Edwardian Era Table Etiquette

“Do not fill pauses in the conversation by trifling with the silver or clinking the glasses unless you are willing to be considered ill bred.” – In HBO’s, “The Gilded Age” the Duke fiddled with his nut pick, but he probably could have jumped onto the table and danced a jig… Bertha still wouldn’t have considered him ill-bred. He was, after all, a Duke!

Manners for the Table

• Assume an erect position while eating at the table. Do not lounge in the chair or do not lean forward to meet your lifted fork.

• A gentleman always remains standing until every lady at the table is seated.

• Place the chair so that the waist or chest is about eight inches from the table. Closer seating throws out the elbows, and a chair farther removed makes its occupant crook the back in a most awkward fashion.

• Do not fill pauses in the conversation by trifling with the silver or clinking the glasses unless you are willing to be considered ill-bred.

• Remember that a reposeful bearing at table invariably marks the man or woman of refinement.

• Be careful to introduce into your conversation only such subjects as shall prove harmonious and shall in no wise embarrass or offend any one at the table. – Imperial Valley Press, 1909

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Teen Etiquette for 1929

There are people so terribly rude 

That they really ought to be sued,

For with jaws wide apart 

In a hurry they start 

Munching and crunching their food. 

— M. B.

1. Nothing less than your own funeral excuses lateness to lunch.

2. When seating a lady do not shove her into her soup.

3. If you have been graduated from the bib class, do not tuck your napkin under your chine, or into your vest.

4. Using a toothpick is never permissible in public. If you must use a pick try your talents on a rock pile.

5. Should it be necessary to remark that the lunch table is not a dressing table? It seems to be.

6. Remember that the lunch table is not an Open Forum and omit quarrels and personal remarks from the conversation.–From Mind Your Manners, East High School Denver, 1929

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Etiquette and Dinner Conversation

The tongue is the best member we possess, potentially not only an artist, but a philosopher, philanthropist, reformer and nurse all in one.
“The best of life is conversation.” –  Emerson    

The prosperous-appearing, but unhappy-looking, quartet pictured here have not received news of a distressing bereavement, nor are they brooding after a quarrel. Owing to their lack of ability to entertain each other by conversation, they are simply bored to death. Sounds from the restaurant orchestra, hidden under the palms, having ceased temporarily, they are so deficient in the quality of self-entertainment, they look and act as if life had no future attraction for them.

For this scene in actual life, look any night in the restaurants and hotel dining-rooms where people congregate. The decline in the art of conversation has made necessary the modern “eating orchestra,” which helps diners to fill up the gaps between noise in gabbling about fashion, gossip, scandal, etc. Once such topics are exhausted, the ordinary dining party is stumped and at the end of its intellectual rope.

Music, a sacred thing, capable of inspiring the understanding and lifting it to a realm which it could not reach if left to itself, is degraded when made the aid of gluttony and intemperance, and is being forced to take the place of conversation in the dining-room only because of a universal neglect to train the faculty of speech, a condition found and rapidly grown worse in all the civilized countries of the world.

Civilization has brought innumerable blessings and also many penalties. Few things in life are simple any more. The more we get, the more quarrelsome we become, and the more we desire. We fight not only for life, but for its superfluities —for the things money alone can buy; and this contest is taking us away from many of the finer enjoyments which, because being free as air to all who would seek them, are neglected. With the progress of civilization has gone the decline of conversation as an art.

Speech is the chief evolution of the mind and the first form it takes; the rapid advance of the art of printing; the cheapness of all forms of daily, weekly and montlily publications, have caused people to depend for their opinions on science, art, literature, religion, business, politics, etc., on a favorite paper, instead of measuring for themselves the facts presented, and through intellectual conversation at home, or in society, get the varied lights and viewpoints which would lead them to accurate personal judgment which might indeed not be different but more satisfactory.

Conversation, which has been described as the music of the mind, is an orchestra in which all instruments have an equal part but do not play together, and was in former days the principal means of knowledge, and might in our day, if encouraged and cultivated, be one of the greatest helps to pleasure and social intimacy. An old Hebrew poet said that the tongue is the best member we possess, potentially not only an artist, but a philosopher, philanthropist, reformer and nurse all in one. – From “The Lost Art of Conversation,” 1909

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia 

Dinner Seating Etiquette, 1895

Dinner tables of society hostesses, in the latter part of the Victorian Era, featured unique and ornate silver patterns. The more silver laid on a dining table, the better. Silver reflected candlelight, illuminating dining rooms that were not yet fitted with electric lights.

A New Dinner Table Fashion!

The new heraldry, or rather etiquette, for large public dinners, annual​ dinners and the like—to which more and more​ frequently ladies are invited—places the wife at the table by her husband's side. She has for some years sat side by side with bim on the box seat when he drives his four-in-hand, and now it is the recognized thing, even in London,where innovations come slowly, to have this arrangement at dinner. 

"It seems very odd," writes an English woman, describing the annual dinner of the Newsvendors Benevolent and Provident Institution at the Grand Hotel, "very odd to go down with Richard, this being one of the particulars in which the public banquet differs from the private dinner. Opposite us were a husband and wife, to the left of us another couple, and a little further off another married pair. None of us quarreled with each other. 

Richard talked to his friend, who occasionally threw me a crumb of the conversation, and I made friends with my other neighbor, admired the lovely tulips on the table and made energetic efforts to see what Lady E_____ looked like. She sat beside the chairman, her husband, her father, the Earl of Arran, supporting her on the right. So you see it was intensely British​, a family arrangement of the most pronounced kind." 

The first time that such an arrangement was tried in Philadelphia was at the dinner given to Dr. James Mac Allister by Mr. Edward T. Steel and a number of other friends. There, husbands sat by their wives, and the novelty and ease of this arrangement was very much enjoyed. Since then the arrangement has become quite a general one for public functions, when other placing of the body of guests would be awkward or impossible. — Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1895

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia