ABSTRACT
In ‘The rise of “politeness” in England, 1660-1715’,1 the first major study of the subject, Lawrence Klein brilliantly mapped the ways in which politeness ‘altered the landscape of discourse’ in early eighteenth-century England. He argued that politeness arose as part of the spread of the courtly tradition over the English élite, something which was not unrelated to the weakness of the Court as a source of culture and as the authority on language, taste and manners that it was in France. In England it was the polite who made themselves into that authority.2
