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by Henry Hitchings

  English taciturnity was matched by a dislike of noise. This was supposed to be racial in origin. Paul Langford glosses the view then common: ‘The Gothic peoples of the sunless north were given to introverted brooding forced on them by their domestic isolation in an adverse climate.’ Sensitivity to noise was a way of demonstrating superiority. James Sully, a psychologist, wrote in 1878 that ‘The sufferings which afflict the sensitive ear in our noisy cities are largely due to the general dullness of people with respect to disagreeable sounds.’13 Among those exceptionally elevated above such dullness were Thomas Carlyle, who took refuge from crowing roosters and the shouts of street hawkers in a soundproof study, and the mathematician Charles Babbage, whose public outbursts over the noise made by organ-grinders caused his neighbours to terrorize him, breaking his windows and leaving dead cats on his doorstep.14

  Campaigners against noise associated it with crime, sickness and a distaste for the life of the mind. Their efforts embodied the middle-class Victorian zeal for collective action, and that zeal was often focused not just on curbing lawlessness, but on defining it. This was a period seized by a mania for legislation. For instance, the laws of association football were codified in 1863, converting a raucous, reckless pastime into a regulated activity and a means of shaping character. Football had long been associated with gratuitous aggression. In his immense history of the sport, The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt traces this, reproducing early on a proclamation issued by Edward II in 1314 about ‘certain tumults arising from great footballs in the fields’. The Victorians recognized that football could be something else: a means of teaching young people about co-operation. Sportsmanship was not exactly an invention of this period – it was as old as the ancient Olympics – but it thrived as compulsory games flourished in the new boarding schools, which espoused an ethos of vigorous amateurism. Sport was intended to keep violent instincts at bay, and football, once its codes were clear, could be ‘an instrument of Darwinian selection’ and a lesson in the healthiness of competition.15

  The Victorian appetite for legislation was evident in both the public and private spheres, and it extended to all departments of existence. There was nothing Victorian polite society liked more than having its ordinary beliefs packaged as nonpareils of wisdom. One man who excelled at this was Martin Tupper, a poet with a facility for grand-sounding proverbial philosophy. His books, now forgotten, were immensely popular; a tour of America and Canada in 1851 enlarged his reputation, and his platitudes, though they gave rise to the disapproving adjectives Tupperish and Tupperian, were treated by his many admirers as if they were the words of an oracle. ‘To join advantage to amusement, to gather profit with pleasure,’ he wrote in one of his poems, ‘Is the wise man’s necessary aim, when he lieth in the shade of recreation.’16 Tupper tapped into the Victorians’ enthusiasm for having their qualities itemized, labelled and sold back to them.

  The myth of idyllic domesticity, a product of the 1830s and 1840s, was an example of this. In the home it was possible to regulate life precisely. The disparity between the public and the private was emphasized, and the privacy of family life was treated as the true location of respectability. This idea was developed through a vast literature that made women the leading actors in the theatre of domestic life. Especially popular were the writings of Sarah Stickney Ellis, who in a succession of books defined the sphere of influence of women in middle-class families. One such work was The Wives of England (1843), in which she set out the duties of wives along with details of their ‘domestic influence’ and ‘social obligations’. She spoke of ‘the way to make others happy, and consequently to be happy ourselves’, and of the necessity ‘for all women to have learned to manage themselves, before undertaking the management of a household’. The essential principles of a well-run home were ‘order, justice, and benevolence’; its mistress ‘should appear calm … whether she feels so or not’ and should maintain this ‘by the mastery of judgement over impulse’.17

  Domestic virtue and domestic management were the unseen pillars of Empire. Rafts of magazines aimed at a female audience combined instruction in thrift with (mild) entertainment. Housekeeping was an area in which women, so often treated as passive or as if children, could exert real influence. On the first page of The Book of Household Management (1861), a splendidly decisive volume, Isabella Beeton declared that ‘As with the commander of an army … so it is with the mistress of a house.’18 But the robust tone of works in this vein could not conceal their basic emphasis on female sacrifice.

