The rights and wrongs of modern manners
A history of social etiquette explores how we came to be so polite. And so rude 
By Henry Hitchings
Over the past couple of years, I have been working on a book about manners. When I have mentioned this to friends and acquaintances, the most common response has been, “Oh yes, 'Manners makyth man’ and all that.”
This suggests how tired a lot of our thinking about manners has become. The motto chosen more than 600 years ago by William of Wykeham for the school he founded – Winchester – and for its Oxford sibling, New College, seems dignified but limited. Nobody who regurgitates it is suggesting that this is all there is to manners. Yet fresh discussion of the subject tends to congeal into dollops of received wisdom.
My plan was to examine the history of manners, rather than complaining about their current deterioration or setting out a personal vision of what it means to be polite. I was keen to examine where this array of behaviours comes from – and supplement my historical digging with anthropology and a little neuroscience.
I focused on English manners (and not even the broader question of British manners) as a way into larger issues: how manners relate to class, the importance of language as a social lubricant, and the idea of manners as protection – not just from others, but also from ourselves. At the same time, English manners illuminate the essence of Englishness: its historical and geographical peculiarities, and also smaller quirks, such as the masochistic delight in queuing.
As far back as we can trace, notions of proper conduct have been shaped by individuals, rather than by committee. Their starting point has been behaviour at mealtimes, which is seen as a reliable indication of how people are likely to behave elsewhere.In the 12th century, King David I of Scotland promised tax rebates to any of his subjects who could learn to eat their food more elegantly. According to the chronicler William of Malmesbury, the initiative was English in origin: David had grown up at the court of Henry I, and there “the rust of his native barbarism had been polished away”.
Move forward to the 15th century and there is a trenchant contribution to the field from John Russell, an usher to the Duke of Gloucester. Russell was an advocate of restraint; he saw the value of muffling our primal urges. If you had an itchy back, for instance, you weren’t to claw at it as if trying to dislodge a flea, no matter how great the irritation.
Guides of this kind assumed a male audience. The first for a specifically female one was not published until 1631 – and was written by a man. (Only in the 19th century did it become common for guides to women’s conduct to be written by women.) Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman set out a narrow idea of politeness: a lady should avoid “variety and inconstancy” in her attire, notwithstanding the instruction to be “fashionably neat”.
From Brathwait, we get a sense of honour as something moderate rather than expansive. By the Renaissance, a ruling class of warriors had given way to one made up of courtiers: they associated social ease with fluency yet also with evasiveness, and paid attention to tiny differences in behaviour and appearance – a proclivity that Sigmund Freud would call “the narcissism of small differences”.
New ideas of polite behaviour came mainly from abroad. The Dutch scholar Erasmus was particularly influential, offering a wealth of precise advice: to cough in order to mask flatulence, for instance, and not to giggle at private jokes or puff out the cheeks (a sign of disdain).
There were Italian influences, too, most notably that of Baldassare Castiglione. His Book of the Courtier (translated into English in 1561) may now seem glib, yet it is alert to matters that feel modern: the need to control one’s space, the theatrical nature of public life. More practically, in 1608, the traveller Thomas Coryat saw forks being used in Italy – by individuals, not as communal implements. He brought one back to England and was mocked for using it.
Coryat’s affectation would catch on amid the ceremonial excesses of the Restoration period, and would not disappear in the more relaxed 18th century. “Our manners sit more loose upon us,” wrote Joseph Addison in the Spectator in 1711, and his contemporary, the Earl of Shaftesbury, spoke of politeness as “amicable collision”. Much of this collision was nocturnal. The spread of street lighting – introduced to London in the 1680s – made it easier to socialise after dark. In towns, even if not in the country, the night became a time for leisure.
There is a rich English tradition of devising schedules to turn leisure hours into near-military performances. “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment,” claimed Dr Johnson with typical pungency, but it was his sometime antagonist Lord Chesterfield who prevailed, promoting just such schemes. Chesterfield also popularised that cramped word “etiquette”, and thanks to his influence it became usual to think of manners as something schematic, quite separate from morals.
In Victorian times, the formulae of polite conduct were accessories of social mobility. Guides to etiquette proliferated. Many of what to us seem timeless features of English etiquette were Victorian innovations: the conventions of mourning dress, faith in the stiff upper lip, and the notion that silence is golden (a Swiss proverb made widely known by Thomas Carlyle). Another Victorian legacy is the contraction of “I am sorry” to “sorry” – an adjective cut off from the person who is feeling the sorrow.
In Victorian England, it became usual to speak of manners as if of a series of traps for the unwary. Today there is perhaps no name more closely linked with the avoidance of such traps than Debrett’s. Its website pronounces it “the modern authority on all matters of etiquette, social occasions, people of distinction and fine style”. But Debrett’s A-Z of Modern Manners betrays the tone of 21st-century angst. It bursts with advice that would have seemed mystifying 20 years ago, such as “Trust your fake tan to the professionals” and “Don’t be an online bore”.
Today, technology has become the main provoker of anxiety about manners. Traditionally, manners have percolated down to the young from their elders. But when it comes to modern communications technology, the reverse applies. It used to be a standard joke among my parents’ generation that they left it to their digitally adept children to set the timer on the VCR. Now we live in a world where such incompetence is costly.Throughout electronic culture, young people dictate protocol. As a result, public life can feel loud and disjointed, preoccupied with the ephemeral. At home, too, children often determine the mood, with parents appearing almost deferential.
So is this a harbinger of the end of days? It’s certainly easy to see signs of a decline in formality and restraint. Yet as new forms of sociability develop, so do new standards of conduct. Our world poses challenges unimagined by our grandparents. The ways in which we negotiate these challenges often seem graceless, but modern manners are a work in progress.
Pondering this, I am reminded of the following quotation: “There being now nothing in our constitution to give due check to our bad manners, their natural consequences must have their full effect, and we run the greatest risk of going to destruction.”
Those words were written by Robert Wallace, a scholar of population. In 1758.
