The Beau Monde, by Hannah Greig

To understand best how Hannah Greig has conceived of this book you need to read very carefully several of the lengthier, discursive endnotes, especially note 53 (pp. 267–8). There she suggests that the ‘configuration of elite status’, compared with the ‘vast literature tackling other social groups’, has been ‘rather neglected’. She has in mind here the middling ranks, whose fortunes and identities have been subject to minute, and sometimes rather exhausting, scrutiny in recent decades. But she is also reacting against what she sees as the rigid ‘formulaic’ definitions of status among the upper ranks that historians have, in her eyes, tended to employ. By contrast, her subject—the fashionable elite—was rooted in the metropolis and the rhythms of the metropolitan season that flourished post-1689, and its pre-eminence was based on ‘fashion, consumption, and public display’ (p. 4). It was, in other words, fundamentally culturally constructed. The emergence and flourishing of this elite in the century or so that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1689 represented, Greig suggests, a re-configuration rather than a revolution, in so far as the bulk of it was drawn from the ranks of the titled nobility. It was, in this sense, an ‘elite within an elite’, a component of a larger group whose security, status and wealth derived from landownership. How much larger is not systematically examined by Greig, and this may be a more important question than she appears to be prepared to concede. The boundaries of her fashionable elite remain elusive, as indeed do the divisions and tensions within it, although she has a considerable amount to say about political divisions at various points. How much of it was resident in Westminster, as opposed to villa-style properties in Twickenham or other places on the outskirts of the capital? What was the place within it of dowagers and spinsters from titled families? On what terms did the non-titled become part of this world or have access to it? Answers to all these questions are hard to find in the book. This fuzziness is partly a function of how she perceives the ‘beau monde’ as being made and re-made season by season. It is, however, also related to how she has chosen to proceed in analysing it. This is a study based on close, and usually very sensitive, reading of a huge quantity of correspondence between members of the London-based elite, and what Greig has done is to produce essentially a series of exploratory studies of different aspects of the cultural formation and identity of this group. Thus, separate chapters examine, in turn, the meaning of fashion within this group; the elite at play in the premier pleasure gardens and theatres; the place of the Court as a site for the display of their elite status; the extent to which the lives of women and men within this group were permeated by politics and politicking; constructions of the notion of the ‘beauty’ within this social world; and, finally, the experience of exile from the ‘beau monde’ and attempts to fake membership as ways of probing the limits of membership. The final two chapters are in many ways the most innovative and interesting, although whether they are fully successful in achieving their stated goals is more debatable.

Aesthetics · Art · Elite · Flourishing · Nobility · Political science · Politics · Scrutiny · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology