Afternoon Tea Etiquette of 1917

A tea set for easy serving that is comprised of a set of 6 cups and saucers, spoons, a sugar bowl and a creamer on a stand.

“And while the bubbling and loud-hissing

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups 

That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

So let us welcome peaceful evening in.” — Cowper

A question that readers frequently ask is whether or not napkins should be served with afternoon tea. And the answer is: you may do as you choose. If you do serve napkins don't make the mistake of serving dinner napkins. 

Small napkins about twelve inches square are most appropriate. The Madeira napkins are suitable but rather expensive. Squares of white linen neatly hem- stitched and marked, perhaps, with an initial or monogram at the corner are less expensive for the hostess who has time for needlework.

A popular book on etiquette makes the statement that it is the fashion nowadays to drink weak tea. Perhaps so, though, personally, it seems as if the drinking of strong afternoon tea was a transgression of the question is sometimes raised as to whether it is “smarter to drink tea with milk, cream or lemon.” 

Readers also want to be informed as to the amount of sugar that good form the permits in sugaring tea. Concerning seems as if Commissioner Hoover had more to say than Dame Fashion and since it is our patriotic duty to give up unnecessary lavishness in sugar, I venture to say that during the period of the war one lump is the correct amount of sugar to use. 

If you wish less than a lump it is awkward to attempt to break or bite a lump in two. Rather put in in in in your cup and do not stir your tea with your spoon after you have gained the desired amount of sweetness. 

A complete tea service includes a pitcher of light cream or leman. There is no good or bad form about lemon or milk— it is simply a matter of individual taste.

Nowadays tea is usually brought in the drawing room or sitting room on a large tray on which the complete tea service is arranged. A muffin stand may be brought in also bearing wafers or bread and butter sandwiches or small cakes or crackers. Sometimes a tea wagon holding the entire service is rolled in from the kitchen or pantry instead.

If you have a satisfactory alcohol tea kettle it is very nice to have this on the tea tray with the kettle full of hot water and proceed to bring the water to a boil and then make the tea, taking the tea leaves from a small tea caddy on the tea tray. But it is just as well, and sometimes more convenient, to have a teapot of freshly made tea and a jug of boiling water brought in from the kitchen. 

If you have no maid it is a simple matter to bring in the tea tray for yourself and drink tea in your living room, and that is in much better form than to take afternoon tea in the dining room. —By Mary Marshall Duffee, 1917

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Incongruous Actions in Bad Taste

Not many days ago at a large military funeral the color bearer was chewing gum, and among those lined up on either side of the street to witness the impressive procession there were thousands who mentally commented on this little piece of bad taste.

“I wish you a little more taste.” — Alan Rene Le Sage

Lots of the little things we do that had better been left undone are not things that any authroity on so- called etiquette could reasonably call in bad form— but they are incongruous and inappropriate actions that possibly irritate other people just as much as actual breaks in etiquette. There are some people who though they have little opportunity to learn the habits of polite society through fortuitous gift of good taste, ever seem to make a break. And there are others, who though trained from their youth in the edicts of society, can never be counted on to avoid incongruities.

Not many days ago at a large military funeral the color bearer was chewing gum, and among those lined up on either side of the street to witness the impressive procession there were thousands who mentally commented on this little piece of bad taste. Now, as a matter of fact, so many Americans do chew gum on occasions that it can hardly be called a piece of bad manners. Aviators, swimmers, football player, soldiers on the march, mountain climbers for the most part, find great help in gum chewing, and some doubt the soldier who had a long march to take on a warm day with a heavy banner to carry reflected that he would lighten his task a ward off thirst if he went fortified with gum. But chewing gum on the gridiron or in the swimming tank 1s one thing and chewing gum on a solemn procession is another. It is one of the things of which a person with an, inherent sense of the fitness of things would, of course, never be guilty.

Americans as a rule have a rather remarkable endowment of this feeling for the fitness of things. Especially is this true of our women. A humble farmer's daughter can go from her rural home and grace the most formal European drawing room and show no less grace of manner than the Duchesses with whom she mingles. And many of the women who have made the most tactful hostesses of our White House and have been praised most lavishly by European visitors are those who have had no preparatory social training save that of some back-woods community and have come fortified simply with this native American sense of congruity.

