Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION: THE CULTURAL WORK OF EMPIRE
- 1 LUNACY IN THE COSMOPOLIS (1759): EXPANSION AND IMPERIAL RECOIL
- 2 PATRIOT GAMES: MILITARY MASCULINITY AND THE RECOMPENSE OF VIRTUE
- 3 PRICKSONGS IN GOTHAM: OR, THE SEXUAL OECONOMY OF STATE IMAGINING
- 4 FRIENDSHIP, SLAVERY AND THE POLITICS OF PITY, INCLUDING A VISIT FROM PHILLIS WHEATLEY
- 5 WOMEN'S TIME AND WORK-DISCIPLINE: OR, THE SECRET HISTORY OF ‘POOR MARIA’
- 6 ‘BRAMIN, BRAMINE’: STERNE, ELIZA DRAPER AND THE PASSAGE TO INDIA
- 7 CONCLUDING ALONG SHANDEAN LINES
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - FRIENDSHIP, SLAVERY AND THE POLITICS OF PITY, INCLUDING A VISIT FROM PHILLIS WHEATLEY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION: THE CULTURAL WORK OF EMPIRE
- 1 LUNACY IN THE COSMOPOLIS (1759): EXPANSION AND IMPERIAL RECOIL
- 2 PATRIOT GAMES: MILITARY MASCULINITY AND THE RECOMPENSE OF VIRTUE
- 3 PRICKSONGS IN GOTHAM: OR, THE SEXUAL OECONOMY OF STATE IMAGINING
- 4 FRIENDSHIP, SLAVERY AND THE POLITICS OF PITY, INCLUDING A VISIT FROM PHILLIS WHEATLEY
- 5 WOMEN'S TIME AND WORK-DISCIPLINE: OR, THE SECRET HISTORY OF ‘POOR MARIA’
- 6 ‘BRAMIN, BRAMINE’: STERNE, ELIZA DRAPER AND THE PASSAGE TO INDIA
- 7 CONCLUDING ALONG SHANDEAN LINES
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
SOCIETY subsist among Men by a mutual Communication of their Thoughts to each other. Words, Looks, Gesture, and different Tones of Voice, is the Means of that Communication. I speaks, and in an Instant my Ideas and Sentiments is communicated to the Person which hear I; my Soul in a Manner pass into his. This Communication of my Thoughts are again the Occasion of others in he, who he communicate to I in his Turn. Hence arise one of the most lively of our Pleasures; by this Means too us enlarges our Knowledge, and this reciprocal Commerce are the principal Source of our intellectual Wealth.
The ‘Private Young Gentlemen and Ladies’ whose task it was to correct this ‘promiscuous exercise’ from James Buchanan's The British Grammar of 1762 were engaged in more than a simple test of linguistic competence. As the passage, entitled ‘On Conversation’, itself suggests, in removing the last grammatical distortions from this model of polite discourse, Buchanan's students would earn their right to be members of a privileged community. As soon as the way to a certain transparency of sense could be cleared, so the social channels of communication would be opened to them. The errors concern what Locke had generally termed the ‘particles’ of language, essential, he believed, to the coherence of a discourse in addition to ‘the clearness and beauty of a good style’.
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- Information
- The Cultural Work of EmpireThe Seven Years' War and the Imagining of the Shandean State, pp. 150 - 196Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007