the london journal, Vol. 35 No.

2, July, 2010, 144–63

Self-preservation in Early Eighteenth-

Century London
Farid Azfar
Scripps College, Claremont, California, USA

The idea of self-preservation has long been examined in intellectual histories

of the early modern period. This article relates the history of the idea to the
history of London in the early eighteenth century. It traces the formation
of a language of self-preservation within three bodies of urban texts: the
Ordinary’s accounts of criminals condemned to death at Tyburn, discus-
sions of maidservants, and descriptions of the masquerades. In each of
these literatures, a worldly discourse of self-preservation posed a challenge
to prevailing moralities. Hence, notions of suspicion, avoidance, self-
advancement, reinvention and verbal sophistication created tension in a
society invested in charity, trust, obedience, submissiveness, and modesty.
By tracing this development, this article identifies a culture of enlightenment
emerging from the intellectually productive milieu of urban modernity.

London in the early eighteenth century was a city in the midst of a crisis of freedom.
A variety of developments — a massive influx of immigrants, a sharp increase in
social mobility, unprecedented access to print, and the burgeoning of new kinds of
public spaces — were testing the limits of legal, political and moral structures of
restraint.1 This crisis inspired a number of responses, some of which involved an
acceptance of new degrees of autonomy. ‘In a world where there was a genuine
growth of autonomy and freedom’, as Thomas Laqueur has observed, ‘there was
consequently a genuine need to create the internal mechanisms of self-government
that would allow individuals to negotiate the vast array of new choices available to
them’.2 Among the legacies of this need was an urban discourse of self-preservation.
It is the purpose of this article to trace how this discourse grew in response to the
pressures and the freedoms of the eighteenth-century city.
Self-preservation is a distinct and important category of thought. It is different
from selfishness, which assumes an explicit disavowal of others. It is also different
from self-abnegation, which implies an explicit disavowal of one’s passions. Its
opposite is not selflessness or hedonism but self-destruction and, to an extent, self-
abandonment. It is tied to politeness, but it is also a concept with its own history and,
as such, its own dynamics, and its own tensions. It also has its own historiography.

© The London Journal Trust 2010 DOI 10.1179/174963210X12729493038333

 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 145

In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias has identified its use in courtly rituals and
suggested that its growth also marked the emergence of a commercial modernity.3 Its
relationship to capitalism has been highlighted by Albert Hirschman and Pierre Force,
both of whom have traced a commercially driven language of ‘interests’ with pro-
found connections to the discourse of self-preservation.4 Most recently, Jonathan
Lamb has identified a strain of interest in self-preservation — one that runs through
the work of Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Defoe, Shaftesbury, and Rousseau — in
order to engage its use in eighteenth-century narratives of voyages to the South Seas.5
The notion, he suggests, was both thoroughly central to early eighteenth-century
culture and solidly anchored in seventeenth-century thought.
This article discusses the urbanity of the idea of self-preservation. ‘There is noth-
ing’, wrote Bernard Mandeville, ‘more sincere in any Creature than his Will, Wishes
and Endeavours to preserve himself’.6 Mandeville’s argument was not necessarily
urban. But in The Fable of the Bees, it was used to describe the problems and freedoms
of urban modernity. Centuries later, the same problems and freedoms would
drive another social theorist to evoke the relationship between urbanity and self-
preservation. Hence, Georg Simmel began ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903)
with the claim that: ‘The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of
the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against
the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the
external culture and technique of life.’7
In Mandeville and Simmel, the urbanity of self-preservation was a function, in part,
of its relationship to change. ‘The art of self-preservation’, writes Force, ‘implies an
ability to adapt, transform and reinvent oneself constantly’.8 ‘The self’, writes Lamb,
‘is preserved only by being changed’.9 Urbanity required an ease with change, so there
was an urbanity to the idea of self-preservation, and a sensibility of self-preservation
at the heart of urban culture. The life of the city was likely, then, to fuel the evolution
of skills of self-preservation and, simultaneously, elicit repeated appeals to a language
of self-preservation.
By inquiring into the history of self-preservation, I also engage with questions of
secularism. ‘The values of city life’, Arthur Weitzman has argued, ‘inevitably clash
with Christian values, which prize fellowship, asceticism, humility, and simplicity; the
city man prospers by adhering to a very different code: individuality, acquisitiveness,
aggressiveness, and sophistication’.10 While I borrow from Weitzman, his image of a
clash is misleading. All things urban were not in a perpetual state of conflict with all
things Christian. It is less useful to think of the city provoking a battle between the
secular and the sacred than to imagine a series of urban debates fuelling a sensibility
of worldliness, and, by so doing, transforming both theology and social thought,
perpetually deepening an interest and investment in worldly betterment that might,
under certain circumstances, conflict with Christian notions. The idea of self-
preservation itself is not inherently secular. The preservation of the body was a
Scriptural injunction — man’s body was God’s creation and its preservation was
man’s duty to God. Hence, Richard Baxter spoke of ‘that rational Love of Happiness
and self-preservation which God did put into innocent Adam, and hath planted in
mans nature as necessary to his Government’.11 Yet a far more urbane and worldly
discourse of self-preservation is evident in a 1706 sermon delivered before an audience
of Levant Company merchants:
146 FARID AZFAR

If we suffer Corruption to take Head, and shape its Course according to its own vicious
Inclinations, we must run out and prove miserable Bankrupts: but if we will inspect our
Income, take care of our Revenue, those noble Talents God hath intrusted us with, we
may secure our selves from all those Thieves, that would rob us of our Treasure.12

The sermon’s author, in this passage, seemed to recognize that his listeners needed a
philosophy that was flexible, adaptable, transportable, and useful — one that would
help them navigate the problems and freedoms of this world, not the next; one that
was focused on their hope and desire for worldly protection, worldly betterment, and
worldly happiness. Two decades later, another sermon for Levant Company mer-
chants would conclude with a reminder to its metropolitan audience of how Christian
‘rules of Decency, Temperance, and Chastity’ would preserve their bodies, allowing
them to ‘enjoy the Pleasure of well-doing in this World, and obtain the glorious
Reward promised to it in the next’.13 Worldliness, however, was critiqued as well as
upheld. ‘A Worldly Spirit’ was described by a 1701 catechism as ‘a Spirit bent, with
an immoderate Solicitude, upon the concerns of this world, not as to any thing
directly Sinful, nor yet as pres’d to it by Necessity’.14 The Levant Company sermons
might not have been ‘immoderate’ in their worldliness, but, combined with this
injunction against worldliness, they do suggest how the problems and freedoms of
the city could have intensified tensions within theological arguments about self-
preservation.
In this article, I explore these issues by identifying a worldly discourse of self-
preservation in three different urban literatures: on crime, maidservants, and
masquerades. In the first section, I show how Christian piety and Christian charity
were challenged in the Ordinary’s accounts of the lives of criminals executed at
Tyburn by a theory of self-preservation designed around worldly principles of avoid-
ance and suspicion: principles that were not necessarily anti-Christian but that did,
nonetheless, conflict with contemporary theological trends. Next, the literature on
maidservants reveals how their rising autonomy — a principal event of the early
eighteenth-century city — brought vital relevance to languages of humanitarianism
and liberty understood through notions of acquisitiveness and assertiveness: both
of them principal forms of self-preservation, and both implicitly inconsistent
with Christian values of deference and submission. The last section considers the
masquerades: a site of ideological disintegration, where Christian values of modesty
and plain-speaking were challenged by urbane and worldly values of reinvention,
acquisitiveness, and verbal sophistication.
Collectively, these three literatures reveal a city that was an agent both of
ideological disintegration and of intellectual production. By probing these bodies
of literature, I locate a set of ideas and feelings that were intellectually significant
— indeed, as I suggest in the conclusion, they contribute to our understanding of the
European Enlightenment. An urban and worldly discourse of self-preservation sheds
light on the origins of an enlightened solicitude for worldly betterment. ‘The instinc-
tive duty of self-preservation is not’, writes Jonathan Lamb, ‘peculiar to a state of
nature, but constantly attends a self aware of the boundary of its own interests and
the limits of its agency’.15 It is possible, this suggests, to find Enlightenment political
philosophy in texts that are not intentionally philosophical, and that merely seek
to describe forms of urbane autonomy, but that nevertheless convey ‘unstructured
 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 147

