The desire to live in a house is strong. Apartments may be practical and adequate, but the wish for something more is almost universal. The trailer, even though it usually affords less space than the meanest sort of apartment, is presented as a house on wheels. In places where we are surrounded by vast numbers of other people – as at a music festival, for instance – there is the urge, even as we exult in shared experience, to summon up the atmosphere of domesticity. In fact, one of the pleasures of festival-going and camping seems to be that it is an excuse to spend the night in a little room you erect and then nest in, surrounded by your clutter. Your tent is another kind of castle.
The places we live announce to others who and what we are. Yet if a house can be a projection of character, it can also shape one’s behaviour in unintended ways, creating identity rather than expressing it. In a shared property, a lot depends on whether you have a room of your own with a door that locks. If you live in a palace with 1,000 rooms, you will behave differently from how you would in a bedsit where sleeping and eating happen in the same space. ‘Differently’ does not mean ‘better’. The houses of the social elite have long influenced ideas of politeness; they have typically been hard to get to, or at least hard to get into, and have thus embodied the relationship between grandeur and exclusivity – a patrician aloofness.
The story of domestic space and its development is, in broad terms, one of specialization: different rooms for different purposes. Even at the top of society, it was once usual to do everything in a single space, as is still the case for some people in Britain and many in less economically developed countries. As Bill Bryson writes in At Home, his genial history of private life: ‘No room has fallen further in history than the hall. Now a place to wipe feet and hang hats, once it was the most important room in the house. Indeed, for a long time it was the house.’2
A large medieval house was a collection of rooms surrounding a central unit: hall, kitchen, chapel. By the sixteenth century, the most important room was the great chamber, sometimes known as the dining chamber. By the seventeenth, many houses had corridors, and voluntary isolation was possible; even if few people enjoyed much privacy, there was at least a sense that not all areas of the home were communal. By the eighteenth century, the hall had generally been reduced to a vestibule, servants were consigned to the backstairs (a word that came in around 1650), and a series of communal rooms running into one another were used for social occasions. Polite entertainment required compartmentalization: separate rooms for gathering, dancing and taking meals. These had to be some distance from the front door, to reduce the chances of anyone tumbling muddily into a sophisticated gathering.3 As domestic space became more specialized, so manners seemed to have more particular departments. In Victorian England, guides to manners were concerned with the behaviour appropriate to each room and the circumstances in which one moved from one room to the next.
The fundamental truth here is that you cannot talk about manners without an awareness of environment. Our experience of environment primes our decisions. A particularly curious demonstration of this was an experiment conducted in 2010 at Cornell University, in which psychologist David Pizarro and PhD student Erik Helzer found that students quizzed about their political attitudes voiced more conservative views if interviewed while standing near a hand sanitizer dispenser.4 This is a small-scale example of something that happens on a much larger scale: we respond to cues that are environmental (and perhaps also olfactory in the case of the hand sanitizer), and as we do so we are largely unaware of what these cues are. Our bodies do not merely register the effects of the choices we make; often they inform our judgements.
23
A fluid world
or, ‘Are you suggesting that I should call you Eric?’
Although middle-class domestic space became more specialized in the nineteenth century, the living conditions of the poor, especially the urban poor, remained cramped, high rents notwithstanding. There was space in the suburbs, but not in the neighbourhoods where workers needed to live in order to be near their places of employment. The poor could not retreat to a soundproof study, as Carlyle did; their lives were noisy and always available for inspection – by their neighbours, and also by philanthropists who came to examine them. Tools, crockery and clothes were jumbled together. Children might sleep three or four to a bed. Family matters were unavoidably public.
