This innovative collection explores how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe.The study of sociability in the long eighteenth century has long been dominated by the example of France. In this innovative collection, we see how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe. The contributors use a wide range of sources - from city plans to letter-writing manuals, from the writings of Edmund Burke to poems and essays about the social practices of the tea table, and a variety of methodological approaches to explore philosophical, political and social aspects of the emergence of British sociability in this period. They create a rounded picture of sociability as it happened in public, private and domestic settings - in Masonic lodges and radical clubs, in painting academies and private houses - and compare specific examples and settings with equivalents in France, bringing out for instance the distinctively homo-social and predominantly masculine form of British sociability, the role of sociabilitywithin a wider national identity still finding its way after the upheaval of civil war and revolution in the seventeenth century, and the almost unique capacity of the British model of sociability to benefit from its own apparent tensions and contradictions.

Foreword - Michèle CohenIntroduction - Valérie Capdeville and Alain Kerhervé'Restoration' England and the History of Sociability - Brian CowanMapping Sociability on Restoration Townscapes - Marie-Madeleine MartinetClub Sociability and the Emergence of New 'Sociable' Practices - Valérie CapdevilleThe Tea-table, Women, and Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain - Markman Ellis'Amateurs' vs. Connoisseurs in French and English Academies of Painting - Elisabeth MartichouMasonic Connections and Rivalries between France and Britain - Pierre-Yves BeaurepaireCompeting Models of Sociability: Smollett's Repossession of an Ailing British Body - Annick CossicA Theory of British Epistolary Sociability? - Alain KerhervéGender and the Practices of Polite Sociability in Late Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh - Jane RendallIn Company and Out: The Public/Private Selves of Johnson and Boswell - Allan IngramFriendship and Unsociable Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Literature - Emrys JonesThe Anti-social Convivialist: Toasting and Resistance to Sociability - Ian NewmanSociability and the Glorious Revolution: A Dubious Connection in Burke's Philosophy - Norbert ColRespectability vs Political Agency: A Dilemma for British Radical Societies - Remy DuthilleConclusion - Valérie Capdeville