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by Henry Hitchings

  9. G. J. Renier, The English: Are They Human? (London: Williams & Norgate, 1949), 171, 194, 18.

  10. Orwell, Essays, ed. Carey, 294.

  11. Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners, ed. Elsie Burch Donald (London: Debrett’s, 1981), 279.

  12. George Slythe Street, People and Questions (London: Martin Secker, 1910), 103.

  13. Alan F. Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 24.

  14. Theodore Zeldin, The French (London: Collins, 1983), 35.

  15. Hermann Muthesius, The English House, ed. Dennis Sharp, trans. Janet Seligman and Stewart Spencer, 3 vols. (London: Frances Lincoln, 2007), II, 108.

  16. Quoted in Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber, 1988), 200.

  Chapter 17: Fanny Trollope and the domestic manners of Americans

  1. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1978), 20. Twain is quoted in Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman (London: Viking, 1997), 176.

  2. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (New York: Harper, 1842), 44. Philip Kelland, Transatlantic Sketches (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1858), 5, 25.

  3. The Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: McCarty & Davis, 1834), I, 34.

  4. Gerald Carson, The Polite Americans (London: Macmillan, 1967), 71, 79.

  5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 713. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1962), II, 332.

  6. Andrew St George, The Descent of Manners: Etiquette, Rules and the Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 175.

  7. Sarah Josepha Hale, Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round (Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1868), 244, 143, 6.

  8. L. J. Ransone, ‘Good Form’ in England, by an American Resident in the United Kingdom (New York: Appleton, 1888), 160–61, 6, 100. Florence Burton Kingsland, Etiquette for All Occasions (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901), 500.

  Chapter 18: ‘You’re the most important person!’: the trouble with children

  1. Stephen L. Carter, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 230.

  2. These are some of the lessons Robert Fulghum recalls learning at Sunday school, in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (London: Grafton, 1989), 6–7.

  3. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 5th edn, 52, 92, 86, 81, 390, 91.

  4. The Works of Jonathan Swift, XI, 313. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 92–3.

  5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 191.

  6. Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006), 108.

  7. Tina Fey, Bossypants (London: Sphere, 2012), 54.

  8. Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘Spoiled Rotten’, New Yorker, 2 July 2012.

  9. Pamela Druckerman, French Children Don’t Throw Food: Parenting Secrets from Paris (London: Doubleday, 2012), 4, 28, 91, 301.

  Chapter 19: What were Victorian values?

  1. Quoted in M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1987), 18.

  2. J. Robinson, A Manual of Manners; or, Hints for the Proper Deportment of School Boys (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1829), ix.

  3. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. Florence Wischnewetzky, ed. Victor Kiernan (London: Penguin, 2009), 68–71, 266. The Works of Jonathan Swift, XIV, 96.

  4. Lawrence Wright, Clean and Decent: The History of the Bath and Loo, rev. edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 139.

  5. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: Harper Perennial, 1995), 627.

  6. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 183.

  7. See Marjorie Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774–1858 (London: St Martin’s Press, 1994).

  8. See Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners, 5.

  9. John Browne, Tobacco Morally and Physically Considered (Driffield: B. Fawcett, 1842), 9. A Present for an Apprentice (London: Thomas Tegg, 1838), 117, 320–22.

  10. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Chapman and Hall, 1858), 134.

  11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/nov/22/televisionbusiness, retrieved 13 June 2012.

  12. Beatrice Knollys, The Gentle Art of Good Talking (London: James Bowden, 1899), 33. George Seaton Bowes, Conversation: Why Don’t We Do More Good by It? (London: James Nisbet, 1886), xi, xiii.

  13. Langford, Englishness Identified, 181. James Sully, ‘Civilization and Noise’, Fortnightly Review 24 (1878), 715.

  14. See John M. Picker, ‘The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise’, Victorian Studies 42 (1999–2000), 427–53.

  15. David Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 17, 27.

  16. Martin Tupper, Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, Originally Treated (London: Joseph Rickerby, 1839), 156.

  17. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Wives of England (London: Fisher, 1843), 242, 250, 267, 268–9.

  18. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, ed. Nicola Humble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7.

  19. The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits (London: Vizetelly, Branston, 1829), 24, 57, 283, 424–5. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Wives of England, 281.

