This study describes, for the first time, the development of an ethic and aesthetic of tact in nineteenth-century Britain. It pursues three main aims through this description: to re-evaluate the assumptions and methods of the study of nineteenth-century sociability; to provide and explicate an aesthetic basis for a theory of liberalism; and to make a case for the cultural centrality and distinctive formal techniques of the under-studied essay form.

Tact as a social practice is an invention of the nineteenth century. In 1814, an article in the British Critic deemed tact a “cant word of the present day”; by the middle of the century, it had been fully incorporated into everyday language. The sense of the word moved from politesse to politics; no longer the prerogative of an elite, it became the basis of a democratic sociability. Tact is a literary style. I show how the post Johnsonian, post Addisonian essay performs the practice of tact and, in the process, I make the case for the cultural centrality of this under-studied genre. It is a style that responds to the period’s mounting social pressures: to urbanization, industrialization, population growth and political reform. At a time when people were living in closer proximity than ever before, and among ever more different people, tactful essays proposed a new mode of “feeling one’s way” in society. They did this by insisting on the recognition of the sensuous aesthetic experience of every social subject. The romantic essayists first raised this insistence, and their experiential ethos formed the basis of an “aesthetic liberalism” in the nineteenth century, in the work of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. Aesthetic liberalism sought both to complement and to challenge what Stefan Collini has termed the “manly” liberalism of procedural conflict and rational consensus associated with the work of John Stuart Mill.

The essay provides a fresh approach to nineteenth-century sociability because it does not, like a novel, represent society mimetically, but rather performs tact as a relational mode that responds to the ethical, aesthetic and political demands of modern democratic life. My study overcomes the fatigued binary of appreciation against suspicion and challenges the conventional wisdom that the study of sociability must reveal underlying power relations in ordinary personal interactions.