'The habits of good society': Victorian manners and etiquette writing, 1834-1890s

Etiquette manuals were a distinctive form of guidance literature, first published in the mid-1830s, providing instruction, in a compact format, on manners and how to behave in society. In the following decades up until the turn of the century, new pocket guides that advised readers how to eat, dress, greet, and most importantly, succeed in a social setting, appeared by the hundreds. This thesis’s main concern is to delve more deeply into this neglected body of material and challenge a series of standard conceptions of the genre, exploring its forms, authors (where known) and its discourse, as enabling as it was restricting about social interaction and social aspiration. The texts themselves play a significant role as sources: preface, form and syntax provide valuable information about readers and writers to be deduced. References to etiquette writings in fiction, newspapers, periodicals, advertisements of the time are equally valuable in gauging the reception and perception of etiquette works. Through these materials, I explore how expectations of conduct operated in relation to constructions of gender, age, and class, and the ambitions for (and anxieties about) social change and social mobility, that preoccupied the authors, readers and publishers of etiquette manuals. In this way, the project will not only shed light on the etiquette genre itself, but also expose its wider implications. Etiquette literature has the potential to tell us a good deal about how social mobility was understood by a significant portion of Victorian society, and also illuminates in more detail both the contemporary management of social fluidity and how individuals tried to navigate a social system in flux