POLITE LITERATURE

Whenever a newcomer visits the Portico the first thing their eyes set upon is the glorious plaster and glass Georgian dome. Some years after the Library opened (in 1806) the glass panels were painted with the shields and arms of England, Scotland and Ireland as well as those for diocese, county and bishoprics. The dome does, of course, crown the Gallery beautifully. However, the other curiosity which catches the visitor’s eye is the subject heading over the shelves occupying two walls of the Library – POLITE LITERATURE. The inevitable question follows sight of this: “Where do you keep your IMpolite literature then?”  When asked about this unfamiliar term, we have always tended to tell people that it is simply the literature that was read in the Polite Society of the Georgian era, and even glibly added that it is the sort of literature deemed sufficiently suitable for a wife or servant – paraphrasing the remark made by the chief prosecutor in the Obscenity Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover!

This is not really the case, though, because amongst our Polite Literature shelves you can find some rather risqué novels, a few books on witchcraft, philosophical and theological arguments that are not particularly polite and so on. So what IS Polite Literature about then?

Dr David Allan could say much more about this than I can and, in fact, he does in his book A Nation of Readers and at a one-day conference in Leeds on 12^th May. But essentially, during the 18^th Century Enlightenment, it was increasingly felt that reading should be a pleasurable rather than just a dutiful, obligatory, doctrinal or educational occupation. The merging economic and cultural society was ever more aware of issues far beyond their own environments, thanks to the developments of the printing presses and the relative rise of the broadsheets – very much like our internet revolution, in fact. The rise of the novel during this period was an additional reaction to what people wanted to read and write and there were often serious or satirical commentaries on the contemporary society.  Think of Daniel Defoe (Gulliver’s Travels), Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy) and particularly the two men who set up The Spectator and were amongst the first to advocate reading for pleasure and a wider world outlook – Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Think also of the Salons and Coffee Houses of the 18^th century.

Knowledge and enlightenment was burgeoning under the strain of market demand and the educated and culturally adventurous middle and upper classes, then, became known as the Polite Society (a ‘polite’ more akin to their cultural standing than necessarily to their manners) with a reading scope to match – hence, Polite Literature.