Defending conduct and property

For much of the period between Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) and John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757) debate about luxury fed on what Hume described as its “very uncertain signification.” ¹ From the mid-1750s to the mid-1780s, however, magazines and polite tracts referred to “luxury” less as a general portmanteau term and more in relation to specific domestic objects and actions. Many interpretations of luxury remained as relativist and dependent upon circumstance as other moral concepts (particularly as many magazines borrowed liberally from ancient publications), but many writers attempted detailed and contemporary definitions of luxury in order to entertain and instruct readerships perceived as increasingly young, impressionable, female, and non-metropolitan. New representations were inspired both by changes in the literary market and by changing economic conditions, notably in domestic consumption, productivity, and landownership. Here I want to show how continuing discussion of luxury became a vehicle by which an expanding but often defensive London press examined more intently the relationship between property and conduct.