A Brief History of Modesty

Abstract

This essay explores the concept of measure and excess through the lens of the term “modest.” By looking at modesty as a key value in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we can start to unpick the complexities of the politics and aesthetics of moderation. The word modest is used widely throughout this period, and this article draws on textual examples from Jonathan Swift, John Milton, Sarah Fielding, and Alexander Pope to show the role the term played in the conception of political rhetoric, sexual propriety, social and dramatic performance. But as its varied uses show, modesty also highlighted tensions between naturalism, restraint, and passion, and revealed the potentially problematic relationship between virtue, and the appearance of virtue.

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XVII-XVIII
71 (2014)
La Mesure et l’excès
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Abigail Williams
A Brief History of Modesty
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
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Abigail WILLIAMS. “A Brief History of Modesty.” RSÉAA XVII-XVII 71 (2014): 135-156.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MODESTY
This essay explores the concept of measure and excess through the lens of the
term “modest.” By looking at modesty as a key value in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, we can start to unpick the complexities of the politics and
aesthetics of moderation. The word modest is used widely throughout this
period, and this article draws on textual examples from Jonathan Swift, John
Milton, Sarah Fielding, and Alexander Pope to show the role the term played
in the conception of political rhetoric, sexual propriety, social and dramatic
performance. But as its varied uses show, modesty also highlighted tensions
between naturalism, restraint and passion, and revealed the potentially
problematic relationship between virtue, and the appearance of virtue.
Cet article aborde les concepts de la mesure et de l’excès par le prisme du
terme “modest”. Considérer la modestie comme une valeur clé des XVIIe et
XVIIIe siècles permet de détailler les dimensions politiques et esthétiques de la
modération dans toute leur complexité. L’adjectif “modest” est utilisé très
fréquemment pendant cette période et l’étude s’appuie sur des exemples tirés
de Jonathan Swift, John Milton, Sarah Fielding et Alexander Pope pour
montrer le rôle joué par ce mot dans la rhétorique politique, la bienséance
entre les sexes, la représentation à la ville comme à la scène. Cependant,
comme le montre la variété des usages de la modestie, celle-ci sert aussi à
souligner les tensions entre naturalisme, retenue et passion, ainsi qu’à mettre
en évidence la relation ambigüe entre la vertu et l’apparence de vertu.
he title of this essay conveys something of its content. As “A
Brief History of Modesty,” it gestures towards a significant
historiographical claim (a “history”) and also a rhetoric of reasonable
humility (a “brief” history). It is a title which attempts to balance
moderation and excess, and in this piece I shall argue that by looking
at modesty as a key term or value in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, we can start to unpick the complexities of the politics and
aesthetics of measure and moderation. I shall show the way in which
the evolving use of the word “modest” demonstrates tensions between
naturalism, restraint and passion, and highlights the relationship
between virtue, and the appearance of that virtue.
T

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The word “modest” is a term that is everywhere in the long
eighteenth century: in political rhetoric; aesthetic debate; new science
and quantification; and in evolving ideas of gender and politeness.
Looking at its semantic history in the OED, it is a word whose use and
meaning has shifted considerably over time. For early twenty-first
century readers, it most commonly signifies a personal attribute –
having “a moderate or humble estimate of one’s own abilities or
achievements” (“modest, adj.” def. 3a). But historically, its earliest
meanings are closely related to the more general balancing of extremes.
The use of the word modest in English comes from the Middle French
adjective modeste, attested from the fourteenth century in the sense
“Modéré, éloigné de tout excès”: moderate, free from excess
(“modeste, adj.” def. 1). The English adjective is first recorded in the
mid-sixteenth century, with the related sense of “[a]voiding extremes
of behaviour; well-conducted, temperate; not harsh or domineering”
(“modest, adj.” def. 1). The first citation in the OED comes from an
expanded edition of Sir Thomas Elyot’s bilingual dictionary,
Bibliotheca Eliotæ (1548), in which the Latin adjective modestus is
defined as “temperate, well aduised, modeste, that vseth a meane in all
his dooynges” (2T2r). Two centuries later, Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary (1755) echoes this definition by rendering the fourth sense
of modest as “Not excessive; not extreme; moderate; within a mean”
(2: 16Q2v).
Everyone wants to be modest in the eighteenth century: the poet
and clergyman Samuel Wesley defines modesty in his Epistle […]
Concerning Poetry (1700) as a stylistic virtue: “STYLE is the Dress of
Thought; a modest Dress, / Neat, but not gaudy, will true Critics please”
(5). For Eustace Budgell, writing in Spectator 373 (1712), modest
assurance is intrinsic to gentlemanly behaviour: “what we endeavour to
express when we say a modest Assurance; by which we understand the
Just Mean between Bashfulness and Impudence” (405). Modesty is
much admired in aesthetic form, and particularly, in architecture. We
see, for example, that Oliver Goldsmith’s virtuous vicar in The
Deserted Village (1770) has a house to match his social humility:
There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose,
The village preacher’s modest mansion rose.
A man he was, to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year;
Remote from towns he ran his godly race,
Nor ere had changed, nor wish’d to change his place;

