Etiquette For Gentlemen Being A Manual Of Minor Social Ethics And Customary Observances The Ball Room Guide

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.

This book analyses English social and occupational behavioural ideals from the courtesy book's demise in 1774 to the Medical Act's passage in 1858. Ideals from conduct and etiquette books mix gracefully with those displayed by professional groups, particularly medical practitioners, in an analysis that challenges conventional thinking about class and social change in early-industrial England. Dr Morgan's study will be essential reading for British historians, as well as for all those interested in how individuals establish personal identity and infuse confidence into human relations in an impersonal, urban society.