 403. 129. [ John Barnard Bayles], Sophisms of Free-Trade and Popular Political Economy Examined (London: Seeleys, 1850), 113–114. 130. Cited by Donald Winch, Malthus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 76. For a similar statement, see Josiah Tucker, Four Tracts, Together With Two Sermons, on Political and Commercial Subjects (Gloucester: R. Raikes, 1774), 19. 131. Paul Langford’s A Polite and Commercial People argues that England’s middle class was the main promoter of these values. For a critique, see Nicholas Rogers, “Paul Langford’s ‘Age of Improvement,’” Past and Present 130 (February 1991): 201–209. 132. Harris, A Treatise upon the Modes, 3. 133. Bourdieu, Distinction, 5. 134. Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700 –1820 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 2. 135. Pears, The Discovery of Painting, 36, 21. For the links between eighteenth-century politics and aesthetics, see also Caygill, Art of Judgement, 45. Taste was thus “an aristocratic faculty,” as Gary Shapiro and Ronald Paulson have both noted (Gary Shapiro, “From the Sublime to the Political: Some Historical Notes,” New Literary History 16, no. 2 [winter 1985]: 219; Paulson, Breaking and Remaking, 2). Taste was not “a bourgeois concept in the most literal historical sense,” as Terry Eagleton and Tom Furniss have argued (Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 8; Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 2). 136. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century, 10.

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137. Though good taste was always considered compatible with Christian modesty, modesty ceased to be an item of great religious controversy in the eighteenth century, as Anglicans and Dissenters shared a similar discourse about everyday life. See, for example, Matthew Audley, The Full Extent of the Doctrine of Christian Moderation and Peace (London: Edward Evets, 1705); Edmund Chishull, Modesty and Moderation (London: J. Round, 1712); James Owen, Moderation a Virtue: Or, The Occasional Conformist Justify’d from the Imputation of Hypocrisy (1700; reprint, London: A. Baldwin, 1703); and White Kennet, Moderation Maintain’d, In Defence of a Compassionate Enquiry into the Causes of the Civil War (London: n.p., 1704). For an opposing viewpoint, see the Jacobite Anglicans like William Shippen, Moderation Display’d: A Poem (London: n.p., 1704). In the quiescent climate that marked English religion before the Evangelical movement of the second half of the eighteenth century, the periodical press and the essay on taste took place alongside the sermon as the primary regulators of “polite” behavior. This is not to say that religious discourse did not continue to demarcate gender roles. See especially Jeremy Gregory, “Homo Religiosus: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Hitchcock and Cohen, English Masculinities 1660 –1800, 85 –110. For a discussion of the role of the church in the eighteenth century, see C. J. Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); Geoffrey Holmes, Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679–1742 (London: Hambledon, 1986), 182; and Cannon, Aristocratic Century, 60. 138. Dr. [ John] Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (London: R. Dodsley, 1747), 26. See also Lawrence Klein, “The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18, no. 2 (winter 1984/85): 213; and Patricia Crown, “British Rococo as Social and Political Style,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 3 (spring 1990): 281. 139. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, xviii and passim. The simultaneous development of an ideology of taste under France’s old regime makes for illuminating comparisons. See Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Jean-Pierre Dens, L’honnête homme et la critique du goût: Esthétique et societé au XVIIe siècle (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1981); Peter France, Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Jones, “The Taste for Fashion and Frivolity,” esp. chap. 5; and Michael Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 140. Daniel Cottom, “Taste and the Civilized Imagination,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34, no. 4 (summer 1981), 371. See also Frans DeBruyn, “Edmund Burke’s Natural Aristocrat: The ‘Man of Taste’ as a Political Ideal,” Eighteenth-Century Life 11, no. 2 (1987): 41– 60. 141. Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988), 49; Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 13; and Walter John Hipple Jr.,

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The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: The Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), 13. 142. Pears, The Discovery of Painting, 3. 143. Cited in Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 119. For the best discussion of Shaftesbury’s influence on the new culture of politeness, see Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness. 144. See Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 25 ff. For further discussion of Locke’s influence on eighteenth-century aesthetics, see Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: A Study of Francis Hutcheson’s Aesthetics and Its Influence in EighteenthCentury Britain (New York: Burt Franklin, 1976), 8 –18; Dabney Townsend, “From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (April /June 1987): 287–305; Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 118 –125; and Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 16 –20. 145. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 19. 146. Common Sense: Or, The Englishman’s Journal, 2: 8, 9. For similar concerns, see Sir Harry Beaumont [ Joseph Spence], Crito: Or, A Dialogue on Beauty (London: R. Dodsley, 1752), 5. 147. Alexander Gerard, Essay on Taste (1759; reprint, Edinburgh: J. Bell and W. Creech, 1780), 131. 148. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar, 1759), 371. For a discussion of Smith’s attempt to ground morals in something other than fashion, see T. D. Campbell, Adam Smith’s Science of Morals (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), 141 ff. 149. As Peter Kivy has written, “The question of the ‘standard of taste’ is the idée fixe of Enlightenment aesthetic theory” (Francis Hutcheson: An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973], 10). See also V. M. Hope, Virtue by Consensus: The Moral Philosophy of Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 150. Richard Fiddes, A General Treatise of Morality, Form’d upon the Principles of Natural Reason Only (London: S. Billingsley, 1724), lxv–lxvi. 151. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London: n.p., 1723), 405. Beauty, David Hume agreed, “is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them” (“Of the Standard of Taste,” in his Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed., John W. Lenz [1757; reprint, New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1965], p. 6). Though Hume shared a notion of taste similar to other aesthetic writers, he was alone in asserting that standards of taste were subjective (Jeffrey Wieand, “Hume’s Two Standards of Taste,” The Philosophical Quarterly 34, no. 135 [April 1984]: 129 –142). 152. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 11. 153. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 140 –141. 154. Cited in Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting, 146. 155. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London: William and John Smith, 1725), vi.

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156. Cottom, “Taste and the Civilized Imagination,” 375. 157. John Barrell has characterized this internalization as a “‘privatisation’ of society” and “‘privatisation’ of virtue” (The Political Theory of Painting, 54). I have chosen “personalization” as a more appropriate concept, given that this intimate connection between personal and political concepts of virtue took place in a very public arena. 158. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762; reprint, New York: Collins and Hannay, 1830), 99. Pierre Bourdieu has argued that possessing taste involved “the ability to apply the principles of a ‘pure’ aesthetic to the most everyday choice of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing or decoration” (Distinction, 5). Anne Hollander has also demonstrated the links between eighteenth-century neo-classical art forms and changes in dress in her Sex and Suits (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). 159. Nathaniel Lancaster, The Plan of an Essay upon Delicacy (London: R. Dodsley, 1748), 2 –3. Thus by extending principles of “taste” to everyday life, aesthetic writers undermined their own distinction of the “pleasures of the imagination” from useful objects of everyday life (as described in Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, xv). For similar links “between the sublime in art and the sublime in character,” as Henry Fielding put it (cited in Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960], 63), see also Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 177; William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty: Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London: J. Reeves, 1753), 33– 34; Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, vii–viii, 69, 73; Joshua Reynolds, The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Edmund Gosse (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1884), 188; and Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 1: 11, 139. 160. “As with everything else aesthetic, the roots of taste are moral” (Dabney Townsend, “Shaftesbury’s Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41, no. 2 [winter 1982]: 210). See also Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 32. 161. Lancaster, The Plan of an Essay upon Delicacy, 55. 162. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 6. 163. [ John Gilbert Cooper], Letters Concerning Taste (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1755), 84. 164. John Turnbull, A Treatise on Ancient Painting, Containing Observations on the Rise, Progress, and Decline of that Art amongst the Greeks and Romans (London: A. Millar, 1740), cited by John Barrell, “‘The Dangerous Goddess’: Masculinity, Prestige and the Aesthetic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Cultural Critique 12 (spring 1989): 103. 165. Dennis, An Essay upon Publick Spirit, 19. 166. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, 129. See also Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 16. 167. Cited in Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language, 49. Lawrence Klein argues that eighteenth-century “politeness” was a less gendered activity than my account implies (“Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere,” 104),

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yet Klein’s model is based on English adoption of French models of politeness which, in the form of salon culture, offered greater opportunities for female participation. See Dena Goodman, “Enlightened Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1988 – 89): 329 –350. 168. [ James Usher], Clio: Or, A Discourse on Taste (London: T. Davies, 1767), 23. 169. J. Lambe, A Sermon Preached before the King and Queen at Whitehall, Jan. 19, 1689 (London: Walter Kettilby, 1690), 14. 170. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 78. For further discussion of the aesthetics of the sublime as the unveiling of the art of concealment, see my translation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Sublime Truth,” Cultural Critique 18 (spring 1991): 5 –31, and 20 (winter 1991–92): 207–229. 171. Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original, 1–2. For a similar argument, see Lancaster, The Plan of an Essay, xxii. 172. As Frances Ferguson has noted, “a major dilemma of the sublime is that of preserving its difference from the custom, habit, and fashion which are continually launching insidious assimilative forays upon it” (“The Sublime of Edmund Burke, Or the Bathos of Experience,” Glyph 8 [1981]: 71). 173. Gerard, Essay on Taste, 131. 174. Eighteenth-century neo-classicism created the space for a “sublimated” discussion of all things Greek, including homoeroticism, as G. S. Rousseau has demonstrated in “The Sorrows of Priapus,” in his Perilous Enlightenment, 65 – 108. 175. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, no. 249 (December 15, 1711), ed. by Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 2: 487. In a slightly modified form, the same phrase appeared in The Young Gentleman and Lady, 1: 317. For discussions of condemnations of luxury in English literature, see Harriet Guest, “‘These Neuter Somethings’: Gender Difference and Commercial Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England,” in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 173–194; and Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 7. 176. Harris, A Treatise upon the Modes, 60. 177. Usher, Clio: Or, A Discourse on Taste, 32. 178. The Gentleman’s Library, Containing Rules for Conduct in All Parts of Life (London: W. Mears, 1715), 60 – 61. 179. Forde, Honor Triumphant, epistle to the reader. 180. The Young Gentleman and Lady Instructed, 2: 146 –147. 181. “The view that dress expressed status was an unchallenged commonplace of the eighteenth century” (Anne Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England [New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979], 13).

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182. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 122. 183. Jeremy Collier, Essays upon Moral Subjects (1694; reprint, London: R. Sare, 1697), 94. 184. Collier, Essays upon Moral Subjects, 53. 185. For local studies of the growth of middle-class consumer spending in the early eighteenth century, see John Small, The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660 –1780 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 93– 104, and Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance. In a different context, Pierre Bourdieu has analyzed definitions of aristocratic taste as reactions against cultural diffusion. See Bourdieu, Distinction. 186. Collier, Essays upon Moral Subjects, 93–94. 187. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 249 (December 15, 1711), 2: 467. The phrase was repeated in Common Sense: Or, The Englishman’s Journal (London: J. Purser, 1738), 24. 188. The Young Gentleman and Lady Instructed, 1: 317. 189. Oliver Goldsmith, “Of the Pride and Luxury of the Middle Class of People,” in The Bee (1759), cited by Stephen Copley, ed., Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 51. 190. See McKendrick, “The Commercialization of Fashion,” in McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 52; Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 104 –153; and Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology, 42 – 49. It is not clear that a new consumer society was born in the eighteenth century. Ownership of clothing is poorly recorded in probate inventories, making it difficult to analyze the clothing purchases of middle- and lower-class consumers (Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 4; and Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660 –1730 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989], 284). What one can argue from the evidence is that, as a proportion of expenditures, spending on clothing did not increase in the early eighteenth century, nor did “the mean amount in consumer goods . . . show much upward movement” (Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America, 86, 92, 95). To be sure, there was an increase in the production and consumption of goods throughout the eighteenth century, as well as a concomitant decrease in the price of clothing, making the diffusion of fashion more readily available to an increasingly wider market, which exacerbated anxieties about class distinctions (Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 41; and Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, passim). For an excellent discussion, however, of the inapplicability of the terms “consumer society” and “mass consumption” to the eighteenth century, see John Styles, “Manufacturing, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993), 527–554. I would like to thank John Styles for his kind support during the research phase of my work. 191. The Economist, 3. 192. William Shenstone, Essays on Men and Manners (1765; reprint, London: J. Parsons, 1794), 87. For a similar sentiment, see Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 120.

