Gilded Age Calling Card Changes

“The fashionable card for a lady is a shade smaller than that of last year. It couldn't be a shade larger without resembling a reception or dinner invitation, so the reduction was a coercive measure.”– Calling card sizes varied over varying decades and the rules for their use, along with the trays for their collection in homes and offices, varied just as much. This gent’s card tray dates from 1891. It is from the book, “What Have We Here?: The Etiquette and Essentials of Lives Once Lived, from the Georgian Era through the Gilded Age and Beyond...”

Leave One of Your Husband’s Cards

The latest edict in the etiquette of card leaving relieves us from the necessity of distributing a shower of paste-boards all along the weary way we traverse in a calling expedition, that is if we would follow English customs. 

A few years ago it became a fixed rule that a woman calling on husband and wife without her consort should leave two of his cards and one of her own with the servant at the door. But the great calling world have gradually decided that it is intensely stupid to use up twice as many of a man’s cards as of a woman’s, when it is plain that a call on the wife is a call on the husband.

Consequently, unless you are very punctilious, it is considered quite sufficient to leave one gentleman’s card. The lady’s card should be left only when the hostess is out, except in the case of a first call, and should not be left at “at homes,” teas or receptions if you would be English and up to date.

The fashionable card for a lady is a shade smaller than that of last year. It couldn't be a shade larger without resembling a reception or dinner invitation, so the reduction was a coercive measure. The man's card is smaller and narrower than that of former years, the proper dimensions being 1½ inches in width and a little more that 3 inches in length.-New York Sun, 1893

 

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