His private letters said what everyone else was thinking. Getting ahead isn't about grace, honour, and tolerance, but learning how to play people. Luckily, he was dead when they published such scandalous advice. His impoverished daughter in law who had been driven to publish Lord Chesterfield's letters unfortunately... was not.

TRANSCRIPT:
Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son, was an instant hit and a game changer for the conduct genre. The letters were private, and because they were private they were intimate, open, and honest. And as a result, publishing the book led to two things: a scandal for Eugenia, and a new social threat for polite society.
The conduct genre was a big industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth century with advice on morals, manners, and etiquette. Lord Chesterfield’s own mother had been the subject of a conduct book, Advice to a Daughter, written by her father. But Lord Chesterfield wasn’t writing a book for publication, he was giving his son an aristocratic cheat sheet for success. There is a LOT of vague talk about morals and how to be the perfect gentleman. But it’s lip service. Most of the actual instructions about how to be successful are about playing the game, manipulating situations to your advantage, and playing dumb.