Answer:

This is a super interesting question! As you can imagine, there have ALWAYS been things that codgers complain about, and they all are pretty much the same as today.

In the 1700s, for example, instead of internet/cell phones, it was the new availability of shocking new "fictional" or "romantic" books; instead of "W.A.P." people complained about the indecency of the waltz and how "close" you were to your partner; instead of laptops "ruining" books and kids not knowing how to write, people complained bitterly about the coarsening of the discourse; and complaints about the "ridiculous fashions" of the young people have never stopped!

To give a few examples:

BOOKS:

We think of "book publishing" as starting with the Gutenberg Press in the 1500's. But for quite a long time, all early published materials were Bibles, or religious in nature.

So you picked a very interesting period--the 1700s, exactly when publishing became more commonly available, and with it, "common" books. (The first known "romance" was published in 1740 (Samuel Richardson’s "Pamela – or Virtue Rewarded") and was followed by numerous others, culminating in the works of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, all 18th 19th century novelists.)

ETA: other "scandalous" novels of the 1700s included: "Tristram Shandy," by Laurence Sterne (1759–67), " Gulliver’s Travels," by Jonathan Swift (1726, 1735), "Clarissa" by Samuel Richardson (1747–48). "Candide," by Voltaire (1759), and, of course, "Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding (1749)--definitely a very lusty, "corrupting" book!

Conservative, fusty old men fulminated endlessly about the "corruption" of young minds with these "trashy" fictional works:

Here is a Reverend Enos Hitchcock in 1790:

*"The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?"*^(1)

Here is an English professor explaining why women, in particular, were criticized for reading novels: Barbara M. Benedict, an English professor who has written on “Northanger Abbey,” told Op-Talk. *“Novel reading for women was associated with inflaming of sexual passions; with liberal, radical ideas; with uppityness; with the attempt to overturn the status quo.”*^(2)

DANCES/MUSIC

Likewise, dancing, with its sexual overtones, was always a target of judgmental prudes. This quote comes from a tiny bit later, but is reflective of the "old people" in the 1700's:

*"The indecent foreign dance called the 'Waltz' was introduced ... at the English Court on Friday last ... It is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies ... to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females ... [Now that it is] forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion."*^(3)

FASHION

And, as always, people complained about the way the young people dressed! Here's an angry letter to the editor in 1771 upon seeing frivolously dressed young men:

"Whither are the manly vigor and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt ..."^(4)

And at around the same time, young men dressed incredibly elaborately and called themselves "macaronis" (this also explains the odd line in "Yankee Doodle"!); entire magazines were devoted to mocking them!

*"You may know a Macaroni when you come near him by his essences and scented waters; and if your sense of smelling is not very acute, you may discover him by seeing everything about him most extravagantly outre. His hat, like his understanding, is very little .... He has generally a good quantity of hair- and if he has not ... he borrows it from his neighbours. His coat slouches down behind, and reaches just far enough to cover his hind parts. His breeches are usually very large and roomy ... But his manners are still more strange than his dress. He is the sworn foe of learning ... and yet the creature affects some of the fine arts. He attends at auctions where he picks up the names of painters and vomits them forth on all occasions. He affects a rapturous taste for music and is continually humming in Piano. If you see him at the theatre he will scarce wink without his opera-glasses."*^(5)

And of course, woman have ALWAYS been judged by crotchety old men. When hoop skirts came into fashion, in the early 1700's, they offered women more freedom and more ventilation. But oh, my, the judgment! In 1741, a writer allowed himself to say:

*"...be it sufficient, that it was well known that many Ladies, who wore 'hoops' of the greatest Circumference were not of the most impregnable Virtue"*^(6)

and then continued with a sentiment that's all too familiar to modern women:

*"I know no other argument should sooner prevail with [women] than to acquaint them it is a Mode very disagreeable to the Men in general"*^(6)

In short, it was pretty much the same as always, but the specifics were different!

​

^(1) from "Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family," Enos Hitchcock, 1790

^(2)Barbara M. Benedict, an English professor who has written on “Northanger Abbey,” as quoted in "When Novels Were Bad For You," article by Anna North in the New York Times, Sept. 14, 2014

^(3) from an 1816 issue of the Times of London, as quoted in "The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances: Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19th and 20th century" by Mark Knowles, Macfarland & Co., 1999

^(4) A letter written to Town and Country Magazine in 1771, as quoted in "Paris Fashion, A Cultural History," by Valerie Steele, Bloomsbury USA, 2017

^(5) From October 1772 issue of "The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure," periodical published in London (1747–1814) by John Hinton and W. Bent

^(6)From the "London Magazine, article titled ""the Modern Hoop Petticoat," as quoted by author Kimberly Chrisman in "Unhoop the Fair Sex: the Campaign Against the Hoop Petticoat in Eighteenth-Century England," published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Fall, 1996), The Johns Hopkins University Press

What we now call the Enclosure Movement. Between the abolition of serfdom and the Enclosure Movement, peasant farmers in England were effectively tenants of the manor lord who paid rents and/or quitrents (goods or services) in exchange for being able to farm the land, and this tenancy was effectively heritable (through payment of a fee), though it usually amounted to subsistence farming. After the Black Death scourged the population, though, individual peasants controlled more land as plots consolidated and gained more economic and political power vis-a-vis the landowners. The landowners realized they would do better for themselves if they kept all the produce of the land themselves and simply paid wages to laborers instead of accepting fixed rents and letting the peasants have the rest, so by various means - Acts of Parliament (being necessary to override the customary rights of manorial tenants), trading or swindling, and in many cases outright fraud - they ended the traditional relationships that manor peasants had to the land. In some cases this was even sought by the tenants: if they had customary rights to a large amount of land it may have made sense for them to convert it to a leasehold and hire laborers themselves.

In any event, this gradually ended subsistence farming in England and replaced it with more centrally managed^(1) agricultural work, which displaced a large number of former peasant farmers, and a number of English writers in the 16th and 17th centuries, including no less than Thomas More, decried the decline of numerous villages as enclosure displaced their inhabitants and drove many into poverty. A number of riots and revolts took place, and enclosure was one of the causes of the English Civil War: the landowners of Parliament supported enclosure because it enriched them, while the King opposed it because it strengthened Parliament. Politically, it also contributed to the rise of "rotten" boroughs that became a major topic of Parliamentary reform in the 19th century.

^(1) Also more efficient, both in terms of surpluses and profit. The agricultural revolution probably couldn't have happened without the Enclosure Movement, and the increasing number of landless, displaced peasants was influential in providing the underskilled labor class that drove the industrial revolution.