To a certain extent this is something that one acquires as a natural endowment; but in a measure it can be acquired. If you would acquire it, then cultivate your powers of observation. Note what other people are doing and without, of course, blindly following them, bend your manners in minor matters to suit theirs. A desire to be distinctive and individual, at any cost almost always leads a person to lose his sense of the fitness of things. He consults only his own whims and personal comfort. He feels that he is relinquishing some of his inalienable rights as an American citizen if he yields his personal whim and habit. — By Mary Marshall Duffee, 1918

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When Respect Grew for Manners

Erasmus of Rotterdam ~ The Father of Children's Etiquette Instructors … The bronze statue of Erasmus, in Rotterdam. Created by Hendrick de Keyser in 1622, it replaced a stone statue from 1557.

New Respectability For Manners; Scholars Tackle a Topic Long Thought Too Trivial for All but Fussbudgets

The subject of manners once seemed worthy of serious attention. The authors of the Talmud took up such topics as burping, yawning and bad breath. Erasmus wrote the 16th-century equivalent of a best seller on civility and Edmund Burke considered manners more important than laws.

But somewhere between the Renaissance and the late 20th century, the topic got a bad name. Manners came to be viewed as trivial, hypocritical and superficial. Heavy thinkers abandoned manners to the authors of etiquette books, with their fussing about finger bowls and the evils of blowing on soup.

Now an interest in the subject, which once preoccupied the middle classes, is back in vogue, and not just among politicians like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who earlier this week went so far as to invoke Plato in his continuing quest to make New York City a more orderly, civil and, well, mannerly place.

Judith Rodin, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, has convened a 48-member national commission, made up heavily of academics, that is in the midst of a three-to-five-year study of what some believe is an explosion of incivility degrading the quality of public life.

At Johns Hopkins University, P. M. Forni, a professor of Italian literature and culture, has organized a wide-ranging project that includes a course on civility, manners and politeness. It also includes research on civility in schools and in health care, and efforts to encourage scholarly work in the field.

Last fall, the university offered the course not only to its own undergraduates but also to inmates of a maximum-security prison in Jessup, Md. Having spent the semester studying texts like Erving Goffman's, “Interaction Ritual,” both groups came together at the end to discuss what they had learned.

And next month, Johns Hopkins plans to hold a three-day, international symposium titled “Reassessing Civility: Forms and Values at the End of the Century,” with speakers ranging from historians who have written on manners to Judith Martin, the author of the Miss Manners columns and books.

“Manners were expelled from respectable scholarly thinking: ‘Who would be interested in a stupid thing like that?’” Ms. Martin said in a recent interview. “Never mind that the answers are Burke, Mill, Emerson, Aristotle, Cicero, Castiglione, Erasmus, Locke.”

There is indeed a long tradition of serious writing on manners, not the least of which were three centuries of “courtesy books” originally written to instruct young princes but later directed to the sons of the upper classes.

One of the best known of the genre was Erasmus’, “De Civilitate Morum Puerilium” (“On Civility in Boys”), first published in 1526, which went into more than 130 editions and covered everything from dental hygiene and the importance of clean fingernails at the dinner table to when and how to spit.

A wide-eyed look suggests stupidity, Erasmus advised. If mucus falls on the ground while blowing one’s nose with two fingers, step on it, fast. When offered a communal tankard, wipe your mouth first. If food sticks to your teeth, remove it (with a quill or a toothpick, not a knife).

“The whole idea of manners was linked to civilization,” said Richard L. Bushman, a Columbia University historian and the author of “The Refinement of America” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). “It would be listed right along with the growth of art, science and law as a sign that we were civilized.”

But that view changed, at least among scholars. Michael Curtin, a historian in Oakland, Calif., has traced the shift to the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when he believes the long association between manners and morals was irrevocably broken.

