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by Henry Hitchings

  9. Freud coined the phrase in his essay ‘The Virginity Taboo’; see Sigmund Freud, The Psychology of Love, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2006), 268. He was influenced here by the work of the British anthropologist Ernest Crawley.

  Chapter 4: Godspeed, babe: or, meetings and greetings

  1. Waldemar Heckel, The Conquests of Alexander the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 109.

  2. John Wade, British History, Chronologically Arranged; Comprehending a Classified Analysis of Events and Occurrences in Church and State, 5th edn (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 827.

  3. Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (London: Penguin Allen Lane, 1971), 79–80.

  4. The Correspondence of Erasmus 1484–1500, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 193.

  5. Glenda Cooper, ‘Kiss of Death or Friendly Salute?’, Daily Telegraph, 14 August 2011.

  6. This is treated at length in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

  Chapter 5: Of courtiers and codpieces: fashioning Renaissance identity

  1. John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 46.

  2. This subject is treated at length in Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

  3. Benet Davetian, Civility: A Cultural History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 61.

  4. William Fiston, The School of Good Manners (London: J. Danter, 1595), 1.

  5. Alister E. McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution – A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 254. Davetian, Civility, 89.

  6. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1960), 85, 232.

  7. Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 118–20.

  8. Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England (London: Bodley Head, 2012), 254, 261.

  9. Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 18.

  10. Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, trans. Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1986), 6–7.

  Chapter 6: But who was the Renaissance man?

  1. Its English title was A Lytell Booke of Good Maners for Chyldren.

  2. Desiderius Erasmus, A Handbook on Good Manners for Children, trans. Eleanor Merchant (London: Preface, 2008), 25, 82.

  3. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1843–60), V, 268.

  4. See Joaneath Spicer, ‘The Renaissance Elbow’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds.), A Cultural History of Gesture (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 84–128.

  5. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier … Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby (London: David Nutt, 1900), 374–7.

  6. Details from Adam Nicolson, The Gentry: Stories of the English (London: HarperPress, 2011), xv, xviii.

  7. Quoted in Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 204.

  8. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman (London: John Haviland, 1630), 457–58.

  9. Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 248.

  10. Quoted in Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Touchstone, 1991), 48.

  11. The phrase is Ernest Barker’s in The Character of England (1947). Quoted in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton (eds.), Writing Englishness, 1900–1950 (London: Routledge, 1995), 59.

  12. Quoted in Nancy Mitford et al., Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocrat (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956), 74.

  13. See Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981).

  Chapter 7: Table manners: or, how to eat a cobra’s heart

  1. Coryat’s Crudities, 2 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905), I, 236.

  2. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 185.

  3. The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook of Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen (London: James Hogg, 1859), 307, 319.

  4. See Judith Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 112.

  5. Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 269. Sir Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather; with Stories Taken from Scottish History (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1833), 220–21.

  6. http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/10/china-201110, retrieved 5 July 2012.

  7. John George Wood, The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World, 2 vols. (Hartford, Connecticut: J. B. Burr, 1870), II, 1431.

  8. See Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners (London: Viking, 1992), xii.

  9. Colin McGinn, The Meaning of Disgust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 203.

  Chapter 8: The Clothes Show: ‘When in doubt, opt for navy’

  1. Quoted in Lauren Collins, ‘Sole Mate’, New Yorker, 28 March 2011.

  2. J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 35, 22, 26.

  3. Ibid., 139.

  4. See Wade, British History, 759–60, and Kimberly Chrisman, ‘Unhoop the Fair Sex: The Campaign Against the Hoop Petticoat in Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (1996), 5–23.

  5. http://www.torturegarden.com/dress/, retrieved 30 July 2012.

  6. Margaret Visser, The Way We Are (London: Viking, 1995), 208.

  7. Laurie Graham, Getting It Right: A Survival Guide to Modern Manners (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), 82.

  Chapter 9: Mr Sex

  1. Thomas Shadwell, The Humorists (London: Henry Herringman, 1671), 2.

  2. Rochester: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Farley-Hills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 57.

