luxuries, fell.

English working people now ate wheat bread, rather than rye
bread, and could afford and obtain small self-indulgences such as ribbons,
laces, mirrors, toys, combs, and the like: a skilled worker in eighteenthcentury
London had the financial means to buy not only cheap print ballads and chapbooks - but even substantial novels selling at six shillings
a copy. Thanks to the growth of Britain's sea-borne trade, exotic luxuries
such as fruit, coffee, tea, sugar, fabrics, and tobacco were arriving from the
East and from the plantations of the New World. The stocks of provincial
shopkeepers are testimony to the spread of gracious living, sophistication,
and luxury to the country towns of Augustan England.
In what Peter Borsay dubs an "urban renaissance" the towns of England
and Wales changed their style, ambience, even their functions, in this
period. In short they became centers for leisure, civility, and consumption.
Instead of being simply markets or industrial centers, towns became
meeting places for the gentry and those who aspired to that status, for
professionals, and for those who had made their money and now wished to
enjoy it. Some of these towns such as Bath or Tunbridge Wells, made a
speciality of leisure and became resorts, while others amalgamated functions.
Whether the measure is the number of coffee-houses, daily and
provincial newspapers, libraries or horse-race meetings, there is no denying
the explosion of places to go and things to do and see in Augustan England.
Towns became centers of polite living because there existed a leisured class,
a majority of whom were female, who had the time to devote to teadrinking,
dancing, and cards, and the wealth to invest in the various
purpose-built Assembly rooms and concert halls, parks, and civic amenities.
And this leisured class deliberately chose to devote itself to civility as a
means of creating a tolerant and tolerable, civilized and stable society.
A civil society
Civility is not just a product of superfluous wealth and leisure; it is created
and sustained by cultural means, by practices which we might label as
discursive or ideological. This is apparent, for instance, in the way in which
Augustan England constructed notions of human nature. In this selfconscious
"age of reason," human psychology was read against its irrational
antithesis, "fanaticism" or "enthusiasm." Several different contemporary
discourses - medical, scientific, religious, cultural, literary, and
political - converged, and "in stressing the connection between enthusiasm,
passions and melancholy, a clear psychological norm was offered as the
basis for the social order: the sober, reasonable and self-controlled
person."34 Such human beings deserved freedom of intellectual inquiry and