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Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for power,
By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour[.] (139-46)
In Alexander Pope’s epigrammatic Essay on Criticism (1711),
modesty is the perfect cover for the would-be literary critic: when in
doubt, “Distrustful Sense with modest Caution speaks,” and in more
inspired moments “modest Plainness sets off sprightly Wit” (lines
626, 302). It was something that every lady needed to be mistress of,
as ‘T. C.,’ writing in the Lady’s Magazine, advised in 1775:
“MODESTY, commonly mistaken for bashfulness, is a just medium
for all our words and actions” (377). This idea that modesty is the
“chief Ornament” of the female sex is also stressed in Spectator
essays by Richard Steele and others, even as these writers warned that
female modesty was being dangerously devalued in contemporary
society. Yet modesty was not the exclusive preserve of women. It also
characterised general polite behaviour, and was recommended by
Budgell in Spectator 197 (1711) as an essential element of good conduct
in disputes: “if you are at any time obliged to enter on an Argument,
give your Reasons with the utmost Coolness and Modesty, two things
which scarce ever fail of making an Impression on the Hearers”
(274). And above all, despite the fact that it originated in medieval
France, modesty was quintessentially English: as Addison claimed in
Spectator 407 (1712), “MOST Foreign Writers who have given any
Character of the English Nation, whatever Vices they ascribe to it,
allow in general, that the People are naturally Modest” (520).1
In many ways, modesty is a term that encapsulates modern
assumptions about the spirit of this period: an age of reason, order, and
neoclassical restraint. The quotations I have given above suggest
balance and propriety, values that had their uses in a whole range of
contexts: in behaviour and social conduct; in argument; in specifically
female virtue; in national identity; in the display of wealth and
architecture. I shall begin by looking at the use of modest in the sense
of temperate and restrained. This meaning is widely invoked in the
rhetorical culture of the long eighteenth century, and it is here that we
find some of the most obvious signs of the tension between modesty and
excess. If we look at the vast number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
1. Given the etymology of the word, it is ironic that Tobias Smollett in his
Travels should see no evidence of it in his experience of French society: “Modesty,
or diffidence, I have already said, is utterly unknown among them, and therefore I
wonder there should be a term to express it in their language” (57).

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century titles containing the word modest, we begin to get some sense
of the usefulness of the word: in the most crude measure, a search of
the English Short Title Catalogue for modest and modeste brings up
over 800 titles containing the adjective between 1561 and 1800.
There are modest enquiries, modest pleas, modest proposals, modest
apologies, and modest defences. A small sample of the use of modest
in print titles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gives a sense
of its rhetorical function:
A cleare, sincere, and modest confutation of the unsound, fraudulent,
and intemperate reply of T.F. (1616)
A modest confutation of a slanderous and scurrilous libell, entituled,
Animadversions upon the remonstrants defense against Smectymnuus
(1642)
Bang as bang can; or, Wo be to the convocation. Being a modest
defence of the present Bishop of Bangor (1717)
Calumny display’d: […] Being a modest and impartial reply to an
impudent and malicious libel, intituled, A letter to a gentleman in
Edinburgh, &c. (1740)
A modest and serious defence of the author of The whole duty of
man, from the false charges and gross misrepresentations of Mr.
Whitefield, and the Methodists his adherents (1740)
It is evident merely from these few, very random examples, that there
is a common pattern in these titles – the modest claims of the author
are pitched against the unreasonable and extreme forces and words of
those he or she is writing against. Here, as elsewhere, there is a
rhetorical symbiosis between modesty and excess – one is dependent on
the other. This dependence is important. It is evident in many of the
contemporary dictionary definitions of the word modest, which define
it in negative terms – Samuel Johnson, we recall, gives one sense of the
word as “[n]ot excessive; not extreme.” One cannot understand modesty
without knowing its other, extremity or excess.
The rhetorical co-existence of the two poles is nowhere more
obvious than in the flurries and skirmishes of contemporary political and
religious print culture. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
thousands of satirical, polemical, and vituperative pamphlet exchanges
were published. Their idiosyncratic and often dyspeptic arguments and
counter-claims over matters of religion, politics, history, policy, and
character created a noisy forum for contemporary debate. The pamphlet