In an article published in the Journal of Modern History in September 1985, Mr. Curtin in particular blamed Lord Chesterfield's courtesy book, “Letters to His Son,” published in 1774, which Mr. Curtin said “appeared to represent manners at their most cynical, expedient and immoral light.” In the book, manners seemed to be entirely in the service of self-interest and self-aggrandizement rather than of any broader civic good.

At the same time, Mr. Curtin suggested, Romanticism helped doom the courtesy book. Cosmopolitan standards of civility became suspect. As he put it, the Romantic quest for deep and authentic feeling, uninhibited by propriety and social convention, was destructive of manners.

Others, including Mr. Bushman, trace the decline of serious attention to the subject to the rejection of the formality and triviality of late-Victorian manners. “We had to reduce it in scholarly importance, so we just cast it aside,” he said. “They were seen as something curious and quaint.”

But in 1978, a history of manners that was then 40 years old, “The Civilizing Process” (Blackwell) by Norbert Elias, was published in English for the first time. Many scholars say has since inspired new interest in manners and helped transform the way they are seen.

First published in German in the late 1930's, the book followed the evolution of manners in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. Mr. Elias, a sociologist and social historian, tracked what he described as a rising level of shame about bodily functions and restraint in public, and traced it to the development of the modern state.

The emergence of the state, with its monopoly on violence and the growing interdependence of its members, necessitated greater degrees of individual self-control, Mr. Elias suggested. People began to modify their approach to everything from eating and scratching to spitting and sex.

Tracing the Fork And the Spittoon

Mr. Elias tracked such things as the arrival of the fork at the end of the Middle Ages, which put distance between diner and dined upon; the increasing restrictions on the way knives were used, the introduction of the nightdress, the handkerchief, the chamber pot, the spittoon.

Since the book’s appearance in English, a number of scholars, many of them influenced by Mr. Elias, have published books that have tended to view manners as a source of power or political authority and as a reflection of larger tensions in developing societies.

“Elias opened the door to a new kind of cultural history,” John F. Kasson, a historian at the University of North Carolina, has written. That kind of history, he said, is “keenly attuned to changing standards of emotional expression, bodily control and personal interaction, and seeking to correlate these with larger changes in social structure.”

In his own book, “Rudeness and Civility” (The Noonday Press, 1990), an examination of manners in 19th-century urban America, Mr. Kasson challenges the idea that so-called improvements in manners necessarily represented an unalloyed good.

“I wish to stress how established codes of behavior have often served in unacknowledged ways as checks against a fully democratic order,” Mr. Kasson wrote, “and in support of special interests, institutions of privilege, and structures of domination.”

As an example, he cites the case of the Astor Place Opera House, built in New York City in the 1840’s to embody the latest standards of etiquette and refinement. The house was “aristocratized,” with open seating eliminated and red damask seats sold only by subscription.

To exclude women of dubious respectability, Mr. Kasson writes, women were admitted only in the company of men. Men were expected to comply with a strict dress code that included evening dress, a fresh vest and kid gloves — a calculated slap, Mr. Kasson says, at working- and lower-class men.

“To look at manners in the 19th century is to realize that so-called good manners were often at the expense of a lot of deference to a broadly speaking privileged middle class,” Mr. Kasson said in an interview. “If class is the dirty secret in American life, manners is a way we launder it.”

Mr. Kasson is hardly the only current scholar of manners who acknowledges a debt to Mr. Elias. Another is Nancy Bentley, an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, who in 1995 published “The Ethnography of Manners” (Cambridge), an analysis of the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

“People like Elias say there is a doubleness about manners,” Ms. Bentley said recently. “They are really about how you get along in a group. At the same time, these acts of gentility are also codes that do reinscribe power in some ways, even if they make for more peaceful coexistence.”

Table manners, for example, thus become arbitrary codes. “Insiders know these codes,” Ms. Bentley said. “If you don't, you won't be recognized as an insider. It becomes a way that you can have a kind of identity and recognition and joining of power that outsiders aren't able to claim.”

Ms. Bentley's sister, Amy Bentley, a cultural historian and assistant professor in the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University, has studied table manners in some detail. In a recent interview, she said she shared the view that manners are about power.

