’Tis Better to Give: The Conduct Manual as Gift

Abstract

Authors of the long eighteenth century often called their texts gifts, signaling authorial largesse (for the text is within the author’s gift, to invoke the manorial metaphor) and intent (by positioning the recipient to acknowledge the text as a gift).¹ Such compelled recognition attempted to trigger obligation to the author and generate a textual response. Among gift texts, none defined the desired recipient response as clearly as conduct manuals, for through the advocacy of specific behaviors they made the dynamics of gift exchange transparent. Some conduct manuals invoked the gift in their titles: most famously the Marquis of Halifax’s The Lady’s New Year’s Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), and also lesser, anonymous works like The Brother’s Gift; or, the Naughty Girl Reformed (1775) and The Father’s Gift: or the Way to be Wise and Happy (1794). Although many conduct manuals did not state their status as gifts, their production and circulation suggests that they functioned as gifts nonetheless. By evaluating the women’s conduct manual as a gift, I will pursue two parallel arguments in this essay. First, the narratives of the conduct-manual gift reveal that gift exchange was a highly variable phenomenon, despite the expectations articulated by the gift. Second, while the ideology of women’s conduct manuals tends to be consistent, there are significant distinctions amongst these works, which reflect the conditions of production, textual transmission, and the anticipated response.