Although there are still people in Britain who live in such conditions, in the last hundred years the amount of domestic space enjoyed by the poor has increased a great deal. Patterns of land ownership have changed, too. Today 70 per cent of the population has a stake in Britain’s land; less than 150 years ago, the figure was 4.5 per cent. In the 1870s a population of 28 million occupied 3.84 million dwellings, 703,000 of them privately owned. Between 1873 and 2010, the population a little more than doubled, but the number of dwellings went up sevenfold, and the number of privately owned dwellings increased to nearly 20 million.1 With ownership has come a sense that privacy is an entitlement – a means of selectively controlling access to one’s space, a guarantee of some degree of autonomy and one of the planks of a more equal society.
In 1882 William Hurrell Mallock, a novelist who was also an economist, published a book called Social Equality: A Short Study in a Missing Science. We may now grimace at that title. The twentieth century can be characterized as the Age of Equality, and as one in which the approach to improving equality was scientific. This is not to say that the distribution of wealth and opportunity is now equal, but, as one history puts it: ‘The twentieth century saw the transformation of our world from one where most people’s lives were short and spent living at close to subsistence level to one where the majority enjoy unprecedented material well-being and greater longevity.’2
Greater social equality has been achieved not in a linear fashion, but in fits and starts. Attitudes to courtship have represented this: there was an obvious relaxation of formalities between 1900 and 1930 (especially during the prosperous, dance-mad, materialistic, playful Roaring Twenties), followed by a period of comparatively modest change between 1930 and the early 1960s, at which point informality sharply increased. Over this timespan parental influence on courtship declined, and sex was more frankly discussed, amid loud complaints from traditionalists about the rise of permissiveness. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a surge of enthusiasm for expressiveness, experimentation and radical activism. Mingled with this were negative feelings about the inauthentic and hierarchical authoritarianism of traditional manners. Deference was mistrusted. The pressure for change was ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’. In freeing up the emotions and valuing many kinds of behaviour that had previously been considered dangerous, the period’s movers and shakers were expressing what is sometimes dignified as nostalgie de la boue, a longing for the primitive and the degrading, a desire to get down and get dirty. Openness, a reduced concern with self-regulation, a desire to discover ironies at every turn: this was the John McEnroe approach, and a harbinger of the kind of mass entertainment in which everything is allowed to hang out (the world of The Oprah Winfrey Show) or slither out (the world of The Jeremy Kyle Show). In pop psychology, which would go super-pop on Oprah and Jeremy Kyle, restraint was associated with pitiful repression.
We can see evidence of these developments in changing styles of dance. At the start of the twentieth century dancing often meant waltzing; new styles to emerge before the 1920s included the foxtrot and the tango; with the 1920s we associate the Charleston; with the 1930s, jitterbugging to swing music; with the 1940s and 1950s, the jive; with the early 1960s, the Twist; and with the 1970s, disco. What’s happened since requires a whole book of its own. But what we see here is a move away from structured dance with a partner towards greater individualism and spontaneity – and towards much less strict control of dance’s sexual elements, from connotations of sex towards an exhibition of it.
A more integrated and open society naturally involved a more emancipated and
unbuttoned approach to social life. A small example: we use people’s given names where once we would have addressed them more formally – in the workplace, for instance, or in the classroom. Harold Nicolson writes in Good Behaviour (1955) that ‘had I been addressed by my Christian name at … school, I should have blushed scarlet, feeling that my privacy had been outraged and that some secret manliness had been purloined from me.’ He suggests that the wider use of given names became fashionable in the reign of Edward VII (1901–10). Yet the old practice hung on.
In the context of calling it ‘old’, I should explain that hereditary surnames were first used in the eleventh century but were not common even in urban families until 300 years later. Before surnames were in wide use, the limited range of personal names meant that people had to be identified using bynames – a reference to their antecedents, occupation or where they lived. In many cases surnames crystallized bynames. Today, given names are incredibly varied; often they compensate for the drabness of a surname (Keyboard Smith, Queequeg Jones). Yet many surnames have deep, romantic associations, and it is not so very hard to imagine an age in which addressing people mainly by their surnames seemed not only judiciously formal but also more tuneful.
