Abstract
The notion that people are products of imitation is not particularly threatening as long as society’s main agents of influence are identifiable and regarded as beneficial. In England’s small-scale, pre-industrial communities where personal ties were strong and everyone knew everyone else, the dominant form of persuasion was personal. This face-to-face influence was considered safe and conducive to stability because it was linked directly to sanctioned authority. That is, accepted authority figures whose social positions and personal identities were known had a monopoly on influence. They included clergymen and parents, as well as those wielding political power. Even members of Parliament and central government officials who spent considerable time in London were known or at least recognised, out in the countryside. They had rural estates where they resided and mingled among local folk during much of the year.
These amiable accomplishments are all to be acquired by use and imitation; for we are, in truth, more than half what we are by imitation.
Lord Chesterfield, Letters (1774)
We are indeed the creatures of imitation, and our habits are fixed as we copy from others. What their example affords, is thus made a part of ourselves.
E. Appleton Early Education (1820)
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Notes
1. See Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women and Mintz, A Prison of Expectations for a discussion of the problem for mutual trust posed by industrialisation and urbanisation in nineteenth-century America.
2. For discussions of the print world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Altick, The English Common Reader; J. Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century; A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson 1726–1780 (London: G. Routledge, 1928); Collins, The Profession of Letters 1780–1832 (London: G. Routledge, 1928); G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society (London: Longman, 1978); A. Cruse, The Englishman and his Books in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: G. G. Harrap, 1930); H. Curwen, A History of Booksellers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1873); R. Gettman, A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); A. Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and D. Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, England 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
3. T. W. Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV’, Journal of Modern History, LIV (September 1982) p. 429.
4. See J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) and Brewer, ‘Commercialization and Politics’, in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Europa, 1982)
pp. 197–262, for discussions of the role of the press in the commercialisation of eighteenth-century politics.
5. Perkin, Origins, p. 302. See Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair’. For an argument against this view that newspapers reached low enough in the social scale to mould opinion on a national scale in the late eighteenth century, see Black, The English Press. Black recognises the dramatic growth in the press during the eighteenth century. He reveals that provincial papers increased from 50 in 1782 to over 100 in 1808. Furthermore, he notes that the roughly one million newspapers sent countrywide from London in 1764 grew to over four and a half million by 1790. But he, nevertheless, dismisses this growth as insignificant, choosing to emphasise that the new plentitude of print dispensed the same conservative ideas filling papers for over a century. Furthermore, he offers the unsubstantiated suggestion that those unable to read did not hear newspapers read aloud in London coffee houses and taverns, because people in the late eighteenth century preferred to read papers in silence. Conduct books suggest that Evangelical moralists were very concerned about the content of printed media, though they focused their concern more on books and journals than on newspapers. In particular, they were concerned about advertisements and novels. Furthermore, they criticised the growing commercialisation of the print world — newspapers included — seeing it as a danger to truth and moral principles.
6. Cranfield, The Press and Society, p. 119.
7. D. Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, England 1750–1914, p. 11. See also J. W. Saunders, The Profession of Letters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
8. T. Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship (London: Siegle, Hill, 1914; first pub. 1841) p. 31 and The Language of the Walls (Manchester: A. Heywood, 1855) p. 211.
9. T. R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London: Heinemann, 1982) p. 40.
10. C. P. Moritz, Journeys of a German in England, trans. R. Nettel (London: Eland Books, 1983) p. 42.
11. E. P. Thompson notes that during the earliest years of the Industrial Revolution, ‘very few of the working people [could] read well enough to read a newspaper’ (see Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 406). On the nature and growth of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century reading public, see also Altick, The English Common Reader and Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture.
12. Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, pp. 21–52.
13. See Keman’s Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson for a discussion of how a market-centred, democratic print world replaced a court-centred, aristocratic world of letters in the late eighteenth century.
14. ‘Mr. Colburn’s List’, The Athenaeum, no. 47 (17 September 1828) p. 736.
15. G. Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. W. J. Harvey (Middlesex: Penguin, 1965; first pub. 1871–2) p. 415.
16. Edinburgh Review (May 1823) quoted in Cranfield, The Press and Society, p. 153.
17. Modern Times; or, The Adventures of Gabriel Outcast (Dublin: Moncrieffe, Jenkin, Walker, White, Burton, Wogan, Byrne, Cash, and H. Whitestone, 1785) p. 231. Emphasis in the original.