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Notes to Pages 119 –123

193. The Gentleman’s Library, 58. This attitude was also articulated in Thomas Newcomb, The Manners of the Age (London: Jer. Batley, 1733), 31–32. 194. Brewster, Essays on Trade and Navigation, 42. 195. [William Darrell], A Gentleman instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life. Written for the Instruction of a Young Nobleman (London: E. Evets, 1704), 38 –39. Thus Darrell’s advice was quite at odds with Neil McKendrick’s assertion that in the eighteenth century “good repute rested on pecuniary strength,” especially “in displaying the clothes one wore” (McKendrick, “The Commercialization of Fashion,” 52). 196. Darrell, A Gentleman instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life, 38 –39. 197. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 26. 198. Isaac Browne, On Design and Beauty (London: J. Roberts, 1734), 2. 199. Arthur Murphy, Gray’s-Inn Journal (London: n.p., 1752), cited in Geoffrey Squire, Dress and Society, 1560 –1970 (New York: Viking, 1974), 125. For a discussion of the frock in French political culture, see Philip Mansel, “Monarchy, Uniform and the Rise of the Frac 1760 –1830,” Past and Present 96 (1982): 103–132. 200. Byrde, The Male Image, 78. See also C. Willett Cunnington and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Eighteenth Century (Boston: Plays, Inc., 1972), 14 –25. 201. [Guy Miege], The New State of England under their Majesties K. William and Q. Mary (London: Jonathan Robinson, 1691), 2: 38 –39. 202. Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia: or the Present State of England, 18th ed. (London: J. Playford, 1694), 462. 203. Béat Louis de Muralt, Letters Describing the Character and Customs of the English and French Nations (1694 –5; reprint, London: Tho. Edlin, 1726), 52. De Muralt’s fellow traveler Henri Misson journeyed to England in the 1690s and observed that “a beau is so much the more remarkable in England, because, generally speaking, the English men dress in a plain uniform manner” ([Henri Misson], M. Misson’s Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England [1698; reprint, London: D. Browne, A. Bell et al., 1819], 15). 204. See Cunnington and Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume, 14 – 25. There continued to be “a remarkable dissociation between the polite and the plebeian culture” throughout the eighteenth century, as E. P. Thompson has well noted in his “The Patricians and the Plebs,” 53. 205. John Macky, A Journey Through England (London: J. Pemberton, 1722), 2: 238. 206. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1787, 165 –166. Colley nonetheless overstates the influence of French fashion on England’s elite. Though French fashion permeated the court, it failed to influence aristocratic dress in general, as Macky here points out. For this argument, see de Marly, Fashion for Men, 58. 207. César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I. and George II (1725; reprint, London: John Murray, 1902), 112, 204 –205, 204, 205.

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208. Don Manoel Gonzales, “The Voyage of Don Manoel Gonzales, (Late Merchant) of the City of Lisbon in Portugal, to Great-Britain,” in A Collection of Voyages and Travels (1730 –1731; reprint, London: Thomas Osborne, 1745), 1: 188. 209. Charles Davenant, cited without publication information, in Cunnington and Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume, 18. 210. de Saussure, A Foreign View of England, 204. 211. Miege, The New State of England, 2: 38 –39. 212. Relation du voyage de leurs excellences Messieurs les Chevaliers L. Soranzo et G. Venier, Ambassadeurs Extraordinaires de la Serenissime République de Venis, a la Cour d’Angleterre (N.p., 1696), 5. Translation mine. See also Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia: or the Present State of England (1694), 462; de Muralt, Letters Describing the Character, 52; Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (London: Charles Rivington, 1726), 173; and Gonzales, “The Voyage of Don Manoel Gonzales,” 1: 188. 213. Anecdotal evidence though the sources quoted may be, they still offer us the most reliable account of everyday dress in eighteenth-century England. Diaries, a more intimate source for discussions of everyday dress, offer either insufficient description of clothes, or, when they do describe clothes, do not offer reliable serial data to allow comparison over time. Aggregate trade statistics tell us nothing about consumption patterns among specific social groups. Probate inventories, so fruitfully used to study consumption of other products, do not include descriptions of apparel type, fabric, or cost—merely a lump sum value for apparel as a whole accrued over a lifetime—and end in 1730, as noted in Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660 –1760, 3; and Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America, passim. I offer artwork in this chapter only as a visual index to changes documented by the sources given above. 214. A New Present State of England (London: R. Baldwin, 1750), 2: 28. 215. de Muralt, Letters, 52. 216. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century, 146. Mingay dates this cultural shift to the writings of Addison and Steele. 217. Philip Dormer Stanhope, earl of Chesterfield, Letters written . . . to His Son (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), 209 –210. Chesterfield’s letters “alarmed [his] contemporaries, who, as is well known, pointed to them as attempts on the part of a cynical and vicious aristocrat to ruin the moral character of a young English gentleman” (Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman, 24). Michael Curtin and Paul Langford also note the hostile reception of Chesterfield’s writings, though associate this hostility with middle-class ideology (Michael Curtin, Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners [New York: Garland, 1987], 101; Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798, 542). 218. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth- Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 55 ff. 219. Valerie Steele, “The Social and Political Significance of Macaroni Fashion,” Costume: The Journal of the Costume Society 19 (1985): 94 –109.

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Notes to Pages 124 –127

220. Fashion historians have traditionally relied on the collections of costume museums, which have an in-built bias toward materials of high monetary or aesthetic value. Lorna Weatherill has found a similar bias in other collections of the history of material culture. See Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 21. Most costume museums contain highly embroidered waistcoats from the eighteenth century, but these seem to have been worn only on formal occasions, and did not represent daily wear, as John Macky testified. 221. Evelyn, Tyrannus, 13. 222. [Sir Dudley North], Observations and Advices Oeconomical (London: John Martyn, 1669), 67– 68, 21–22. 223. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774; reprint, New York: Garland, 1974), 55. The poet Nahum Tate argued that women had a prerogative to fine dress: “If they appear with the ornaments of dress, it is no more than their sex’s privilege, who were made for nature’s greatest triumph” ([Nahum Tate], A Present for the Ladies: Being an Historical Vindication of the Female Sex [London: Francis Saunders, 1692], preface). 224. See Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (New York: Routledge, 1989), 93–145. 225. Harris, A Treatise upon the Modes, 42. 226. Addison and Steele, The Spectator 1, no. 81 (June 2, 1711): 2: 349. 227. Collier, Essays upon Moral Subjects, 74 –75. 228. [ Jeremy Taylor], Several letters between Two Ladies: Wherein the Lawfulness and Unlawfulness of Artificial Beauty in Point of Conscience, are Nicely Debated. Published for the Satisfaction of the Fair Sex (London: Tho. Ballard, 1701), 96, 117. 229. This is not the same as what Thorstein Veblen called “vicarious consumption,” where women are “valuable as evidence of [a man’s] pecuniary strength” (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 149). This overused notion should be seen as a product of its time: a Victorian notion in which married women were defined in relation to their husbands. The notion of vicarious consumption fails to account for female agency or to fully consider the ways in which a female subjectivity was created in which women saw possibilities to display their own gentility, their own status, and their own sense of taste, not that of their husbands. Bonnie Smith has also criticized Veblen for portraying female consumption from a male point of view in her Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 55. I would like to thank Bonnie Smith for her thoughtful comments on my work. 230. Alice Browne, The Eighteenth-Century Feminist Mind (London: Harvester, 1987), 34. Often this double message existed in the same text: while one anonymous writer called on “fair ladies” to “break the disgraceful bonds and universal despotism of fashion,” this author nonetheless believed that “female virtue is never more in danger, than when totally in rags. Its first, though perhaps its least amiable, security, is a little personal pride, and vanity of dress and appearance” (Hints to Radical Reformers, 118, 157). Not all authors participated in this double standard, however, since throughout early modern England many writers decried both female and male luxury, and called for “most seem-

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ing gravity” among both men and women (Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, Drawne out to the Full Body: Expressing What Habilliments doe Best Attire Her, What Ornaments doe Best Adorne Her, What Complements doe Best Accomplish Her (London: I Dawson, 1641), 274. See also [Allestree], The Ladies Calling, 2; Hall, “The Fashions of the World,” 5: 296; and Several Discourses and Characters Addressed to the Ladies of the Age. Wherein the Vanities of the Modish Women are Discovered. Written at the Request of a Lady, by a Person of Honour (London: Christopher Wilkinson, 1689), 143. 231. See also Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984). 232. Steele, The Spinster, 3. 233. F. Nivelon, Rudiments of Genteel Behavior (London: n.p., 1737), plate 1 for men, plate 1 for women. 234. The Young Gentleman and Lady Instructed, 1: 337–338. See also [Richard Allestree], The Whole Duty of a Woman (London: n.p., 1700), passim. 235. Although it is true that as a genre eighteenth-century courtesy manuals “appear to have no political bias,” as Nancy Armstrong has argued in her Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 60, courtesy manuals were only one of a great variety of sources helping to create a female subjectivity that was explicitly political. As Kathryn Shevelow has written of ideals of domestic femininity in eighteenthcentury print culture: “by the very means of its production, then, the discourse of the private is a public discourse” (Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, 15). I have chosen to use the terms “personal” and “political” rather than “public” and “private,” precisely because of the public nature of these constructions. 236. Berkeley, The Querist, 14, 29. 237. The Woman of Taste. occasioned by a late poem, entitled, The Man of Taste (London: J. Batley, 1733). 238. David Black, Essay upon Industry and Trade (Edinburgh: James Watson, 1706), 25. 239. An Enquiry into the Melancholy Circumstances, 18. See also Several Discourses and Characters, 143, and [Defoe], The Just Complaint, 6 –7. 240. Cited in Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 249. 241. For a discussion of women’s political action through less formal channels of power, see Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 237–282. 242. For a discussion of eighteenth-century feminism, see Browne, The Eighteenth-Century Feminist Mind; and Katharine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). 243. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London: A. Roper and E. Wilkinson, 1696), 25, 3, 11. This was also the argument in Sophia, A Person of Quality, Woman not Inferior to Man: Or, A Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, Esteem, with the Men (London: John Hawkins, 1739), 24 –25. 244. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (London: K. Wilkin, 1694), 23, 25. Astell’s anti-Lockean feminism is best elaborated in Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

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245. Astell, Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 31–33. 246. Astell, Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 61. 247. Macaulay’s critique of Burke was published in [Catherine Macaulay], Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France, in a Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope (London: C. Dilly, 1790). The next chapter will more fully address women radicals, as well as the relationship between radicalism and feminism. 248. A Vindication of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Answer to all his Opponents (London: J. Debrett, 1791), 98. See also the anti-feminist doggerel of [Richard Polwhele], The Unsex’d Females: A Poem (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798). For a further discussion of Catharine Macaulay’s place in a masculinist political culture, see Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 130 –148. 6.

