Sarah A. Chrisman - True Ladies and Proper Gentlemen: Victorian Etiquette for Modern-Day Mothers and Fathers, Husbands and Wives, Boys and Girls, Teachers and Students, and More

Arrangement and Introduction Copyright 2015 by Sarah A. Chrisman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Jane Sheppard

Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-582-7

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-000-5

Printed in China

Contents

INTRODUCTION

I was gratefulalthough admittedly a bit intimidatedwhen my husband gave me a leather-bound antique book with the rather formidable title, Hills Manual of Social and Business Forms: A Guide to Correct Writing With Approved Methods in Speaking and Acting in the Various Relations of Life, Embracing Instruction and Examples in Penmanship, Spelling, Use of Capital Letters, Punctuation, Composition, Writing for the Press, Proof-Reading, Epistolary Correspondence, Notes of Invitation, Cards, Commercial Forms, Legal Business Forms, Family Records, Synonyms, Short-Hand Writing, Duties of Secretaries, Parliamentary Rules, Sign-Writing Epitaphs, The Laws of Etiquette, Book-Keeping, Valuable Tables of Reference, Writing Poetry, Etc., Etc.

This book with a title of biblical length weighed five and a half pounds, had a measure from top to bottom equal to the length of my forearm, and was considerably thicker than our parlor door. My husband had acquired it for me in response to a fervently expressed desire on my part: I wanted a guide for knowing the truly Victorian response to lifes daily challenges. This book certainly was that!

Targeted at a middle-class American audience, Hills Manual... explained the intricacies of everything from how to describe a quit-claim deed for a mine (page 234) to how to give a speech upon being nominated for political office (page 465). This promiscuous array of advice covered such a wide range of human interactions that anyone from a social-climbing rail-splitter to an immigrant freshly landed at Ellis Island was bound to find something useful in the books crimson-edged pages. The book was originally published in 1873, and by the time our particular volume was printed eighteen years later, the publishers could already boast sales of 345,000. When it appeared in the 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalog for $1.75, Hills Manual was one of the top listings in the S & R book departmentappearing several pages before the bibles.

In America of the late nineteenth century, individuals from a remarkable diversity of cultural and economic backgrounds were encountering new people and novel situations at a rate that seemed mind-boggling. Class status was a more malleable idea than it had ever been beforeafter all, both President Lincoln and President Garfield had been born in log cabins. In an era when it seemed a very definite possibility that the person who served as a waiter in a fine restaurant one day might well be an honored guest at the same table a week later, one of the most important things people could learn was the right way to treat each other.

The sections of Hills Manual... I found most delightful (and most timeless) were the ones regarding etiquetteor, as the esteemed Mr. Hill put it: What to Say and How to Do. There is a finite limit to the number of people who can find scintillating reading material in the instructions for writing a Letter of Substitution Appended to Power of Attorney (page 269). But it seems no loving couple could fail to be touched by the etiquette between husbands and wivesNever neglect the other, for all the world beside, and Let the angry word be answered only with a kiss. Turning to the suggestions about shopping, I found the first item on the list to be: Purchasers should, as far as possible, patronize the merchants of their own town. (Shop local!) Every section on manners conveyed advice that has remained surprisingly currenteven after the passage of more than a century.

My husband and I are both incessant readers, and as I explored other antique books and magazines from the nineteenth century, I found countless ways the situations described in them corresponded to the etiquette I was learning from Hills Manual... and still more underscoring of parallels with the modern world. The Art of Travel was written by Elizabeth Bisland just a few years after her 1889 race around the world against fellow reporter Nellie Blyboth of them rushing to beat the eighty-day record of Jules Vernes fictitious Phineas Fogg character. Her humorous commentary on the behavior of customs officials seems very familiar to anyone who has passed through security in a twenty-first century airport. Similarly, the first time I read the hilarious piece Modern Improvements, about a fictitious country bumpkins first encounter with a telephone, through my laughter I had a strong sensation of deja vu as I recalled the first time I had seen someone chatting with a blue-tooth device and, like the grammatically challenged deacon of Belle C. Greenes story, felt certain I was witnessing the ravings of a madman. Our modern challenges and encounters are still echoing those of our nineteenth-century predecessors, and their advice on dealing with troublesome situations has a lot to teach us about our own problems.

There are reasons behind all laws of etiquette. Sometimes these reasons are obscure, but more often they become obvious if we only stop to think about them. For example: Never use your own knife when cutting butter. Always use a knife assigned to that purpose. Why? Because using your own knife in the communal butter dish smears around the crumbs of everything else youve been eating. (Besides the likelihood that your neighbors wont appreciate sharing the contents of your mouth in quite so intimate a fashion, crumbs shorten the butters shelf-life.) Throughout all of our quotidian travails, manners keep the crumbs out of lifes butter.

Some readers might be surprised to find advice from the nineteenth century about the proper way to answer an I Saw You ad in a newspaperbut again, these are reminders that some issues are older than we might at first consider them.

The volume you are now holding in your hands contains what I feel to be the best of the Hills Manual... its portions with the most abiding relevance to society. Weight-lifters might not find this version to be quite as helpful in building muscle mass as the original (and there have been a few very minor updates of punctuation to aid in legibility), but the advice contained within is just as useful as the antique tome. To put all this advice in context, it has been interspersed with articles and stories from its own time period.

Readers familiar with antique publications might notice a charming convention that has been retained in this volumethat of separating the colored artwork as a unique portion of the work. In the 1800s, it was a common practice to print all black-and-white materials (text as well as graphics) together as the main section of a magazine and put all the color plates together at the back. Colored plates illustrating fashions would be accompanied by reference numbers to the articles describing them, but other colored artwork would include little or no text beyond a title (if that). Women would often cut these colored pictures out of their monthly magazines and use them as decor pieces or inexpensive artwork around their home, so they specifically didnt want text detracting from the pictures. In a sweet homage to this tradition, the publishers have borrowed this formatting convention and printed the colored illustrations corresponding to the beauty advice separately, as a beautiful insert.