A book on contemporary manners from 1933 reports that ‘In no way is the offhand attitude of these days as apparent as in the extravagant use of Christian names.’3 A year later, the mountaineer Eric Shipton, after a month or so sharing a small tent with his fellow Himalayan explorer Bill Tilman, asked if they could stop calling each other by their surnames. Tilman replied, ‘Are you suggesting that I should call you Eric? I’m afraid I couldn’t do that. I should feel such a bloody fool.’4
In 1939 Laura, Lady Troubridge, whose guides to etiquette were popular before the Second World War, wrote that ‘Friendships are made far quicker now that the barrier of undue formality has been lifted, and Christian names follow swiftly on mutual liking in a way which would make old-fashioned people aghast.’ Yet thirteen years previously, her attitude had been different: she had warned that ‘everyone, and women especially, should be extremely careful in making friends and acquaintances in hotels’, on the grounds that ‘strangers still remain strangers, even though you sleep under the same roof with them.’5 It is striking, too, that Lady Troubridge’s thoughts were in 1926 being packaged as The Book of Etiquette – subtitled The Complete Standard Work of Reference on Social Usage – whereas by 1939 they were presented as Etiquette and Entertaining – with a jaunty explanation on the cover that the book would serve ‘to help you on your social way’.
In the twentieth century etiquette ceased to be regarded as a form of law and instead came to be thought of as an art. At the same time the Victorian pattern persisted: the readers of etiquette books were, to an ever greater extent, women. The development of low-cost paperback publishing, which began in 1935 when Allen Lane launched the Penguin imprint, made books of this kind accessible to all but the poorest. Advertising in magazines promoted the idea that guides to etiquette were an aid not only to social ease, but also to self-sufficiency.
In Austerity Britain, a vivid picture of the post-war years, the historian David Kynaston lists some of the things that Britain did not have in 1945. There were ‘No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves’, and yet there were ‘Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red telephone boxes’. Abortion and gay relationships were illegal. Capital punishment was still in force. This was a world of ‘dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers’, in which every Monday was wash day and the hearth was the centre of people’s homes.6 The rigidity of such a society may seem the stuff of a mercifully bygone age, but it is common to look back on that time as one of decency and stoicism, typified by the ‘make do and mend’ philosophy of a people bound together by feelings of shared purpose.
We speak of lost communities, the precious solidarities once valued but now scorned. This is a romantic view of the past. The extensive findings of the Mass Observation Project, begun in 1937, dispel the image of a golden age of neighbourliness and community spirit. Instead they reinforce the impression of what the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer called ‘distant cordiality’.7 Gorer was writing in 1955, a time we might incline to think of as steeped in a warmth now gone. Yet in his analysis of the findings of a questionnaire filled out by readers of the Sunday newspaper the People, he noted that while two-thirds knew their neighbours well enough to speak to them, fewer than 5 per cent felt able to drop in on them without an invitation. A larger percentage complained that their neighbours were nosy, noisy, snobbish or stupid.
The question of how we behave towards our neighbours is interesting, because we misrepresent our feelings on the matter. It is normal to idealize neighbourly behaviour as an overt chumminess, but in reality being a good neighbour, especially in a closely packed environment, is more likely to be latent – it often involves averting our gaze. Neighbourliness is really the art of managed indifference, a selective inattention. Ask people to talk about good neighbours they have had, rather than about the idea of a good neighbour, and you will glimpse a negative sort of solidarity: ‘She never complained about my music’, ‘He kept his nose out’, ‘I barely heard a peep out of them.’
