Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Setting the Scene: The Arrival of the Duel and a Brief History to 1750
- 2 Fashion and Physicality
- 3 Politeness, Interest and Transgression: Social Interaction and the Causes of Duelling
- 4 Controversies and Calculations: The Incidence and Distribution of Duelling
- 5 Guts and Governance: Honour Culture and Colonial Administration
- 6 Dangerous Friends: Conciliation, Counsel and the Conduct of English Duelling
- 7 Th e Contest in the Courtroom: Duelling and the Criminal Justice System
- 8 The Years of Decline, the European Middle and the Domestic Duellists
- 9 The Reformation of Space, Place and Mind
- 10 Dishonourable Duellists and the Rationalisation of Punishment and Warfare
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - The Reformation of Space, Place and Mind
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Setting the Scene: The Arrival of the Duel and a Brief History to 1750
- 2 Fashion and Physicality
- 3 Politeness, Interest and Transgression: Social Interaction and the Causes of Duelling
- 4 Controversies and Calculations: The Incidence and Distribution of Duelling
- 5 Guts and Governance: Honour Culture and Colonial Administration
- 6 Dangerous Friends: Conciliation, Counsel and the Conduct of English Duelling
- 7 Th e Contest in the Courtroom: Duelling and the Criminal Justice System
- 8 The Years of Decline, the European Middle and the Domestic Duellists
- 9 The Reformation of Space, Place and Mind
- 10 Dishonourable Duellists and the Rationalisation of Punishment and Warfare
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If Simpson's ‘dandelion’ hypothesis is to be discarded, as I am afraid it must be, then a contrary hypothesis suggests itself: that duelling disappeared not because the middle were adopting it to the alarm of the elite, but because the middle were resolutely opposed to it and imposed their will upon their betters. The belief that the demise of duelling can be ascribed to the rise of a new commercial middle class, whose values were (allegedly) necessarily antithetical to the culture of honour, has gained broad acceptance. Donna Andrew has suggested that:
The most important effect of the growth of commerce was that by encouraging personal freedom and political liberty, a new and energetic class arose, a class that could both oppose itself to the classes above it, while claiming to represent the real interests of all of society … It could and did reject the established norms of gentlemanliness, which the code of honour represented and substitute its own redefinition of the term … Duelling was identified as a failing of the upper classes and, as such, roundly condemned.
According to Andrew, it was the onset of Christian commerce in place of the code of honour that served to displace the duel and the middle classes that struggled the hardest to suppress duelling, ‘thus the debate about duelling was an important element in the formation of the middle class, and the gestation of middle class culture’. Kiernan seemed to accept Andrew's argument when he declared that the abandonment of the duel was an important symptom of the decline of aristocratic hegemony. James Kelly again reiterated the argument in his work on the duel in Ireland. According to him the demise of the duel was:
A triumph for the rule of law over that of traditional privilege and for the emerging middle class over traditional aristocratic mores. These contrary tendencies had been engaged in a visible struggle for pre-eminence since at least the 1780s when there was a perceptible increase in public commitment to law and morality … From one perspective this was the inevitable result of the emergence in industrialising Britain of a propertied middle class increasingly determined to enforce its social priorities and ideological concerns.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Polite Exchange of BulletsThe Duel and the English Gentleman, 1750-1850, pp. 191 - 216Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010