have friendsLearning of the world and courtly sociability in Lord Chesterfield' Letters to his son
Keywords:
Lord Chesterfield, nobility, courts, politics, good mannersCopyright (c) 2022 Javier Laspalas Pérez
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The letters written by Lord Chesterfield to his natural son, Philip Standhope, with the purpose of helping him to become a prominent politician, are justly famous, but their content has not yet been studied with adequate attention and depth. Furthermore, they reveal striking and important aspects of the aristocratic education and mentality, but historians have not considered them from this perspective. This article focuses on the image of courtly life painted in such letters, similar to the one previously drawn by Gracián, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère. However, the discourse is more explicit and the questions are posed with openness and crude realism.
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