ABSTRACT
In the last 30 years or so, the social history of the eighteenth century in Britain has come to be dominated by a single story: how the provincial gentry, and how the commercial middle class, fashioned themselves into members of a polite society; how they became polished, in all the senses the word brought with it from Italy and Paris – not grubby but cleaned up, not rough round the edges but smooth, not varnished but with a deep down lasting shine. This development has given us a new and valuable understanding of eighteenth-century British culture, especially of literature and the visual arts, but for dinosaurs like me, brought up on E. P. Thompson and history from below, it has not been a wholly positive development. It has relegated the vast majority of the people who lived in the eighteenth century to mere extras, walk-on parts in the corners of drawing rooms or street scenes, a process facilitated and confirmed by the recent revival of the word ‘Georgian’ in art exhibitions and in the version of British history peddled by the BBC’s Channel 4. 1 Nobody would attempt to deny that there were poor people in the eighteenth century, but they had no claim on the elegant identity ‘Georgian,’ so we can hardly complain when they are cleansed from the historical record of the ‘Georgian’ period.