THE MAKING OF THE SELF-MADE MAN, 1750 –1850

1. William Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, and (incidentally) to Young Women, in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life (London: Mills, Jowett, and Mills, 1829 –30), (no pagination), paragraph 21. Although Cobbett became more and more an advocate of universal male suffrage, his Advice to Young Men was addressed predominantly to middle- and upper-class men. 2. Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, paragraph 21. 3. Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, paragraph 21. 4. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 755. 5. Cited in Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 754. See also James Vernon’s description of Cobbett as the “ideal image of the gentleman farmer” in Vernon, Politics and the People, 254 ff. 6. William Cobbett, Political Register, September 24, 1803, 433. As Karl Schweizer and John Osborne have written, “Cobbett found repugnant all signs of foreign effeminacy, . . . and glorified in the lore of ‘English manners’ and habits” (Cobbett in his Times [Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990], 8). 7. William Hazlitt, “Character of Cobbett,” in Table Talk (1821), in P. P. Howe, ed., The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1931), 8: 59. 8. For the influence of Burke on Cobbett’s early political life, see Raymond Williams, Cobbett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3–20; and Schweizer and Osborne, Cobbett in his Times, 8 ff. Cobbett “democratized the Country platform,” as Ian Dyck has succinctly put it in his William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10. 9. Cited in Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 819. For similar sentiments, see Matthew Bridges, An Address to the Electors of England: More Especially those of the Middle and Operative Classes (London: James Ridgway, 1832), 12. Further examples are too numerous to mention. 10. To borrow E. P. Thompson’s famous (and famously gendered) formulation: “Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this

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is its only definition . . . I am convinced that we cannot understand class unless we see it as a social and cultural formation” (Making of the English Working Class, 11). 11. This is the approach of the otherwise inspiring work of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, whose Family Fortunes delineates the ways in which a shared gender ideology helped consolidate middle-class consciousness. Family Fortunes retains a productivist definition of class, dividing classes according to the incomes of (predominantly) men, and thus remains within a definition of class which positions domestic life, consumer behavior, and gender ideology as merely aspects of a class consciousness which reproduces one’s relation to the means of production, rather than produces class itself. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780 –1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), esp. 28 –30. 12. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, 218 –251. 13. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, 436. 14. For reviews of this literature, see D. C. Coleman, Myth, History and the Industrial Revolution (London: Hambledon, 1992), 1– 42; and James Raven, “British History and the Enterprise Culture,” Past and Present 123 (May 1989): 178 –204. 15. Perry Anderson, “The Figures of Descent,” in his English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), 121. See also Perry Anderson, “Origins of the Present Crisis,” in English Questions, 21–24. 16. Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850 –1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 157. 17. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 51; Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, 436. As we have seen in previous chapters, attributing economic decline to the adoption of aristocratic “softness” is an old historiographical trope, dating back at least to the sixteenth century. 18. See Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. 141–157. 19. Edward Royle and James Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers, 1760 –1848 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 189 –190. Classes often express values which are not specifically their own, as Patrick Joyce has noted in his Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15. 20. Sir James MacKintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae. Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers Against the Accusations of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (Philadelphia: William Young, 1792), 40. This text was originally published in London. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 2d ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1790), 97. Wollstonecraft’s feminist appropriation of republican ideology will be discussed later in this section. Reformers “based their political demands on the historic rights of Englishmen under the ancient constitution,” as H. T. Dickinson has observed (“Introduction: the Impact on Britain of the French Revolution and the French Wars, 1789 –1815,” in H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989],

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9). See also Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, 108; and John Brewer, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 330. 21. MacKintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 156, 42. Similarly, the radical William Godwin asserted that “revolutions of states . . . consist principally in a change of sentiments and dispositions in the members of those states” (An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness [London: G. C. J. Johnson, 1793], 1: 202). As Colin Bonwick has noted, “references to 1688 were legion in radical tracts” (English Radicals and the American Revolution [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977], 25). See also Royle and Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers 1760 –1848, 40. 22. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859; reprint, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 282. For an earlier expression of this sentiment, see Richard Price, A Discourse of the Love of our Country (London: T. Cadell, 1789), 15. 23. For a discussion of the politics of manners in middle-class political culture, see Joanna Innes, “Politics and Morals: The Reformation of Manners Movement in Later Eighteenth-Century England,” in Hellmuth, ed., The Transformation of Political Culture, 57–118; and Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680 –1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. 193–215. I thank Margaret Hunt for her comments and support. 24. [Charles Pigott], The Female Jockey Club, or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age (London: D. I. Eaton, 1794), xli. 25. Burgh, Britain’s Remembrancer, 43. 26. What Stefan Collini has argued about the later Victorian period equally applies to the earlier era: “terms like ‘altruism’ or ‘character’ constitute the animating dynamic of much of the political thought of the period,” while “ideals of ‘manliness’ play an unexpectedly important part in defining . . . political attitudes” (Public Moralists, 7). Without explanation, however, Collini dismisses “questions of sexual identity and gender construction” (171) from his discussion of manliness. For other attempts to divorce Victorian discussions of “manliness” from discussions of sex and gender, see Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1; and Boyd Hilton, “Manliness, Masculinity and the Mid-Victorian Temperament,” in Lawrence Goldman, ed., The Blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 65. 27. [ John Cartwright], Take your Choice! (London: J. Almon, 1776), xix; William Godwin, The Enquirer. Reflections on Educations, Manners, and Literature (Philadelphia: Robert Campbell, 1797), 146. This text was originally printed in London. Kathleen Wilson has written of “the widespread fears of the emasculation and degeneracy of the British body politic” in popular political writings during the period of the Seven Years War (“A Sense of the People,” 185). 28. See Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution, xiv;

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Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 86 –90; Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4; Mark Philp, “The Fragmented Ideology of Reform,” in Mark Philp, ed., The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54; and Thompson, The Making the English Working Class, 88. 29. Malcolm I. Thomis and Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977), 5. See also Royle and Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers 1760 –1848, 76; and John Dinwiddy, “Conceptions of Revolution in the English Radicalism of the 1790s,” in Hellmuth, ed., Transformation of Political Culture, 540 –541. 30. See Observations on Mr. Paley’s Theory of the Origin of Civil Government and the Duty of Submission (London: T. Thornton, 1789); [ Joseph Towers?], Thoughts on the Commencement of a New Parliament (London: Charles Dilly, 1790); John Derry, “The Opposition Whigs and the French Revolution 1789 –1815,” in Dickinson, ed., Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815, 40; and Royle and Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers, 41. As James Vernon has noted, the French Revolution did not create “a major discursive shift” in English political culture, precisely because the Paineite language of natural rights was successfully portrayed as part of a foreign invasion (Politics and the People, 307). 31. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, 218 – 221. As James Vernon has cogently argued, “Paineite and constitutionalist languages did not exist in different categories” (Politics and the People, 308). For other analyses which downplay the significance and incompatibility of Paineite radicalism, see Brewer, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III”; Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism; J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History. Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Dickinson, “Introduction: the Impact on Britain of the French Revolution and the French Wars, 1789 –1815.” 32. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, 142 – 143; Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, 143, 146; and Claeys, Thomas Paine, 106. 33. The Catechism of Man. Pointing out from Sound Principles, and Acknowledged Facts, The Rights and Duties of Every Rational Being (London: D. I. Eaton, 1794), title page, v. 34. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution, 8th ed. (London: J. S. Jordon, 1791), 70. See also The Times; Or, The Age of Ruin (London: printed for the author, 1795), 13, for a gendered critique of titles. 35. George Woodcock, “The Meaning of Revolution in Britain, 1770 – 1800,” in Ceri Crossley and Ian Small, eds., The French Revolution and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6. 36. Joel Barlow, A Letter to the National Convention of France (New York:

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Thomas Greenleaf, 1793), 8. Barlow was an American member of the Society for Constitutional Information, and a friend of John Horne Tooke, Thomas Paine, and Joseph Priestley. 37. See, above all, Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). 38. R. S. Neale, Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 10. See also Asa Briggs, “The Language of ‘Class’ in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” in R. S. Neale, ed., History and Class: Essential Readings in Theory and Interpretation (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 2 –29. 39. Briggs, “The Language of ‘Class,’” 16. Political economists also contributed to defining class, as the next section will discuss. The intent here is not to separate political and economic determinants of “class,” especially in a period when these were not separate discourses, but rather one discourse articulated around different issues. The next section will demonstrate the great confluence between the radical political tradition and radical political economists in the construction of a language of class. 40. Joan W. Scott, “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (spring 1987), 10. Though Scott is here referring to the language of class used by Chartists, the same insight applies to their middle-class radical predecessors. 41. “Class’ is treated as a discursive rather than an ontological reality, the central effort being to explain languages of class from the nature of politics rather than the character of politics from the nature of class,” as Gareth Stedman Jones has argued in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832 –1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 8. For revisions of this formulation, see Scott, “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” 1–13; and James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790 –1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 71. 42. William Cobbett, for example, defined a social hierarchy “not according to relationships with the means of production, but according to rural residence, a love of the land and a shared opposition to the culture and ideology of the city” (Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 47). 43. Price, Observations on the Importance, 39. Earlier versions of this “middling” ideology can be found in Daniel Defoe: “the middle state . . . was the best state in the world, the most suited to labor and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind” (Robinson Crusoe [1719; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1985], 68). As R. S. Neale has pointed out, “many who defined themselves as ‘middle class’ were more sure about what they were not than what they were” (Class and Ideology, 6). 44. [Thomas Mortimer], The National Debt No National Grievance; or The Real State of the Nation (London: J. Wilie, 1768), 60. 45. Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: W. Spotswood, J. Rice, and T. Seddon, 1785), 40. This text was originally pub-

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lished in London. For similar arguments, see MacKintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 42; and Charles Pigott’s definition of “effeminacy” in his A Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meaning of Words (London: D. I. Eaton, 1795), 16 –17. For brief discussions of this reversal, see Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, 141; and Vernon, Politics and the People, 308. 46. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, cited in Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, 218. For a discussion of Godwin’s republican critique of luxury, see Noel Thompson, The Market and Its Critics: Socialist Political Economy in Nineteenth Century Britain (New York: Routledge, 1988), 31. For his “Miltonic” critique of political idolatry, see Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, 218 ff. 47. Price, Observations on the Importance, 44. English radicals praised American colonists precisely because they “had simple manners, dressed in homespun, and were strangers to luxury,” while aristocratic Britain “was irreligious, dissipated, and enervated by luxury and vice,” as Colin Bonwick has observed (English Radicals and the American Revolution, 46, 49). For a further discussion of luxury and manliness in the American Revolution, see Innes, “Politics and Morals,” 60. 48. Richard Price, Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and the War with America (London: T. Cadell, 1777), 25. See also Mortimer, National Debt, 57. For a discussion of the “support the middling ranks and artisans gave to the American Revolution,” see Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, 17 ff. 49. Jonathan Dymond, Essays on the Principles of Morality, and on the Private and Political Rights and Obligations of Mankind, 4th ed. (London: Charles Gilpin, 1842), 46. 50. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men, 28. 51. Rev. Christopher Wyvill, Papers and Letters, Chiefly Respecting the Reformation of Parliament (Richmond: M. Bell, 1816), 18. Wyvill was very adept at using country ideology in opposition to court corruption, as Ian Christie has noted in his Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760 –1785 (London: Macmillan, 1962), 77. 52. Thomas Cooper, A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective against Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Watt, in the House of Commons, on the 30th of April, 1792 (London: J. Johnson, 1792), 34. For a discussion of the use of the language of productive and unproductive classes, see also Briggs, “The Language of Class,” 8 –9; James Epstein, “The Constitutionalist Idiom: Radical Reasoning, Rhetoric and Action in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of Social History 23, no. 3 (spring 1990): 557; and Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 712. 53. As Anna Clark has noted, arguments for not extending suffrage to the working class were made “by contrasting the middle-class man’s ‘self-denial’ in supporting his family with the ‘sensual indulgence’” of working-class men (“The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s,” Journal of British Studies 31 [ January 1992], 66). See also Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 39 – 40. 54. An Address to the Gentlemen, forming the several Committees of the as-

