Georgian Etiquette for Gentlewomen

Gentlewomen, the first thing you are to observe is, to keep your back straight, and do not lean your elbows on the table.
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How To Eat 

Social Etiquette Advice, circa 1831

An English magazine has brought to light a “Manual on Social Etiquette” which was promulgated many years ago. We give an extract or two: “Gentlewomen, the first thing you are to observe is, to keep your back straight, and do not lean your elbows on the table. Discover not by any ravenous gesture your angry appetite, nor fix your eyes too greedily on the meat before you as if you would devour more that way, than your throat can swallow.”

In another page: “Do not eat spoon-meat so hot that the tears stand in your eyes, or that thereby you betray your intolerable greediness. Do not bite your bread, but cut or break it, and keep not your knife always in your hand, for that is as unseemly as a gentlewoman who pretended to have as little a stomach as she had a mouth, and, therefore, would not swallow her peas by spoonfuls, but took them one by one, and cut them in two before she could eat them.”

Gentlewomen are further instructed: “Fill not your mouth so full, that your cheeks shall swell like a pair of Scotch bagpipes.” Gentlewomen are also pleasantly put on their guard against the possible perpetration of certain minor misdemeanors: “You will show yourself too saucy by calling for sauce on any dainty things. Avoid smacking in your eating. Forbear putting both hands to your mouth at once; nor gnaw your meat, but cut it handsomely, and eat sparingly.” The latter admonition is addressed to what the author styles “the female younger sort,” but always gentlewoman born and bred. — From “Public Opinion” periodical, 1863

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