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Civility and Rudeness: Urban Etiquette and the Bourgeois Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

John F. Kasson
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Extract

This essay represents an effort to understand how members of the middle class adjusted to the emergent urban-industrial order in the nineteenth century. In particular, I wish to inquire into what changes in social behavior, in emotional regulation, ultimately in identity this order entailed. I shall pursue these issues through the study of what may at first appear an unlikely source: the multitude of American etiquette manuals published between 1830 and 1910. Such materials can substantially enlarge our understanding of how behavior and identity were shaped and the cultural and social orders adjusted and maintained, as middle-class Americans encountered the momentous changes of a new urban-industrial society. This essay will concentrate on urban experience because here the problems of adjustment were most intense; but I would argue that as the process of capitalist development and modernization advanced, the styles of life and modes of consciousness first developed in cities came to a large extent to dominate the nation as a whole.

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Research Article
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Prospects , Volume 9 , October 1984 , pp. 143 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I prepared an earlier draft of this essay while concurrently holding fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Humanities Center, and I wish to thank both foundations for their vital support.

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98. De Valcourt, , Illustrated Manners Book, p. 122.Google Scholar

99. On this subject see Cuddihy, John Murray, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).Google Scholar