“Love Is the Foundation of All Our Duties to Others”: Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Print World as a Social and Political Project, 1839–60

While the 1853 courtesy guide, the Manual de urbanidad y buenas maneras, by Venezuelan Manuel Antonio Carreño (1813-1874), has become iconic across the Spanish-speaking world, much less is known about Carreño’s work as a journalist, translator, printer, educator and book-seller. Building on analysis of Carreño’s publications and bookstore lists, this paper argues that Carreño imagined a community (to echo Benedict Anderson) based on mutual respect and mutual obligation, peopled with citizens who understood their social duties and position, living in a nation in which arts and industry alike could flourish. A teacher, school director and father, Carreño used print pedagogically, to offer readers guidance for their individual behaviour while explicitly connecting those personal choices to an improved society for everyone. As a book-seller, he stocked books in Spanish, French and English that offered readers imagined encounters with other people, places, ideas and times. He thus offered a detailed map for individual behaviour, respectful co-existence and tolerance for others which would, in his opinion, improve the nation. While dreaming of a cohesive society of radical politeness within a hierarchy based on age, gender, experience and role, Carreño lived in a country in which only about ten percent of the population were eligible to vote, uprisings mattered as much for political power as elections, slavery was still legal (until 1854) and the press was restricted. But Venezuela’s very existence, out of the recent independence wars, proved transformation was possible. Building on James Sanders’s findings, this paper situates Carreño’s political, social and individual vision within urgent debates about increasing political participation, new types of social relationships and cultural modernity that also characterised the period. Through his print world, including his Manual de urbanidad, Carreño conjured up a new society and promised readers that they could contribute to its success.