A Visitor's Guide to Georgian England by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / General
ISBN: 9781473876873
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2017-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

Greetings and Salutations

This will be an area fraught with potential social gaffes. Rituals of salutation have always existed in every society and involve a delicate interplay of acknowledgement, recognition, respect and deference depending on status, age and gender. The most universally-recognised gesture of unthreatening acknowledgement among all humans is merely eye-contact followed by briefly-raised eyebrows, an upward tilt of the head and, maybe, just the merest hint of a smile. This seemingly hard-wired response has broken the ice in first encounters between strangers throughout all societies, and serves to suggest that aggression may be deferred – pending further and cautious interaction. In complex and status-conscious societies, however, this ancient instinct was obviously not enough to preserve and reinforce the pecking orders of civilisation, so further rituals were necessary. It seems that every possible gesture, posture and verbal greeting has been formalised somewhere, from total prostration to totally ignoring someone.

In eighteenth century emerging cities, like London, where the poor and the aspiring middle-classes would inevitably interact with their betters in ever more complex situations, from being servants to lawyers for example, etiquette became very important. None of us will ever get it absolutely right, but here is a brief guide to not getting it catastrophically wrong in better-off circles.

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