Manners and Social Usages

Produced by Holly Ingraham.
Manners are the shadows of great virtues. —Whateley
Solid Fashion is funded politeness. —Emerson
This etiquette manual was probably originally a series of columns in a newspaper or a magazine like Harper's, as the chapters on weddings in the different seasons refer to how the fashions have changed since the last one—by the original copyright, 1884, though the book version appeared in 1887. Notable features among the usual: how to dance the German, or Cotillon; remarks and four chapters on English, French, or others in contrast to American customs, making it a guide to European manners; proper behavior for the single woman past girlhood; appropriate costumes for many occasions; three chapters on staff and servants.
There is no country where there are so many people asking what is proper to do, or, indeed, where there are so many genuinely anxious to do the proper thing, as in the vast conglomerate which we call the United States of America. The newness of our country is perpetually renewed by the sudden making of fortunes, and by the absence of a hereditary, reigning set. There is no aristocracy here which has the right and title to set the fashions.
But a reigning set, whether it depend upon hereditary right or adventitious wealth, if it be possessed of a desire to lead and a disposition to hospitality, becomes for a period the dictator of fashion to a large number of lookers-on. The travelling world, living far from great centres, goes to Newport, Saratoga, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and gazes on what is called the latest American fashion. This, though exploited by what we may call for the sake of distinction the newer set, is influenced and shaped in some degree by people of native refinement and taste, and that wide experience which is gained by travel and association with broad and cultivated minds. They counteract the tendency to vulgarity, which is the great danger of a newly launched society, so that our social condition improves, rather than retrogrades, with every decade.