“They're necessary, but the ways they’re devised and developed can be about distancing people from one another,” she said. “Who is at the head of the table, who is carving, who waits until they are spoken to — all those kinds of rules about gender, age and other things.

“So I'm not anti-manners,” she said. “Because manners are good. But the ways that they've been used or developed can show interesting things about what people were anxious about in the society and who they were anxious about.”

A correction was made on

March 5, 1998: An article in the Arts and Ideas pages on Saturday about recent scholarly interest in manners referred incorrectly to the role of P. M. Forni in starting the civility project at Johns Hopkins University. He was one organizer; he shared that role with Giulia Sissa, a classics professor. –By Janny Scott, NYT, 1998

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Gilded Age Tabletops and Manners

  

The teaching of table manners cannot be begun too soon. But children should never be allowed to trouble guests. If not old enough to behave well at table, guests should not be invited to the meals at which they are present. It is very trying to parents, guests, and servants.

It is well in all households, if possible, for the children to breakfast and lunch with their parents. The teaching of table manners cannot be begun too soon. But children should never be allowed to trouble guests. If not old enough to behave well at table, guests should not be invited to the meals at which they are present. It is very trying to parents, guests, and servants.

When luncheon is to be an agreeable social repast, which guests are expected to share, then the children should dine elsewhere. No mother succeeds better in the rearing of her children than she who has a nursery dining-room, where, under her own eye, her bantlings are properly fed. It is not so much trouble, either, as one would think– and no matter if it is trouble.

Table mats are no longer used in stylish houses, either at luncheon or at dinner. The waiter should have a coarse towel in the butler’s pantry, and wipe each dish before he puts it on the table. Menu-cards are never used at luncheon. Salt-cellars and small water carafes may be placed up and down the luncheon-table.

In our country, where servants run away and leave their mistress when she is expecting guests, it is well to be able to improvise a dish from such materials as may be at hand. Nothing is better than a cod mayonnaise. A cod boiled in the morning is a friend in the afternoon.– From “Manners and Social Usages,” by Mrs. John Sherwood, 1884

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Gilded Age Formal Lunch Etiquette

If a lady gives a more formal lunch, and has it served à la Russe, the first entrée– let us say chops and green pease– is handed by the waiter, commencing with the lady who sits on the right hand of the master of the house. This is followed by vegetables. Plates having been renewed, a salad and some cold ham can be offered. The waiter fills the glasses with sherry, or offers claret. When champagne is served at lunch, it is immediately after the first dish has been served, and claret and sherry are not then given unless asked for.

If a hot luncheon is served, it is not etiquette to put the vegetables on the table as at dinner; they should be handed by the waiter. The luncheon-table is already full of the articles for dessert, and there is no place for the vegetables. The hot entrées or cold entrées are placed before the master or mistress, and each guest is asked what he prefers. The whole aspect of luncheon is thus made perfectly informal.

If a lady gives a more formal lunch, and has it served à la Russe, the first entrée– let us say chops and green pease– is handed by the waiter, commencing with the lady who sits on the right hand of the master of the house. This is followed by vegetables. Plates having been renewed, a salad and some cold ham can be offered. The waiter fills the glasses with sherry, or offers claret. When champagne is served at lunch, it is immediately after the first dish has been served, and claret and sherry are not then given unless asked for.

After the salad a fresh plate, with a dessert-spoon and small fork upon it, is placed before each person. The ice-cream, pie, or pudding is then placed in front of the hostess, who cuts it, and puts a portion on each plate. After these dainties have been dis- cussed, a glass plate, serviette, and finger-bowl are placed before each guest for fruit. The servant takes the plate from his mistress after she has filled it, and hands it to the lady of first consideration, and so on. When only members of the family are present at luncheon, the mistress of the house is helped first by the servants.