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market that evolved during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
both a space for the exchange of ideas, and a very visible commercial-
isation of arguments and opinions. Mark Knights, writing of political
discourse in late Stuart Britain, has argued that the polemical extremity
of print culture was driven by the market: “[p]rinted polemic tended to
polarize arguments, often favouring the irreverent or pugnacious
expression of bold and uncompromising views, since fierce controversy
sold better than quiet moderation” (236). Rhetorical extremity flourished
in a competitive polemical arena, and within that, there was a special
place for modesty. Modesty thrives in the intersection between money
and ideas: it is a prized commodity in a bear market which is shaped by
rhetorical excess. In the rowdy, competitive print arena of the late
seventeenth century, most writers depicted themselves as lone voices of
moderation and reason. However hysterical or immoderate one’s
arguments might actually be, it was essential to pretend to be moderate
and reasonable, and to paint one’s adversary as unrestrained by truth or
conscience. The term modest was a crucial weapon in this rhetorical
game of feigned logic, as we can see from its numerous uses in the
titling of the pamphlet literature of the period.
Digging a bit deeper into the modest pleas and apologies of the
era, we can see that the rhetorical restraint implied by the use of the
word modest in a title is often supported by textual and paratextual
gestures towards objectivity and order: within the pamphlets claiming
to present a modest argument, there are enumerated points of debate,
recurrent invocations of authorial humility, or a heavy use of the
language of quantitative analysis – the phrase modest computation was
especially popular.
It is within the context of these publications that we should view
Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal – or to give it its full title, A Modest
Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a
Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial
to the Publick (1729). Swift’s celebrated and shocking response to the
economic crisis in Ireland advocates the alleviation of poverty and
overpopulation by eating the children of the Catholic poor. A Modest
Proposal is in itself a cleverly balanced exercise in measure and
excess – a thin veneer of logic and ordered argument is layered over an
hysterical anxiety about the state of Ireland and over the horrific idea
of cannibalism. Setting out the rudiments of the scheme, Swift’s
projector calculates the potential of human life; his posture of public-

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spirited rationality soon modulates into a rhetoric which isolates and
dehumanises the “savage” poor:
I DO therefore humbly offer it to publick Consideration, that of the
Hundred and Twenty Thousand Children, already computed,
Twenty thousand may be reserved for Breed; whereof only one
Fourth Part to be Males; which is more than we allow to Sheep,
black Cattle, or Swine; and my Reason is, that these Children are
seldom the Fruits of Marriage, a Circumstance not much regarded
by our Savages; therefore, one Male will be sufficient to serve four
Females. (111)
For some critics, the logical detachment of A Modest Proposal is
an approach calculated to push privileged readers to address their
own abdication of social duties towards the poor. Summing up this
reading, James Ward has remarked that “it is by comparison with
obscene normality that the Proposal achieves its modesty” (80). By
exploiting the rhetorical symbiosis between modesty and excess,
Swift prompts his readers to diagnose the corresponding and harmful
symbiosis in reality between the inertia of the rich and the excessive
suffering of the poor.
A Modest Proposal is now the only modest proposal that has
survived the topical maelstrom of eighteenth-century pamphlet
debate. It has become a byword for the satirical undercutting of the
literature of political proposition. Robert Phiddian has argued that the
Proposal “enters a deconstructive dialogue with its pre-texts,” blurring
the boundaries between orderly and subversive discourse, and
exposing the inhumanity of all logical and systematic thinking (21-
22). But in many ways, A Modest Proposal works rather like Swift’s
other famous prose satire, Gulliver’s Travels, in that it draws heavily
on the forms it parodies. Gulliver’s Travels mocks the truth claims and
outlandish inventions that were characteristic of contemporary travel
writing; similarly, A Modest Proposal parodies the false humility and
the contrast between modest claim and immoderate content that are
established features of the discourse of contemporary pamphlets. Rather
than seeing A Modest Proposal as a countercultural piece which
uniquely exposes and recognises the fallacies of political argument,
we might equally well see it as a text which emerges from a well-
established tradition of pamphlet genres – the hundreds of modest
pleas and modest arguments that we see listed in ESTC. They too

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were peddling the potent combination of rational argument and
fantastical idea.
What A Modest Proposal highlights – and what that whole genre
of modest pamphlets also highlights – is that because of the rhetorical
utility and over-usedness of the term modest, it came to embody a
semantic uncertainty. Modesty was everywhere and nowhere in
eighteenth-century culture – it was the title of a hundred pamphlets,
but evident in none of them. It was something that needed to be
proclaimed, but not necessarily, in reality, to be exercised.
There was nothing new in this – we can trace suspicion about
claims to modesty back to classical rhetoric. The Rhetorica ad
Herennium (c.86-82 B.C.), formerly attributed to Cicero, was the
most popular Latin rhetorical treatise of the early modern period,
appearing under its own separate title in fifty unabridged editions and
translations printed between 1470 and 1700 (Green & Murphy 124-26).
It argues that modesty – in the form of an author saying that they are
too modest to write – is in fact a sign of great arrogance:
For if modesty consists in saying nothing or writing nothing, why do
they write or speak at all? […] It is as if some one should come to
the Olympic games to run, and having taken a position for the start,
should accuse of impudence those who have begun the race[. …]
These Greek rhetoricians do likewise. When they have descended
into the race-course of our art, they accuse of immodesty those who
put in practice the essence of the art; they praise some ancient
orator, poet, or literary work, but without themselves daring to come
forth into the stadium of rhetoric. I should not venture to say so, yet
I fear that in their very pursuit of praise for modesty they are
impudent. (235, 237; IV. iii. 4-5)
So although I began by arguing that the terms modest and modesty
played a crucial role in defining the balance between measure and
excess, and were invoked by many as a kind of golden mean, neither
too much nor too little, they were also terms which were apt to extend
to denoting the mere appearance of those qualities. In classical
rhetorical theory, there was a niggling sense that the claim to be modest
was actually deeply immodest, a sleight of hand designed to secure
one’s writing from accusations of vanity or self-interest. What we see
in Swift’s Modest Proposal and the other modest pamphlets of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a recognition of the importance
of seeming modest. And over the course of the eighteenth century, the

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superficial role of modesty came to be perceived as no less important
than the real thing.
This idea that modesty was an appearance, something that it was
crucial to demonstrate, a thing of surface and perception, is evident in
the historical usage of the word. As well as documenting the changing
meanings of modest, the OED records some rarer uses of the word in
compound forms, such as modest-looked, modest-looking, and modest-
seeming (“modest, adj.” spec. uses). All these compounds illustrate
the way in which modesty was coupled semantically with appearance.
Modesty is in the eye of the beholder. And when we look at the uses
of these terms there is often a gendered aspect to this idea of
“appearing modest.” The OED’s first recorded use of modest-looking
comes from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), and more specifically
from the pen of Lovelace, laying out his plan to trick Clarissa by
enlisting two women to impersonate his well-bred relatives. Lovelace
names one of the women as “my little Johanetta Golding, a lively, yet
modest-looking girl” (5: 207). Johanetta is “ashamed of nothing but
detection,” a pretender to the virtue and decorum underpinning female
modesty. Yet Johanetta’s modesty, like her fellow actress’s respectability,
is a fiction so powerful that she herself believes it: both women are “in
their own conceit, when assuming top parts, the very quality they ape.”
Here we can see the way in which the notion of modesty as a thing
of appearance, rather than substance, intersects with the gendered
meaning of modesty, as sexual virtue. The second sense of modest in
the OED relates primarily to female behaviour and dress: it is defined
as “Of a woman: decorous in manner and conduct; not forward,
impudent, or lewd; demure” (“modest, adj.” def. 2a.). Johnson is more
particular in setting the sexual sense of modest apart from its more
general connotations of good conduct and manners: the third sense
given in his dictionary is “[n]ot loose, not unchaste” (2: 16Q2v). This
meaning of modesty becomes increasingly dominant over the course of
the eighteenth century. And this sense of modesty, I will argue, is also
more complex than it initially seems. Modesty is both the defining
quality of a virtuous woman, and a quality that can be feigned. This
makes it a word vulnerable to a double reading.
The double-edged use of the word resonates throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, if we look at
Milton’s uses of the word, we find very few, but those that are there
tend to speak to this dual sense. There is one instance each of the

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words modest and modesty in Paradise Lost (1667; expanded 1674).
The noun occurs in Adam’s description of his first encounter with
Eve in book 8. Describing her virtuous demeanour, this is what he
says of her:
Yet innocence and virgin modesty,
Her virtue and the conscience of her worth,
That would be wooed, and not unsought be won,
Not obvious, not obtrusive, but retired[.] (8.501-04)
In this context, Milton’s emphasis on modesty is tricky. In his edition
of Paradise Lost, Alastair Fowler follows Dennis Burden in trying to
explain away the problem by saying that Eve’s “modesty springs not
from guilt but a sense of the ‘sole propriety,’ the exclusive privacy of
love” (456). However, to read Milton’s description of Eve is to be
reminded of the common connotations of modesty, as a pattern of
learned, social behaviour, an art of seeming demure and chaste.
Adam’s reference to Eve’s modesty and her consciousness of her
worth, its social function, and the fact that she must be wooed seem to
suggest that there is an artfulness in her demeanour that is not as
innocent as it ought to be. Eve’s value is defined here in opposition to
what it is not: sinfulness, or immodesty, or obviousness. It is also
defined by competition amongst suitors, needing to pursue her. All of
these definitions are meaningless in Paradise, where there is only
innocence, where there is no sexual shame, and where there is only
one man and one woman. Does modesty only have meaning in a
fallen world? That was certainly what Bernard Mandeville thought. In
his cynical dissection of contemporary morality in The Fable of the
Bees (1714; expanded 1723), he takes special issue with the notion of
modesty, and its perceived importance in contemporary society. One
of his complaints about modesty is that it only has meaning in a social
context – it has no meaning in a private situation, and is essentially a
virtue that only exists or matters as perception:
But when we are by our selves, and so far remov’d from Company
as to be beyond the reach of their Senses, the Words Modesty and
Impudence lose their meaning; a Person may be Wicked, but he
cannot be Immodest whilst he is alone[.] (72)
Mandeville’s conception of modesty exposes the moral hollowness of
eighteenth-century social conventions, and highlights the dissonance
which Milton risks by ascribing modesty to Eve. As Fowler puts it,
the problem is that “many passions are only imaginable in fallen