  20. Quoted in Judith Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 232.

  21. Michael Curtin, Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners (New York: Garland, 1987), 277.

  22. A Present for an Apprentice, 275–6.

  23. Oliver Bell Bunce, Don’t: A Manual of Mistakes and Improprieties More or Less Prevalent in Conduct and Speech (London: Field & Tuer, 1883), 61, 52–3, 56, 60.

  24. Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London: Minerva, 1995), 40.

  25. Hester Lynch Piozzi, British Synonymy (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794), 14. Bharat Tandon writes in Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (London: Anthem, 2003) that Piozzi’s work ‘raises the possibility that vulgarisms might issue infectiously from the mouths of the poor, like germs or bad breath, and British Synonymy repeatedly attempts to keep the objects of its disapproval at least at arm’s length’ (31).

  26. The subject is explored at length in Richard W. Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

  27. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: Knopf, 1995), 259–63.

  Chapter 20: Curb your enthusiasm: new ways for new times

  1. Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘Place Settings’, New Yorker, 20 October 2008. Helen Huntington Smith, ‘Lady Chesterfield’, New Yorker, 16 August 1930.

  2. Edmund Wilson, ‘Books of Etiquette and Emily Post’, New Yorker, 19 July 1947.

  3. Emily Post, Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, 10th edn (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1960), 61.

  4. Ibid., 602.

  5. Ibid., 45, 456, 525, 576.

  6. Amy Vanderbilt, ‘Bad Manners in America’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 378 (1968), 90, 92, 96, 98.

  7. Letitia Baldrige’s New Manners for New Times (New York, Scribner, 2003), 53.

  8. Judith Martin, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), 158, 211, 384.

  9. This is reported by Margaret Y. Han in the Harvard Crimson, 11 May 1984.

  10. See Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, rev. edn (London: Picador, 1998).

  11. ‘Miss Manners on Office Etiquette’, Fortune, 6 November 1989.

  12. Elizabeth Wyse et al., Debrett’s A�
�Z of Modern Manners (Richmond: Debrett’s, 2008), 90, 176, 173, 128, 231.

  13. Anne Edwards and Drusilla Beyfus, Lady Behave: A Guide to Modern Manners for the 1970s (London: Cassell, 1969), 160.

  Chapter 21: Creative hubs and ‘extreme phenomena’: negotiating the modern city

  1. Inedited Tracts. Illustrating the Manners, Opinions and Occupations of Englishmen During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Whittingham and Wilkins for the Roxburghe Library, 1868), 31. The quoted words are in fact Valentine’s, not Vincent’s, but they support Vincent’s arguments.

  2. Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: Picador, 2008), 26–7, 68.

  3. Orwell, Essays, ed. Carey, 295.

  4. Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324, 329, 338.

  5. See John Reader, Cities (London: Vintage, 2005), 111.

  6. See Emily Cockayne, Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours (London: Bodley Head, 2012).

  7. Evelyn Waugh, ‘Manners and Morals’, in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 591.

  8. Torbjörn Lundmark, Tales of Hi and Bye: Greeting and Parting Rituals Around the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146.

  9. Fox, Watching the English, 170–71.

  10. Quoted in Frank Victor Dawes, Not In Front of the Servants (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 35.

  11. Joe Moran, Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime (London: Profile, 2007), 39.

  Chapter 22: Location, location, location: the rules of place

  1. Philip Smith, Timothy L. Phillips and Ryan D. King, Incivility: The Rude Stranger in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 64.

  2. Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life (London: Doubleday, 2010), 48.

  3. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1978), 194.

  4. The experiment is cited in Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Penguin Allen Lane, 2012), 61.

  Chapter 23: A fluid world: or, ‘Are you suggesting that I should call you Eric?’

  1. These figures come from Kevin Cahill, ‘The Great Property Swindle’, New Statesman, 11 March 2011.

  2. Richard Pomfret, The Age of Equality: The Twentieth Century in Economic Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2011), 1.

  3. Alice-Leone Moats, No Nice Girl Swears (London: Cassell, 1933), 23.

  4. Quoted in David Attenborough, Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (London: BBC Books, 2002), 143.

  5. Lady Troubridge, Etiquette and Entertaining (London: Amalgamated Press, 1939), 10. Lady Troubridge, The Book of Etiquette (Kingswood: The World’s Work, 1926), 302–3.

  6. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 19.

  7. Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London: Cresset Press, 1955), 52.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 296–7. Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity, 75.

