Examines nineteenth century etiquette books to determine what manners were like during the period, and looks at their connection with class, ideology, and behavior.

This book is a groundbreaking study of etiquette in the nineteenth century when the success of etiquette books reached unprecedented heights in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. It positions etiquette as a fully-fledged theoretical concept within the fields of politeness studies and historical pragmatics. After tracing the origin of etiquette back to Spanish court protocol, the analysis takes a novel approach to key aspects of etiquette: its highly coercive and intricate scripts; the liminal rituals of social gatekeeping; the fear for blunders; the obsession with precedence. Interrogating the complex relationship between historical etiquette and adjacent notions of politeness, conduct, morality, convention, and ritual, the study prompts questions on gender stereotyping and class privilege surrounding the present-day etiquette revival. Through adopting a unique comparative approach and a corpus-based methodology this study seeks to revitalise our understandings of etiquette. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as those in neighbouring fields such as literary criticism, gender studies and family life, domestic and urban spaces.

Americans have traveled a far piece since Goody Randall climbed over the back of a Bay Colony pew in defense of her social position, or a frontier Congressman tried to eat the doilies at a White House dinner, or, more recently, since the adjustable Emily Post interpreted the social law on whether a lady’s maid could appear in bobbed hair. (She could not!) With unfailing scholarship, great good humor and occasional overtones of irony when snobbery raises its ugly nose, Gerald Carson here portrays the journey of American manners through shifting tastes and customs in regards to weddings, dances, hair styles, drinking, dueling, dress, smoking, the telephone, the automobile, the rise of the country club and the history of the fraternal lodge, among hundreds of topics. There is much of special interest to citizens of Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and many other cities. There is a full chapter on manners in the nation’s capital as well as one on books of etiquette. The author’s emphasis is upon the middle class, the mainstream of America’s national life, rather than Society with the capital S. This field has been plowed a good many times, while Mr. Carson’s area is almost untouched. His central theme is the reaching out of the American man and woman for self-improvement and a life of some grace. Citizens of the United States are still free to become, as the late Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger pointed out, as unequal as they can.