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communities larger than two,” and modesty is one of those concepts
(456). However, Milton’s wordplay harbours the potential to close
this breach between fallen and unfallen worlds. Christopher Ricks has
revealed how Milton uses words in their etymological or primary
senses to recreate a “pre-lapsarian state of language,” shadowed by
the post-lapsarian meanings more familiar to his audience (110).
Thus, modesty, etymologically derived from the Latin modestus,
meaning temperate, can be read as another of the Latinisms which in
Milton’s poem chime with the earlier purity of language, without
entirely letting go of its later corruption.
Milton’s sole adjectival reference to modesty in Paradise Lost
comes in book 4, in his famous description of Eve’s appearance. Here
he is, describing her hair:
She as a veil down to the slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay. (4.304-11)
Many critics have noticed Milton’s choice of language in this
passage: Eve’s “wanton” ringlets, “coy submission,” “sweet reluctant
amorous delay,” and, interestingly for us, her “modest pride” – all of
which have perfectly innocent seventeenth-century meanings, but
which also connote a degree of sexual playfulness, a knowingness of
the value of appearing to be reticent and modest. Once again,
modesty is linked to artifice and artfulness in this, the primary
inscription of unfallen woman. Feminist readers of Paradise Lost
have seen in Milton’s depiction of Eve a conventional patriarchal
construction of female sexuality, as both a God-given ornament and a
force which requires control. Commenting on this passage, Catherine
Belsey observes that Christian moralists from St Paul onwards have
seen women’s hair as “at once a glory and a danger,” capable of both
modestly concealing female sexuality and displaying its temptations
(65). This is a fallen perspective, which, without trapping Eve in an
anachronism that makes her sinfulness inevitable, foreshadows the
loss of sexual innocence at the Fall.

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For the purposes of my argument, this passage is important
because it is symptomatic of a wider set of associations between
modesty, restraint, naturalism, and artifice that we see elsewhere and
later in eighteenth-century culture. When Milton uses the adjective
modest in Samson Agonistes (1671), it is once again to describe a woman
whose appearance is as a veil, signifying virtue while potentially
concealing something else. Speaking of Delilah, after she has betrayed
Samson, the Chorus says:
Seeming at first all heavenly under virgin veil,
Soft, modest, meek, demure,
Once join’d, the contrary she proves, a thorn
Intestin, far within defensive arms
A cleaving mischief [.] (1035-39)
Modesty is here very explicitly cast as a deception which is assumed,
part of the feigning of female innocence. Milton was clearly worried
about this aspect of female behaviour. In The Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce (1643), a tract advocating the radical reform of the laws
prohibiting divorce, Milton had cautioned his readers to be aware of
the false allure of modest demeanour: “who knows not that the
bashfull mutenes of a virgin may oft-times hide all the unlivelines &
naturall sloth which is really unfit for conversation” (249). Milton’s tone
here and the voice of the Chorus in Samson Agonistes betray a
profound suspicion of female behaviour, and of the construction of
virtue. The unwary male can be tricked into the false appearance of
modesty. In this context, modesty might be seen as part of a wider
vocabulary of misogynistic criticism, the fear that women might not
be as faithful, beautiful, or transparent as they seem on the surface.
Nowadays we use the phrase “false modesty” to describe
behaviour which, by appearing self-effacing, is actually calculated to
attract attention and acclaim. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, false modesty meant feigned virtue, something that was far
more morally threatening. In A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the
Present Corruption of Christians (1700), a translation from the French
of the Swiss Protestant pastor Jean Frédéric Ostervald, “false Modesty”
is invoked as one of the mainstays of sinful behaviour among the
faithful (165). It is “that Shame, which hinders Men to do that which
they know to be their Duty,” and it stems from the vanity of men
striving to maintain their reputations in society: “The true Cause then

