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British
Sociability in the Long Eighteenth-Century Challenging the Anglo-French Connection
Edited
by Valérie Capdeville & Alain Kerhervé
Studies in the Eighteenth Century Series Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2019 Hardcover. xvi+304 p. ISBN 978- 1783273591. £65
Reviewed
by Claire Boulard Jouslin Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3
The
present volume is the fruit of several years of academic and international
sociability—including seminars and conferences co-organised by the general
editors Valérie Capdeville (Université Paris 13) and Alain Kerhervé (Université
de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest) between 2015 and 2019—and is meant to
complement Annick Cossic’s six-volume collection La Sociabilité en France et en Grande Bretagne au siècle des Lumières
(Le Manuscrit, UBO, 2012-2017), which compared the French and British forms of
sociability and explored some of their main features—their emergence, places
of sociability, their aesthetics and forms of resistance to that
sociability. Unlike
Cossick’s collection, British Sociability
in the Long Eighteenth Century : Challenging the Anglo-French Connection
offers to tackle the national construction of sociability between 1660 and
1815, a subject which has not been given much attention in the numerous
scholarly works recently published on sociability. This elegant volume
constitutes a neat collection of fourteen chapters written by veteran and
junior scholars. Their studies are presented in chronological order and provide
an insight into the various places of sociability in existence in Britain—squares,
clubs, tea-table, masonic lodges, salons, radical societies—as well as into
such various forms of sociability as conversations, letters and toasts. It also
illustrates how Protean, paradoxical and difficult to define the concept of
sociability is. The
book is divided into three parts (‘Emergence of new political and social
practices’, ‘Competing models of sociability’ et ‘Paradoxes of British sociability’),
which are introduced by a summary of each chapter. It is completed with a
general bibliography and a general index, which are most useful. As
indicated by the full title of the book and by the editors’ introduction, the
argument of the book is threefold. It maintains that the features of British
sociability are distinct from that of the French; that these British
specificities emerged and developed from the Restoration and lasted well beyond
the French Revolution. Finally, it claims to revise the standard scholarly view
that British sociability was constructed in imitation to the hegemonic French
model of sociability. It therefore implies that the origins of British
sociability were first and foremost political. This
collection of studies somewhat qualifies such a confident title. Reading the
various studies raises the feeling that reality was far more complex than
suggested and that the distinctly British features of sociability did not seem
that numerous—neither was the construction of
sociability blatantly denying French influence nor was it as Francophobic as
the title suggests. Brian
Cowan’s masterly bibliographical overview of seventeenth-century English
sociability (‘Restoration England and the history of sociability’), which opens
the first part, happily sets the history of sociability into a much longer
historical timeline. It also warns against the double temptation of reducing
sociability to a long eighteenth-century phenomenon, and of defining it simplistically
as a harmonious eighteenth-century Habermasian outcome which would reflect J.H.
Plumb’s myth of a stable 18th-century British monarchy. From the outset Brian
Cowan highlights the complex, contradictory and paradoxical nature of
sociability in Britain. Although he acknowledges tensions in Anglo–French
relations in the Restoration period, Cowan also cautions readers against
underestimating Francophilia and its impact on the development of sociability
in Britain. So,
as Michèle Cohen put it in her preface to the book, what made British
sociability so British? The book tentatively provides some direct and some more
oblique answers to this intricate and vast question in the second and third
parts respectively. It seems that if gender segregation was at the heart of
British sociability, as the chapters by Valérie Capdeville (‘Club sociability
and the emergence of new “sociable practices” ’), Markman Ellis (‘The
tea-table, women and gossip in early eighteenth-century Britain’) and Jane
Rendall (‘Gender and the practices of polite sociability in late
eighteenth-century Edinburgh’) show; and if British painting academies suggest
that they were more socially mixed than their French counterparts, as is
evidenced by Elizabeth Martichou (‘Amateurs’ vs connoisseurs in French and English academies of painting’), the
intense Britishness of British sociability is still to be explored. So
is the anti-French ideological construction of British sociability. Alain Kerhervé,
who examines the codes of British epistolary sociability and concludes that
they seem to be more socially opened than the French, also points out that it
is hard to give a clear-cut answer since the epistolary guides he observes very
much relied on French manuals. Thus the question mark to his chapter’s title
(‘A theory of British epistolarity?’) suggests that caution is necessary when
dealing with the political, anti-French foundation of British sociability. It
is however undeniable that forms of sociability in Britain did reflect the Anglo-French
political rivalry, as P.Y. Beaurepaire’s chapter on ‘Masonic connections and
rivalries between France and Britain’ shows; or that they could strengthen
individual patriotic convictions. In her article titled ‘Competing models of
sociability,’ Annick Cossic-Pericarpin confirms Jeremy Black’s conclusions on
the nationalist effect of the Grand Tour on British travellers (The British Abroad : The Grand Tour in
the Eighteenth Century, 2003) when she argues that Tobias Smollett settled
back in England with restored health but also with the deep conviction that
British liberties guaranteed superior forms of sociability than those of the
continent. In
the same way, the third part uncovers sociable practices and some literary and
journalistic representations of sociability that were directly linked to
politics (read Emrys Jones’s chapter, ‘Friendship and unsociable sociability in
eighteenth-century literature’, and Ian Newman’s ‘The anti-social
convivialist’, for instance). It shows that while creating a “plebeian
sociability”, some societies constituted a sometimes difficult initiation to
democracy. A case in point is provided by Rémy Duthille (‘Respectability vs. Political agency’), who analysed the
tensions generated by the necessity for the members of the London Corresponding Society to
respect the codes of middle-class respectability, which made it difficult
for them to voice radical demands inspired by the French Revolution. However,
if we agree with Linda Colley’s seminal study Britons : Forging the
Nation, 1707-1837 (1992) and its claim that Francophobia and the rejection
of French values (religion, fashion, etc.)
was one major component of the construction of Britishness, we remain
unconvinced by the argument of this collection of essays that a specific desire
to reject French sociability was the driving force behind the overall
construction and evolution of British sociability. Part of the reason for such
scepticism may lie in the absence of studies about the way French forms of
sociability were perceived and represented in Britain. One wonders in
particular whether it is accurate to claim, for the entire period, that French
sociability as a whole was only portrayed as harmonious and hegemonic in Britain.
Moreover, even though the third part of the book investigates forms of
resistance to sociability which proved that currents of Imanuel Kant’s later,
paradoxical concept of unsocial sociability (1784) were at work in Britain
(read for instance, Allan Ingram’s ‘In company and out : The public / private
selves of Johnson and Boswell’), one sometimes fails to
understand why this concept should become the hallmark of British sociability
and why such paradoxes should in particular distinguish the British from the
French forms of sociability at the same period. Despite
those reservations, this collection of essays on British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century is stimulating
and invites readers to explore further the definition of sociability and the complex
interrelations between sociability and such concepts as those of civil society,
of the self and of conviviality.
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