Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century urban America by John F. KassonReview by: Tamara Plakins ThorntonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Jun., 1991), pp. 951-952Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2162606 .

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United States 951

have much to learn from the "trivial" writings of "ordinary" women.

JUDY BARRETT LITOFF

Bryant College

CHANDOS MICHAEL BROWN. Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1989. Pp. xvi, 377. $29.95.

As the first professor of chemistry and mineralogy at Yale College from 1804 to 1853, Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) became a leading figure in the growing scientific community of nineteenth-century America. One of the founders of the Yale Medical School, editor of the American Journal of Science from its founding in 1818 until 1838, widely traveled lecturer, and early path maker in the field of scientific consult- ing, Silliman left an imprint on his times apprecia- tively noted by historians. Biographers in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries recorded his life, and more specialized works have explored his contri- butions to science. In this volume, Chandos Michael Brown seeks not to add to the literature on Silliman as a scientist but to offer a cultural biography of Silliman during his youth and the years to 1820. The period after 1820, when Silliman had his greatest influence in the national scientific community, is reserved for a later volume.

The subtitle accurately reveals the author's focus and intent. The book presents a close and probing study of a young New Englander and his extended, often troubled, family in a changing world. In an imaginatively conceived and gracefully written book, Brown provides an extraordinarily revealing look at Connecticut society in the new republic and offers keen insights into the culture of the young nation.

Born during the revolution, while his father, a commander of a Connecticut brigade, was a prisoner of war in British hands, Silliman was sent to Yale at the age of thirteen. He graduated in 1796 in the first class to come under the influence of Timothy Dwight. His father then deceased and family fortunes declin- ing, Silliman faced an uncertain future of dwindling economic opportunities in the region of his birth. Searching for his place in the world, he managed his mother's farm for a year, tried teaching school, and studied law before being appointed a part-time tutor at Yale by President Dwight.

In 1801 Dwight surprised his young favorite by asking him if he would like to become professor of chemistry. It was a field about which Silliman knew nothing, but he seized the opportunity. Aided by Dwight and the Yale Corporation, he was soon wid- ening his world by studying in Philadelphia, observ- ing the teaching of chemistry at Princeton, and trav- eling in Europe to purchase books and equipment. In 1804 he gave his first lecture at Yale as professor of chemistry and mineralogy to a class that, among others, included John C. Calhoun.

Brown skillfully and perceptively employs the rich resources available to illuminate his subject's life and thoughts. He has been diligent in seeking out family papers and letters retained by the circle of Silliman's correspondents, and he could not have written so revealing a book had not Silliman himself been so introspective and given to recording his thoughts, doubts, and deepest feelings. His journals, poems, essays, and other early writings are effectively em- ployed. Silliman also kept journals of his travels and experiences in Europe. These were published and enjoyed considerable success. He later wrote reminis- cences of his life. All are perceptively used by the author.

Details of family history are effectively presented and add richness to the volume, although they make demands on the reader that occasional reminders of relationships would have alleviated. The reader, how- ever, is aided by the author's illumination of the culture of the society in which Silliman matured. The insights into religious life, economic life, and techno- logical development are plentiful. The political back- ground against which the events of Silliman's life transpire is only broadly indicated. Silliman's involve- ment and interest in politics seem to have been weak; even the War of 1812 appears to have only marginally disrupted his life.

Brown has succeeded in presenting an insightful portrait of a life in the young republic, deepening our understanding of the early decades of the new nation.

NOBLE E. CUNNINGHAM, JR.

University of Missouri, Columbia

JOHN F. KASSON. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang of Farrar Straus and Giroux. 1990. Pp. xii, 305. $22.95.

The disgust with which sophisticated European trav- elers reported such American habits as tobacco spit- ting has been noted by historians as evidence of a perception of the New World as rude and the Old World as civilized. In his discussion of rudeness and civility in nineteenth-century America, John F. Kas- son moves the discussion of American manners far beyond this well-worn schema. As Kasson demon- strates, manners became an integral part of the definition and projection of social boundaries and identity, playing an essential role in the transforma- tion of behavior and consciousness in an urbanizing, industrial age.

Kasson begins by recognizing nineteenth-century gentility of manners as a break with a distinctly cruder colonial code of behavior. This new gentility clearly reflected the class and gender assumptions of the era. A chapter on public entertainments, for example, argues that as these entertainments bifur- cated into highbrow and lowbrow forms, their class

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1991

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952 Reviews of Books

character was defined as much by the prescribed deportment of the audience as its composition. But etiquette did not merely reflect contemporary mores. It also tried to resolve the tensions inherent in a mobile, democratic, and acquisitive market society. Kasson's decoding of the Victorian formal dinner is a stunning example of this function. In the behavior of hosts, guests, and servants and in the very manner in which food was served, the dinner party functioned as a ritual of self-restraint in an age of materialism and greed, dangerous social appetites.