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of this false Modesty, is a feeble regard to Mens Judgment, and a fear
of falling under their Contempt or Hatred” (166, 168).
Ostervald’s work suggests that – for men at least – the performance
of false modesty is an effective safeguard against the condemnation
of others, since “few People love or practise” Christian virtues in
contemporary society (168). For women, however, the performance
of modesty is far more strongly associated with sexual virtue, and
more open to suspicion. The fourth and final definition of modesty in
Johnson’s dictionary conveys the gendered meaning of the word,
defining it as “[c]hastity; purity of manners” (2: 16Q2v). Each of the
three quotations Johnson provides to illustrate this sense relate to
women, and the first is an indictment of false modesty:
Would you not swear,
All you that see her, that she were a maid,
By these exterior shews? But she is more,
Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.
Of all the modesty in literary history, Samuel Johnson has chosen an
instance in which once again, modesty is about appearance – false
appearance. The quotation comes from Shakespeare’s Much Ado
About Nothing (c.1598-99; printed 1600), and is part of Claudio’s
speech interrupting his own marriage service to denounce Hero, his
bride, as a whore (4.2.36-40). The whole scene is about the underlying
carnality of women, the possibility that they can seem, and yet not be,
virtuous. How does anyone really know what lies beneath a modest
demeanour? Hero’s defence of her “maiden modesty” goes unheard
in the onslaught of Claudio’s accusations, and the sign of modesty,
her blushing, is interpreted as guilt (4.2.179).
The examples, from Much Ado and from Milton, betray an unease
about the possibility of female trickery, the notion that modest
behaviour might bely a voracious sexual appetite, or “a cleaving
mischief.” Examples from Milton and Johnson echo this sense of
concern about the dissimulation of modesty, defined as sexual virtue.
In one of his Sermons to Young Women (1766), the celebrated preacher
James Fordyce warns that among women the “more accomplished
ensnarers” are not those who behave without decency or shame, but
those who pretend to virtue:
[I]t must be owned, there are those of them [young women] who,
[…] without any remains of natural modesty, yet practise the art of
feigning its decent demeanour; […] In this instance, no doubt, […]

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the operations of Nature may be counteracted by violence, and her
most speaking features silenced by dissimulation. (1: 101-02)
But not everyone thought that this acting out of modesty was a
bad thing. In the advice literature of the later eighteenth century we
can also see a more pragmatic approach to the adoption of a modest
behaviour. The Polite Lady: or, a Course of Female Education (1760)
was a popular pedagogical handbook in epistolary form. Written by
Charles Allen, it was published with the fictitious claim to be a
collection of letters exchanged by a mother and her daughter at
school. Allen’s considerate mother devotes one of her later letters to a
discussion of modesty, which she defines as a performance that makes
Modesty, my Dear, is the outward expression of a pure and chaste
mind: and therefore, every word you speak, every action you perform,
every gesture of your body, every look of your eyes, every part of
your dress; in fine, every thing, by which the inward dispositions of
the mind can be expressed and discovered, comes under the regulation
of this virtue. (213)
In practice, however, she acknowledges that modesty is just as much
about maintaining decorum on the surface as it is about revealing the
substance of a “pure and chaste mind”:
But, my Dear, modesty regards not only the matter of your
conversation, but also the manner of it; not only what you say, but
likewise how you say it. And, indeed, this is such an essential part
of modesty, that it frequently appears more visibly in the manner of
expressing a thing, than in the nature of the thing itself. (213-14)
She then goes on to give some very specific instructions on how to
convey modesty in speech and gesture:
Nothing, my Dear, is more inconsistent with modesty, than to talk
with a loud, shrill, and harsh tone of voice. This is very unbecoming,
even in a man, but much more in a woman […] ’Tis the duty of a
young lady to talk with an air of diffidence, as if she proposed what
she said, rather with a view to receive information herself, than to
inform and instruct the company. (214-15)
She moves on to gestures, another important signifier of modesty:
[Modesty] is expressed by a certain decent, graceful, and composed
gesture, equally removed from the pert and forward air of impu-
dence on the one hand, and the aukward and clumsy gait of

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sheepishness on the other: and to teach you this graceful gait, ought
to be the principal, if not the only end of dancing. (216)
According to this conduct book, modesty is about how you look,
how you speak, how you convey your ideas (or not!) and how you
dance. The idea that modesty is a form of learnt behaviour, a guise
under which to seem virtuous or moderate is not exclusive to discussions
of female or sexual behaviour. Most critics who have studied the notion
of modesty in this period have focussed almost exclusively on female
modesty.2 But modesty was also important in the understanding of
social identity and social performance in general, and we find a lot of
discussion of the role of modesty in speaking, acting and writing. So,
for example, in An Essay on Criticism, Pope’s early ars poetica in
which he establishes a series of Horatian precepts by which to judge
literature, one of the most important qualifications for being a critic is
modesty. He defines it in the following terms:
Be silent always when you doubt your Sense;
And speak, tho’ sure, with seeming Diffidence. (566-67)
“Seeming diffidence” is a good way of describing the role of modesty
here. Pope’s injunction to “speak […] with seeming Diffidence” also
forms a precedent for The Polite Lady’s advice to “talk with an air of
diffidence.”3 This performance of self-restraint inherent in modesty was
not merely applicable to secular and social contexts. In his liturgical
handbook The Sublime Reader (1784), the Reverend John Trusler
provides instruction for worshippers in how to understand and participate
in church services. Good conduct begins at the church door:
Your Entrance into Church should be humble, modest, quiet and
sedate; remembering, you are treading upon hallowed ground, and
in the presence of a Superior Being, who truly examines into the
minutest parts of our conduct. (8)
Modesty was a social performance designed to convince others
that one was virtuous, but also something to adopt for the inspection
of an all-seeing God. Just as in Paradise Lost Milton described Eve in
2. For discussions of ideas of modesty in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
culture, see Yeazell and O’Brien.
3. Pope’s poetic maxims translated easily into advice genres – a quotation from
Pope’s “Epistle to Cobham” also appears on the title page of The Polite Lady: “ ’Tis
Education forms the tender Mind, / Just as the Twig is bent, the Tree’s inclin’d”
(“Epistle to Cobham” 101-02).