intuitions’, or notions ‘that underlay people’s fundamental assumptions about who

they were and who they could be’.16

Criminals
The discourse of self-preservation in the early eighteenth century was fuelled by the
synergy of two urban developments: the growth of crime and the growth of print.
The city, as John Beattie has observed, was ‘an urban world that was finding the
problems of crime and social order increasingly difficult to contain’.17 At the same
time, 75 publishing houses had formed in London by 1724: products both of vibrant
consumerism and of the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695.18 With supply so com-
petitive, publishers frequently resorted to baiting city readers with urban fears, high
among which was the fear of self-destruction. The Ordinary’s accounts of criminals
executed at Tyburn (hereafter referred to as the Account) formed a key part of this
literature of alarm. Four hundred editions, containing biographies of some 2500
executed criminals, were published from 1676 to 1772.19 ‘I exhort all to take Warning
by my sad Misfortune’, proclaimed one of the individuals executed at Tyburn and
quoted by the Ordinary, ‘That they would not give way to Jealousy, Anger, Revenge,
or such like Passions’.20 A vast majority of the Ordinary’s criminals made statements
such as this — partly because it was expected of them.21 These statements also func-
tioned as advertisements for the Account. They suggest how the Account perpetually
manufactured a sense of its own usefulness as an avenue to self-preservation.
Key to the Account’s version of self-preservation was a domino-effect theory of sin.
‘Avoid all manner of Sin’, advised one of the criminals, ‘even the smallest; for from
one little Sin Men easily fall to the Commission of greater ones’.22 This theory of sin
supported the argument that only piety was an effective form of self-preservation.
‘HE seem’d to be very much griev’d that he had liv’d such a wicked Life’, as the
Ordinary wrote of one criminal, ‘that his Neglect of GOD’s Service, and abandoning
of himself to a loose and lewd Life, dispos’d him for the commission of those Crimes,
which at last prov’d his utter Ruin in this World’.23 Piety alone would guard the
prospective criminal against minor sins such as swearing, idleness, and profanation.
As such, it was an essential preventive against sins that inevitably snowballed into
deeper, graver sins such as theft, murder, or highway robbery: sins that inexorably
led to the scaffold.
It is clear that the Ordinary’s ideological programme was not entirely successful.
He was described by Bernard Mandeville as distributing ‘Scraps of good Counsel to
unattentive Hearers’.24 Nor was Mandeville peculiar in this regard. ‘How his message
was received was a matter of debate at the time’, writes Tim Wales in his biograph-
ical account of the Ordinary Paul Lorrain, citing the contemporary observation that
‘all he said — was made to go in at one Ear and out at the other’.25
We can gauge the origins of an ideological resistance to the Ordinary’s message by
reading the Account as it would have been read in early eighteenth-century London:
as a text whose meanings were multivalent. The ideological power of the Ordinary’s
authorial voice was consistently undermined by the voice of the condemned criminal,
one with its own unique moral authority. In a key article on the decline of the
Account, Andrea McKenzie has explored ‘the transformation of the older conception
148 FARID AZFAR

of the condemned as a “monument of grace” and an “Everyman” qualified to preach

to the general public into a “poor unhappy wretch” lacking both the rational and
moral faculties of his readers’.26 McKenzie’s suggestion that the Account was as
successful as the criminal was believable paves the way for an alternative explanation
for its appeal. Even at the height of its success, the criminals undermined the
Ordinary’s moral authority by telling a story that conflicted with his moral philoso-
phy. McKenzie hints at this herself when she describes the Account as ‘a dialogue
rather than a normative and univocal or baldly catechetical text’, and, elsewhere,
explains how ‘an ostensibly normative execution ritual could be undermined by a
condemned person who succeeded in turning its religious rhetoric against itself’.27
It is my contention here that the Ordinary’s professed message — that piety would
ensure self-preservation — was persistently undermined by the criminals, who made
much of the senselessness and randomness of their self-destruction. The domino-
effect theory of sin was challenged, first of all, by innumerable stories of the kindly,
generous and meek falling passively into lives of crime. A man who fell in with a gang
of thieves who frequented his public house ‘seem’d to have been a Fellow of an easie
Temper, and of no bad Disposition naturally, if he had not been Corrupted’.28 Three
honest carmen driven to highway robbery after squandering their fortunes at
Bartholomew Fair were ‘Novices in Wickedness’, the Ordinary recorded, ‘none of
them having been wicked Livers before this desperate Adventure’.29 In both of these
stories, it was the randomness of the modern urban world rather than an inner, inher-
ent inclination towards sinfulness — as evidenced by swearing, blasphemy, or vicious
thoughts — that led to the person’s self-destruction.
Both were also stories that complicated the notion of piety as an avenue to self-
preservation. ‘The evil of it’, John Gother wrote of the ‘worldly spirit’, was the fact
that it led to ‘a want of Confidence in the Goodness of God’.30 These stories would
have severely damaged that confidence. They would also have suggested that self-
preservation was best ensured through an external vigilance that depended upon skills
of social avoidance. The Ordinary began the case of John Stanley with the claim that
by ‘observing his Life, others may the better direct their own, and learn to avoid the
Beginnings of Debauchery, and in time to curb their Passions’.31 But Stanley’s early
sins did not sufficiently account for his tragic, untimely end. His story, in fact, was
the story of London; a city of tricks, obstacles and hoaxes — deceitful women, wily
friends, traps and minefields of every shape and form:
But returning into England, he follow’d his usual Course, which (as he said) he should
not have done, had he been Master of a competent Fortune for his Subsistance: For then
he could have avoided Gaming Houses, which he never took any real Delight in; and
could he have desisted from those Houses, he could have dropt the Acquaintance that he
did not approve of.32

Historians have noted that ‘in telling their stories, convicts were able to introduce
mitigating factors in justification of their crimes’.33 The city, in all its randomness
and suddenness, was the necessity that mitigated Stanley’s guilt. The paths that he
happened to cross and the people that he happened to meet were all largely unpredict-
able; all seemed to have pushed him to the scaffold, and all challenged the domino-
effect theory of sin, as they did the notion of God’s inherent goodness. Repeatedly,
 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 149

by introducing an element of suddenness and randomness, the Account worked to

mitigate the criminal’s guilt, and, at the same time, testified to the importance of
external vigilance, a razor-sharp awareness of one’s surroundings, guided, above all,
by suspicion. A domino-effect theory of sin was replaced by a social minefield theory
of sin. Hence Elizabeth Harman, accused of pickpocketing:
desired all young Women above all to take care of being deluded: For there are many
young Creatures that come up to London with an honest intent, who are easily
Debauched and Corrupted by wicked People that get acquainted with them. Therefore
her Advice to them is, that they should avoid all ill Company; which if she had done she
might have lived happy.34

