Etiquette of Gilded Age Newport

 Long before the season opens all the dates are taken, invitations sent out and gayeties planned. Newcomers settling at Newport, provided with the finest introductions, may desire to give handsome entertainments, but they will find themselves sadly disappointed.

NEW YORK'S CLOSE ARISTOCRACY

It is, of a truth, easier for a camel to go through the needle's eye than for a newcomer to get into New York society on one season's introduction. New York's society is conducted very much on the lines of a popular theater. Long before the season opens all the dates are taken, invitations sent out and gayeties planned. Newcomers settling at Newport, provided with the finest introductions, may desire to give handsome entertainments, but they will find themselves sadly disappointed. This will be from no ill-will or lack of hospitable inclinations on the part of the leaders of Newport, but simply because they have no vacant chair at their dinners nor a leftover card from their balls to offer new friends.

Of course, if there is a death or illness in a family a vacancy is created, and then one of the outsiders is called in to fill the place. But if you wish to get well into the New York swim you must, particularly if you are a hostess, take time by the forelock and begin in August to plan the next winter's campaign. As to impromptu entertainments and informal affairs, they are almost unknown in exclusive society, and if you want to know whence comes this new etiquette you will learn that it is an adoption of another English custom. — Los Angeles Herald, Number 233, 21 May 1899

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