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1700Congreve, The Way of the World
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1700John Dryden, Fables
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1702Queen's Royal Cookery
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1704East India Company sales catalogue
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1711The Spectator
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1712Jonathan Swift, A Proposal...
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1715Sugar in Britain
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1719Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
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1721Bartholomew Fair
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1724Trade and the English language
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1729Swift, A Modest Proposal
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1730East India Company: Bengal textiles
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1731English arrives in the West Indies
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1733Hogarth, Harlot's Progress
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1738Cities in chaos
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1738Polite conversation
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1738James Miller, Of Politeness
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1740Samuel Richardson, Pamela
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1742Advert for a giant
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1743Muffin seller
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1747The Art of Cookery
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1749Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
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1755Johnson's Dictionary
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1759Sterne, Tristram Shandy
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1762Lowth’s grammar
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1762Rousseau, The Social Contract
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1764Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
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1773Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
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1775Captain Cook's journal
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1775Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
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1780Burns, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
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1780Anglo-Indian newspaper
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1781Notices about runaway slaves
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1782First British advert for curry powder
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1789Storming of the Bastille
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1789Olaudah Equiano
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1790William Blake's Notebook
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1791Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
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1791Walker’s correct pronunciation
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1792Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
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1794Songs of Innocence and Experience
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Intro
The satirist Jonathan Swift published Polite Conversation in 1738. It consists of three satirical dialogues at breakfast, dinner and tea, presented as a guide to ‘Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, According to the Most Polite Mode and Method Now Used at Court, and in the Best Companies of England’.
On these pages
The text is full of catch phrases, colloquialisms, slang, oaths, exclamations, greetings, farewells and all kinds of banality. Several features, such as prefacing a remark with pray, come or faith, capture polite conversation of the period. Swift may be poking fun at phrases that were considered over-polite or archaic even then.
Shelfmark: 1080.k.16.
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