The Lady Guide to Modern Manners: February 15
Dear Thomas,
I notice that it’s 200 years, almost to the day, since Pride And Prejudice was published. This novel is often said to be a comedy of manners but I’m never very sure what that means. Anyway, I was wondering what we can learn from the etiquette of the past – there are all those amazing old etiquette books, aren’t there? Have you read any of them? Connie Stanwyck, Moreton-in Marsh
Dear Connie,
What a delightful topic. My favourite guide to the manners of yesteryear is Lady Troubridge’s Book Of Etiquette, first published in 1926 and in print for many years subsequently. Lady T explains the form when you invite royalty to dinner: ‘From the moment they enter until they leave the house, royal personages are regarded as being the owners of it.’
Make sure you’ve got that straight.
‘Hotels are a great trap for the unwary,’ she thunders elsewhere. A woman loitering alone in the lobby is quite the worst thing. Lurking, too awful to be mentioned, is the dread that such a female will be mistaken for a prostitute or somehow, by accident as it were, will actually become one.
Lifts are a challenge, too. Do they count as indoors or outdoors and therefore should a gentleman remove or merely tip his hat?
All this induces smug ridicule in the modern reader but Lady Troubridge is dead against haughtiness and rudeness to staff. ‘Dress well but quietly,’ she advises. Like Jane Austen, she doesn’t care for vulgarity and ostentation.
Pride And Prejudice, and indeed all Austen’s novels, are profoundly about manners and elevate the subject many miles beyond the trivial. The Austen world is one in which no action or thought or feeling can remain entirely private – there is always an impact on somebody else. Bad manners are absolutely the measure of the person as when Lady Catherine de Bourgh, arriving at Longbourn to order Elizabeth not to marry Mr Darcy, forges into the house and starts opening all the doors as if in her own home. Most bitingly, Elizabeth tells Darcy that he did not behave in a ‘gentleman-like’ manner when he first, so offensively, proposed to her.
The true gentleman, or lady for that matter, does not look down on others. In the end, Mr Darcy co-operates with Elizabeth’s rich uncle, even though he is ‘in trade’, to confer just enough respectability on Lydia to save the Bennet family.
Real courtesy has tolerance at its heart and is the force, no less, that allows the many diverse and conflicting elements of society to cohere. So yes, Pride And Prejudice speaks to us today.
Please send your questions to Thomas.blaikie@lady.co.uk or write to him at The Lady, 39-40 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ER
Journalists have been harassed, even by death threats. The writer Philip Hensher, who wrote a scrupulously fair piece about disability benefi t, has been hounded and insulted. Many of these ‘contributors’ are anonymous. They gnaw at any perceived transgression of political correctness. They revel in the everyone-can-have-their-say freedom of the internet. Are they like roadraging motorists, stupefi ed by apparent isolation within the car and imagined lack of responsibility? Would these people behave like this on Question Time?
Individuals attacked online may rise above it. As it happens, professional standing and livelihoods are not threatened by these would-be wreckers. But website owners are still reluctant to take action (ie, remove abuse as any decent print publication editor would do), respecting too much the ‘democracy’ of the internet.
I notice that it’s 200 years, almost to the day, since Pride And Prejudice was published. This novel is often said to be a comedy of manners but I’m never very sure what that means. Anyway, I was wondering what we can learn from the etiquette of the past – there are all those amazing old etiquette books, aren’t there? Have you read any of them? Connie Stanwyck, Moreton-in Marsh
Dear Connie,
What a delightful topic. My favourite guide to the manners of yesteryear is Lady Troubridge’s Book Of Etiquette, first published in 1926 and in print for many years subsequently. Lady T explains the form when you invite royalty to dinner: ‘From the moment they enter until they leave the house, royal personages are regarded as being the owners of it.’
Make sure you’ve got that straight.
‘Hotels are a great trap for the unwary,’ she thunders elsewhere. A woman loitering alone in the lobby is quite the worst thing. Lurking, too awful to be mentioned, is the dread that such a female will be mistaken for a prostitute or somehow, by accident as it were, will actually become one.
Lifts are a challenge, too. Do they count as indoors or outdoors and therefore should a gentleman remove or merely tip his hat?
All this induces smug ridicule in the modern reader but Lady Troubridge is dead against haughtiness and rudeness to staff. ‘Dress well but quietly,’ she advises. Like Jane Austen, she doesn’t care for vulgarity and ostentation.
Pride And Prejudice, and indeed all Austen’s novels, are profoundly about manners and elevate the subject many miles beyond the trivial. The Austen world is one in which no action or thought or feeling can remain entirely private – there is always an impact on somebody else. Bad manners are absolutely the measure of the person as when Lady Catherine de Bourgh, arriving at Longbourn to order Elizabeth not to marry Mr Darcy, forges into the house and starts opening all the doors as if in her own home. Most bitingly, Elizabeth tells Darcy that he did not behave in a ‘gentleman-like’ manner when he first, so offensively, proposed to her.
The true gentleman, or lady for that matter, does not look down on others. In the end, Mr Darcy co-operates with Elizabeth’s rich uncle, even though he is ‘in trade’, to confer just enough respectability on Lydia to save the Bennet family.
Real courtesy has tolerance at its heart and is the force, no less, that allows the many diverse and conflicting elements of society to cohere. So yes, Pride And Prejudice speaks to us today.
Please send your questions to Thomas.blaikie@lady.co.uk or write to him at The Lady, 39-40 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ER
WHAT TO DO… If you’re abused on Twitter
Maybe you don’t have a Twitter account, but online abuse is an issue that concerns us all and is going on all the time. Facebook, or any website such as TripAdvisor (amateur reviews of restaurants and hotels) can be commandeered by a few warped individuals for unpleasant purposes.Journalists have been harassed, even by death threats. The writer Philip Hensher, who wrote a scrupulously fair piece about disability benefi t, has been hounded and insulted. Many of these ‘contributors’ are anonymous. They gnaw at any perceived transgression of political correctness. They revel in the everyone-can-have-their-say freedom of the internet. Are they like roadraging motorists, stupefi ed by apparent isolation within the car and imagined lack of responsibility? Would these people behave like this on Question Time?
Individuals attacked online may rise above it. As it happens, professional standing and livelihoods are not threatened by these would-be wreckers. But website owners are still reluctant to take action (ie, remove abuse as any decent print publication editor would do), respecting too much the ‘democracy’ of the internet.