‘Bad Company had corrupted him’, one glove-thief reported a decade later, ‘and
brought him to this untimely end, wishing he had been so wise as to avoid such
Persons as made it their Practice to entice Men to Sin, and then bring them to Shame’.35
Twenty years later, the same advice was being offered: ‘Avoid all loose and prophane
Companions’, urged another criminal, ‘the want of observing that Caution; has been
the Cause of my Ruin’.36 It was the company a person kept, and not necessarily the
feelings in a person’s heart, or the ungodly words that came from a person’s mouth,
that brought him or her to the scaffold most often.
The sensibility of suspicion that travels through the Account affected the literature
of crime as a whole. Tom Merryman, the title character of a 1725 text entitled The
Matchless Rogue, mimicked the Account in the structure of his tale and also echoed
its advice: ‘From hence we ought to learn not to be too credulous, nor pin our Faith
upon every thing that a Friend, or rather a pretended Friend only in Appearance,
affirms to be true, lest we suffer, as poor Tony has often done, by the Imposition
of his sham Friend’.37 The plot of The Matchless Rogue seemed to suggest that
every apparent friend was in fact a sham friend. It also posited that successful self-
preservation did not depend upon piety. ‘As I lived merrily’, The Matchless Rogue
told his readers by way of conclusion, ‘so would I advise every Man to do the same;
but caution all the world to shun those Snares which bring us to the Gallows’.38
The culture of suspicion promoted in the Account and stories such as The Match-
less Rogue evoked a tension at the heart of Augustan Christianity, which was itself
increasingly divided between opposing sentiments of love and suspicion, charity and
avoidance.39 There was, in fact, a long-standing strain of Christian thought replete
with warnings about false appearances, bad company, and evil snares. Indeed, this
theological idiom was often tied to a discourse of self-preservation. ‘Christianity’,
wrote Richard Baxter, ‘renounceth not wisdom and honest self-preservation: But yet
it maketh men plain-hearted and haters of crafty fraudulent minds’.40 This was a
strain of thought that drew upon the power of the first table of the Decalogue: the
one that concerned man’s duties to God. Hence, Simon Priest wrote a sermon in 1710
entitled The Danger of Bad Company with Respect to Our Obedience to God: Or,
The Impossibility of Their Keeping god’s Commandments that Keep Bad Company.
There was, this suggests, a Christian element to the criminals’ warnings, although the
criminals were also being worldly when they suggested, repeatedly, that the problem
with bad company was the fact that it led to the scaffold rather than whether it
damaged the individual’s relationship with God. However, over the course of the
150 FARID AZFAR

seventeenth century, the Christian argument for suspicion of others was challenged
by a major development in the realm of theology: the increased emphasis on the
second table of the Decalogue, the one that focused on man’s duties to man.41 The
results of this development are marked in texts such as Richard Allestree’s Whole
Duty of Man, which only mentioned suspicion to caution against it:
The fourth exercise of our Charity is towards the Credit of our Neighbour [. . .] the most
frequent exercises of this Charity happen towards those, of whose either innocency or
guilt we have no knowledge, but are by some doubtful actions brought under suspicion:
And here we must remember, that it is the property of love, not to think evil.42

The impact of the second table is also revealed by the subject of the lessons provided
in John Gother’s 1701 catechism on worldliness: ‘Of Loving our Neighbor, and Living
in Charity and Peace with Him’, ‘Of Forgiving Injuries, and Being Reconcil’d
After Quarrels’, ‘Of Detraction or Speaking Ill of Our Neighbor’, and ‘Of Hearing
Detraction or Backbiting’. His essay on suspicion concluded with the following
pronouncement:
all, who are subject to be Positive in Judging, to be too Forward in Suspecting would but
punctually set down for one Month, how often they are mistaken; and I cannot but think,
they would have reason for the future, rather to suspect themselves, their own Judgments
and Suspicions, than any thing besides.43

What is significant is that the whole tenor of the Account was at odds with the
message of sermons such as this and Allestree’s. Nor was the Account alone in
promoting a culture of estrangement of city dwellers from each other. Fragmentation
and alienation, as Robert Shoemaker has shown in his work on the decline of public
insult, were the cultural epiphenomena of London’s expansion and, increasingly, the
central elements of urban life.44 Centuries later, a fragmented suspicion was also
central to Simmel’s definition of urbanity. ‘Self-preservation in the face of the great
city requires [. . .] a negative type of social conduct’, he wrote, and ‘the privilege of
suspicion which we have in the face of the elements of metropolitan life’ necessitates
a kind of ‘external reserve’, the inner side of which involved ‘not only indifference
but more frequently than we believe [. . .] a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and
repulsion’.45 The criminals who relayed their stories to the Ordinary offered the same
message. In extracting lessons from their ill-fated lives, they were also forming a
theory of human sociability. It was a theory that drew upon the desire for self-
preservation in the chaotic temporal world of London: a theory, in other words, that
was fundamentally worldly.
Why did the Ordinary allow the criminals to have their way — to make the
Account their own? First, the Ordinary did not have the authority to excessively alter
the stories. ‘The early Account’, as McKenzie has argued, ‘presented more compelling
truth claims than its erstwhile sister publication, the Old Bailey Proceedings’.46
Second, ‘the Account’, as Tim Wales has observed, ‘was at once true-crime story and
religious tract, and at once moral and commercial in its functions’.47 It was, as other
scholars have observed, ‘a profitable sideline for the Ordinary earning him up to £200
a year in the early eighteenth century’.48 Third, the growth of rival genres, such as
that represented by the story of The Matchless Rogue, added to the importance of
 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 151

accuracy among the Account’s distinguishing characteristics. It was commercially

important for it to present itself as an accurate account of events, and not skewed or
filtered for a moral purpose. Hence, the following phrase is inserted into the Account
from the early 1730s:
The Publick may depend on the Accounts publish’d in this Work, as containing a just
and faithful Narration of the Conduct of these unhappy Persons, and a true State of
their respective Crimes, without any Additions of feigned and romantick Adventures,
calculated meerly to entertain the Curiosity of the Reader.49

The Account, this suggests, was read because it was realistic and, like the captivity
narratives of the period, satisfied the desire for all things strange but true. ‘Plot’,
as Terry Castle has observed, ‘itself depends on less stable and predictable realms:
the Garden, the Road, the City. It is necessary to leave the unchanging, endlessly
self-regulating world of the home — to move beyond the boundaries of order and
rectitude — in order to precipitate interesting stories’.50 Stories that stressed the
randomness and suddenness of urban life would, this suggests, be far more successful
than stories that emphasized the merits of neighbourly love, or methodical tales of
the domino-effect theory of sin. The Ordinary had access to a wealth of such stories.
To strip them of their strangeness, or to strip them of their truth, would be to strip
them of their appeal, and, by extension, undermine their commercial function. It was
the place of the Account in the marketplace that underpinned its advancement of
both the theory of self-preservation and the image that it created of a city at once
sensational, dangerous, lurid, and remarkable.

Maidservants
Obedience and submissiveness, like piety and charity, were pillars of Anglican moral-
ity. Servants, especially, were expected to display these qualities: ‘Only with me the
Honest Heart shall dwell, That’s Humble, Painful, willing to Obey’, proclaimed the
figure of the master in a 1675 broadside entitled The Husband’s Instructions to His
Family.51 Like piety and charity, these moral values existed in a state of tension with
values of self-preservation: in this case, acquisitiveness and assertiveness, the former
a type of self-advancement, and the latter a type of self-protection.
Precipitating this tension were deeper cultural shifts, one of which was a contem-
poraneous upsurge of humanitarian sentiment, what Karen Halttunen has called ‘a
sympathetic concern for the pain and suffering of other sentient beings’.52 Hence,
William Fleetwood discouraged masters from being ‘over-rigorous’ with their
servants.53 ‘If you please, Sir’, a maidservant said of half a crown in a scene from a
1728 play The Lottery, ‘I had rather lock it up in my own Trunk, its all I have been
working for these three Years’.54 This humanitarian position was particularly sensi-
tive to the ill-treatment of women, and, as a consequence, the increase in the number
of female servants added to the intensity of pro-servant argument and pro-servant
images.55 Also shaping the treatment of maidservants was the political idiom of
liberty and freedom that arose in the seventeenth century. Hence, the 1719 edition of
John Hill’s The Young Secretary’s Guide contained an example of a letter purport-
edly written by a London maidservant and addressed to her friend in the country:
152 FARID AZFAR

