The Civilizing Process: the Morphology of Gentility

Abstract

Prescriptions for gentility have been offered in Europe for more than five hundred years in manuals of advice, grounded in the principle of self-control, instructing the rude in the dos and don’ts of polite behaviour and the correct elements of refined living. Until the nineteenth century, specific changes in the nature of refinement were less than the degree to which refined standards came to be practised by increasing numbers of people. But though the outward forms of refinement remained the same, the internal structures of traditional courtesy were transformed in the fifty years around the turn of the nineteenth century by the processes of middle-class formation, which, riding a wave of religious revival, reformulated ideas about manliness and ‘true womanhood’ and generated a highly focused domestic ideology of separate spheres. The new scenarios arising from these intersections were practised in a surging environment of social contacts structured by prescriptive etiquette and by consumerist enthusiasm fuelled by rising levels of income and the new capacity for mass production. At this nexus, the Victorian middle class actively appropriated to themselves refined values and practices from the aristocracy, and established their own new and characteristic cultural system of gentility.