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sociated Counties, Cities, and Towns, for supporting the Petitions for Redress of Grievances, and against the unconstitutional Influence of the Crown over Parliament (N.p., 1780), ix. 55. An Address to the Gentlemen, vi. 56. [ Joseph Towers?], Observations on Public Liberty, Patriotism, Ministerial Despotism, and National Grievances (London: J. Towers, 1769), 27–28. For a brief discussion of Towers’ use of the language of independence, see Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, 107. For similar sentiments, see MacKintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae, 41; and Sir William Jones, “Speech to the Assembled Inhabitants of the Counties of Middlesex and Surrey, the Cities of London and Westminster, and the Borough of Southwark, 28 May 1782,” in Three Tracts by Sir William Jones (London: Effingham Wilson, 1819), 51. These lines were cited in [Robert Evans], Three Letters of Publicola, On The Expediency of A Reform in Parliament (London: J. Budd, 1811), 29. 57. Rev. Christopher Wyvill, A State of the Representation of the People of England (York: J. Johnson, 1793), 44, 43. 58. William Cobbett, Prospectus of a New Daily Paper, to be Entitled The Porcupine (London: n.p., 1800), 7, cited by Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 19. 59. Brewer, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” 344; and Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, 9. 60. James Vernon has argued that “this new, sober, self-improving, and independent radical politics represented a moral and political assault on received exclusive definitions of citizenship and the public political sphere. It sought to prove that the politically excluded were virtuous and independent proto-citizens with the moral right for a voice in the nation’s affairs” (Politics and the People, 225). In like manner, James Epstein has observed that “the virtues of manly independence were among the key terms of constitutionalist reference” in radical discourse (Radical Expression, 23). 61. Cartwright, Take your Choice! x. See also Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, The Principles of Government and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (London: T. Cadell, 1776), 98. Gareth Stedman Jones has observed that “the attribution of evil and misery to a political source” was “the central tenet of radicalism” (Languages of Class, 105). See also Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution, 4; and Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, 140. 62. [George Dyer], The Complaints of the Poor People of England (London: n.p., 1793), 14. 63. John Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Rights of Britons to Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and the Freedom of Popular Association (London: printed for the author, 1795), 69. 64. John Thelwall, Peaceful Discussion, and not Tumultuary Violence the means of Redressing National Grievance (London: J. Thelwall, 1795), 9. For a discussion of Thelwall’s distinction between luxury and productive consumption, see Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815– 60 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 29. 65. Joanna Innes is right to point out that reformers disagreed over whether

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moral decay was to blame for political corruption, or vice versa (“Politics and Morals,” 59). Innes is equally correct to note that many conservative moral reformers, such as Wilberforce, did not link moral reform with parliamentary reform at all (Innes, “Politics and Morals,” 101). 66. Cooper, A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective against Mr. Cooper, 71. 67. Dymond, Essays on the Principles of Morality, 115. Many radicals saw “the moral vigour of the citizens as the prime requirement for the health of the body politic,” as Stefan Collini has noted for a later period (Public Moralists, 109). 68. Mortimer, National Debt, 47. See also Granville Sharp, A Declaration of the People’s Natural Right to a Share in the Legislature, which is the Fundamental Principle of the British Constitution of State (London: B. White, 1775), 160. Almost one hundred years later, Samuel Smiles echoed these sentiments when he wrote: “The solid foundations of liberty must rest upon individual character; which is also the only sure guarantee for social security and national progress. In this consists the real strength of English liberty” (Self-Help, 17–18). 69. [Evans], Three Letters of Publicola, 30. 70. Walter Fawkes, The Englishman’s Manual; Or, A Dialogue between a Tory and a Reformer, 2d ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, 1817), 48, 49. 71. Collini, Public Moralists, 171. 72. Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 18. Mandler, like many authors, too easily portrays fashion as an aristocratic sensibility and modesty as a middle-class virtue during a period in which these values were most contested and most under negotiation. 73. John Horne Tooke equally criticized what he saw as Fox’s “boundless profusion and prodigality,” and sided with his electoral rival, the younger Pitt, whom he praised as “remarkably sober, prudent, moral and economical” (Two Pairs of Portraits, Presents to all the Unbiassed Electors of Great Britain, and especially to the Electors of Westminster [London: J. Johnson, 1788], 13, 3). Later, William Cobbett condemned Fox’s “squandering and luxurious habits” (Advice to Young Men, paragraph 19). Fashionable Foxite Whiggism certainly had its adherents, though “it was always swimming against the mainstream, against powerful currents in society and the economy,” as Peter Mandler himself notes (Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform, 85). 74. John Wilkes, A Collection of all Mr. Wilkes’s Addresses to the Gentlemen, Clergy, and Freeholders of the Country of Middlesex ([London:] J. Burd, 1769), 33. For a brief discussion of Wilkite manliness, see Wilson, “A Sense of the People,” 219 –228. Wilkes’s defender Joseph Towers returned the compliment, lauding his “noble firmness, and manly constancy, [that] give him a just claim to being considered as a very proper man to maintain [his constituents’] privileges in the great national assembly” (Observations on Public Liberty, 9). 75. Cited in Byrde, The Male Image, 80. 76. As John Brewer writes: “Wilkes’ public manner, . . . together with his flamboyant dress, won him the immediate admiration of all those who would have loved to flout authority” (Party Ideology and Popular Politics, 163; see also 185). Despite his lack of gender analysis, Brewer nonetheless succeeds in demonstrating how “‘personal’ politics could be used . . . to open up political issues”

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(169), and thus goes beyond earlier analyses which separated Wilkes’s political and personal careers. See, for example, Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform, 32; and George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), xiv. 77. Brewer, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” 343. 78. Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 26. See also Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, 153–157. 79. Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country, 43. This passage was cited by Dymond, Essays on the Principles of Morality, 77. 80. See Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 727. Republicanism, for that matter, was not a peculiarly English phenomenon. For the use of gender ideology in French republicanism, see Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution; Outram, The Body and the French Revolution; and Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette.” Ironically, it was American revolutionists who turned “English” republicanism against the English themselves, contrasting simple American manners with the luxury of the English, as various authors have noted. See Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution, 46 – 49; and E. Anthony Rotondo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 15 –16. 81. Epstein, Radical Expression, 559. See also Briggs, “The Language of ‘Class,’” 21; and Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 732, 807. 82. John Campbell, An Examination of the Corn and Provision Laws, from their First Enactment to the Present Period (Manchester: A. Heywood, 1842), 51, 39. Campbell was secretary to the executive council of the National Charter Association. See also Rev. Henry Edwards, “Union!” The Patriot’s Watchword at the Present Crisis (London: R. Groombridge, 1842). 83. The masculinism of Chartism and working-class radicalism has been discussed in Clark, “The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity,” 62 – 88; Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, 141–153; Scott, “On Language, Gender, and WorkingClass History,” 1–13; and Dorothy Thompson, Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation (New York: Verso, 1993), 99. See also Sonya Rose’s discussion of the language of manly virtue in late nineteenth-century working-class culture (Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], 126 –153). 84. “Feminist arguments had to combine both the demands that arose from the perceived needs of women, and the contemporary language of the male political world” (Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780 –1860 [London: Macmillan, 1985], 4). 85. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983), 3–5. Taylor, however, argues that feminists were inspired more by the language of natural rights than by arguments from historical rights, which offered women little precedent to work with. It is perhaps for this reason that, as Taylor notes, early socialists like the Owenites were more receptive than more “constitutionalist” radicals to feminist arguments.

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86. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1985), 81. 87. G. J. Barker-Benfield, “Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthwoman,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 1 (January/ March 1989): 95. Wollstonecraft’s “works from the 1790s are at least as infused with a language of republicanism as of legal rights,” as Virginia Sapiro has noted in her A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xx. 88. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 97, 310. See also Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 1–22. For a brief discussion of Wollstonecraft’s arguments for simplicity in dress, see Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, 216 –219. 89. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 132. For a similar sentiment, see Mary Hays, Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (London: T. Knott, 1793), viii. 90. Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for its Improvement (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 17–18, 16. See also Hays, Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous, 20. Other, more moderate advocates for improvements in women’s education and morals also used a critique of female luxury, yet did not link this critique with women’s political empowerment. Thus there was nothing inherently republican, or indeed feminist, in calling for a female reformation of manners. The anonymous author of The Female Aegis, for example, was willing to define woman as “an animal fond of dress,” though the author tried to direct this naturalized fondness into “proprieties” and “decencies” rather than “vanities.” As “an inherent bias” in women, then, a reformed though still feminized fondness for dress could be used to improve society, to “give to civilised society its brightest and most attractive lustre” (The Female Aegis; Or, The Duties of Women from Childhood to Old Age, and in Most Situations of Life, Exemplified [London: Sampson Low, 1798], 25 –26, 25, 10). Reformed women might improve the general manners of society while remaining within “the proprieties natural to her sex,” and thus not challenging the masculinist ideology of English political culture (Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex [1797; reprint, Philadelphia: James Humphreys, 1798], 89). This text was originally published in London. 91. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 83. 92. Anna Clark has observed the same phenomenon in the rhetoric of Chartist domesticity, demonstrating how “female suffrage was difficult to reconcile with domesticity,” especially as Chartists drew on constitutionalist arguments (“The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity,” 80). See also Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 264 – 282. 93. Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females: A Poem, 6. 94. Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, paragraph 337.

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95. [Mary Robinson], A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), cited in Vivien Jones, ed., Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 241. See also Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 62. The role of women’s agency in this feminization of fashion deserves greater exploration. 96. [Maria Edgeworth], Letters for Literary Ladies (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 52. 97. Smiles, Self-Help, 399. 98. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 817. 99. Henry Dunckley, The Charter of the Nations (London, 1854), 25, cited in Briggs, “The Ideology of ‘Class,’” 17. 100. Smiles, Self-Help, 418. For the revival of chivalry in Victorian culture, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 68 – 86; and Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 17 ff. 101. Cooper, A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective against Mr. Cooper, 13. See also Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 2d ed. (Birmingham: Thomas Pearson, 1791), 17, 29; and Short Observations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Reflections (London: G. Kearsley, 1790), 16. 102. Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, paragraph 21. 103. Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, 73. 104. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 120 –121. 105. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 63. For a discussion of Smith’s brand of Whiggism, see Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, 26 ff. 106. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 474; Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, Delivered in the University of Glasgow . . . Reported by a Student in 1763, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Kelley and Millman, 1956), 257. For a discussion of Smith’s rejection of Mandeville, see Hont and Ignatieff, “Needs and Justice,” 11. For his masculinist worries about excessive trade, see Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, 106. 107. “I have always been inclined to look upon the moral consequences of carrying out our principles of free trade as infinitely the more engaging, and as infinitely the most important of any consideration connected with the movement” (Richard Cobden, Speech of R. Cobden, Esq, M.P., on Thursday, October 6, 1842, at a Meeting of Members of the Anti-Corn-Law League [London: R. Groombridge, 1842], 7). For a discussion of the links between moral ideals and classical political economy, see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); and Richard F. Teichgraeber, “Free Trade” and Moral Philosophy: Rethinking the Sources of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986). 108. For histories of free trade, see Sydney Checkland, British Public Policy, 1776 –1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Rajani Kannepalli Kanth, Political Economy and Laissez-Faire: Economics and Ideology in the Ricardian Era