  10. Clive Aslet, Anyone for England? A Search for British Identity (London: Little, Brown, 1997), 155.

  11. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, 692, 125, 128.

  12. Manners and Rules of Good Society, 17th edn (London: Frederick Warne, 1891), 32, 185, 225.

  13. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/technology/27myspace.html, retrieved 29 June 2012. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075133/Christopher-Hitchens-death-In-Memoriam-courageous-sibling-Peter-Hitchens.html, retrieved 29 June 2012.

  Chapter 24: Technology and the revenge effect

  1. Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand (London: Profile, 2005), 23.

  2. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 1.

  3. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/foreman05/foreman05_index.html, retrieved 31 May 2012.

  4. Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 145–50.

  5. This image is used, a little differently, by a character in a Max Frisch novel. See Max Frisch, Homo Faber, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Penguin, 2006), 182.

  Chapter 25: ‘Are we there yet?: manners now

  1. Benjamin DeMott, ‘Seduced by Civility: Political Manners and the Crisis of Democratic Values’, Nation, 9 December 1996.

  2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2011/dec/14/reading-the-riots-investigating-england-s-summer-of-disorder-full-report, retrieved 29 June 2012.

  3. Phoebe Griffith, Will Norman, Carmel O’Sullivan and Rushanara Ali, Charm Offensive: Cultivating Civility in 21st Century Britain (London: The Young Foundation, 2011), 18.

  4. Edward Shils, The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society, ed. Steven Grosby (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1997), 4.

  5. Griffith et al., Charm Offensive, 10, 43.

  6. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 132.

  7. Richard Sennett, Respect: The Formation of Character in An Age of Inequality (London: Penguin Allen Lane, 2003), 207.

  8. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012), 200–201, 286–7.

  9. Florence Bell, The Minor Moralist (London: Edward Arnold, 1903), 39.

  10. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/two-year-asbo-for-10yearold-tearaway-7200957.html, retrieved 30 August 2012. http://www.messengernewspapers.co.uk/news/8671336.11_year_old_Hale_Barns_boy_gets_five_year_ASBO/, retrieved 30 August 2012. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-469670/Asbo-12-year-old-thug-nicknamed-Chucky.html, retrieved 30 August 2012.

  11. See Martin Ingram, ‘Sexual Manners: The Other Face of Civility in Early Modern England’, in Burke, Harrison and Slack (eds.), Civil Histories, 99.

  12. For the review in question, by Theo Tait, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/08/lionel-asbo-martin-amis-review, retrieved 29 August 2012.

  13. Wyse et al., Debrett’s A–Z of Modern Manners, 264, 111, 277.

  14. John Morgan, The Times Book of Modern Manners (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 60, 116–17, 132.

  15. Anne de Courcy, A Guide to Modern Manners (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 145.

  16. Scots Magazine 44 (1782), 368.

  17. The questions are intended to be rhetorical. Still, responding spontaneously, I would give the following answers:

  I don’t know, but I expect I’ll find out if I have a daughter.

  Straightforwardly.

  Rarely; on the whole you should choose something that you can eat or should choose to eat elsewhere, but in a restaurant where you are a regular a special request of this kind is permissible.

  Yes, but only in extreme circumstances, and don’t expect to win any prizes for doing so.

  Yes, although you will probably think I need to loosen up a little.

  Well … it’s so uncool that it’s almost cool, but, on hygiene grounds, no.

  Yes, if it’s not raining or snowing and there’s a suitable space for smoking, such as a balcony or indeed a garden.

  Just about, if it is done briefly and unintrusively, but it’s a bit creepy.

  18. David Brooks, The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens (London: Short Books, 2012), 394.

  19. Truss, Talk to the Hand, 152–3.

  20. Waugh, ‘Manners and Morals’, 587.

  21. See Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005).

  22. See Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London: Routledge, 2004).

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  Petrus Alfonsi, Disciplina Clericalis, ed. and trans. Eberhard Hermes, trans. into English P. R. Quarrie (Lo
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  Henry Alford, Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners (New York: Twelve, 2012)

  Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (Oxford: printed at the Theatre, 1673)

  __________, The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety (London: E. and R. Pawlet, 1704)

  __________, The Whole Duty of Man (London: John Eyres, William Mount and Thomas Page, 1735)

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

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  __________, Manners and Rules of Good Society, 17th edn (London: Frederick Warne, 1891)

  Jorge Arditi, 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)

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