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Paradise using language that could easily be construed as impure, so
Trusler recommends that worshippers adopt a manner in church that
could be seen as affected. Yet neither writer was advocating feigning
innocence, but rather, bringing impure language and imperfect modesty
into contexts where more innocent forms of language and modesty
could be imagined, though not fully achieved.
What all these examples of modesty, innate and assumed, male and
female, show is that there is a tension in the understanding of the
concept of modesty in this period, which centres on the idea of
naturalism and restraint. On the one hand, modesty is about the
suppression of natural urges, passions, and ambitions. It is about
veiling ambition in seeming diffidence; adopting a reserve which gives
no hint of passion; voicing one’s deeply felt arguments and ideas in
moderate and measured ways.
Yet on the other hand, modesty was also seen as profoundly
natural, in contrast to the excesses of artifice. Shakespeare was crucial
here, since the touchstone for this version of modesty in the eighteenth
century was the repeated invocation throughout the period of Hamlet’s
advice to the players to “o’erstep not the modesty of nature.” Having
derided the excessive roaring and gesturing of actors capable of
“o’erdoing” even the most haranguing characters, Hamlet continues:
Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit
the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special
observance – that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. (3.2.16-19)
In this passage, modesty is understood as natural behaviour and
appearance, as opposed to the excesses and distortions of exaggerated
acting styles. This quotation was cited again and again by eighteenth-
century readers, who drew from it a sense of naturalism. They linked
it to propriety of characterisation, of speaking and acting.
The resonances of the passage can be seen in the official souvenir
engraving for the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769.
The piece was created with the consent of the festival’s presiding
genius, David Garrick, and modelled on a portrait which Garrick
commissioned from Thomas Gainsborough in the Jubilee year. It
shows the great actor-manager propping himself familiarly against a
pedestal, on which sits a bust of Shakespeare and an inscribed scroll.
Garrick gestures open-handed towards the inscription on the scroll,

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Isaac Taylor, “Garrick with Shakespearean Characters,
Commemorating the Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1769” (1769)
Reproduced with permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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which is also inscribed on the engraving itself: “o’er step not the
modesty of Nature.” On the left, a group of Shakespearean characters,
including Ophelia and Sir John Falstaff, pay attention as Garrick
presents Hamlet’s dictum. Given the prominence in this engraving of
Hamlet’s advice not to “o’er step” proper bounds, it is ironic that all
of its figures are seen in a complex exchange of roles. Hamlet’s
instruction is presented as a decree from Shakespeare himself. Garrick,
meanwhile, delivers Hamlet’s admonition not to his fellow actors, as
might be expected, but to an audience of characters who appear to
have stepped directly out of the eighteenth century’s collective
Shakespearean imagination. Finally, as Michael Dobson explains,
Garrick’s posture enables him to speak for Shakespeare himself, not
simply as an actor delivering lines but also as an adapter of
Shakespeare’s texts: “Garrick, speaking for the ghostly author, is Prince,
Shakespeare’s characters merely the Players, for whom Garrick thus
attains the authority to set down and insert as many speeches of some
dozen or sixteen lines as he pleases” (171). Garrick’s apparent advocacy
of the modesty of naturalistic acting can thus be seen as an assertion
of his own authority to “o’er step” the role of actor and become
Shakespeare’s editor and executor.
One of the contexts for understanding the great interest in Hamlet’s
words in this period was the elocution movement of the 1760s and
70s, and the upsurge of enthusiasm for learning to read out loud. Of
course, rhetoric had a long and well documented history, and was the
subject of numerous treatises from the Sophists onwards. What
happened in the mid-eighteenth century, however, was that ideas about
delivery and linguistic effect were repackaged in more accessible forms
for aspirational audiences eager to acquire skills of self-improvement.
Reading out a written text became a popular art form, hobby, spectator
sport, subject of academic enquiry, and topic of satire. As book after
book was churned out for eager readers and orators, Hamlet was on
hand to give advice. In William Enfield’s The Speaker (1774), an
anthology for students of elocution which achieved wide popularity in
Britain and America, would-be orators and readers-aloud are told to
follow Hamlet’s stricture, whether their passions are simulated from
life or from the theatre:
accustom yourself either to follow the great original itself, or the
best copies you meet with, always however, “with this special obser-
vance, that you O’ERSTEP NOT THE MODESTY OF NATURE.”
(xxiv-xxv)