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(London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986); and Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958). 109. See especially N. C. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 110. The silk and shipping interests combined with landlords to fight free trade, as Barry Gordon has demonstrated in his Economic Doctrine and Tory Liberalism, 1824 –1830 (London: Macmillan, 1979), 96. 111. Gary F. Langer, The Coming of Age of Political Economy, 1815–1825 (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 43. 112. John Cazenove, Outlines of Political Economy; being a Plain and Short View of the Laws relative to the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth (London: Pelham Richardson, 1832), 14. 113. New and Old Principles of Trade Compared; or a Treatise on the Principles of Commerce between Nations (London: J. Johnson, 1788), 32, 2. For similar sentiments, see Jeremy Bentham, “Defence of Usury,” in Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, ed. W. Stark (1787; reprint, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952), 1: 161; and Robert Pearson, Free Trade. A Reply to “Sophisms of Free Trade, And Popular Political Economy Examined. By A Barrister” (London: Effingham Wilson, 1850), 42. 114. Baines, On the Moral Influence of Free Trade, 3. See also New and Old Principles of Trade Compared, 47. In laissez-faire political economy, “economic issues were not discussed in purely pragmatic terms or in splendid disregard for questions of moral ends,” as Ellen Frankel Paul has noted in her Moral Revolution and Economic Science: The Demise of Laissez-Faire in Nineteenth-Century British Political Economy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), 3. 115. For a critique of the idea of fixed class associations of ideals of capitalism, see M. J. Daunton, “‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’ and British Industry, 1820 – 1914,” Past and Present 122 (1989): 133. 116. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1982), 437. 117. [ Jane Haldimand Marcet], Conversations on Political Economy; In Which The Elements of That Science Are Familiarly Explained (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), 422. Marcet was the most popular political economist of her day, as Gary Langer has noted (The Coming of Age of Political Economy, 14). See also John Ramsay McCulloch, The Principles of Political Economy (Edinburgh: William and Charles Tait, 1825), 416. 118. McCulloch, The Principles of Political Economy, 392. As a book reviewer for the Edinburgh Review, McCulloch also promoted Ricardo’s ideas. On McCulloch’s politics, see Langer, The Coming of Age of Political Economy, 39. On the Edinburgh Review’s influence on political and economic issues, see Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review 1803–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 119. Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy, 424 – 425. 120. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 446 – 447. The distinction between productive and unproductive consumption was standard fare in classical economics. For a brief sample, see Jeremy Bentham, “Supply Without Burthen or Escheat Vice Taxation” (1795), in Bentham, Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, 1:

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358; Cazenove, Outlines of Political Economy, 84, 101; James Mill, “Elements of Political Economy,” in his Selected Economic Writings, ed. Donald Winch (1826; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 322 –323; David Ricardo, “Notes on Malthus’ Principles of Political Economy,” in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa (1820; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 2: 436; and Samuel Roper, Letters on the Nature and Objects of Political Economy, and on some Particular Topics of that Science (London: H. Teape, 1825), 8. 121. Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy, 448. 122. For a brief historical survey of definitions of wealth, see Luigi L. Pasinetti, Lectures on the Theory of Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 1–34. For a discussion of the classical theory of value, see Maurice Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution Since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Gunnar Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 56 –79; and Jeffrey T. Young, Classical Theories of Value: From Smith to Sraffa (Boulder: Westview, 1978), 22 –34. For a discussion of Ricardian theories of value, see Krishna Bharadwaj, Themes in Value and Distribution: Classical Theory Reappraised (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 41–76. 123. See, for example, James Mill, “Commerce Defended. An Answer to the Arguments by which Mr. Spence, Mr. Cobbett, and others, have attempted to prove that Commerce is not a Source of National Wealth” (1808), in his Selected Economic Writings, 127; and Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Milton, First and Second Addresses to the Landowners of England on the Corn Laws (London: James Ridgway and Son, 1836), 30. 124. As noted in chapter 3, Adam Smith incorrectly conflated mercantilism with bullionism, and thus misunderstood mercantilism’s critique of bullionism. 125. Emerging out of Ricardo’s critique of the Corn Laws, the commodification of land went hand in hand with the Ricardian labor theory of value. See David Ricardo, “The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” (1817), in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, 1: 77–78; and Oser and Blanchfield, The Evolution of Economic Thought, 110 ff. Pre-1800 classical economists did not share this distinction. Adam Smith “advanced a theoretical model of an agrarian-based economy,” as David McNally has demonstrated (Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism, 152). 126. For Marx’s definition of capital as the transformation of money into commodities and back into money (M-C-M’), see Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867; reprint, New York: The Modern Library, 1906), 163–173. 127. Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy, 426. 128. Mill, “Elements of Political Economy,” 324. 129. Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy, 433. See also James A. Froude, The Influence of the Science of Political Economy on the Moral and Social Welfare of the Nation (Oxford: J. Vincent, 1842), 36. 130. Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy. Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution (London: Charles Tait, 1827), 241.

Notes to Pages 156 –157

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Hodgskin has often been described as a Ricardian socialist, though perhaps Smithian populist would be more accurate, since Hodgskin tried to link free trade with social equality. See Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium, xxiii; and Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816 –34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 98, 105. 131. Nassau William Senior, Political Economy, 6th ed. (1836; reprint, London: Charles Griffin, 1872), 59. The Whig Senior was an influential member of the Political Economy Club, whose “abstinence theory of capital . . . received favourable notice,” as Mark Blaug and Paul Sturges have noted in their Who’s Who in Economics (London: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983), 347). 132. Boyd Hilton’s distinction between “professional” political economists and “amateur practitioners” (The Age of Atonement, 6) was less one of moral stance, as Hilton asserts, than one defined by the language in which they expressed that moral stance. 133. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1957), 68 –76. See also Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, 237–239. 134. For the close associations between free trade and parliamentary reform, see Frank Whitson Fetter, The Economist in Parliament: 1780 –1868 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1980), 213–226; Barry Gordon, Political Economy in Parliament, 1819–1823 (London: Macmillan, 1976), 6; and Langer, The Coming of Age of Political Economy, 34. 135. Lord Milton, First and Second Addresses, 34. “I believe this to be a movement of the commercial and industrious classes against the lords and great proprietors of the soil,” asserted the leading parliamentary advocate John Bright (“Free Trade,” in his Speeches on Questions of Public Policy [1845; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1869], 2: 275). As Asa Briggs and others have noted, “class” was a central aspect of free-trade political economy (Briggs, “The Ideology of ‘Class,’” 11; and Steven Wallech, “‘Class versus Rank’: The Transformation of Eighteenth-Century English Social Terms and Theories of Production,” in Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ed., Race, Gender, and Rank: Early Modern Ideas of Humanity (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1992), 269 –291. Not all classical economists shared this class language, of course. Nassau William Senior, for example, was much more willing to accept “a certain display of opulence” as necessary for “the higher ranks of society,” and thus did not extend his distinction between productive and unproductive consumption to a definition of productive and unproductive classes (Political Economy, 55 –56). 136. An Essay on Free-Trade (London: James Ridgway, 1841), 20. For a similar sentiment, see Cazenove, Outlines of Political Economy, 52. 137. Walter Fletcher, Letter on Free Trade (Liverpool: Joshua Walmsley, 1842), 6, 14. 138. Philip Harwood, Six Lectures on The Corn-Law Monopoly and Free Trade: Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution (London: John Green, 1843), 19. 139. Harwood, Six Lectures on The Corn-Law Monopoly and Free Trade, 34. 140. An Argument for Dishonesty, Conducted in the Manner of the Corn-

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Law Advocates (Manchester: Thos. Forrest, 1842), 8. As Stephen Edgell and Rick Tilman have noted, the term “conspicuous consumption” was first introduced into political economy by the Smithian John Rae, whose Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy greatly influenced Thorstein Veblen. See Stephen Edgell and Rick Tilman, “John Rae and Thorstein Veblen on Conspicuous Consumption: A Neglected Intellectual Relationship,” History of Political Economy 23, no. 4 (winter 1991): 731–744. 141. Froude, The Influence of the Science of Political Economy, 42. “The interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community,” David Ricardo asserted in his “Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock” (1815), in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, 4: 21. 142. David Buchanan, Observations on the Subjects Treated of in Dr Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Waugh and Innes, 1817), 185. Buchanan was also the editor of an 1814 edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 143. G. R. Beauclerc, The Operation of Monopolies on the Production of Food, as Illustrated by the Corn Laws: For Which the Only Adequate Remedies are Moral Government and Free Trade (London: W. Ridgway, 1842), 11. 144. Nine Letters on the Corn Laws (London: Henry Hooper, 1842), 38. 145. Reported in John R. Fyfe and William Skeen, Reports of the Speeches Delivered at the Conference of Ministers and Members of Dissenting Churches (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1842), 24. 146. W. Field, A Lecture on the Provision Laws, Chiefly Considered as a Moral and Religious Question (London: Edward Foden, 1842), 21–22. 147. William Huskisson, Free Trade (London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1826), 58. 148. Bright, “Free Trade,” 2: 287. 149. Richard Cobden, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy (1844 –1845; reprint, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1870), 2: 145, 1: 59. For a brief mention of manliness in free-trade rhetoric, see Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, 224 –225. 150. Harwood, Six Lectures on the Corn-Law Monopoly, 97. 151. Henry Edwards, “Union!” The Patriot’s Watchword at the Present Crisis, 16. See also Monopoly Ruinous. The Present Condition of the Iron and Coal Trades, Shewing the Operation of the Corn Laws, and other Injurious Restrictions, and the Advantages which would Result from the Operation of Free Trade Principles (Liverpool: Mitchell, Heaton, and Mitchell, 1843), 9. 152. Richard Sulley, The Fallacies of the Protective System Exposed, and the Effects of the Corn Laws Especially Considered (Manchester: J. Gadsby, 1841), 30. For further instances of the use of anti-luxury discourse in attacks on the Corn Laws, see Beauclerc, The Operation of Monopolies on the Production of Food, 8 –11; Cobden, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, 1: 13; The Corn Bill (London: Peter Putright, 1842), broadsheet; Ebenezer Elliott, The Splendid Village: Corn Law Rhymes, and other poems (London: Benjamin Steill, 1833), 32, 117; M. Loudon, Corn Laws. Selections from Mrs. Loudon’s Philanthropic Economy (Manchester: National Anti-Corn Law League, 1842), 2; John Taylor,

Notes to Pages 159 –162

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An Essay on the Standard and Measure of Value (London: Hatchard and Son, 1832), 80; and George Thompson, Lectures on the Corn Laws (Carlisle: J. Steel, 1842), 15. 153. W. W. Whitmore, A Second Letter to the Agriculturists of the County of Salop (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1841), 33. 154. McCulloch, Principles of Political Economy, 395. 155. Roper, Letters on the Nature and Objects of Political Economy, 13. 156. Bentham, “Defence of Usury,” 1: 127. 157. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 441, 446. This argument was repeated almost verbatim by Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy, 427; and McCulloch, Principles of Political Economy, 393. 158. Roper, Letters on the Nature and Objects of Political Economy, 9. 159. See, for example, John Stuart Mill, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (London: John W. Parker, 1844). Despite Mill’s critique of “the immense importance attached to consumption” (47) in classical and preclassical economics, Mill nonetheless recapitulated the division between productive and unproductive consumption. 160. Thomas Spence, “The Restorer of Society to its Natural State” (1801), in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H. T. Dickinson (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Avero Publications, 1982), 70. See also Spence, “A New and Infallible Way to Make Trade” (1807?), in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, 118. 161. Campbell, An Examination of the Corn and Provision Laws, 39. 162. See William Thompson, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1824), 183–187; Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium, 103–106 and passim; and Thompson, The Market and its Critics, 74 ff. 163. Piercy Ravenstone, A Few Doubts as to the Correctness of Some Opinions Generally Entertained on the Subjects of Population and Political Economy (London: John Andrews, 1821), 13. See also Piercy Ravenstone, Thoughts on the Funding System and its Effects (London: J. Andrews, 1824), 330. Ravenstone is probably the pseudonym of Edward Edwards (Thompson, The Market and its Critics, 22 –25). 164. Thomas Chalmers, On Political Economy in Connexion with the Moral State and Moral Prospects of Society (Glasgow: William Collins, 1832), iv, 123, 41. For a discussion of Tory liberal economic policy, see Gordon, Political Economy in Parliament, 1819–1823; and Gordon, Economic Doctrine and Tory Liberalism. For a more general discussion of conservative political economy, see A. M. C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a more specific discussion of Chalmers, see Hilton, The Age of Atonement, 61. 165. Whately, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, 40. 166. See Gordon, Economic Doctrine and Tory Liberalism, 4. 167. McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism, 214. 168. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 410. 169. New and Old Principles of Trade, 4.