‘I was no sooner arrived, but I was settled in a credible Place, and not long after
discovered, that those pretended Dangers and Inconveniences, with which we
Country Lasses were frequently discouraged, proved only Bugbears to fright us from
the Pursuit of our better Fortunes and Advantages’.56 Hill, in this passage, assumed
a reader who was indignant at the thought of a maidservant denied her fortunes and
advantages: an assumption that reflected a political culture imbued with the language
of liberty.
The statement from The Young Secretary’s Guide also drew its ideological power
from its social context. The maidservants of early eighteenth-century London were,
in fact, unprecedentedly autonomous. Whereas only 13.5 per cent of female servants
stayed in the same job for less than a year in the early seventeenth century, by the
early eighteenth century (from data compiled for the period between 1695 and 1725),
the figure had risen to 62.4 per cent.57 Only some of this mobility was a product of
dismissals. ‘The reason for many servants moving’, as Bridget Hill has noted, ‘was in
order to better themselves, either by moving to a place that gave them extra respon-
sibility and an improved status in the domestic service hierarchy, or to extend the
tasks they were capable of performing with an eye to future advancement’.58 D. A.
Kent has noted the replacement of yearly hirings — which had provided employers
with a sense of reassurance — with shorter hirings, which allowed servants to move
every month, rather than every year.59 At the same time, the growth of the middle
class was increasing the demand for servants, thus creating what Hill has called a
‘paradoxical situation of employer’s dependence on employees they wanted to keep
servile and submissive’.60 The fact that maidservants were more autonomous than
they had ever been before does not mean that they were autonomous in some absolute
sense. Their relative autonomy did not save them from a heavy workload, a constant
threat of sexual violence, or the corresponding fear of single motherhood.61 Neverthe-
less, maidservants did have more freedom than ever before and — as Hill, Earle and
Kent have also suggested — far more so in London than anywhere else. ‘To arrive at
the truth’, as Hill notes, ‘means constantly allowing for employers’ prejudices, while
granting that many servants were in a position to exploit their situation at the expense
of their employer’.62 The newfound autonomy created by the changing demand for
servants was heightened, simultaneously, by a transformation in the master–servant
relationship: from one based on patronage to one based on contract. The increased
opposition to ‘vails’ (gratuities) ‘reflects the often unresolved tension between the old
paternalistic relationship between masters and servants [. . .] and a strictly wage
contract relationship’.63
All of this — a growing middle class, servants’ actual professional mobility, the
waning of paternalism, and the dawning of contract — helps explain the increased
incidence of vituperative, polemical attacks on maidservants. Their newfound
autonomy was described by Daniel Defoe as the gravest of travesties: ‘the greatest
abuse of all, is, that these Creatures are become their own Lawgivers [. . .] they hire
themselves to you by their own Rule [. . .] if they don’t like you they will go away the
next Day, help yourself how you can’.64
The sentiment was reactionary, but it was based in a social reality. More than ever
before, the maidservants were their own lawgivers. This also underlay the scheme
that Defoe proposed: one that would limit the maidservants’ wages, require them to
wear liveries, and reward them for continued service with a system of certificates.65
 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 153

It was in response to this scheme that early eighteenth-century writers on maidser-

vants offered the most explicit arguments in favour of the maidservants’ right to
self-advancement or acquisitiveness. At the same time, they confirmed what Defoe
had said about servants’ propensity for self-advancement and acquisitiveness, but
turned the vitriol back against him. They attacked Defoe both for his ideological
antipathy to autonomy and his refusal to acknowledge the reality of autonomy. ‘He
seems’, wrote Jack Johnson, one of Defoe’s most virulent critics, ‘to deprive Servants
of that little Liberty they at present enjoy’.66 But Johnson himself suggested that this
liberty might not have been so little:
How he [Defoe] or any one else can expect that Servants will condescend to do their
Business, upon the Terms he proposes, I know not, seeing by his Scheme he renders
them Slaves; insomuch that they must have no Use for their Sense or Reason in the
Management of their own Affairs.67

Defoe’s denial of the servant’s right to self-preservation was inconsistent with dis-
courses of humanitarianism and liberty, but its ability to rankle was also a product
of its denial of the fact that the maidservants of early eighteenth-century London were
able to operate according to the rational laws of self-preservation and, moreover,
were liable to act according to those laws. Johnson’s was not a lone voice against
Defoe. Among the others was a figure calling herself ‘Catherine Comb-brush’, who
repeatedly described Defoe’s detachment from reality as an aspect of his cruelty.
‘Why don’t you make Slaves of us at once, and not go this round about way?’ she
demanded sarcastically — suggesting, with this question, that Defoe was defying
cultural values about the sanctity of autonomy. Later, she asked ‘Why must poor
Servants Wages stagnate, or at least not be permitted to advance in proportion to
every thing else?’68 ‘Everything else’ was an allusion to the rapid advancement of
opportunities in the early eighteenth-century metropolis, fuelled by commercial and
urban growth. Defoe’s draconian scheme was, for his critics, all the more egregious
and all the more appalling in a city such as early eighteenth-century London, where
self-advancement was the order of the day.
By discrediting anti-servant writers such as Defoe on moral and rational grounds,
pro-servant writers also made space for the argument that the maidservants’ self-
preservation might involve the overt abandonment of forms of moral self-control
associated with values of obedience and servility. Maidservants were repeatedly
afforded the right to assertiveness or verbal self-protection. ‘As to the Maids answer-
ing him as she did’, Johnson stated of one of Defoe’s objections, ‘I think it was very
pertinent to his churlish and arbitrary Speech, as if it was not Slavery enough to give
up her Liberty to be his Servant, but she must be directed by him how she must wear
her own Cloaths’.69 In endeavouring to correct Defoe’s false reasoning, Catherine
Comb-brush argued as follows:
If a Servant expostulates with her angry Mistress, tho’ in never so submissive a Manner,
she is call’d a saucy Slut, an impudent Creature, and one that talks again; as if the
Benefit of Speech was deny’d to her, and her Mistress only had Liberty to make use of
that female Weapon, the Tongue.70

Words were thus repeatedly identified as appropriate agents of maidservants’ self-

preservation. The maidservant’s right to verbal protection was secured according to
154 FARID AZFAR

humanitarian and liberal principles. The expression of this right served to fuse these
principles into a sensibility of self-preservation.
The formative effects of urban mobility upon a worldly discourse of self-
preservation are also revealed by the manner of its intrusion into texts that aimed to
ensure maidservants’ submissiveness. It is implicit in the preface to the ninth edition
(1729) of The Compleat Servant-Maid, which began with the following words: ‘So
strong, so great, so vehement is my Desire for your Benefit and Advantage, your
Prosperity, and Preferment in this World; that I have with much Pains and Industry,
not only composed, but enlarged this Book, as a Rich Store-house, for you.’71 No
such pronouncement greeted readers of the 1704 edition of the same text. New words
were also added to the preface’s conclusion: ‘Let me prevail with you, for your
own Interest, to read this Book often; and read it carefully and with Attention.’72
The contents of the text were the same in 1704 as in 1729 — technical advice about
household tasks combined with moral advice about appropriate behaviour. But the
meaning of this advice was fundamentally altered by such prefatory allusions to the
maidservants’ interests. The power of the language of interests would continue
to accumulate: partly in response to social mobility, and partly in response to the
proliferation of texts endeavouring to attract maidservant readers. Hence, in the
preface to the tellingly subtitled A Present for a Servant-Maid: Or, the Sure Means
of Gaining Love and Esteem (1743), Eliza Haywood expressed her hope that the
reader would:
find it so much her Interest, as well as her Duty, to behave in a contrary Manner from
what too many for some Years have done; that she will make it her whole Study to avoid
the Errors she may see in others, and reform such as she has been guilty of herself.73

This tacit distinction between ‘Interest’ and ‘Duty’ pointed at the possibility that
the maidservant’s duty might not, in fact, have been in her interest. This passage, like
the previous one, suggests a recognition of the maidservant’s increased freedom: the
freedom to choose between various texts of instruction, the freedom to disobey the
rules of moral self-control, and the freedom to move from job to job.

