ABSTRACT
In one of the extended footnotes to his Fable of the Bees (1705-14), Bernard Mandeville attacks the gently reformist periodicals of Addison and Steele in a way that might surprise many modern readers of the Tatler and the Spectator (1709-14).1 Describing the essayists’ “politeness” and “elegance” as a cover for their “ingenious sophistry,” Mandeville compares Steele’s rhetorical address to his reading public to the “tricks made use of by the women that would teach children to be mannerly.”2 For Mandeville, Steele’s hopeful accounts of human nature and of his audience’s potential for self-improvement should be viewed as “fulsome fl atteries” and “abominable lies” by “anyone above the capacity of an infant.”3 To illustrate his point, Mandeville develops an allegorical scene in which Steele’s readers are represented by a young girl who is learning to curtsy:
When an awkward girl, before she can either speak or go, begins after many entreaties to make the fi rst rude essays of curtsying, the nurse falls in an ecstasy of praise: “There’s a delicate curtsy! O fi ne miss! There’s a pretty lady! Mama, Miss can make a better curtsy than her sister Molly!”; the same is echoed over by the maids, whilst Mama almost hugs the child to pieces; only Miss Molly, who being four years older knows how to make a handsome curtsy, wonders at the perverseness of their judgment and, swelling with indignation, is ready to cry at the injustice that is done her, till, being whispered in the ear that it is only to please the baby, and that she is a woman, she grows proud at being let into the secret and, rejoicing at the superiority of her understanding, repeats what has been said with large additions, and insults over the weakness of her sister, whom all this while she fancies to be the only bubble among them.4
