Paul Goring demonstrates how eighteenth-century writers and performers, including Samuel Richardson, David Garrick and Laurence Sterne, were involved in the construction of innovative bourgeois ideals of sentimental eloquence in contrast to more patrician, classical bodily modes. Spanning oratory, theatre and the novel, Goring charts the growing links between bodily eloquence and the wider formalities of politeness to reveal a cultural contest concerning the appropriate forms of physical expression.