18. Ilchester, Earl of (ed.), Elizabeth, Lady Holland to Her Son, 1821–1845, p. 163.
19. W. M. Thackeray, Pendennis, vol. II (London: J. M. Dent, 1910; first pub. 1850) p. 20.
20. The Athenaeum (1830) p. 767; emphasis as in the original.
21. A. Hayward, ‘Codes of Manners and Etiquette’, Quarterly Review, LIX (October 1837) 396.
22. L. Strachey and R. Fulford (eds), The Greville Memoirs, 1814–1860, vol. IV (London: Macmillan, 1938) p. 129.
23. J. Pitt, Instructions in Etiquette (Manchester: J. Pigot, 1828).
24. A Guide to the Ball Room and Illustrated Polka Lesson Book (London: C. Mitchell, 1845) p. xvi.
25. Etiquette For the Ladies, 4th ed. (London: C. Tilt, 1837) p. 21.
26. A. Alison, ‘The Influence of the Press’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XXXVI (September 1834) 374.
27. Paternal Advice, Chiefly to Young Men on Entering into Life (London: R. Groombridge, Panyer-Alley, n. d.) p. 15.
28. C. Bronte, Jane Eyre, ed. Q. D. Leavis (Middlesex: Penguin, 1966; first pub. 1847) preface.
29. The Christian Observer, I (1802) iii.
30. See J. Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel 1760–1830 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1943) for a discussion of hostility to the novel.
31. ‘Observations on Novel Reading’, Christian Observer, XIV (August 1815) 513.
32. J. West, Letters Addressed to a Young Man, vol. III (London: Longman and Rees, 1801) p. 167; emphasis as in the original.
33. W. Johnstone, ‘Close of the London Season’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XXIV (September 1828) 332.
34. Female Excellence or, Hints to Daughters, 2nd ed. (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1840) p. 32.
35. The Christian Observer, XIII (1814) 91.
36. P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770, and P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). By ‘town’ here is meant any community with a population of 2500 or more — 500 more people than the ‘census town’ of the mid nineteenth century.
37. Perkin, Origins, p. 117.
38. J. Walvin, English Urban Life 1776–1851 (London: Hutchinson, 1984) p. 11.
39. Perkin, Origins, p. 118.
40. Walvin, English Urban Life, p. 13.
41. Perkin, Origins, p. 118. The 11 coastal resorts cited in the 1851 census were: Worthing, Brighton, Torquay, Ryde, Ramsgate, Dover, Cowes, Weymouth, Margate, Scarborough and Ilfracombe.
42. Walvin, English Urban Life, pp. 8–9. For census purposes, the definition of a town in 1851 was any community of 2000 or more.
43. Perkin, Origins, p. 117.
44. F. A. Wendeborn, A View of England towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century, vol. I (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791) p. 252.
45. T. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, with a foreword by M. Engel (New York: New American Library, 1960) p. 94.
46. J. Lindsay, The Monster City: Defoe’s London, 1688–1730 (London: Granada, 1978) p. 7; Perkin, Origins, p. 117; Walvin, English Urban Life, p. 9.
47. For discussions of London’s overwhelming influence on Britain’s newspapers and culture, see Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century; R. Porter, ‘Science, Provincial Culture and Public Opinion in Enlightenment England’, in P. Borsay (ed.), The Eighteenth-Century Town, 1688–1820, pp. 243–67; and Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
48. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 152.
49. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800, p. 99.
50. B. Reeves (ed.), Colburn’s Kalendar of Amusements in Town and Country for 1840 (London: H. Colburn, 1840) p. 349.
51. Hon. J. Byng, The Torrington Diaries, 1781–1794, intro. A. Bryant (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954) p. 33.
52. See, in particular, F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society, and Thompson, ‘Town and City’, in Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, vol. I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp. 1–86.
53. This distinction is made by R. Williams, Keywords (London: Croom Helm, 1976) p. 47.
54. H. Cockburn, Memorials of his Time (New York: D. Appleton, 1856) p. 34.
55. For a discussion of the city in the early industrial period as a ‘world of strangers’ see L. H. Lofland, A World of Strangers (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Lofland arbitrarily defines a world of strangers as any city containing more than 8,000–10,000 people. For additional discussions of the problem of anonymity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cities see P. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); K. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women; and R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The phrase ‘face-to-face’ community is taken from P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1965), a study of pre-industrial English society. See Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance; Borsay (ed.), The Eighteenth-Century Town; and G. Sjoberg, The Pre-Industrial City (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960) on the pre-industrial city in particular.