Masquerades
The language of interests makes it possible to connect the discussion of maidservants
to other urban texts such as the Account and The Matchless Rogue, both of which
evoked the reader’s desire to preserve his or her interests. The worldliness of these
texts is defined, to an extent, by their own preoccupation with interests. It is, then,
not surprising that the language of interest would so profoundly shape descriptions
of the quintessential urban event: the masquerade. ‘Int’rest you’ll find the ruling
Principle’, as one observer wrote, ‘and Virtue but a Disguise’.74 More than being just
a place where ‘interest’ was a ‘ruling principle’, the masquerade, as I show, became
a place that validated the pursuit of interests and, more broadly, other urban
discourses of self-preservation.
The masquerade, as Terry Castle has noted, was an ‘extravagantly popular urban
phenomenon’, described by The Spectator as ‘a rage of the town’.75 Exact figures are
hard to gauge, but it is fair to say that somewhere between a 1000 and 2000 visitors
 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 155

attended on a weekly basis in the 1720s and 1730s.76 Owing in part to the introduc-
tion of a ticket system, it was transformed, over the course of this period, from a
mainly elite institution to ‘a form of large-scale commercial public entertainment,
urban and non-exclusive in nature, cutting across historic lines of rank and
privilege’.77
The extent of its popularity and the range of its attendees do not fully account
for its significance. For Londoners in this period, the masquerade was a place of
profound revelations, a disorientating mirror of contemporary culture. The problem
of concealment upon which it depended was not specific to the masquerade — it was
endemic throughout the city. ‘In Cities’, according to one contemporary periodical,
‘People are of so different a Cast of Mind, and mingle so much of Disguise in all they
do, that it’s a hard Matter very often to distinguish between Good and Evil’.78 Hence,
The Universal Spectator proclaimed in 1729, ‘I can’t but think the Invention of
Masquerades was with a Moral Design to insinuate to us, that nothing ought to be
valued or esteemed by an Outside Appearance’.79 This was a statement that was
powerfully underpinned by a rapidly intensifying distrust of appearances, which was
fuelled, in these years, by cultural representations of dissimulating servants, well-
dressed prostitutes, and the arcane rituals of bourgeois sociability — all epiphenom-
ena of commercial growth and social mobility.80 The South Sea Bubble also added to
the symbolic powers of the masquerade. Hence, the Plain Dealer in 1724 identified
masquerades, gaming and stock-jobbing as the three most important ‘abuses’ of
recent years: ‘They grow out of the Obliquity of a Mind, that glances Injuries towards
every happy Neighbour that it thinks upon, and meditates an unnatural Increase of
its own Ease, by diminishing the Satisfaction of other People, and filling their Minds
with Uneasiness and Disquiet.’81 The masquerade, this suggests, was the institutional
manifestation of the Ordinary’s advice — a warning to be wary of everyone else, for
everyone is looking out for themselves — and the institutional refutation of charity
and neighbourliness. As such, it captured the anxieties of urban culture.
What follows considers how the literature of the masquerade challenged modesty
and plain-speaking — two central values of Christian morality — and replaced them
with a deepening respect for verbal sophistication. The value of modesty lay at the
core of Augustan Christian morality. One form of modesty was a modesty of tempo-
ral desire. ‘Contentedness in our Station’ was described in a sermon as a ‘Dictate of
Righteousness’.82 It was a ‘great Truth’, wrote Richard Willis, ‘that it is God that
governs the World, and who assigns to every Man his proper Rank, and Station, and
Condition in it; and that therefore it becomes us who are poor depending Creatures,
to submit with Modesty and Cheerfulness to whatever he shall please to order’.83
The readers of a text called Christian Humility were similarly advised ‘to be lowly
minded’ — ‘to have a modest and mean Opinion of our selves’.84 ‘There is nothing
more Fatal to a Man’, they were later told, ‘than to think himself too great for his
Duty or Circumstances’.85
However, the early eighteenth century also witnessed an increased resistance to this
language of modesty. A seething antipathy is evident, for instance, in the ironic use
of the word ‘modest’ in Swift’s Modest Proposal (a decidedly immodest argument
for the consumption of Irish babies) and Mandeville’s Modest Defense of Public-
Stews (an enthusiastic endorsement and celebration of brothels).86 The urgency and
156 FARID AZFAR

intensity of the reaction to modesty is also suggested by a 1729 poem entitled The
Signal: Or, A Satyr Against Modesty:
Whether by Fame or Inclination drove,
To worldly Interest led, or worldly Love,
Profitless Virtue I thy Cause disown . . .
Curs’d be the cautious Hand, the Look that’s meek!
The bashful Gesture, and the blushing Cheek
Which puts Constraint upon each Thought and Word,
And make Men (from the fear of it) absurd.87

There is an impatience in these lines with the hollowness of the argument for
modesty, with its abject irrelevance in the world of the city — an impatience that is
manifested in a celebration of worldliness.
The masquerade stirred this brewing discontentment with station and modesty. It
did this, in part, by inciting latent yet powerful currents of enthusiasm for reinven-
tion, acquisitiveness, and irreverence. ‘Here Nuns confess to Harlequin’, went a poem
that endeavoured to trace all the ‘Wonders’ of the masquerade, ‘A Goddess and
a Mezetin Are no ill-match’d Pair’.88 A song entitled ‘the Masquerade Garland’
repeated the same trope: ‘A Lord will court a Scullion,/A Lady hug a Clown; A Judge
embrace most tenderly/A Madam of the Town’.89 Notions of station were also chal-
lenged by sensibilities of acquisitiveness. The narrator of The Amorous Bugbears
could barely conceal his excitement at the fact that ‘both Sexes and all Degrees, that
can but purchase Tickets’ had ‘equal Opportunities in this promiscuous convention,
of meeting with their Matches, if they have but Courage enough to push home at a
fair Mark, and Skill enough to manage an Intrigue to the best advantage’.90 Deference
was another form of morality associated with station and fractured by the masquer-
ade. ‘We are allow’d’, noted a character in Benjamin Griffin’s Masquerade, ‘to be
satirically rude to our Superiors, free with our Neighbours Wives, and talk lascivi-
ously to the Sex in general, delighting their Fancies without the Expense of a
Blush’.91
Descriptions of this kind were more than just representations. They were ideo-
logically charged and ideologically formative, for they intensified as well as reflected
the urban dissatisfaction with modesty that is suggested in poems such as The Signal.
‘We are [. . .] not so much as in our Thoughts to murmur or repine at it’, Richard
Willis had said of God’s assigned station.92 But these images of miraculous metamor-
phosis were louder by far than murmurs. ‘A want of Submission to his Orders and
Appointments’ was one of the evil consequences of ‘a worldly spirit’, according to
John Gother.93 But it was exactly such a submission that the masquerade wrecked so
exuberantly.
The worldliness of the masquerade was a product, in part, of its wordiness. The
culture of masquerade was one of verbal sophistication as well as verbal rebellion:
only through words could a person pursue their interests and succeed in the larger
‘game’ of the masquerade. ‘There is an absolute Freedom of Speech’, noted one
observer, ‘without the least Offence given thereby [. . .] Wit incessantly flashes about
in Repartee.’94 Verbal competition was a constant spur to verbal sophistication. Much
of The Amorous Bugbears, an account of a masquerade infiltrated by a ‘spy’, was
 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 157

spent in providing detailed transcriptions of extended episodes of verbal play between

the parvenu narrator, dressed as a friar, and a series of disapproving women:
Madam, I thank you for the Satisfaction, as well as the seasonable Reprimand you
have vouchsaf’d to give me, who must own my self a Person in no measure equal to your
excellent Conversation.
Sir, says she, you talk like a very civil Gentleman, but pray take this advice along with
you [. . .]95