  3. The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 89.

  4. http://www.hrp.org.uk/discoverthepalaces/Historyandstories/Lifeinthepalaces/Mannersandetiquette, retrieved 6 July 2012.

  5. Elizabeth Stone, Chronicles of Fashion, from the Time of Elizabeth to the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1845), II, 4.

  6. The subject is illuminated by Peter Burke in The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1992).

  7. Francis Osborne, Advice to a Son (London: David Nutt, 1896), 48–9, 79.

  8. The seventeenth-century phenomenon of libertine ‘anti-civility’ is discussed in Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 243–75.

  9. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 5th edn (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1705), 87. William Hazlitt, Table-Talk: Original Essays on Men and Manners, 2 vols. (London: C. Templeman, 1861), II, 315.

  10. John Playford, The English Dancing Master (London: Thomas Harper, 1651), 2.

  11. Jonas Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days Journey … to which is added An Essay on Tea, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London: H. Woodfall, 1757), II, 2, 276, 273.

  12. The phrase occurs in Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, 9th edn, 6 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1834), III, 307.

  13. This subject is discussed by Jorge Arditi in A Genealogy of Manners: Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 122–54.

  14. Quoted in Joan Wildeblood and Peter Brinson, The Polite World: A Guide to English Manners and Deportment from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Century (London: Oxfo
rd University Press, 1965), 197.

  15. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (Oxford: printed at the Theatre, 1673), 259. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 109.

  16. Jerry White, London in the Eighteenth Century (London: Bodley Head, 2012), 3.

  17. Cited in David G. Hey, An English Rural Community: Myddle Under the Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974), 227.

  18. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 80.

  Chapter 10: Not Mr Sex: when ‘coffee’ doesn’t mean coffee

  1. George Mikes, How To Be A Brit (London: Penguin, 1986), 35.

  2. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, abr. edn (London: Penguin, 1990), 324.

  3. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: Richard Jones, 1583), 120, 89–91.

  4. Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London: Penguin Allen Lane, 2012), 44.

  5. Aristotle’s Masterpiece, or The Secrets of Generation Displayed in All the Parts Thereof (London: J. How, 1684), 6, 49.

  6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/24/online-dating-etiquette-advice, retrieved 14 September 2012.

  7. See Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2008), 23.

  8. Osborne, Advice to a Son, 41, 38, 44, 54, 49, 55–6.

  Chapter 11: The elephant and the bad baby: the everyday language of manners

  1. This is discussed at greater length in Anna Wierzbicka, English: Meaning and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 204–96.

  2. Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others (London: Routledge, 2009), 337.

  3. The question of ‘polite lies’ is discussed by Karen Stohr in On Manners (New York: Routledge, 2012), 92–113.

  4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 69.

  5. This is explored more fully in Anna Wierzbicka, Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  6. Wierzbicka, English: Meaning and Culture, 160–67.

  7. The book, written by Elfrida Vipont, has lovely illustrations by Raymond Briggs.

  8. Seneca, Moral and Political Essays, ed. and trans. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 203, 218.

  Chapter 12: Spectators and stratagems: the polite, commercial eighteenth century

  1. See Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, 320–21.

  2. Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1988), 210, 277.

  3. This subject is treated at length in Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

  4. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 2008), 373.

  5. Quoted in the Introduction to Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator, ed. Ross, 54.

  6. Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator, ed. Ross, 210.

  7. Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), 237.

  8. Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 184.

  9. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31.

  10. The Works of Jonathan Swift, 19 vols. (Edinburgh: Constable, 1814), IX, 453.

  11. Ibid., XI, 406, 419, 389.

  12. Wise Sayings and Favourite Passages from the Works of Henry Fielding (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1909), 120.

  13. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963–5), III, 341, 383. The Works of Jonathan Swift, XII, 392–3.

  14. Jane Collier, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (London: Andrew Millar, 1753), 27, 142, 232.

  15. Peter Beckford, Familiar Letters from Italy, to a Friend in England, 2 vols. (Salisbury: J. Easton, 1805), I, 9.

  16. Hannah Cowley, The Belle’s Stratagem (Dublin: 1781), 8, 26–7.

  17. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 3rd edn (London: Joseph Johnson, 1796), 112.