Fruit tarts, pudding, sweet omelette, jellies, blanc- mange, and ice-cream are proper desserts for luncheon; also luncheon cake, or the plainer sorts of loaf-cake.–From “Manners and Social Usages,” by Mrs. John Sherwood, 1884

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Gilded Age Luncheon Etiquette

“If you cannot afford salad and dessert, choose the former by all means. The happiest closing to a real good dinner is a crisp salad well dressed, served with a bit of cheese and bread and butter or toasted cracker.” – Sarah Tyson Rorer, 1898 — Image of Towle lettuce serving fork and a matching Towle lettuce serving spoon, sitting alongside an individual Towle salad fork. All 3 feature gilding on the functional ends. Salad forks did not exist prior to 1885, making them creations of the Gilded Age.

It is well for people living in the country, and with a certain degree of style, to study up the methods of making salads and cold dishes, for these come in so admirably for luncheon that they often save a hostess great mortification. By attention to small details a very humble repast may be most elegant. 

A silver bread-basket for the thin slices of bread, a pretty cheese-dish, a napkin around the cheese, pats of butter in a pretty dish, flowers in vases, fruits neatly served— these things cost little, but they add a zest to the pleasures of the table.—From “Manners and Social Usages,” by Mrs. John Sherwood, 1884

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Etiquette of Service Flag Stars

“The term ‘man’ and ‘enlisted man’ means a person, whether male or female,” according to that act, that settles the matter of sex, Moreover, the act tells us that such persons are all in active service in the military or naval forces of the United States, including non-comissioned and petty officers and members of training camps authored by law.

“If it be aught toward the general good,

Set honor in one eye, and death in the other,

And I will look on both indifferently.” -Shakespeare

Whether or not a woman engaged in war work should have a star on the service flag of her family, the church to which she be- longed or the business where she was employed is a question that has come up for some little dispute. According to the best authorities on the subject sex has nothing to do with it. It is all a matter of kind of service.

The idea is that anybody in military service should be represented on the service flag was the idea of the retired captain who devised the service flag shortly after war was declared. Now in order to discover just who is and who isn't in military service those who have made a study of the etiquette of the service flag go to a certain act of congress relating to war risk insurance in which that body clearly defines just what person in military service really is.

“The term ‘man’ and ‘enlisted man’ means a person, whether male or female,” according to that act, that settles the matter of sex, Moreover, the act tells us that such persons are all in active service in the military or naval forces of the United States, including non-comissioned and petty officers and members of training camps authored by law.

As a matter lot of stars of fact there are service a flags all on over the country that ought not to be there. This does not mean the that persons for whom they were put there are not doing a big bit in the war, but it means that they are not doing what can be called active service in the military or naval forces.

For this reason we ought not to include on service flags stars representing any one on war boards or commissions even when that work takes the person's entire time. Not even Y.M.C.A. secretaries at the front are entitled to be represented since they are not regularly commissioned by the United States Army.

Here is another question that has arisen concerning the etiquette of service flags. Is a person who is serving in one of our Allies’ armies entitled to a place on our service flag if he would be there were he in our own army? That is, may a family with a son in the Canadian army, or a concern with an employee  fighting under the Italian colors, place a star on its banner for that soldier? The answers to that question, according to best authorities, is emphatically yes.— By By Mary Marshall Duffee, 1918

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Etiquette and Patriotic Rings, 1918

Until recently diamonds —either a solitaire, a cluster or circlet— set in platinum were most in vogue, but the recent plea on the part of the government for the conservation of platinum has put this type of engagement ring out of the list of things patriotic. 

What Readers Ask 

“Will you please tell me what is the most approved style of engagement ring at the present time? Is it usual to have the ring bought ready to present at the time of proposing marriage or is it usually purchased afterward?”

A man would have to be a mind reader or pretty sure of his own powers of persuasion to be sure before asking the young woman of his choice that he was going to be successful in his suit. Most young women wouldn’t like to be so taken for granted, and besides it is usual to consult the one who must wear the ring as to her taste in settings and stones. Until recently diamonds —either a solitaire, a cluster or circlet— set in platinum were most in vogue, but the recent plea on the part of the government for the conservation of platinum has put this type of engagement ring out of the list of things patriotic. Diamonds are still the usual stones, but they should be set in gold. —Mary Marshall Duffee, 1918

 

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