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170. Robert Law, The Moral Duties Necessary to secure the Advantages of a Free Trade: With a Caution against some Abuses to which the Beginnings of Manufactures and Commerce are peculiarly exposed (Dublin: William Hallhead, 1780), 1. 171. Harwood, Six Lectures on the Corn-Law Monopoly, 95 –96. 172. Among recent accounts, see Elizabeth Ewing, Everyday Dress, 1650 – 1900 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1984), 71–75; Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1986), 111; and Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 29. For an exception, see Steele, “The Social and Political Significance of Macaroni Fashion,” 96. 173. J. C. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 113. 174. Marjorie Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774 –1858 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 119. Like historians more generally, historians of manners have tended to understand aristocratic manners not on their own terms but in the terms of their middle-class critics, thus portraying the English aristocracy as embracing and embodying Chesterfieldian ideals of sartorial splendor, cosmopolitanism, and Francophilia. See, for example, Curtin, Propriety and Position, 101–102. More broadly, George Mosse asserts that “the construction of modern masculinity was closely linked to the new bourgeois society that was in the making at the end of the eighteenth century” (The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 17). 175. See, for example, Elizabeth Stone, Chronicles of Fashion (London: Richard Bentley, 1845), 2: 442; and Frederick William Fairholt, Costume In England: A History of Dress to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1854; reprint, London: George Bell and Sons, 1885), 1: 402. William Hazlitt attributed the new modesty to “the ideas of natural equality and the Manchester steamengines” (Sketches and Essays [1839; reprint, London: Grant Richard, 1902], 141). 176. James Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London During the Eighteenth Century (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 449. Malcolm lived in London from the 1790s to his death in 1815. His words were repeated verbatim by George Bryan [Beau] Brummell, Male and Female Costume (1822; reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), 119. 177. Christian Augustus Gottlieb Goede, A Foreigner’s Opinion of England, trans. Thomas Horne (London: C. Taylor, 1821), 2: 55. “There are,” Goede conceded, “some English coxcombs” (2: 249). For a similar observation, see [Felix M’Donough], The Hermit in London: Or, Sketches of English Manners (London: Henry Colburn, 1822), 2: 90. 178. Hermann, Furst von Puckler-Muskau, Tour in England, Ireland, and France in the Years 1828 and 1829; with Remarks on the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants, and Anecdotes of Distinguished Public Characters (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1833), 160. For a similar complaint that “restraint [is] already much too prevalent in English society,” see Brief Remarks on English

Notes to Pages 164 –166

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Manners, and An Attempt to Account for Some of Our Most Striking Peculiarities. In a Series of Letters to a Friend in France (London: John Booth, 1816), 74. 179. Heman Humphrey, Great Britain, France and Belgium: A Short Tour in 1835 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838), 2: 177–178. 180. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “English Traits,” in his English Traits, Representative Men and Other Essays (1856; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), 56. Emerson toured England in 1833 and 1847. For a discussion of Emerson’s own anxieties about masculinity, see Susan L. Roberson, “‘Degenerate Effeminacy’ and the Making of a Masculine Spirituality in the Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in Donald E. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 150 –172. 181. Senior, Political Economy, 37. 182. Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays, 141. 183. Stone, Chronicles of Fashion, 2: 445, 442. 184. Alexander Andrews, The Eighteenth Century or Illustrations of the Manners and Customs of our Grandfathers (London: Chapman and Hall, 1856), 20. 185. Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays, 141. 186. Stone, Chronicles of Fashion, 2: 441; and Andrews, The Eighteenth Century, 26. 187. As Marjorie Morgan has noted, conduct literature “looked back to a former time, seeking to combat commercialization.” Yet Morgan makes too much of a distinction between a moralist, middle-class conduct literature and a more “secular” genre of etiquette books which “codified aristocratic behavioural ideals” (Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class, 119). At least in the case of men’s dress, the advice of these purportedly different genres was not at all different. As Michael Curtin notes, in contrasting fashion with good manners, “all etiquette writers, whether for good, aristocratic, or fashionable Society, taught the same manners” (Propriety and Position, 88). 188. An Enquiry into the Manners of the Present Age (London: J. Bew, 1778), 1; Brief Remarks on English Manners, 11; John Corry, A Satirical View of London; Or, A Descriptive Sketch of the English Metropolis: With Strictures on Men and Manners 3rd ed. (1803; reprint, London: R. Ogle, 1804), 54 –55; John Andrews, An Inquiry into the Manners, Taste, and Amusements, of the Two Last Centuries in England (London: J. Debrett, 1782), 8. See also Robert Brown, An Essay on the Laws of Nations as a Test of Manners (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1790), 17–23; William Dodd, The Beauties of History; Or, Pictures of Virtue and Vice: Drawn from Examples of Men Eminent for the Virtues, or Infamous for their Vices (1796; reprint, Philadelphia: B. and T. Kite, 1807), 147 (this text was originally published in London); Letters Concerning the Present State of England: Particularly Respecting the Politics, Arts, Manners, and Literature of the Times (London: Printed for J. Almon, 1772), 14; and More, Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners, 9 –10. 189. [Charles Day], Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society with a Glance at Bad Habits (1836; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), 30. This text was originally published in London.

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190. Day, Hints on Etiquette, 32; John Hamilton Moore, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Monitor, and English Teacher’s Assistant (London: John W. Green, 1802), 20; and Etiquette; Or, The Perfect Gentleman (London: Milner, n.d.), 83. Though undated, this last text appears from internal evidence to be written in the early reign of Victoria. 191. Etiquette; Or, The Perfect Gentleman, 23. 192. Hugh Blair, Advice to Youth (Philadelphia: Benjamin Warner, 1817), 89 –90. This text is from the third London edition. 193. Andrews, An Inquiry into the Manners, 115. 194. Smiles, Self-Help, 16, 406. See also William Roberts, The Portraiture of a Christian Gentleman (London: John Hatchard and Son, 1829), 123. 195. James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1792 –94), 2: 58. This text was first printed in London. 196. For a discussion of “the early transformation of the family from a unit of production to a unit of consumption,” see Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle Class Women in the Victorian Home (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 1. 197. Classically, the “masculine virtues” were the “rigid virtues” of “justice and fortitude,” while feminine virtues included “softness and mildness” ([Frances Reynolds], An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty [London: J. Smeeton, 1789], 22). See also John Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners, 2d ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1793), 2: 140; Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects, Particularly Designed for Young Ladies (1777; reprint, Philadelphia: Young, Stewart and McCulloch, 1786), 1– 4; and M’Donough, The Hermit in London, 2: 175. 198. [Arthur Freeling], The Pocket Book of Etiquette (Liverpool: Henry Lacey, 1837), 67. 199. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 81– 85. Since class is defined as much culturally as it is a relation to the means of production, more research needs to be done to investigate how women defined their own sense of class through consumer culture. 200. “Art of Dress,” Quarterly Review 79 (1847): 379, cited in Helena E. Roberts, “The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2, no. 3 (spring 1977): 566. 201. For a discussion of the anxieties produced by constructing women as consumers in the later Victorian period, see Erika Rappaport, “‘A Husband and His Wife’s Dresses’: Consumer Credit and the Debtor Family in England, 1864 – 1914,” in Victoria de Grazia, ed., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 163–187. 202. For a general discussion of women in etiquette literature, the best work is still Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (London: Croom Helm, 1973). For discussions of domestic ideology in Victorian England, see Joan N. Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Croom Helm, 1982); and Catherine Hall,

Notes to Pages 168 –169

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White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). 203. Andrews, An Inquiry into the Manners, Taste, and Amusements, 138. See also More, Essays on Various Subjects, 8. For this dilemma, see Branca, Silent Sisterhood, 7. For a discussion of the Victorian doctrine of women’s moral influence, see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9 –11. 204. Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners, 1: 15, 148. See also [Mrs. M. Peddle], countess of Carlisle, “Rudiments of Taste,” in The Lady’s Pocket Library (1789; reprint, Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1809), 203; and The Mirror of the Graces; or, The English Lady’s Costume. Combining and Harmonizing Taste and Judgment, Elegance and Grace, Modesty, Simplicity and Economy, with Fashion in Dress (New York: I. Riley, 1813), 10. These tracts were originally published in London. 205. Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, paragraph 114. 206. Dodd, The Beauties of History, 187. See also Modern Belles. Dedicated to All the Beaux (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1818), 14. 207. Peddle, “Rudiments of Taste,” 205. 208. Corry, A Satirical View of London, 168. For further pronouncements, see More, Essays on Various Subjects, 2 –3. As Davidoff and Hall have noted, Hannah More argued for a natural femininity, yet also saw it as acquired (Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 170). 209. The Female Aegis, 25 –26. 210. Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners, 1: 140. See also Etiquette; Or, The Perfect Gentleman, 89; More, Essays on Various Subjects, 1; and Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, 89. 211. Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen; or the Principles of True Politeness (London: Milner and Sowerby, 1852), 72, cited in Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class, 105. 212. [ John Reeves], Thoughts on the English Government (London: J. Owen, 1795), 6. 213. William Hazlitt, “On Personal Character” (1821), in Selected Essays of William Hazlitt, 1778–1830, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1948), 62, 54, 55. 214. [Richard Cumberland], The Observer: Being a Collection of Moral, Literary and Familiar Essays, 2d ed. (London: C. Dilly, 1787), 3: 224. 215. [Elizabeth Thomas], Woman; Or, Minor Maxims (London: A. K. Newman, 1818), 1: 2. 216. Moore, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Monitor, 22. 217. Hazlitt, “On Personal Character,” 62. 218. Jane West, Letters Addressed to a Young Man, on his First Entrance into Life (1801; reprint, Charlestown: Samuel Parker, 1803), 2: 59. This text was originally published in London. West was a self-taught poet, essayist, and firm opponent of Mary Wollstonecraft. 219. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrckh (1831; reprint, New York: John B. Alden, 1885), 190 –191. For

