Regency Cool

In their book Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude , Dick Pountain and David Robins define Cool as “an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express defiance to authority - whether that of the parent, the teacher, the police, the boss or the prison warden.” More pithily, Cool is “a permanent state of private rebellion.”

It’s permanent because it’s not a phase but “something that if attained remains for life” (think Mick Jagger) and private because it’s “not a collective political response but a stance of individual defiance, which does not announce itself in strident slogans but conceals its rebellion behind a mask of ironic passivity.”

Pountain and Robins confine their examination to the development of Cool since the 1950s, but the attitude has some earlier manifestations. Virginia Woolf’s description of Regency-era dandy “King” Beau Brummell highlights the connection:

“That was his style, flickering, sneering, hovering on the verge of insolence, skimming the edge of nonsense, but always keeping within some curious mean.”

The edge of nonsense is best captured by Hazlitt’s example: Brummell spent some considerable time wondering which was his favorite leg. And he perfected a trick - no doubt by standing in front of a mirror for practice - of opening a snuff box with one hand.

But it’s the “hovering on the verge of insolence” that’s most closely connected with Cool. Brummell was one of the the Prince Regent’s entourage, but fell out during partly because of Brummell’s popularity. The Prince took offense during an event a Belvoir Castle in 1799, when Brummell was mistaken for the prince himself. Brummell made the most of the mistake. At another event, the Prince snubbed Brummell, prompting the latter to turn to the host and ask who his “fat friend” (ie, the Prince) was. As Roger Sales notes, “The question is a perfect example of the minimalism that both amused and exasperated Hazlitt. The Prince is cast as an obscure gatecrasher . . . . He has no identity other than as a hanger-on.”

Jane Austen knew the type, and Sales makes a good case that Henry Crawford of Mansfield Park is a dandy who excretes the air of Regency Cool. When Edmund asks him whether he knew he had ventured onto the estate of Thornton Lacey during a hunting trip, Henry answers, “No, I never inquire. But I told a man mending a hedge that it was Thornton Lacey, and he agreed to it.” Sales remarks, “Like Brummell, [Henry] fashions his conversation into exquisite little mirrors to reflect his own sense of superiority.”

Henry’s gestures also identify him as a dandy. In response to Edmund’s praise of his reading of Shakespeare, Henry makes “a bow of mock gravity.” He conforms to the standards of polite behavior, but hovers at the edge of insolence by mocking the gesture as he makes it. He bows twice to Sir Thomas’s speech about clerical pluralism, again conforming to the standard but hovering “on the dividing line between social poise and theatrical pose. The second bow mocks the propriety of the first. Henry hovers, like Brummell, on the very of insolence.”