As I’m running around today, and even going out this evening, my brain is something of a snow-globe. I thought that, in lieu of striving after lucid originality, I would pick up Henry Hitchings’s Sorry!: The English and Their Manners and revisit some earmarked pages.

I’ll begin with a comment about the subtitle. Now that the book’s contents have steeped in me for a few days, I find the subtitle incredibly misleading and, indeed, the source of much of my original puzzlement. While Hitchings does indeed write about manners, and while his sights are indeed focused on the English, his subject is not the bundle of shibboleths by which people gauge each others’ socioeconomic backgrounds but, far more largely, the psychological distance that has been extended, in Europe and North America, between bodily functions and effects deemed noisome on the one hand and social space on the other. Of course there is a physical distance as well — that’s why most bathrooms accommodate one person at a time. But the psychological distance is what allows us to forget about bathrooms altogether when we are not actually using them, or in need. That’s the kind of manners that interests Hitchings, not the table settings or the forms of address. Nancy Mitford’s mischievous essay, “Noblesse Oblige,” is disposed of in one paragraph — in the chapter on Victorian manners, if you please. The book’s second chapter is entirely devoted to the seriously undermannered period known as the Middle Ages.

The third chapter begins with the motto that William of Wykeham had chiseled over the doors of both of his foundations, Winchester College and New College, Oxford: “Manners maketh man.” William’s sentiment “may strike us as archaic,” writes Hitchings, but that is only because centuries of refinement (and “refainment”) separate us from his earthier era. In the Fourteenth Century, it was all too easy, at least in the benighted economic system that we call feudalism, to slip toward the bestial. Young people depended on their elders for their manners — there were no magazines or visual media to help them out — and most elders knew only what they had learned living out their lives in one spot. It was not a world that greeted strangers cordially and treated them well. The exhibition of a certain attentive flourish, combined with disciplined impulse control, was the only known passport. The display of what William meant by manners entitled its bearer to a room in the house, rather than a stall in the barn.

One particularly noisome bodily function is violence, and indeed this was tackled before all the others. Failure to wipe your mouth after eating might cost you the good opinion of others, but the uncertain handling of your knife could cost you your life. Today, we can hardly imagine the dangers of a medieval banqueting table. (When we sit down to eat, we don’t even fear intentional poisoning anymore.) Hitchings wants to remind us of them, if only to show us the ground of our own behavior, which we quite naturally take completely for granted.  That’s Hitching’s other point: the manners that we take for granted. He is not really interested in those that we don’t, or that we associate with social classes other than our own.

Class (page 36):

It was in the nineteenth century that the word class began to be used to signify a system. Since the seventeenth century people had spoken of classes — ‘lower,’ ‘higher,’ ‘governing.’ Middle class was established as a noun by around 1750; as an adjective it did not take off until about a hundred years later. We might interpret this as a sign that what we would call class distinctions were coming into sharper focus. But in its new sense the word class, rather than marking social differences precisely, did the reverse. It suggested the existence of a pattern of social divisions, yet created sketchiness where previously there had been the crisper demarcations of rank, order, station and degree. The old terms connoted heredity, along with duties and ethical expectations. Class was not so bound up with the past, having no air of the feudal or the medieval, and was therefore easier to change. The business of changing it was spelled out in the Victorian period’s innumerable etiquette books, which were aids to ambition. As social distinctions became less static, so defensiveness and rivalry increased, as did a fondness for playing detective, spotting differences that had been submerged.

The difference between “manners” and “etiquette” is important; children pick up manners readily enough, but not etiquette.

Plus ça change (page 133):

But English euphemisms seem to be everywhere, and many of the words we feel the need to avoid were euphemisms in their time — vagina and excrement, for instance.

Ageing well (page 170):

Nevertheless, we can see the practical bent of Savile’s counsel: he tells his daughter that ‘one careless glance giveth more advantage [to predatory men] than a hundred words not enough considered,’ and that she must ‘every seven years make some alteration … toward the graver side,’ so that she does not become like one of those ‘girls of fifty, who resolve to be always young, whatever Time with his iron teeth hath determined to the contrary.’

Baloney (page 193): Hitchings follows up a brief mention of a dicey situation in Fanny Burney’s Evalina with some salty language of his own (relatively speaking).

That basic attitude survives among many men, who defend their priapic blitzkrieg with baloney along the lines of ‘She was asking for it.’

The sentence stands out in Hitchings’s generally pastoral prose — priapically, as it were.

Punctuality (page 251): This is also from the chapter entitled “What Were Victorian Values?”

Among the consequences of closer timekeeping was a greater arbitrariness about what were the right and wrong times for certain kinds of activity. Prescriptions about timing replaced an intuitive understanding of it. Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit, constantly fussing about the time, is a true Victorian.

Tipping (page 260): Tips were also known as “vails.”

Voltaire, having dined once with Lord Chesterfield, turned down a second invitation because the servants expected such great vails.

Location, location, location (page 276): This is a chapter heading. Manners are everywhere, and everywhere a little different. This frees us all, ultimately, to get on with more interesting things.

Ah, youth (page 315):

First of all, the young are likely to behave in a depraved way because they have yet to experience the consequences of such behavior, or because they know what the consequences are and don’t consider them significant, or because the consequences are much smaller for them, or because there is a masochistic thrill to be had from inviting the consequences. The ‘forgetting’ of manners referred to by my friend is in part a wilful abandonment of manners, an expression of independence. It is also a test of the structures that manners appear to hold in place.

This warrants a separate meditation.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 12th, 2013 at 4:39 pm.