  Chapter 13: Lord Chesterfield and the invention of etiquette

  1. Gentleman’s Magazine 7 (1737), 34–5.

  2. Eliza Cheadle, Manners of Modern Society: Being A Book of Etiquette (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878), 35.

  3. The Works of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, ed. Mark N. Brown, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), II, 390, 393, 363, 373, 390.

  4. This is the date of the first letter to Philip in Bonamy Dobrée’s six-volume edition, though in his introduction Dobrée gives the date as 1738; Lord Chesterfield, Letters, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, 6 vols. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1932), I, 162; II, 306.

  5. World, 12 August 1756.

  6. Mark Twain at Your Fingertips, ed. Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1948), 33.

  7. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 2 vols. (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1837), II, 109.

  8. Fanny Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (London: Penguin, 2001), 33.

  9. Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Womersley, 144.

  10. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 272.

  11. George Edward Ayscough, Letters from an Officer in the Guards to his Friend in England (London: Thomas Cadell, 1778), 23.

  12. John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 5th edn (London: Davis and Reymers, 1757), 135–7, 141.

  13. Arthur Young, Travels, During the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789 (Bury St Edmunds: J. Rackham, 1792), 277.

  14. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, 43.

  15. Béat-Louis de Muralt, Letters Describing the Character and Customs of the English and French Nations (London: Thomas Edlin, 1726), 11.

  16. J. A. Sharpe, ‘Civility, Civilizing Processes, and the End of Public Punishment in England’, in Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack (eds.), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 227.

  17. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 76.

  18. Robert Lesuire, The Savages of Europe (London: Dryden Leach, 1764), 21. Kielmansegge is quoted in Langford, Englishness Identified, 56.

  19. Carl Philip Moritz, Journeys of a German in England, trans. Reginald Nettel (London: Eland, 2009), 176, 61.

  20. Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, A Picture of England, 2 vols. (London: Edward Jeffery, 1789), I, 60.

  21. William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797), 326.

  22. The Letters of William Godwin: Volume I, 1778–1797, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 71–3.

  Chapter 14: Letters and social change: Jane Austen and Fanny Burney

  1. See Charles Bazerman, ‘Letters and the Social Grounding of Differentiated Genres’, in David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds.), Letter Writing as a Social Practice (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000).

  2. The Young Lady’s Companion; or, Beauty’s Looking-Glass (London: printed and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster, 1740), 41.

  3. Jane Austen, Selected Letters, ed. Vivien Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85, 49.

  4. See Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 12.

  5. Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. Sabor and Troide, 252.

&nbs
p; 6. Ibid., 230.

  Chapter 15: The Englishness of English manners

  1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2nd edn (London: James Dodsley, 1790), 112–13.

  2. Edmund Burke, Two Letters Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament (Dublin: William Porter, 1796), 72.

  3. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2nd edn, 128, 144.

  4. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, 6th edn (London: Methuen, 1930), 17.

  5. Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Pimlico, 2001), 10, 122.

  6. Doris Lessing, In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1960), 9.

  7. Arthur Bryant, The National Character (London: Longmans, Green, 1934), 6.

  8. Bill Bryson, Notes from A Small Island (London: Black Swan, 1996), 32.

  9. Quoted in Giles and Middleton (eds.), Writing Englishness, 101.

  10. Julian Barnes, England, England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 83–5.

  11. George Orwell, Essays, ed. John Carey (London: Everyman, 2002), 292, 1026–8.

  12. Fox, Watching the English, 256–7.

  13. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, 89–90.

  Chapter 16: Island Man and his discontents: ‘They do things differently there’

  1. One of those advertisements can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK_NinOmFWw, retrieved 9 August 2012.

  2. For details of this, see Margaret Visser, The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 36–46.

  3. Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011), 274.

  4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 826.

  5. Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favourite Fetish (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), 3.

  6. Pearl Binder, The English Inside Out (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961), 32, 128, 131, 151, 244, 68, 243, 111.

  7. Mikes, How To Be A Brit, 30, 42, 22, 54.

  8. Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2006), 179.