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John Raithby, the anonymous author of an epistolary manual for
trainee lawyers, The Study and Practice of the Law Considered (1798),
urges the recipient of his letters to present himself with confidence,
“which, if not permitted to overstep the modesty of nature, produces
no unpleasing effect” (82). Samuel Johnson’s great praise of Joseph
Addison’s essays in his Life of Addison (1781) is that “He never
‘outsteps the modesty of nature,’ nor raises merriment or wonder by
the violation of truth” (2: 677).
Modesty was not just about speaking and writing, and but
extended to other aesthetic values. The Scottish judge and philanthropist
Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone, embarked on a European tour in
his old age and published an account of his travels in the 1790s. In it,
he described a visit to the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome,
where he saw Michelangelo’s marble statue of Moses:
Though I cannot much relish those collossal figures, which exceed
the limits of truth; and to use Shakespeare’s expression, “Overstep
the modesty of nature”; yet I could not help admiring the boldness
of execution, and the striking expression of authority and
displeasure conveyed in the figure and features of this remarkable
statue. (3: 137)
In her preface to the Countess of Dellwyn (1759), Sarah Fielding
shows how novelists more widely linked Hamlet’s notion of acting in
accordance with the limits of what is natural and real with their own
project of the accurate construction of realistic fictional characters:
If the Word Writing was substituted instead of Playing, the Speech
in general would be full as applicable to the Author as the Player;
and when the former deviates from the Paths of Nature, in either
stopping short of her Mark, or wildly running beyond the Limits she
prescribes, it is natural for the Reader, as well as for the Spectator at
the Theatre, to join with Hamlet in his Observation, that “Some of
Nature’s Journeymen have made Men, and not made them well;
they imitate Humanity so abominably.” (1: viii-ix; the quotation
from Hamlet refers to 3.2.32-34)
There is profound irony in all of these quotations of Hamlet, and
of his advice. The first irony is that Hamlet’s words come from his
advice to the players – that is, he is telling the actors how to pretend
to be real. So the source is itself about feigning naturalism. And the
second, related, irony, is that all the examples listed here are also
about projections of identity: they are about the way one should

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perform when speaking lines in the drawing room, or the court room;
they are about how one should construct characters in a novel; or
about how Michelangelo should make his statues. So they are using a
fictional character, who is giving fictional actors advice on how to
seem more real, and they are using this advice to illustrate how
people or writers or artists should act modestly in order to seem more
authentic. The layers of meta-fiction, or perhaps it is meta-modesty,
are bewilderingly complex. So we return full circle to the idea that
modesty is a form of dissimulation, and that it is only by artfully
dissimulating modesty that one can hope to appear “natural.”
What this short history of modesty shows is that all these terms,
which seem to be in antithesis with one another – passion and
restraint, or naturalism and artifice – are all, in fact, dependent on one
another. Modesty in speech and conduct depends on excess for its
meaning and value. Modesty is associated with nature, but naturalism
in self-presentation, or artistic creation, depend on the artificial
dissimulation of modesty. I have shown here that modest and modesty
are key terms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are
very useful terms, because they imply a sense of balance that can be
translated into all kinds of different arenas. So we have seen how the
word modest is useful as a way of suggesting rhetorical moderation; it
is a key – and for many, the main – quality of female virtue, somewhere
between coquettishness and prudishness. And it was also important to
the understanding of self-projection and social performance. Yet in
each one of these contexts, what we see is an acknowledgement, or
sometimes an anxiety, that this virtue which was so often called
innate or natural, was in many ways an act of dissimulation. Modesty
was a virtue that was all about perception and performance – and that
made it vulnerable to claims that it was nothing more than surface
appearance. This is something we see coming through very strongly, for
example, in Milton’s treatment of modesty. But the very importance
of the appearance of modesty, the idea that it was something which
could be performed, became increasingly useful in an era of such
self-consciousness about how to act, and how to improve oneself.
Modesty was both a profoundly serious criterion for understanding
moral, aesthetic, political and social conduct in this period – and also
a meaningless cliché, something that everyone talked about, and no
one did. This sense of the link between modesty being everywhere

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and nowhere leads, in conclusion, to an epigram quoted by Alexander
Pope in the second edition of The Dunciad Variorum (1729). Pope
writes of James Moore Smythe who had plagiarised his work:
M–re always smiles whenever he recites;
He smiles (you think) approving what he writes;
And yet in this no Vanity is shown;
A modest man may like what's not his own. (3: 2.46, note)
Abigail WILLIAMS
St Peter’s College, University of Oxford
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