  Before Stickney Ellis, many of the publications aimed at young women were concerned with recreation. A representative example is The Young Lady’s Book of 1829. This offers guidance on moral deportment (uppermost are ‘piety, integrity, fortitude, charity, obedience, consideration, sincerity, prudence, activity, and cheerfulness’ – a sort of Ten Commandments) and the appreciation of flowers (‘A bunch of wild flowers is a gallery of landscapes’), as well as presentation (‘Jewellery should never be used to cover any imperfections of form in the neck’) and archery (in shooting, the arrow should be ‘brought not towards the eye, but the ear’). Stickney Ellis and the many others like her wrote of the lives of young women in terms that had little to do with personal amusement. In The Wives of England it is suggested that ‘young women should cultivate habits of attention to the public as well as the private affairs of the country in which they live, so far as to obtain a general knowledge of its laws and institutions.’ The correct use of such knowledge would allow them ‘to carry out the views of an enlightened legislature through … minor channels’.19

  One of the period’s key developments was a new emphasis on timekeeping. This was crucial on the railways and in factories. But it was also important at home, especially where meals were concerned. As more and more people had clocks in their homes and watches on their person (the watch, a luxury item until well into the nineteenth century, became a badge of solvency), exactness about time became the norm. However, openly checking one’s watch was considered impolite. A lady was expected to check the time behind a fan and to have the dial plate of her timepiece concealed within a case. Among the consequences of closer timekeeping was a greater arbitrariness about what were the right and wrong times for certain kinds of activity. Prescriptions about timing replaced an intuitive understanding of it. Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit, constantly fussing about the time, is a true Victorian.

  Sarah Stickney Ellis warned her readers that they should make a habit of ‘minute calculations upon the value and progress of time’, as ‘Every year, and month, and day, have their separate amount of responsibility.’20 It was necessary to be as careful about spending one’s time as one was about spending one’s money. Yet amid all this concern with precise timing, women of the upper classes were understood to have a great deal of leisure. Increasingly, they were able to socialize away from home. There were more places for the nineteenth-century woman to go, and she could go there more freely. In the second half of the century, the use of chaperones declined. The sheltered miss was still common, but the streets of large towns were full of unaccompanied women.

  The development of lunch as a social occasion was part of a broadening of what we might call ‘the public day’. This became noticeable in the 1860s. By the end of the century, lunch was established as a necessary part of a lady’s schedule – the beginning of the day’s sociability. Men were likely to lunch elsewhere, at clubs or taverns or restaurants. Although eating away from home has long been necessary, the restaurant has existed in Europe for not much more than 250 years, and in Britain it did not catch on till the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Only at evening engagements were men and women equally represented. Deference was a mechanism for preserving dignity in such situations. Historian Michael Curtin itemizes the three main types of deference paid to Victorian ladies: the right to be first or occupy the best places, the right to have their physical needs attended to, and the right to be introduced only to thos
e who had been carefully selected for the privilege. In each case this looked very much like the deference traditionally due to superiors, and ‘the deference paid to ladies superseded that given to superiors: in almost all cases a superior gentleman deferred to an inferior lady. He carried her packages, passed through doorways second, yielded her right of recognition after an introduction, etc.’21

  Even so, some of the mechanisms of deference, such as the bow and the curtsy, were in decline. Still required on formal occasions, they had otherwise given way to less theatrical greetings, and where curtsies were performed they were more economical – part curtsy, part bow. A Present for an Apprentice discoursed at some length about handshakes: ‘never receive the hand even of a stranger with coldness or suspicion’ and, in approaching another, ‘throw your kindling and gladdened eye right into his, and give him your hand at once without any preliminary flourish.’22 By the end of the century, books of etiquette had moved on and were giving details of when it was acceptable to ‘cut’ acquaintances (i.e. pretending not to recognize them).

