SOCIETY

How to be an Eighteenth-Century English Gentleman

 The phenomenon of the “English gentleman” surfaced just prior to the eighteenth century, amid a centrifugal redistribution of power from town municipalities and guilds to the private person. The public sphere, long contaminated by monarchical hegemonies, began a cleansing process of contained, idealist self-fashioning.  Of course, much of the impetus for change was couched in oligarchic self-interests, so “the private person” became the protagonist in the society.

British freedom, then, was secured by the central government’s decision not to interfere with its bourgeoisie’s rights and privileges, a remove that protected chartered corporations and instilled a rising confidence among all. A web of societies flourished that included salons, coffee houses, theaters, and literary, scientific, and philosophical associations, and all became important sites for reshaping identities and rethinking the rules of constitutions. 

The MIDDLE-CLASS was the ruling class but also the leading one. In fact the ideas and the values of this class influenced all the society. For example the new “moral conduct” realized a great change in manners. For the first time in English history, there was an adoption of a specific code of social politeness.

The “gentleman” in Fielding’s works is robust, learned and productive. He is a construct deemed invariably instrumental to the success of an emerging capitalist Britain.

Character and manners could explain why “the English nation, in little more than a century [. . .] since the happy revolution of 1688, has increased more in population, in knowledge, in grandeur and in political prosperity, than any nation, ancient or modern, has been able to do in many centuries.”

If one is to disassemble such a construct, that is, unmask the eighteenth-century English gentleman and reconsider his tastes, pastimes, manners, and aspirations, one must first reveal the complexities that permit “gentleman” to figure prominently in Enlightenment England’s socioeconomic relations and national identity.

The emphasis on an existential “to be” is deliberate here; after all, if one can construct oneself the “right way,” then one’s character cannot be fixed.  This modern, dynamic ontology was for many something with which to be reconciled, for not everyone in eighteenth-century England was enthusiastic about dismissing the solidified self wrought through divine determinism.  Fielding, for one, appears to have been unwilling to abandon the more conservative view that “character was fixed by God or nature, and that the seemingly unpredictable contingencies in which it expressed itself were equally predetermined”.

The “stronger sense of the complexity of human psychology,” at once underscoring Locke’s tabla rasa and undermining Leibniz’s devout determinism, had a direct bearing on the growing acceptance of “individual choice” rather than “inherited types and humours”.

The decentering of power reached the countryside and had a tremendous effect on the nation’s economic topography.  According to some, the typical eighteenth-century Englishman was a villager, a “villager accustomed to meet men of various crafts and occupations and classes”.

There is a “multiform and vigorous society, part agricultural, part industrial,” in which the power of the squire “loomed large,” “beneficent or tyrannical but always patriarchal.

There is no “class of men to whom the word ‘Gentlemen’ more emphatically applies, or who are more generally distinguished for their culture and refinement,” the country squires of eighteenth-century England were very different people.  According to almost unanimous testimony they were generally boorish and ignorant, mighty hunters, and hard drinkers, who swore oaths, and used in the drawing room the language of the stable.  There are of course exceptions to the general description; and we have Squire Allworthy in ‘Tom Jones,’ and Sir William Thornton in the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ who are models of propriety”.

Some one calls Alloworthy the “typical squire”.

Tom Jones, arguably the greatest novel of the eighteenth century, is in many ways a guide on how to be a gentleman. Though Fielding certainly does not disown his class, he is, after all, a Tory through and through, his “instruction” on how to be in mid-eighteenth century England forces his reader to, at the very least, rethink “gentleman.”  Neither Squire Allworthy nor Tom is without fault, but both have enough redeeming qualities to become Fielding’s gentleman, and that is the lesson.  In Fielding’s own words: “it is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good”. 

Tom cannot take his place in the community, cannot be a gentleman if he is a foundling. But Fielding understands “gentleman” too—it is just that Tom, like many of his readers, is still on his way to becoming one.  Fielding self-consciously tells his reader in his dedication that he should not find the work offensive, that there is nothing in the story that is “prejudicial to the cause of religion and virtue; nothing inconsistent with the strictest rules of decency, nor which can offend even the chastest eye in perusal”.What is more, he concludes “that virtue and innocence can scarce ever be injured by indiscretion; and that it is this alone which often betrays them into the snares that deceit and villainy spread for them”. But “gentleman” is so entwined with production and with capital that Tom’s desultory ways are perceived as a misrepresentation of the ideal.  So one can see how Tom the flaneur cannot possibly be Tom the gentleman, and that the novel overall might be antithetical to England’s prosperity.

“Reason assisted nascent capitalism by permitting utility or usefulness to be calculated and objects and people to be identified, assigned categories, and controlled”.  The “gentleman” is one such category.  The idea that he was being “controlled” may have been beyond the Enlightenment subject, including Diderot, who would situate man within a great creative process, a part within the whole.  The capitalist collective, however, manifests a more tangible individual, now no longer for the benefit of a monarch, but for a privileged class.

This last distinction between the Enlightenment subject and the socialist self is certainly underscored if one considers how a good part of the former’s construction arises from a Lockean brand of individual liberty that does not include the poor or anyone thought to be of a “lower” race.  Locke’s belief that the right of private ownership is implied by natural law and justified by labor—a natural phenomenon belonging to the laborer—nonetheless excludes those doing most of the labor.  Ironically, then, though man is not born immoral, as Hobbes had suggested, Locke’s discriminatory liberalism would make him so anyway.  Such conflicting ideologies fuel the eighteenth-century, and if one attempts to trace a path from rationalism to empiricism to skepticism one ultimately finds that the Enlightenment is never any one thing.  Rather, it is a period that both prefigures Modernism's autonomous self and denies its plausibility.