This is a book about bodies – about the eloquence of bodies and their capacity to express symbolically the values of a particular culture. The ‘rhetoric of sensibility’ under scrutiny here, then, is a bodily rhetoric. It is the passionate, emotional language of the body which came to be esteemed in British society in the mid eighteenth century, and which has since been regarded as one of the key markers of that period's culture (or often ‘cult’) of sensibility. I have aimed to illuminate the relations between this powerful bodily rhetoric and notions of politeness which were developing in Britain at the time. The body, I suggest, came to be invested with new representational functions as a medium for the emblematisation or performance of modern politeness.

The development of new protocols of bodily behaviour was a widespread and multifaceted eighteenth-century enterprise taking place within a range of different cultural arenas. To capture that breadth I have cast my net wide, and the book therefore presents a large number of characters – orators, elocutionists, rhetoricians, actors, acting theorists, novelists, and others – whose various contributions to eighteenth-century culture involved some form of shaping of, or commentary upon, bodily eloquence. These include the very familiar, such as David Garrick, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne, together with figures who are less well known today, such as Thomas Sheridan, Aaron Hill, and Richard Graves. I hope that by making the study wide-ranging I have not sacrificed too much in terms of depth.