  Alert to their readers’ liking for using first impressions to inform social judgements, Victorian etiquette writers tended to expatiate on linguistic faux pas. Purity of expression could quickly be measured, and was understood as a sign of moral purity and patriotic good character. But the ‘proper’ use of English was conceived in defensive terms rather than positive ones. In this vein Oliver Bell Bunce published in 1883 a manual entitled Don’t: A Manual of Mistakes and Improprieties More or Less Prevalent in Conduct and Speech. Bunce’s linguistic guidance consisted of injunctions such as ‘Don’t speak ungrammatically.’ More interesting than his remarks about improper language are his proscriptions about what one can do in public: ‘Don’t carry cane or umbrella in a crowd horizontally’, ‘Don’t smoke in the street, unless in unfrequented avenues’, ‘Don’t eat fruit or anything else in the public streets’, ‘Don’t be over-civil’ (‘haste to wait on others is over-civility’), ‘Don’t at any public entertainment make a move to leave the auditorium before the performance is over.’23 The trouble, as we all recognize, is that an instruction beginning with the word Don’t immediately has an effect that is the opposite of the one desired. Don’t think of a grey kitten.

  Saying ‘Don’t’ is an abrupt kind of censoriousness. The term we now inevitably associate with this kind of attitude is snob. Snobbishness is seen by foreigners as a peculiarly English ailment – and one that masquerades as a talent. The history of the word snob is worth unpacking. Originally a slang term for a cobbler or his apprentice, it had by the middle of the nineteenth century become a term for someone who was trying to advance socially (a businessman seeking to pass himself off as a gentleman). Yet by the end of the century, its sense had shifted and it denoted someone who on the basis only of background regarded himself as better than those of lower social rank. This was a striking inversion. Theodore Zeldin has observed that ‘The purpose of snobbery is to limit conversation.’24 Snobbery is a form of vulgarity practised by people intent on identifying and repelling vulgarity; it is the beacon of an unearned sense of their own excellence. It comes in many varieties (intellectual, aesthetic, sexual, sartorial) but is always an attempt to consolidate a superiority that may not actually exist. The snob shows us the difference between civility, which makes a virtue of tolerance, and etiquette, which is uncompromising and looks a lot like intolerance.

  As far as linguistic snobbery was concerned, Oliver Bell Bunce was subscribing to a mature tradition. A good deal of snobbery involves not using words and expressions that have been soiled by heavy use. The most notable book on this theme is Hester Piozzi’s British Synonymy (1794), billed as ‘an attempt at regulating the choice of words in familiar conversation’. Mrs Piozzi, once a close friend of Samuel Johnson, observed that parents and teachers ‘wear out their lives in keeping the confines of conversation free from all touch of vicinity with ordinary people, who are known to be such … the moment they open their mouths’. Using vulgar words here seems very much like having bad breath.25

  But it is not enough to avoid ordinary words and their nasty smell. Using twee alternatives is in fact a graver offence, a mistake made while trying to avoid a mistake. The most celebrated discussion of this is comparatively recent: Nancy Mitford’s collection Noblesse Oblige (1956) includes a simplified version of an article by Alan Ross about ‘class indicators’ in English. This draws a distinction between ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ terms: the legitimate, correct, upper-class words, and the illegitimate, incorrect, lower-class ones, which tend to be pretentious evasions of the everyday. Thus jam is U, preserve non-U; rich is U, wealthy is non-U; napkin is U, serviette is non-U; lavatory paper is U, toilet paper is non-U; and so on. This is the kind of distinction most people today affect to find laughable and maybe even odious. But we certainly make judgements about the little details of people’s vocabulary that speak of their background and aspirations (the receptive and the elective), although we are likely to insist that we do not.