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this slippage in the strict social definition of “the gentleman,” see Curtin, Propriety and Position, 101–103; and Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 6 – 8. As Asa Briggs has noted, the “idea of a ‘gentleman,’ [was] one of the most powerful of mid-Victorian ideas but an extremely complicated one both to define and to disentangle” (“The Language of ‘Class,’” 25). For discussions of Carlyle’s masculinism, see James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 21– 60; and Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 16 –72. 220. Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners, 2: 118; Smiles, Self-Help, 415; Day, Hints on Etiquette, 67; and Dodd, The Beauties of History, 188. See also Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays, 143; and Thomas, Woman, or Minor Maxims, 2: 2. For further references, see Curtin, Propriety and Position, 102, note 28. 221. Advice to a Young Gentleman, on Entering Society (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1839), 6. This text was originally published in London. 222. Smiles, Self-Help, 404. 223. Auguste Louis, baron de Stael-Holstein, Letters on England (London: Treuttel and Wurtz, Treuttel, jun. and Richter, 1825), 132 –133. 224. See, among others, Anderson, “The Figures of Descent”; Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society; and Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. 225. West, Letters Addressed to a Young Man, 2: xi. 226. West, Letters Addressed to a Young Man, 1: ix. 227. Corry, A Satirical View of London, 50. 228. William Johnson Fox, Finsbury Lectures: Reports of Lectures Delivered at the Chapel in South Place, Finsbury (London: Charles Fox, 1835), 2: 4. Fox was a preacher, parliamentary reform advocate, and leading orator of the Anti-Corn Law League. 229. Roberts, The Portraiture of a Christian Gentleman, 123, 93. Roberts was the biographer of Hannah More. For a thorough analysis of the influence of evangelicalism on Victorian gender ideology, see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 71–148. For a discussion of ideals of manliness in Victorian religion more generally, see Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit. 230. The “distinction between public and private character [is] grounded on no real difference” (Roberts, The Portraiture of a Christian Gentleman, 65). For a similar sentiment, see John Aiken, Letters from a Father to his Son, on Various Topics, Relative to Literature and the Conduct of Life, 3rd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1796), 1: 41. 231. John Bowdler, Reform or Ruin: Take your Choice! 6th ed. (1797; reprint, London: J. Hatchard, 1798), 17–18. For a discussion of Hannah More’s conservative attempts to reform the upper classes, see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 167–172. For a parallel discussion of William Wilberforce, see Innes, “Politics and Morals,” 76. 232. [Vicesimus Knox], Personal Nobility: Or, Letters to a Young Noble-

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man, on the Conduct of his Studies, and the Dignity of the Peerage (London: Charles Dilly, 1793), 208 –209, 310, xx. 233. Reflections on the Best Means of Securing Tranquility, Submitted to the Consideration of Country Gentlemen (Dublin: J. Chambers, 1796), 17. See also Temperate Comments upon Intemperate Reflections: Or, A Review of Mr. Burke’s Letter (London: J. Walter, 1791), 11; Fawkes, The Englishman’s Manual, 74 –75; and The Civil and the Ecclesiastical Systems of England Defended and Fortified (London: T. Longman, 1791), 33. 234. Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, 2: 188. 235. David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774 –1967 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1980), 29, 28. Despite his qualifications, Peter Mandler makes a similar argument in Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform, 97. 236. Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class, 5. Morgan speaks of “a midcentury integration of aristocratic secularism with middle-class moralism and religiosity resulting from compromises made by both the aristocracy and the middle class” (119). 237. Burgh, Britain’s Remembrancer, 43; Knox, Personal Nobility, 307– 308. 238. Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, paragraph 40. 7.

INCONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

1. Hazlitt, “On Personal Character,” 70. 2. McKendrick, “The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England,” 19. McKendrick asserts that Mandeville “anticipated Veblen” in his notion that “good repute rested on pecuniary strength” (McKendrick, “The Commercialization of Fashion,” 52). 3. Day, Hints on Etiquette, 33. 4. “Let [the “independent country gentleman”] beware of emulating either the oriental or occidental upstart, in expenses which he cannot equal, without diminishing his patrimony and losing his independence” (Knox, Personal Nobility, 19 –20). See also Day, Hints on Etiquette, 3. 5. Emerson, “English Traits,” 42. 6. Goede, A Foreigner’s Opinion of England, 2: 51. 7. Wray, The Ladies Library, 60 – 61. For a similar sentiment, see Andrews, The Eighteenth Century, 4. 8. Corry, A Satirical View of London, 210 –211. 9. Emerson, “English Traits,” 56; Goede, A Foreigner’s Opinion of England, 2: 60. See also Puckler-Muskau, Tour in England, 308. As Ellen Moers has aptly observed: “Certainly Brummell was nicknamed Beau for his style of dress, not for his physical beauty. But legend is confused about the nature of that style. The popular version has always been that he dressed too obviously well, with fantastic colours and frills, exotic jewels and perfumes. The accurate (and important) report declares that he dressed in a style more austere, manly and dignified than any before” (Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm [New York: Viking, 1960], 31). Dandyism is generally confused with foppery (see, for ex-

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Notes to Pages 175 –178

ample, Joanne Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self [London: Polity Press, 1991], 113), yet James Laver is correct to interpret dandyism as participating in, rather than resisting, the great masculine renunciation (James Laver, Dandies [London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968]). 10. The dandy was sincere in his flouting of the constructed, artificial nature of masculinity, while the self-made man artificially constructed his own identity as natural. As merely “a clothes-wearing man” (Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 215), the dandy revealed the constructed nature of masculinity. 11. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 11. 12. Cited in Curtin, Propriety and Position, 107. 13. Aiken, Letters from a Father to his Son, 39 – 40. 14. Moore, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Monitor, 13. 15. Freeling, The Pocket Book of Etiquette, 17. 16. Advice to a Young Gentleman, 53. 17. Etiquette; Or, The Perfect Gentleman, 83. 18. Smiles, Self-Help, 306. For a clear understanding of “the idolizing of reputation” in “the morality of the middle classes,” see Fox, Finsbury Lectures, 3: 30. 19. William Hazlitt, “On the Knowledge of Character,” in Table Talk, 8: 304. 20. Joshua E. White, Letters on England (Philadelphia: published for the author, 1816), 1: 17. For a similar sentiment, see also Matthew Flournoy Ward, English Items: Or, Microscopic Views of England and Englishmen, 3rd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1853), 246. 21. Goede, A Foreigner’s Opinion of England, 2: 60. 22. Puckler-Muskau, Tour In England, 309.

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Index

Adams, Thomas, 21, 59 Addison, Joseph, 105 adiaphora (“things indifferent”), 27, 43, 45 – 48, 65 – 67, 106 aesthetics, 4, 14, 112 –116, 220n135 affectation, 26 –27, 31, 49, 116, 175 –177 Alison, Archibald, 109 Allestree, Richard, 19, 24, 49 Almack, John, 109 Amussen, Susan, 9 Andrews, Alexander, 165 –166 Andrews, John, 167 Anglicanism, 45 –50, 67, 96, 221n137 anti-Catholicism, 33, 45, 57, 66 – 68 Antoinette, Marie, 91 Appleby, Joyce, 11, 194n108, 195n122, 196n131, 205n113, 207n148, 218n92 Armstrong, Nancy, 229n235 Ascham, Roger, 64 Astell, Mary, 131 Bacon, Francis, 25, 30 Barbon, Nicholas, 44, 104, 196n131 Barlow, Joel, 140 –141 Barnes, Barnabe, 21 Barrell, John, 14, 223n157 Bayles, John Barnard, 111 Beattie, James, 167 Bell, John, 110

Bentham, Jeremy, 160 Berkeley, George, 94 –95, 104, 109, 110, 130 Berry, Christopher, 196n131 Bethel, Slinsby, 71, 73 Black, David, 130 Blair, Hugh, 167 Blewitt, George, 109 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 99 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 179n7, 223n158, 225n185 Bowdler, John, 171 Bowles, John, 95 –96, 100 –101 Bramston, James, 130 Brathwait, Richard, 67– 68, 200n34, 203n94 Bray, Alan, 190n59, 215n64 Brewer, John, 223n159, 237n76 Brewster, Francis, 71, 120 Bright, John, 158 Brooke, Christopher, 54 Brooks, Thomas, 81 Brougham, Henry, 135 Brown, John, 3, 96, 105 Browne, Isaac, 121 Brummell, George Bryan, 175, 251n9 Bucer, Marrtin, 203n82 Buchanan, David, 158 Bullinger, Heinrich, 48 bullionism, 40, 42 – 43, 74, 155 Burgh, James, 6, 9, 15, 72, 138

295

296 Burke, Edmund, 3, 6, 8 –9, 13, 91–93, 100, 104, 113, 135, 139, 151, 167, 210n2, 216n74 Burton, John, 168 Butler, Judith, 183n30 Byrde, Penelope, 81 Campbell, Archibald, 102 Campbell, John, 147, 161 capital (economics), 154 –157 Carlyle, Thomas, 169 Carter, William, 74 –75 Cartwright, John, 139, 143, 147 Cary, Walter, 59, 61– 62 Cazenove, John, 154 Chalmers, Thomas, 161 Chamberlayne, Edward, 38, 84, 88, 122 character, 54, 56, 138, 143–144, 149, 168 –169 Charles I, king of England, 31–32, 154 Charles II, king of England, 1, 6, 77– 80, 209n26 Chartism, 137, 147 Chesterfield, Earl of. See Stanhope, Philip Dormer Civil War, English, 11, 40, 42, 51–52, 55 –56, 69, 80 Clarendon Code, 46 Clarendon, Earl of. See Hyde, Edward Clark, J. C. D., 212n28 Clarke, George, 74 class, definitions of, 136 –137, 141–142, 156 –158 Clifford, George, 22 Cobbett, William, 133–136, 138, 147, 149, 151–152, 168, 172, 230n1 Cobden, Richard, 153, 158 –159 Colley, Linda, 214n51, 226n206 Collier, Jeremy, 99, 117–118, 126 Collini, Stephan, 232n26 conspicuous consumption, definition of, 79n3, 180n13, 185n7 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 105, 113–114, 175 Cooper, Thomas, 142, 144 Corn Laws, 110, 153, 158 –159, 161–162 Cornwallis, William, 27, 57 Corry, John, 168, 175 Cotton, Robert, 71 Country ideology, 59, 61– 63 Court, criticism of, 52 –58, 61 Court, economic role, 39 – 41, 43– 45 courtesy manuals, 25, 49, 110, 115 –117, 166 –167, 247n187

Index Crossman, Samuel, 48 Culpeper, Thomas, 75 Danby, Earl of. See Osborne, Thomas dandyism, 124, 144 –145, 252n10 Darrell, William, 121 Davenant, Charles, 94, 97, 99, 123 Davidoff, Leonore, 231n11 Day, Charles, 166 Defoe, Daniel, 53, 107 Dekker, Thomas, 67 de Malynes, Gerrard, 29, 43 de Marly, Diana, 190n59 de Muralt, Béat Louis, 122, 124 Dennis, John, 97, 99, 107, 115 de Quincy, Thomas, 116 de Rocheford, Jorevin, 85 de Saussure, César, 123 de Stael-Holstein, Auguste Louis, baron, 170 Dodd, William, 168 Dorset, Richard, Earl of, 21, 23 Dunckley, Henry, 150 Dyer, George, 143 Dymond, Jonathan, 142, 144 Eagleton, Terry, 14, 220n135 East India trade, 41, 74, 123 Edgeworth, Maria, 149 Edwards, Henry, 158 Elias, Norbert, 9 Eliott, George, 62 – 63 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 31, 37–38, 47 Ellis, Clement, 68 – 69 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 164, 166 Evans, John, 47, 67 Evelyn, John, 1, 78 – 80, 83, 85, 90, 125, 209n25 Felltham, Owen, 26 femininity, 9 –10, 20, 123–131, 148 –149, 167–168, 228n230, 229n235, 239n90 feminism, 131–132, 148 –189 Ferne, John, 34, 42 Flugel, John Carl, 163 Fortrey, Samuel, 77–78, 85 Foucault, Michel, 186n19, 188n46 Fox, Charles James, 144 –145 France, antipathy to, 56 –57, 62, 74 –75, 81– 82, 87– 88, 98, 100, 109 –110, 123–124, free trade, 10, 110, 153–154, 159 – 162 Freeling, Arthur, 176 French Revolution, 91, 139, 171

