In this video Professor Susan Fitzmaurice is in the Salon at Nostell Priory where she introduces us to the 18th-century notion of “politeness” and describes how this differs from the modern day notion of “minding one’s manners”.
Susan examines how country and city attitudes towards politeness differed. We begin to think about how manners, appearance and conversation might be a hot topic in the popular literature of the day, for example, in Joseph Addison’s ‘Spectator’ essays.
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