  Though not a uniquely Victorian pursuit, regulating language was a Victorian obsession. There was a pernickety concern with the ‘best’ usage; those who deviated from it could expect to be punished, and their offences were discussed as if moral rather than linguistic. Arguments about pure and proper English were pursued by bossy amateurs with a pretence of scientific precision, but the fixation with shibboleths and tests reflected a limited understanding of both language and science.26

  Today there are New Victorians who profess admiration for the rigid values of their forebears, though they hardly honour them. Their paternalism is clumsily literal-minded. As Gertrude Himmelfarb writes in a fierce critique of this ‘travesty of Victorianism’, the New Victorians create legislation that their supposed antecedents would have found embarrassingly overt. ‘Today’s moralists,’ writes Himmelfarb, have a ‘far-away, fanatical glint in their eye’. Their concern is not ‘the kinds of crime that agitate most citizens – violent, irrational, repeated, and repeatedly unpunished’. Instead they push for ‘new legislation to punish speech or conduct normally deemed uncivil’, and seek to criminalize words and behaviour that were formerly regarded as simply vulgar or distasteful.27

  Perhaps what is truly Victorian in the modern world is the tendency to treat as sacrosanct things that are arbitrary: colonial borders, for instance, or the exact size and format of a visiting card. People uphold and defend contingent values precisely because they are contingent – an expression of their truth. ‘We do things this way because this is the way we do them,’ a starchy train manager tells me, when I ask why in a so-called quiet carriage I can’t silently listen to my iPod to drown out the noise of the adjacent travellers playing Connect Four. When he catches me in the act for a second time and I question the sense of the rule, he threatens to involve the British Transport Police. We have the following exchange: ‘There are good reasons why you can’t listen to your MP3 player in a quiet carriage.’ ‘What are they?’ ‘I couldn’t tell you.’ ‘Is that because they don’t exist?’ ‘No, it’s because it doesn’t matter what they are. What matters is that they are.’

  20

  Curb your enthusiasm

  new ways for new times

  Although my use of an iPod in a quiet carriage precipitated a volley of Victorianism from a train manager, the situation was in most respects a colourfully modern one. It made me feel like the often-offending, often-offended Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. This is apt, for there is perhaps no better primer in the prolixity of modern manners than that HBO comedy series. In every episode Larry comes up against the miserable truth that there is a difference between being right and doing what’s considered polite. In principle Larry favours good manners, but in practice they seem archaic or nonsensical.

  In the first episode of the opening season, Larry argues with his irritating friend Richard. Larry has had a run-in with Richard’s new girlfriend at the cinema: he wanted her to move her legs so that he could get past her to his seat,
and she was ungracious about it. Richard defends his girlfriend, and attempts to convey her good qualities by saying she likes to read the Jewish writer and activist Elie Wiesel. Larry responds, ‘You know what she should be reading? Emily Fucking Post.’

  The reference will be lost on a large part of the show’s international audience. But in America, Emily Post is the doyenne of Doing It Right. Although she died in 1960, her legacy continues. Her writings and the work of the Emily Post Institute highlight an important fact about Americans’ attitude to social niceties: they are much less embarrassed (than the English, than pretty much anyone) about asking what is correct and aspiring to self-improvement. Post’s principles permeated the American middle class, and live on in the many places American middle-class values now reach. While the English may not read Emily Post, and may not even have heard of her, they have seen the fruits of her work.

  Post stumbled into writing about manners. A socialite and the author of half a dozen novels, she was contracted in 1921, aged nearly fifty, to write an encyclopedia of etiquette. This was a time when, thanks to a flood of advertisements introduced with statements such as ‘Everybody tittered when I took an olive with my fork’, a lot of people tittered at the mention of a guide to etiquette. A lot of people – but not everybody. Alongside advertisements for soap, deodorants and mouthwash, magazines frequently contained articles bemoaning the decay of American manners. Post prospered by responding to this perception. Her syndicated advice column would eventually appear in more than 150 newspapers, and during the Second World War her Etiquette was reportedly the most requested book among GIs. Her attitudes, as a New Yorker profile remarked in 1930, were idealistic. She believed that a gentleman ‘affected by alcohol’ should not appear in the presence of ladies. In the words of the profile’s author, Helen Huntington Smith, ‘The problem of a lady affected by alcohol she neglects to take up.’1