ABSTRACT
Friendship is a touchstone for the ethics of fiction in the later Hanoverian period that serves to validate ideals of virtue and sociability. A distinguished form of bonding and an esteemed quality of private and public relations, the bond is located at the heart of Enlightenment and Romantic discussions about moral conventions and social conduct. In novels from the 1760s to the 1830s, friendship exemplifies virtuous principles and directives for both individual and communal interaction, and it illustrates how they can be substantiated and realized in different situations. The values most often connected with the friendship motif are sympathy, other-regard, respect, love, and companionship. Whatever its persuasion – for friendship has the potential to embody established structures and sentiments as well as revolutionary tenets – it seeks to determine the ethical value of the represented behaviour by putting the latter’s virtuousness to the test. In contrast to the motif of romantic love, which often sets the individual against society, friendship derives significance from exemplifying interaction with others. It binds characters to their community and seeks to impact their situation by endowing conventions with the virtues they claim to warrant. In this respect, friendship represents the ethical dimension of the eighteenth century’s preoccupation with manners:
[In the eighteenth century,] the idea of manners assumes both moral and social significance, despite the neutrality of manner as merely a way of doing something. Moral meanings preceded social ones. [. . .] Since even the most trivial rules justify themselves in terms of the individual’s effect on others, concern for manners shades readily into moral obligation. Morality, after all, involves responsibility to and for one’s fellow man and woman.2
