Manners and Social Usages

Manners and Social Usages [with
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Title: Manners and Social Usages
Author: Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
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[frontispiece]THE MODERN DINNER-TABLE.
MANNERS AND SOCIAL USAGES BY MRS. JOHN SHERWOOD
M.E.W.
AUTHOR OF "A TRANSPLANTED ROSE"
"Manners are the shadows of great virtues."--Whateley
"Solid Fashion is funded politeness."--Emerson
NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION, REVISED BY THE AUTHOR
JUN 11 1887

PG TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
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.
PREFACE.
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.
There may be many social purists who will disagree with us in this
statement. Men and women educated in the creeds of the Old World,
with the good blood of a long ancestry of quiet ladies and gentlemen,
find modern American society, particularly in New York and at
Newport, fast, furious, and vulgar. There are, of course, excesses
committed everywhere in the name of fashion; but we cannot see that
they are peculiar to America. We can only answer that the creed of
fashion is one of perpetual change. There is a Council of Trent, we may
say, every five years, perhaps even every two years, in our new and
changeful country, and we learn that, follow as we may either the grand
old etiquette of England or the more gay and shifting social code of
France, we still must make an original etiquette of our own. Our
political system alone, where the lowest may rise to the highest
preferment, upsets in a measure all that the Old World insists upon in
matters of precedence and formality. Certain immutable principles
remain common to all elegant people who assume to gather society
about them, and who wish to enter its portals; the absent-minded
scholar from his library should