Kasson also argues that as a rank-structured, def- erential society gave way to one in which the market defined social relations, the "laws" of etiquette pro- vided a new source of social authority. For individu- als, acquisition of etiquette-book manners bought a secure place in the genteel middle class. The fact that manners were a purchasable commodity, however, pointed up one of the deepest tensions of the new urban and industrial order, namely, the troubling discontinuities between manners and morals, be- tween superficial, multiple identities and the tran- scendent, immutable core of character. A pivotal chapter addresses this issue of social identity. Using sources from Allan Pinkerton to Edgar Allan Poe (one of the pleasures of this book is the intelligent eclecticism of its sources) and addressing such diverse issues as the "mysteries and miseries" genre of urban description, the confidence man as a character type, and the "science" of physiognomy, Kasson examines the pervasive anxiety experienced by the Victorians as they confronted the potential of social deception in an anonymous, commercial society. Etiquette manu- als responded to this chilled fascination by educating their readers in the semiotics of everyday behavior, providing the means to distinguish social counterfeits from the genuine article.

Here Kasson is at his most daring and productive, moving well beyond a bemused interest in Victorian social conventions to a penetrating analysis of what Kasson labels the "crisis of social representation" (p. 117). What could have lent his wide-ranging ex- plorations even greater internal coherence is a discus- sion of the boundaries of the field of etiquette as defined by etiquette manuals themselves. That these manuals addressed such issues as the reading of character indicates that the issue of self-representa- tion is no historiographical construct, that Kasson's gift has been to recognize the inherent structure of Victorian etiquette. Additionally, other issues, such as the nature of proper business and personal corre- spondence, might have been suggested as the subjects of fruitful analysis.

Apart from the original conceptualization and in- sightful analysis, even apart from the engaging writ- ing style, one cannot help but delight in the pungency of detail Kasson provides. The symphony conductor as audience disciplinarian, the popularity of urban bird's-eye view lithographs, the hidden meaning of a folded calling card-these are the kinds of subjects

that make Kasson's book as entertaining as it is illuminating.

TAMARA PLAKINS THORNTON

State University College of New York, Fredonia

ROSS THOMSON. The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1989. Pp. xii, 296. $39.95.

In this thorough study of nineteenth-century indus- try, Ross Thomson compels a reexamination of our easy generalizations about the generation and diffu- sion of technological change. He addresses two issues: first, how do craft-oriented societies mechanize, and, second, once launched, how does mechanization be- come self-generating? Although the author draws on a plethora of studies of the shoe industry, the heart of his research comes from a close analysis of thousands of shoe patents. These lead him to offer a new lexicon for comprehending what economic historians con- sider to be the preeminent characteristic of the indus- trial revolution, namely, pervasive mechanization.

In the first section of this volume, Thomson ex- plores a question left unanswered by Karl Marx and Paul Mantoux. How does the transition from handi- craft to machine manufacture take place? Rather than posit a sharp break, Thomson lobbies for a transformation within the craft system that made mechanization possible. Two institutional changes predominate. The emergence of a national market for shoes in the first half of the nineteenth century facilitated the clustering of firms in eastern Massa- chusetts and their shift to more thorough task-ori- ented divisions of labor. Second, this concentration of shoe firms in a region of machine makers encouraged technological cross-fertilization, bringing forth a new product fit for the national market, the standardized, pegged shoe. Although shoe production remained essentially a handicraft business, the institutional groundwork had been laid for a second, industrial stage.

This stage was characterized by the emergence of specialized shoe machinery companies, which revolu- tionized the industry. These new capital goods firms had no antebellum predecessors, and, although a sizable market beckoned, they had to surmount tech- nical, production, financial, and marketing barriers. The sewing machine, developed for another indus- try, offered the entering wedge, or "break-in" oppor- tunity. Originally used to sew uppers, it was modified by Lyman Blake and later Charles Goodyear into a wet thread machine that could stitch bottoms. Both types of machines involved significant technological breakthroughs, because they did not replicate craft processes. These innovations fostered the growth of specialized shoe machinery firms, which built rudi- mentary machines, perfected them through use, and diffused them through sale or lease. Once the ma-

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