ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book examines the impact of eighteenth-century polite society on representations of the gentleman, on contemporary debates over the meaning and condition of manliness, and on the self-perception and conduct of real social actors. Each approach has revealed the importance of masculinity as a social category, created, maintained or undermined by men's social, not sexual, performance. The chapter argues that eighteenth-century male readers of conduct literature, periodical essays, magazine articles, sermons, novels and academic treatises, and to male participants in urban social spaces, this dominant ideal would have been understood as centered on men's participation in polite society. Issues of Christian morality and stoicism featured prominently in the construction and regulation of both a polite and a sentimental gentlemanly ideal.
