ABSTRACT
In eighteenth-century England, a debate began among the nation’s learned elite. This debate would ultimately have far-reaching consequences for the types of settler societies that emerged in the United States and Australia. However, in the eighteenth century, the focus of this debate was on the nature of human character, intellect, and social status in England. In a biting satire of this debate, Daniel Defoe’s The Compleat English Gentleman (1729) lampooned the increasingly popular idea that genetic ancestry determined one’s character and social status. In a conversation that Defoe claimed to have witnessed between the Earl of Oxford and “a certain modern Nobleman,” the Earl exclaimed: “I am Aubrey de Vere Earl of Oxford; my Grandfather was Earl of Oxford, my Great-grandfather was Francis de Vere, Lieutenant-general to Queen Elizabeth.” In response, Defoe’s “modern Nobleman” announced that “I am William Lord my Father was Lord Mayor of London and my Grandfather was the Lord knows who.” Defoe’s wit was designed to register his disdain for a growing chorus of eighteenth-century elites who, in Defoe’s mind, claimed that a gentlemen’s lineage contained “some Globules in the Blood, some sublime Particles in the Animal Secretion” that produced civility and virtue. Search beyond three generations of any family, Defoe contended, and one’s lineage, like that of the Nobleman, dissolved into the “Mist and Cloud” of the forgotten past. According to Defoe, a true gentleman, a man of good breeding, was a man devoted not to ancient bloodlines, but to the cultivation of “Honour, Virtue, Sense, Integrity, Honesty, and Religion.”1