Some of the questions in Gorer’s survey are framed intriguingly. Respondents are asked to identify the main reasons behind an apparent recent increase in crime ‘especially among young people’. The options available are ‘People got into bad ways in the Forces’, ‘Children whose fathers were in the Forces didn’t have proper discipline’, ‘Children who were evacuated weren’t properly looked after’, ‘Modern parents aren’t strict enough’, ‘Modern schools aren’t strict enough’, ‘Young people follow the bad example of crime films and crime stories in books and on the radio’ and ‘People are neglecting religion’.8 Gorer’s findings chime with the spirit of a good deal of 1950s journalism. For instance, in 1953 the Daily Express ran a series of pieces depicting ‘The New Poor’, middle-class strivers struggling to keep up appearances while paying high taxes. Their conformity was proverbial, yet found frequent expression in an almost paranoid aversion to anything ‘common’. That word has been used to mean ‘ordinary’ and even ‘inferior’ for more than 600 years, but towards the end of the nineteenth century it came to be a term for unrefined, lower-class people, and it caught on amid the social competitiveness of the post-war years.
Gorer’s findings, together with the Mass Observation Project, unsettle familiar assumptions. Is intimacy always a good thing? It has become customary to suggest that it is. But rather than being democratic, intimacy can be troublesome. Today we are obliged to be relaxed. Casualness is mistaken for fairness. The idea that each of us should do what makes us feel comfortable does not result in other people’s comfort and hardly seems to improve our own. I’ll call this the paradox of laxity: to paraphrase Norbert Elias, we are constrained to be unconstrained. There is a self-consciousness about this relaxedness: when someone professes to be ‘chilling’, the mood is not in fact sedate.
The flipside of instant intimacy is instant hostility. We are quick to adopt a hollow or at any rate cool intimacy, as for instance when kissing someone we barely know on the cheek, but quick also to tear into others or pepper them with candid advice and personal remarks. An example from my own experience: in a restaurant in Egypt, another British tourist – to whom I had never spoken, though we knew each other by sight – stopped me as I was helping myself to pudding, saying, ‘Don’t eat that: a minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.’ When I smarted, she insisted that she was ‘only trying to be helpful’. This taunting semi-helpfulness concluded with the observation that ‘It would be awful if one day you just keeled over.’ It is but a step from this to rank abuse, the overt hostility we feel able to show people because we don’t know them and expect not to see them again. Walking through a railway station, at Christmas, I chance on a shopper berating a worker from a
nearby building site; I have no idea what he has said or done to her, but she is spraying him with invective, confident that she can at any moment retreat through a ticket barrier – ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? You don’t fucking know me, you deaf cunt.’
I don’t believe that this kind of behaviour is completely new, but it feels as if it is on the rise. I say this a little tentatively because it may simply be that I have become more sensitive to it. Writing a book about manners has made me notice conduct I might previously have overlooked. Still, the view prevails that manners have declined (or are in decline).
Canvassing opinions about why this may have happened, I heard about multiculturalism, sexual freedom, the perils of individualism, the impact of technology, the Sunday Trading Act of 1994, the decimalization of currency in 1971, the end of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in 1960), the encroachment of liberal values on school teaching, the encroachment of capitalism on just about everything, the cult of efficiency, the shrinking of the public sector, the bloated public sector, tight clothing, very loose clothing, men no longer wearing ties, the pampered ennui of James Bond, the concept of ‘unisex’, in-ear headphones, hip-hop, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the European Union, TV, the gutter press, hard drugs, the growing acceptance of soft drugs, atheism, lazy agnosticism, religious extremism, the poor quality of modern diet, the wide use of agrochemicals and food additives, mass-produced housing and the rupturing of long-established neighbourhoods, the decline of the ‘family business’ and the fraying of family life. I also heard about institutional sloth and political niaiserie. Samuel, a sixty-two-year-old jeweller, spoke for many in declaring that ‘Good manners have disappeared because there’s no discipline. Nobody trusts the fucking government, nobody trusts the fucking police. The Church is mostly run by … you know’ – he makes a pungent claim – ‘so you can’t trust them, can you? Who do kids look up to? I’ll tell you who – fucking celebrities. Where’s the good of that? Women’s lib has got something to do with it, too.’
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