56. F. MacDonogh, The Hermit in London; Or, Sketches of English Manners, vol. II (London: H. Colburn, 1822) p. 159.
57. Moritz, Journeys, p. 34.
58. Wendebom, A View of England, vol. I, p. 265.
59. For discussions of eighteenth-century cities as arenas for competition and consumption, see Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance, and Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800.
60. The Fable of the Bees (1714) quoted in P. Borsay, ‘The English Urban Renaissance: The Development of Provincial Urban Culture c. 1680-c. 1760’, Social History, II (May 1977) 594.
61. J. Austen, Sense and Sensibility (New York: Random House; first pub. 1811) p. 101.
62. That moralists focused much of their criticism of cities on London and the resort communities is understandable considering conduct books’ intended middle-class audience. Members of the middle class, because of their increasing wealth as well as improvements in travel, flocked in ever-increasing numbers during the early industrial period to indulge in the leisurely pastimes offered by these cities. Not until the 1830s and 1840s did hostility towards cities shift from being directed at the luxuries of London and the resorts to focusing on the filth and poverty in Northern industrial towns. Regarding this shift, see B. I. Coleman (ed.), The Idea of the City in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) and Thompson, ‘Town and City’.
63. W. Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System (London: T. Cadell, 1797) p. 372.
64. J. Fordyce, The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (London: T. Cadell, 1776) p. 55.
65. J. F. Murray, ‘The World of London’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, L (September 1841) 335.
66. G. Ellis (ed.), A Memoir of Mrs. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, vol. II (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1874) p. 316.
67. T. Gisborne, An Inquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, 9th ed. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1810) p. 155.
68. Letters of Advice from a Lady of Distinction to Her Niece, the Duchess of Shortly after her Marriage (London: H. Colburn, 1819) p. 212.
69. MacDonogh, The Hermit, vol. III, p. 178.
70. On the eighteenth-century consumer boom see Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance; C. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); E. Jones, The Fashion Manipulators: Consumer Tastes and British Industries 1660–1800’, in L. P. Cain and P. J. Uselding (eds), Business Enterprise and Economic Change (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1973) pp. 198–226; B. Lemire, ‘Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes’, Journal of British Studies, XXVII (January 1988) 1–24; McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society; H. C. and L. H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989); and J. H. Plumb, Georgian Delights (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). For a critique of the consumerist approach to understanding eighteenth-century English society see B. Fine and E. Leopold, ‘Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution’, Social History, XV (May 1990) 151–79. Fine and Leopold do not deny that consumerism and an interest in fashion were spreading, but rather challenge the view that changing consumer behaviours can be used to explain the industrial revolution.
71. Wendeborn, A View of England, vol. I, p. 269.
72. F. de la Rochefoucauld, A Frenchman in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933; first pub. 1784) p. 4.
73. N. McKendrick, ‘The Commercialization of Fashion’, in The Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 34–99. See also Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in
Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 221–48 for a discussion of the clothing trade’s more aggressive sales techniques beginning in the 1770s.
74. On hand-coloured fashion plates see V. Holland, Hand-Coloured Fashion Plates 1770–1899 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1955).
75. Gallery of Fashion (London: N. Heideloff, 1794) advertisement.
76. See Fine and Leopold, ‘Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution’, and Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988).
77. Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Lady Palmerston and Her Times, vol. I (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922) p. 88.
78. Flora Tristan’s London Journal, 11.
79. J. Leech, Pictures of Life and Character, vol. I (London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1886) p. 28.
80. The Female Instructor: Or Young Woman’s Companion (Liverpool: Nutall, Fisher, 1815) p. 169.
81. La Belle Assemblée, II (1807) 125.
82. Mrs W. Parkes, Domestic Duties; or, Instructions to Young Married Ladies, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1828) p. 126.
83. Stone, Chronicles of Fashion, vol. II, p. 379.
84. Ibid., vol. II, p. 79.
85. J. West, Letters to a Young Lady, vol. I, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1806) p. 11.
86. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 264.
87. Reverend V. Knox, Liberal Education (London: printed for C. Dilly, 1781)
p. 158.
88. M. Edgeworth, Belinda in Tales and Novels, vol. XI (London: Baldwin & Cradock, 1833) p. 295.
89. J. West, Letters to a Young Lady, vol. III, p. 17.
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© 1994 Marjorie Morgan
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Morgan, M. (1994). The Problem of Influence: Print, Cities, Fashion and ‘Society’. In: Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774–1858. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379541_3
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