A significant portion of the account proceeded in this vein. But despite his consider-
able verbal prowess, the narrator consistently failed to retain the attention of
these women. He simply was not witty and verbally proficient enough for the
masquerade.
The cultural centralization of wit was a Restoration event, as John Spurr has
shown in his analysis of 1670s England.96 The growth of the masquerade reflected as
well as deepened the premium on wit. The Amorous Bugbears proved a point that
had been made in a letter of complaint to The Spectator:
I could wish, Sir, you could make them understand, that it is a kind of acting to go in
Masquerade [. . .] The last Day we presented, every Body was so rashly habited, that
when they came to speak to each other, a Nymph with a Crook had not a Word to say
but in the pert Stile of the Pit Bawdry; and a Man in the Habit of a Philosopher was
speechless, till an occasion offered of expressing himself in the Refuse of the Trying-
Rooms.97

The masquerade, this suggests, fed upon the culture of wit, created an atmosphere in
which it could thrive unchallenged by rules of verbal modesty, and added to its worth
as a form of self-preservation.
We might legitimately characterize this valuing of verbal sophistication as urban
and urbane. The worldly city was increasingly celebrated for its wordiness – indeed,
the wordiness of the city became a major element of what Spurr describes as ‘the
chasm between “the city” and “the country”’.98 Hence, an anonymous text entitled
Kiss my A__ is No Treason would openly skewer northern tradesmen for the
‘undisguised Way of delivering their Sentiments’.99 And in a sermon delivered at the
Guildhall, before an audience of the mayor and aldermen, concealment would be
described as the very essence of ‘Civility and Urbanity’.100 The masquerade was there-
fore a training ground for what the city demanded of its citizens and a celebration of
urban freedoms and excitements.
By engendering an appreciation for verbal sophistication, the masquerade prevailed
against several ideological currents in the early eighteenth century. It parallelled the
literature of maidservants in its endorsement of verbal freedom. By so doing, it chal-
lenged forms of Christian morality associated with plain-speaking. ‘Great plainness
and simplicity of speech’ was one of Christ’s great examples for every Christian.101
The masquerade made a mockery of plain-speaking, turning it into the greatest of all
liabilities. The masquerade also challenged other moral and political sentiments.
‘Hobbes and Locke’, writes Jonathan Lamb, ‘imagined the history of self preservation
as a shift from the indulgence of passion to rational self-restraint’.102 But reason and
passion were inseparable in descriptions of the masquerade as a battle of wits in
158 FARID AZFAR

which verbal victories yielded sexual prizes. In all of these ways, there were cultural
tensions between wit and plain-speaking, verbal sophistication and verbal modesty:
tensions that the masquerade brought to the fore.
These tensions were dramatically central to the masquerade scene of Richardson’s
Pamela. If, as James Ralph wrote, the masquerade was ‘the most ready, natural and
proper Trial of Wits and Dispositions’, then Pamela was resolutely placed on trial
when she was taken there against her will.103 But once she was there, she could have
refused to participate in this trial. Instead, she participated actively and succeeded
spectacularly. Self-preservation, as Force has suggested, was contingent, in part, upon
adaptation, and Pamela, in this scene, adapted with a kind of effortless self-possession
to the wordiness of the masquerade. When a lady in a partly coloured habit com-
mented on her dress, she retorted with: ‘if thou hadn’t been pleas’d to look at home,
thou wouldst not have taken so much Pains to join such Advice’. Her sense of
triumph was barely concealed: ‘This made every one that heard it, laugh — One said,
The Butterfly had met with her Match.’ Even the victim of the biting retort agreed
that this was ‘Smartly said!’ — or so Pamela reported. She then asked Pamela whether
her intention had been to shine in front of men or women. ‘Verily, Friend, neither’,
replied Pamela, ‘but out of mere Curiosity to look into the Minds of both Sexes;
which I read in their Dresses’. She then proceeded to insult a series of masqueraders
— dressed, respectively, as a nun, a friar and a country girl — only to be compli-
mented by a witness to these verbal triumphs: ‘a Merry Andrew took my Hand and
said, I had the most piquant Wit he had met with that Night’.104
The subtitle to Pamela was Virtue Rewarded, and much of the plot supported this
precept. Its heroine’s virtue was rewarded by her spectacular advancement in the
temporal, secular world. So what can we make of Pamela’s decidedly immodest
appreciation of her own verbal success? It is true that morality was not absent from
Pamela’s words or actions: her retorts were often as moralistic as they were biting.
After all, it was her modesty that she was defending with words; and it was the
immodesty of the masquerade that she was attacking. But she was also, by so doing,
attesting to the fact that plain-speaking, an essential form of moral self-control, was
a disadvantage in an urban world where self-preservation was contingent on verbal
prowess.
It is best to read this scene as a reflection of several intersecting cultural tensions.
It suggests, on the one hand, that Augustan society had yet to be reconciled to the
inconsistency of wit and plain-speaking, or that of modesty and verbal sophistication.
Wit, it suggests, was challenging station as a marker of status. By challenging station,
it was also challenging such moral virtues as plain-speaking and modesty. The scene
also raises questions about the moral implications of the novel as a whole. It reminds
us of the fact that Pamela, ultimately, was a fable of transformation: a bewildering
transformation from maidservant to mistress. If ‘the protean life of the city’, as
Terry Castle has suggested, ‘found expression in a persistent popular urge toward
disguise and metamorphosis’, then Pamela, like the masquerade, was a manifestation
of that urge for change.105 Pamela’s wit testified to the success and completion of her
transformation. But the transformation that occurred over the course of the novel
also revealed the paradox at the heart of any story that sought to exhibit modesty
rewarded in the temporal secular world. For such a story, however insistent its
 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 159

protagonist’s disavowal of temporal desire, necessarily appealed to its reader’s desire

for the protagonist’s worldly advancement. This, in turn, implied a resistance to the
values of station. Taking this into account, Pamela’s masquerade adventure seems to
be less an anomaly than the paradoxical essence of the book. It raises serious ques-
tions about the novel’s subtitle — Virtue Rewarded. Why would virtue be rewarded
in a world where virtue itself was so often a disguise? And why would anyone even
want it to be rewarded — would it still be virtue if it was not its own reward? Neither
of these conundrums was soon to be solved. They were long to remain open for
discussion. The scene from Pamela is but one indication of how urban spaces such as
the masquerade brought them to the fore.

Conclusion
The urban discussion of self-preservation is a window, as I suggested at the outset,
into the culture of the Enlightenment in England. Enlightenment, writes John
Robertson, was an ‘original inquiry into the fundamentals of human sociability’ with
a ‘new focus on betterment in this world’.106 Pamela, the Account and the literature
on maidservants all appealed to an instinct for betterment in this world — namely,
a desire for security and temporal happiness. J. G. A. Pocock has described the
Enlightenment as ‘a moral philosophy that made humans capable of society without
needing recourse to God’.107 Such a philosophy was implicit in the city of strangers
described by the Account, a city from which God seemed markedly absent. It was
necessitated, at the same time, by the prodigious rise of a new class of maidservants
with increased power to determine their destinies, and, at the same time, by the ways
in which the verbal and social freedoms of the masquerade spurred resistance to
modesty and interest in social advancement. ‘The Enlightenment’, as David Garrioch
has observed, was founded upon ‘a secular humanism that emphasizes the rights of
individuals’.108 The three sections of this essay suggest three different ways in which
‘the fact or condition of existing as an individual’ began to involve the ‘self-centred
feeling or conduct as a principle’ that connotes ‘individualism’.109 ‘The part of the
eighteenth century that we call “The Enlightenment”’, Judith Shklar has written,
‘was a state of intellectual tension rather than a sequence of simple propositions’.110
Pamela, the Account and the literature of maidservants all suggest how the city con-
tributed to this state of intellectual tension by creating pressures and opportunities
for freedom. They also indicate how a worldly discourse of self-preservation grew as
a response to these pressures and opportunities.
But what do they suggest of the relationship between the city and the Enlighten-
ment: the Enlightenment of popular historical imagination, the Enlightenment of
great thinkers engaged in heated discussion, all in the spirit of human betterment?
The use of the idea of self-preservation in literatures of crime, maidservants and
masquerades provides a new context for understanding a seminal figure such as
Bernard Mandeville, who spearheaded the Enlightenment — or at least a particular
strain of the Enlightenment — by articulating a set of questions that were examined
for decades by the likes of Rousseau and Adam Smith. The Fable of the Bees, as
E. J. Hundert has argued, ‘decisively shaped the Enlightenment’s encounter with
what Mandeville insisted, and his contemporaries found themselves forced — often
reluctantly — to agree, were the unique and uniquely disturbing paradoxes of
160 FARID AZFAR

