There is a remarkable distance between sophistication in Ann Radcliffe and sophistication inThe New Yorker. Disparaged and distrusted in 1791, it is, by 1930, something to aspire to. By what mysterious process did this change occur? Somewhere in the nineteenth century, it appears, the earlier meanings of sophistication – ‘falsification’, ‘specious fallacy’, ‘disingenuous alteration or perversion’, ‘adulteration’, according to theOxford English Dictionary– were superseded by quite other definitions: ‘worldly wisdom or experience, subtlety, discrimination, refinement’. TheOEDtidily dates this shift to 1850. But the change, of course, was neither sudden nor complete. Indeed, the earlier and the more...

Sophistication is, seemingly, incompatible with Romanticism. The setting of sophistication is usually thought to be the metropolis; that of Romanticism, the countryside or wilderness. The sophisticate’s emphasis on style, wit, urbanity and polish is not easily reconciled either with the idealisation of sentiment and sensibility in the fiction of the later eighteenth century, or with the idealisation of innocence and naturalness in much Romantic poetry. The sentimental or Gothic heroine, the innocent child, and the shepherds and vagrants of Romantic pastoral are alike representative of unsophistication. A good example is Miss Walton in Henry Mackenzie’s novelThe Man of Feeling...

‘Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore’ (105) says Lord Illingworth in Oscar Wilde’sA Woman of No Importance(1893).¹ Earnestness is one of the central ideas which historians and critics use to explain the distinctiveness of nineteenth-century Britain; as John Kucich notes, ‘a momentous inflation of the cultural cachet of honesty took place in Victorian England’ (6). In this context, sophistication – with its connotations of performance, polish, even deceit – might seem even more incongruous than it had done in the era of Romanticism. But Kucich argues that...

If there has ever been an Age of Sophistication, it was surely the 1920s and 1930s. I begin with a defining image from that era: Coward and Gertrude Lawrence inPrivate Lives(1930) (Figure 2). For audiences in 1930, this image – or this play as a whole – would have suggested sophistication because of its modernity. Amanda’s extreme modernness consists in her smoking (still a rebellious act for a woman),¹ her bobbed hair, and her peculiar situation in relation to her two husbands. The scene also suggests luxury (the silk jacket, the expensive items for consumption) and has a very poised,...

In 1950, T. H. White wrote at the beginning ofThe Age of Scandal: ‘Well, we have lived to see the end of civilization in England. I was once a gentleman myself’ (9). He goes on, with a mixture of archness and conviction, to measure the modern age against an idealised past:

I believe that the peak of British culture was reached in the latter years of George II: that the rot began to set in with the ‘Romantics’: that the apparent prosperity of Victoria’s reign was autumnal, not vernal: and that now we are done for. [...] I have...

In 1995, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a winter series of dramas titled ‘Season of Romance’, and the play featured on Christmas Day was Coward’sPrivate Lives, starring Stephen Fry and Imogen Stubbs. Sheridan Morley introduced it, and began by recalling 1969, when he was writing the first biography of Coward. He had asked him ‘how often he now thought back to the great defining success of his career,Private Lives’, and to Gertrude Lawrence, who had been dead for nearly twenty years:

‘How often do I remember her?’ Noël echoed, looking as though I had asked him if he was...