Index

297

Fuller, Thomas, 49 Furniss, Tom, 220n135

Klein, Lawrence, 14, 223n169 Knox, Vicesimus, 171–172

Gibbon, Edward, 96 Gilby, Anthony, 66 Glorious Revolution, 46, 51, 54, 56, 90 –91, 93–94, 121, 123 Godwin, William, 139, 142 Goede, Christian Augustus Gottlieb, 164, 174 –175 Gosson, Stephen, 49 Great Reform Act, 133, 164 Greene, Robert, 17–18, 24, 44 Gregory, John, 126 Grimston, Harbottle, 68

Lancaster, Nathaniel, 100, 115 Laud, Archbishop, 46, 68 Laver, James, 251n9 liberality, 24, 26, 30, 44 libertinism, 147 Locke, John, 113, 181n19 Loggan, David, 86 London, 56, 59, 62 Louis XIV, 81, 123

Halifax, Marquis of. See Savile, George Hall, Catherine, 231n11 Hall, Joseph, 56, 62 Harris, John, 117, 126 Harwood, Philip, 162 Hawkins, Richard, 61, 66 Hazlitt, William, 134, 165, 169, 173, 177 Head, Richard, 38 Henry VIII, king of England, 34 Heynes, Matthew, 102 Hickeringill, Edmund, 58, 67 Hirschman, Albert, 11 Hodges, John, 71 Hodgskin, Thomas, 156, 242n130 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 115 homosexuality, 11, 54, 100 –101, 116, 190n59, 214n58, 215n64 Hooper, John, 66 Hooper, Wilfrid, 77 hospitality, 59, 62, 76 Hume, David, 109 Humphrey, Heman, 164 Humphrey, Lawrence, 68 Hunt, Lynn, 182n22 Huskisson, William, 158 Hutcheson, Francis, 115 Hyde, Edward, 49 –50, 68 Ignatieff, Michael, 11 Jacobite Party, 97–100 James I, king of England, 28 –29, 31, 33, 38, 54, 190n59 James II, king of England, 46, 93–94 James, William, 74 Jones, David, 94 Keach, Benjamin, 59 – 60 Kelly, Joan, 26

Macaulay, Catharine, 131–132 MacKenzie, George, 99 Macky, John, 122 Malcolm, James, 164 Malthus, Thomas, 105, 109, 111, 161, 217n86 Mandeville, Bernard, 105 –109, 124, 151, 174, 217n91, 219n111 Manley, Thomas, 62, 72 manners, 3, 29, 56, 72 –73, 91, 94 –96, 138, 144, 167, 246n174 manufacturers, 39, 69 –76, 109 –111, 153–154 Marcet, Jane, 155 Marvell, Andrew, 80 Marx, Karl, 155 Mary II, queen of England, 93–94 McKendrick, Neil, 14, 195n122, 225n190 mercantilism, 39 – 40, 69 –76, 102 –112, 151–152, 204n110, 205n113 Merchant Adventurers, 40 – 41 merchants, 39 – 45, 153 Miege, Guy, 122 –123 Mill, James, 155 Milton, John, 45, 53, 56 –57, 68, 201n35 Milward, John, 81– 82 Mingay, G. E., 124 Misselden, Edward, 12, 73 moderation, 25 –26, 29 –31, 43, 48, 61, 221n137 Moore, John Hamilton, 169 Morgan, Marjorie, 247n187 Mortimer, Thomas, 110 Morton, Thomas, 48 Mun, Thomas, 12, 55, 71, 73 Murphy, Arthur, 121 museums, clothing, 228n220 Nalson, John, 44 nationalism, 57–58, 74 –76, 81– 82, 99 –100, 110, 130, 214n51 natural rights, 139 –141, 160 Newman, Gerald, 214n51

298 Newton, Samuel, 84 Nivelon, F., 127–129 North, Dudley, 104, 126, 217n82 Ogilby, John, 86 Osborne, Thomas, 84 Outram, Dorinda, 182n22 Overbury, Thomas, 57 Paine, Thomas, 139 –140 Paley, William, 105 Parker, Henry, 41– 42 Parkes, William, 20 Parliament, 46, 52, 54, 133, 143–144 patriarchalism, 9, 29, 52, 57, 72 –73 Peacham, Henry, 20 –21, 70 Pears, Iain, 14 Peck, Linda Levy, 55 Pepys, Samuel, 1, 81– 85 Pett, Peter, 71, 73 Petty, William, 44 Petyt, William, 74 Philips, John, 53 Pigott, Charles, 138 Pocock, J. G. A., 182n28, 184n41 politeness, 14, 112 –113 Pollexfen, John, 110 Price, Richard, 141–142, 147 protectionism, 12 –13, 70 –76, 102, 109 –110, 157–160 Puritanism, 45 – 47, 65 – 69, 71, 221n137 Puttenham, George, 31 Quarles, Francis, 48 radicalism, 137–151 Rankins, William, 21 Ravenstone, Piercy, 161 Reeves, John, 168 Republicanism, 52 –53, 55, 57, 94 –96, 135, 138, 148, 151 Reresby, John, 56 Rey, Claudius, 99 Reynell, Carew, 42 Reynolds, Frances, 167 Reynolds, Joshua, 114 Roberts, Lewes, 41– 42 Roberts, William, 170 Robinson, Mary, 149 Rome, 57, 96, 139 Romei, Annibale, 24 Root and Branch Petition, 46 Royalism, 19, 27–33 Sancroft, William, 81 Savile, George, 57, 84, 87– 88 Sekora, John, 202n50

Index semiotics, 8, 27, 38, 48, 63– 66, 113–114, 181n19, 186n19, 188n46 Senior, Nassau William, 156, 165 separate spheres ideology, 126, 130 –131, 167 Settle, Elkanah, 88 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of. See Cooper, Anthony Ashley Shakespeare, William, 20, 64 – 65, 186n11, 203n76 Shammas, Carole, 14 Shenstone, William, 118 Sheridan, Thomas, 48 silk, 12, 17, 21, 35 –37, 57, 67, 74, 82, 109, 121, 123, 130, 158, 219n115 Smiles, Samuel, 138, 149 –151, 167 Smith, Adam, 12, 39, 114, 117, 151–155, 160, 162 Smith, Bonnie, 228n229 Smith, Thomas, 42, 206n126 South Sea Bubble, 95 Spence, Thomas, 161 Stanhope, Philip Dormer, 124, 227n217 Steele, Richard, 105, 127 Stone, Elizabeth, 165 Stone, Lawrence, 24, 55, 187n31, 190n59 Stubbes, Philip, 17, 24 Sturmy, Samuel, 86 suffrage, 133, 135 –139, 142, 149 sumptuary law, 33–38, 54, 65, 73, 96, 112, 118, 160, 193n84, 199n14 Taylor, Barbara, 238n85 Taylor, Jeremy, 126 Thelwall, John, 143–144 Thirsk, Joan, 14 Thompson, E. P., 230n10 Thompson, William, 161 Tinney, John, 96 Torrens, Robert, 12 Tory Party, 44, 52, 94, 97–99, 104 –105, 107 Towers, Joseph, 143 trade: balance of, 12, 39, 41– 43, 69 –71, 73–74, 109 –110; domestic, 39, 43, 69 –70, 73–76, 109 –110; foreign, 25, 39 – 45, 69 –76, 109 –110 Trumbach, Randolph, 191n59, 214n58, 215n64 Turnbull, John, 115 Usher, James, 116 value (economics), 155 –156 Veblen, Thorstein, 5, 167, 174, 179n3, 180n11, 180n13, 185n7, 228n229

Index vest, introduction of, 1–2, 80 – 88 vestments controversy, 46 – 48, 66 vicarious consumption, 167–168, 228n229 Violet, Thomas, 112 von Puckler-Muskau, Hermann, Furst, 164, 178 Walpole, Robert, 98 –99 Ward, Edward, 101 Waterhouse, Edward, 76 Weatherill, Lorna, 14 Weber, Max, 66, 205n122 Whately, Richard, 106, 161 Wheeler, John, 40 – 41 Whig Party, 44, 52, 91–94, 96 –99, 103, 106, 138, 151 White, Joshua, 177 Whitmore, W. W., 158

299 Wilkes, John, 144 –147 William III, king of England, 93–94 Williams, Albert, 103 Williams, John, 33, 47 Wilson, Kathleen, 214n51 Wilson, Thomas, 24 Winch, Donald, 11 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 148 women: dress of, 20, 121, 125 –131, 167–168; exclusion from power, 10, 130 –132, 147–149 Wood, Anthony, 85 wool, 12, 34 –35, 37, 69 –70, 74 –77, 84 – 85, 109, 123 working-class politics, 137–138, 147, 161 Wotton, Henry, 31 Wray, Mary, 174 Wyvill, Christopher, 142 –143

STUDIES ON THE HISTORY OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Editors 1. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, by Lynn Hunt 2. The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century, by Daniel Roche 3. Pont-St-Pierre, 1398–1789: Lordship, Community, and Capitalism in Early Modern France, by Jonathan Dewald 4. The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania, by Gail Kligman 5. Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, by Samuel D. Kassow 6. The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt 7. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style, by Debora L. Silverman 8. Histories of a Plague Year: The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence, by Giulia Calvi 9. Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia, by Lynn Mally 10. Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914 –1921, by Lars T. Lih 11. Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble, by Keith P. Luria 12. Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810, by Carla Hesse 13.

Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England, by Sonya O. Rose

14. Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867–1907, by Mark Steinberg 15. Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920, by James von Geldern 16. Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City, by John Martin 17. Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria, by Philip M. Soergel 18. Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France, by Sarah Maza 19.

Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900 –1914, by Joan Neuberger

20. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, by Paula Findlen

301

21. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, by James H. Johnson 22. The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 16401914, by Richard Biernacki 23. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, by Anna Clark 24. Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France, by Leora Auslander 25. Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History, by Catherine J. Kudlick 26. The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution, by Dominique Godineau 27. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin, by Victoria E. Bonnell 28. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi 29. Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970, by Sumathi Ramaswamy 30. Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution, by Paul Metzner 31. Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 18561914, by Stephen P. Frank 32. The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study in Practices, by Oleg Kharkhordin 33. What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Germany, by Elizabeth Heineman 34. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, edited by Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt 35. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany, by Uta G. Poiger 36. The Frail Social Body and Other Fantasies in Interwar France, by Carolyn J. Dean 37. Blood and Fire: Rumor and History in East and Central Africa, by Luise White 38. The New Biography: Performing Femininity in NineteenthCentury France, edited by Jo Burr Margadant 39. France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times, by Raymond Jonas 40. Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 18151830, by Sheryl Kroen 41. Provisional Notes on the Postcolony, by Achille Mbembe 42. Fascist Modernities: Italy, 19221945, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

43. Women Writing Opera: Creativity and Controversy in the Age of the French Revolution, by Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson 44. Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia, by E. Anthony Swift 45. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, by Benjamin Nathans 46. The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question, by Nelson Moe 47. The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550 –1850, by David Kuchta

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