modernity’.111 It is relevant, then, that self-preservation was central to Mandeville’s

concerns. That self-preservation was ‘the Law of Nature’ was the central conceit
of The Fable of the Bees.112 The same assumption lay at the core of the ‘Essay on
Charity and Charity-Schools’, the inclusion of which in the 1723 edition of The Fable
catapulted him to instant notoriety.113 It was the spectre of self-advancing servants
that drove him to rail against the schools. The impulse for self-preservation explained
the behaviour of cunning criminals and sanctimonious philanthropists alike.114 Even
pity, he suggested to great controversial effect, was a form of self-preservation.115 The
image of a city propelled, at once, by forces of concealment, mobility, and autonomy
— the city described in the urban literatures that I have discussed in this article —
steered Mandeville’s arguments at every stage. Hundert focuses on Mandeville’s
continental influences and continental impact, but the texts discussed in this article
help to establish that Mandeville did not merely import the idiom of self-preservation:
he used it, in part, for its metropolitan currency. As Paul Slack has argued, the 1723
edition of The Fable of the Bees ‘articulated doubts which were already current in
unfocussed form’.116 Part of what he was focusing on was a troubling anxiety about
self-preservation that pervaded urban writings on a variety of topics. Mandeville was
a product not just of the republic of letters but also of his immediate discursive
environment. Through Mandeville, we can draw a connection between the urban
experience described by the texts on crime, maidservants and masquerades and the
Enlightenment writ large. By so doing, we recognize seeds of the Enlightenment in
prosaic reactions to the quotidian realities of urban life: in statements and assertions
that might otherwise be dismissed as inadvertent, their significance evanescent.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tim Harris, Deborah Cohen, several anonymous reviewers
for the London Journal, students and faculty at the Bowdoin College Department of
History (where an early version of this article was presented), and Miles Ogborn, who
helped enormously with the revision process.

