An enlightened sense of virtue: Morals and manners in eighteenth-century American periodical literature

Michal Marie Trafny Mitol, Purdue University

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the Enlightenment reached middle- and lower-class colonial Americans prior to independence and revolution. Essays on morals and manners appearing in five periodicals published along the southern and mid-Atlantic coast between the years 1750 and 1775 were analyzed for markers of Enlightenment thought. These were isolated from a review of well-known social and intellectual histories of the period. An advertiser list and a subscription list provided documented readers for two of the five periodicals, which were then analyzed for income, occupation, and socio-economic status using demographic studies as well as an early taxables list of colonial Philadelphians. Enlightened ideas of rational criticism, tolerant civility, a belief in progress, and a simplified moral philosophy based on the practice of modest virtues were found to have framed the periodical essays. The essays covered a variety of issues that touched the social, personal, and at times, very intimate lives of colonial Americans. The colonial readers of these essays emerged from across the socio-economic spectrum, with a substantial number coming from the middle and working classes. The periodical essays, as a whole, provided these colonists with an enlightened moral guide to living a good and virtuous life, and the effects of such a guide were to imbue its readers with a sense of empowerment and to contribute to the evolution of American republicanism.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Oreovicz, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|American literature

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