Tradesmen and craftsmen, merchants and shopkeepers benefited as pro-
ducers, purveyors, and consumers from the expanding availability of household
goods and clothes and decorative objects. And the prosperity of the middling
ranks of London society brought the increasing numbers of places of pleasure
and entertainment within their means—the coffee-houses and taverns, theatres
and, by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, Vauxhall and Raneleigh
Gardens. These features oflife in the metropolis also helped to draw increasing
numbers of the gentry and aristocracy to London for the social season. But the
public life they supported was not closed to the aspiring bourgeoisie of the City.
And over time the growth of commerce, of wealth, and of consumption en-
couraged an engagement with fashion and emulation, and changes in behav-
iour, at least among the upper ranks of the middling class, that were thought by
contemporaries to signal a growth of politeness and sociability, a refinement of
manners and taste, a growing ethos of urbanity.
Those attributes were indeed consciously spread and sustained by an ex-
panding press that provided examples of, and instructions in, the alterations in
sensibility that politeness required—and in magazines like the Spectatorand
Tatler, in which Addison and Steele set out to instruct readers in the behaviour
and manners that were the signs and essence of gentility. In addition, Lawrence
Klein has shown, a large number of manuals were published in the late seven-
teenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth that offered instruction
in social as well as more practical skills to a non-gentry audience. ‘ “Politeness”,
was purveyed to plebeians’, Klein has said, ‘in an array of non-fictional books of
secular improvement, books offering people what they needed to pursue a given
occupation or to assume or reinforce a certain social personality.’^9 The rules of
polite behaviour were set out in these manuals, for example, for the very large
number of shopkeepers in the metropolis who, for good commercial reasons,
needed to treat their customers with civility and good manners.^10 The changing
character of commercial life was one of the vehicles of the spread of a new urban
culture.
The changing culture of the City helps to explain why men who made a great
deal of money in business in the eighteenth century were more inclined than
their predecessors of a hundred years earlier to retain their fundamental at-
tachment to the urban and commercial world. London merchants and fi-
nanciers continued to use their wealth to buy large estates and to take their
families into the elevated social world that broad acres would in time open up to
them. But many more than ever before were content to buy a house with a limited
parcel of land in the Home Counties or in the suburban ring surrounding the
metropolis, while maintaining their interests in the commercial world and468 Conclusion(^9) Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes. Consumption and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-
Century England’, in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds.), The Consumption of Culture 1600 – 1800 :
Image, Object, Text(London, 1995 ), 367.
(^10) Ibid., 372 – 3.
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