Notes
1 6
P. Earle, A City Full of People: Men and Women
of London, 1650–1750 (1994); R. Shoemaker,
7
Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the
Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c.1660–1725
(Cambridge, 1991).
2 8
T. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of
9
Masturbation (Cambridge, 2003), 276.
3 10
N. Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of
Manners and State Formation and Civilization,
trans. Edward Jephcott (Oxford, 1994), 484.
4 11
P. Force, Self-Interest Before Adam Smith: A
Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge, 2007);
12
A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests:
Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its
Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977).
5 13
J. Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas,
1680–1840 (Chicago, Ill., 2001).
B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private
Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), 182.
G. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’
(1903), printed in G. Bridge and S. Watson, The
Blackwell City Reader (Oxford, 2010), 103.
Force, Self-Interest Before Adam Smith, 137.
Lamb, Preserving the Self, 12.
A. J. Weitzman, ‘Eighteenth-Century London:
Urban Paradise or Fallen City?’ Journal of the
History of Ideas, 36 (1975), 484.
R. Baxter, A Christian directory, or, A summ of
practical theologie (1673), 158.
T. Owen, A Sermon Preach’d Before the Honour-
able Company of Merchants Trading to the Levant
Seas (1706), 13.
C. Burdett, A Sermon Preach’d Before the
Right Worshipful the Deputy-Governour and the
 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON
Company of Merchants Trading to the Levant Seas
(1724), 24.
14
J. Gother, A Practical Catechism in Fifty Two
Lessons: One for Every Sunday in the Year (1701),
168.
15
Lamb, Preserving the Self, 18.
16
C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 307,
cited in D. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern
Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century
England (New Haven, Conn., 2004), xv.
17
J. Beattie, ‘London Crime and the Making of the
“Bloody Code”, 1689–1718’, in L. Davison and
T. Hitchcock (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive:
The Response to Social and Economic Problems
(New York, 1992), 70.
18
J. Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment
Europe (Cambridge, 2001), 20.
19
P. Linebaugh, ‘The Ordinary of Newgate and
his Account’, in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in
England, 1550–1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1977), 248.
20
P. Lorrain, The Ordinary of Newgate his Account
of the Behaviour, the last Dying Speech and Con-
fession of Mr Roger Lowen . . . Who was Executed
on Friday the twenty-fifth of October (1706).
21
Linebaugh, ‘The Ordinary of Newgate’.
22
Cited in L. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms
and Fictions of Criminal Biography (Cambridge,
1987), 104.
23
P. Lorrain, The Ordinary of Newgate his Account
. . . twenty-ninth of April, 1713 (1713), 4.
24
B. Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes of the
Frequent Executions at Tyburn (1725), 29.
25
D. Defoe, The History of the Press-Yard (1717), 49;
cited in T. Wales, ‘Lorrain, Paul (d. 1719)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004),
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17021
(accessed 20 Sep 2009).
26
A. McKenzie, ‘From True Confessions to True
Reporting? The Decline and Fall of the Ordinary’s
Account’, London Journal, 30 (2005), 55–70,
Abstract.
27
A. MacKenzie, Tyburn Martyrs: Execution in
England, 1675–1775 (2007), 124; A. McKenzie,
‘Martyrs in Low Life? Dying “Game” in Augustan
England’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003),
167–205.
28
J. Guthrie, The Ordinary of Newgate, His account
. . . 11th of this Instant November, 1728 (1728), 4.
29
Ibid.
30
Gother, A Practical Catechism in Fifty Two
Lessons, 168.
31
T. Purney, The Ordinary of Newgate, His Account
. . . 23d of December, 1723 (1723).
32
Ibid., 4.
33
C. Emsley, R. Hitchcock and R. Shoemaker,
‘Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts’, Old Bailey
Proceedings Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org
(accessed 17 Jun 2008).
161
34
P. Lorrain, The Ordinary of Newgate his Account
. . . ninth of March 1704/5 (1705).
35
P. Lorrain, The Ordinary of Newgate his Account
. . . 23rd of December, 1713 (1713), 5.
36
J. Guthrie, The Ordinary of Newgate, His Account
. . . ninth of this Instant July, 1734 (1734), 15.
37
Anonymous, The Matchless Rogue: Or, An
Account of the Contrivances, Cheats, Stratagems
and Amours of Tom Merryman, Commonly
Called, Newgate Tom (1725), vi.
38
Ibid., 87.
39
A. Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and
Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester,
2006); D. Valenze, ‘Custom, Charity, and Human-
ity: Attitudes towards the Poor in Eighteenth-
Century England’, in J. Garnett and C. Matthew
(eds), Revival and Religion: Essays Presented
to John Walsh (1993), 59–78; J. Gregory, ‘The
Eighteenth-Century Reformation: the Pastoral
Task of Anglican Clergy after 1689’, in J. Walsh,
C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (eds), The Church
of England c. 1689–c. 1833. From Toleration to
Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 67–85.
40
Baxter, A Christian directory, 135.
41
J. S. Mcgee, The Godly Man in Stuart England:
Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables (New
Haven, Conn., 1976).
42
R. Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man, Laid Down
in a Plain and Familiar Way for the Use of All
(1703), 143.
43
Gother, A Practical Catechism in Fifty Two
Lessons, 152.
44
Also discussed in R. B. Shoemaker, ‘The Decline
of Public Insult in London, 1660–1800’, Past and
Present, 169 (2000), 130.
45
Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 106.
46
McKenzie, ‘From True Confessions to True
Reporting?’, Abstract.
47
Wales, ‘Lorrain, Paul’.
48
Emsley, Hitchcock and Shoemaker, ‘Ordinary of
Newgate’s Accounts’.
49
T. Guthrie, The Ordinary of Newgate, His
Account . . . 16th of this Instant OCTOBER 1732
(1732), 19.
50
T. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The
Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English
Culture and Fiction (Stanford, Cal., 1986), 116.
51
Anonymous, The Husband’s Instructions to His
Family (1675).
52
K. Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the
Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’,
American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 303.
53
W. Fleetwood, The Relative Duties of Parents and
Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and
Servants, Consider’d in Sixteen Sermons (1705),
103, 157, 307.
54
Anonymous, The Lottery, A Comedy (1728), 36.
55
See: Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Porno-
graphy of Pain’; and Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human
Rights: A History (New York, 2007), 35–70.
162 FARID AZFAR
56
J. Hill, The Young Secretary’s Guide, 20th edn
(1719), 77.
57
Earle, A City Full of People.
58
B. Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in
Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989), 138.
59
D. A. Kent, ‘Ubiquitous but Invisible: Female
Domestic Servants in Mid-Eighteenth Century
London’, History Workshop, 28 (1989), 120.
60
Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics, 131,
133.
61
T. Meldrum, ‘London Domestic Servants from
Depositional Evidence, 1660–1750: Servant–
Employer Sexuality in the Patriarchal Household’,
in T. Hitchcock, P. King and P. Sharpe (eds),
Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of
the English Poor (New York, 1997), 47–69.
62
Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics, 131–2.
63
B. Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the
Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996), 88.
64
D. Defoe, Every-body’s business, is no-body’s
business; or, private abuses, publick grievances:
exemplified in the pride, insolence, and exorbitant
wages of our women-servants, footmen, &c. With
a proposal for amendment of the same (1725),
11–12.
65
Ibid., 15–25.
66
J. Johnson, Modern Gentility No Christianity: Or,
a complete answer to every body’s business is no
body’s business (1725), 21.
67
Ibid., 33.
68
C. Comb-brush, Every man mind his own business,
or private piques no publick precedents: being an
answer to a late scurrilous pamphlet . . . written by
an old, peevish, trading J-ce, whose false reasoning
is here expos’d, the cruelty of masters and mis-
tresses exemplify’d, and the hardships of servitude
set in a clear light (1725), 13, 22.
69
Johnson, Modern Gentility No Christianity, 32.
70
Comb-brush, Every man mind his own business,
27.
71
H. Wolley, The Compleat Servant-maid: Or, the
Young Maiden’s and Family’s Daily Companion
(1729), Preface.
72
Ibid.
73
E. Haywood, A Present for a Servant-Maid: Or,
the Sure Means of Gaining Love and Esteem (1743),
Preface.
74
B. Griffin, The Masquerade: Or, An Evening’s
Intrigue (1716), 17.
75
T. Castle, ‘Eros and Liberty at the English
Masquerade, 1710–90’, Eighteenth Century
Studies, 17 (1983/1984), 160; The Spectator, no. 14
(16 Mar 1711).
76
Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 2, 6, 349.
77
T. Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-
Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny
(Oxford, 1995), 85.
78
Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, XCVIII
(22 Aug 1730).
79
Cited in S. Carter, ‘“This Female Proteus”: Repre-
senting Prostitution and Masquerade in Eighteenth-
Century English Popular Print Culture’, Oxford
Art Journal, 22 (1999), 57–79.
80
Carter, ‘This Female Proteus’; J. Davidson, Hypoc-
risy and the Politics of Politeness (Cambridge,
2004).
81
The Plain Dealer (27 Mar 1724).
82
B. Grosvenor, A Sermon Preach’d to the Societies
for Reformation of Manners, in the Cities of
London and Westminster. July the 2d, 1705 (1705),
33.
83
R. Willis, A Sermon Preach’d before the Queen,
in the royal Chappel at St James’s, on Sunday
February the 23d, 1706/7 (1707).
84
W. King, Christian Humility: A Sermon Preached
Before the Queen at St James’s Chappel, on
Palm-Sunday, 1705 (1705), 3.
85
Ibid., 16.
86
J. Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the
Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to
their Parents or the Country (1729); B. Mandeville,
A Modest Defense of Publick Stews: Or, An Essay
Upon Whoring, As it is Now Practis’d In These
Kingdoms (1725).
87
F. Hawling, The Signal: Or, A Satyr Against
Modesty (1727), 3–4.
88
Anonymous, The Masquerade: A Poem (1724), 5.
89
Anonymous, The Merry Musician; Or, A Cure for
the Spleen (1716), 106.
90
Anonymous, The Amorous Bugbears: Or, The
Humours of a Masquerade. Intended as a
Supplement to the London-spy (1725), 21.
91
Griffin, The Masquerade, 22.
92
Willis, A Sermon Preach’d before the Queen.
93
Gother, A Practical Catechism in Fifty Two
Lessons, 168.
94
Weekly Journal (15 Feb 1718).
95
Anonymous, The Amorous Bugbears, 30–1.
96
J. Spurr, England in the 1670s: This ‘Masquerad-
ing’ Age (Cambridge, 2000).
97
Spectator, no. 14 (16 Mar 1711).
98
Spurr, England in the 1670s, 162.
99
Anonymous, Kiss my A__ is No Treason: Or, An
Historical and Critical Dissertation Upon the Art
of Selling Bargains (1728), 9.
100
R. Burrow, Civil Society and Government Vindi-
cated From the Charge of Being Founded On, and
Preserv’d By, Dishonest Arts: In a Sermon Preach’d
Before the Right Honourable the Lord-Mayor
(1723), 25.
101
J. Glanville, An Essay Concerning Preaching:
Written for the Direction of a Young Divine (1703),
23; R. Murrey, Christ Every Christian’s Pattern
(1715), 130.
 SELF-PRESERVATION IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON
102
Lamb, Preserving the Self, 25.
103
J. Ralph, The Taste of the Town: Or, A Guide to
All Publick Diversions (1731), 177.
104
S. Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded. In a
Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young
Damsel, to her Parents (1741), 107.
105
Castle, The Female Thermometer, 83.
106
J. Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment:
Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge,
2005), 8, 47.
107
J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Historiography and Enlighten-
ment: A View of Their History’, Modern Intellec-
tual History, 5 (2008), 84.
108
D. Garrioch, ‘The Police of Paris as Enlightened
Social Reformers’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 16
(1992), 44.
109
‘Individuality’ and ‘Individualism’, The Oxford
English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989).
Notes on Contributor
Farid Azfar received his doctorate in History from Brown University in 2009. He is
currently Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Scripps College in Claremont,
California.
163
110
J. Shklar, ‘Politics and the Intellect’, in Stanley
Hoffmann (ed.), Political Thought and Political
Thinkers (Chicago, Ill., 1998), 94.
111
E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard
Mandeville and the Discovery of Society: Ideas in
Context (Cambridge, 1994), 15.
112
Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 182.
113
See D. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London
Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.,
1989), 32; see also Hundert, The Enlightenment’s
Fable, 22, 122.
114
B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or Private
Vices, Publick Benefits. With An Essay On Charity
and Charity Schools (1723), 299, 300, 322, 336, 350,
356, 361, 365.
115
Ibid., 287–8.
116
P. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement:
Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford,
1998), 120.