You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  CHAPTER 22

  THE GOOD LIFE

  The Arts and High Society

  Sir George Grove

  A Dictionary of Music

  and Musicians

  1879–99

  Emily Post

  Etiquette in Society

  1922

  Many reference books are grimly utilitarian, concerned only with what we need to know: legal codes to settle the penalty for adultery, logarithm tables to aid artillery batteries, dictionaries to settle Saxon etymologies. But reference books can also tell us things we want to know. They can be just as useful in helping us find le mot juste for a poem, guiding us through the world’s great museums, or advising us on which wine is worth a week’s salary. Reference books, that is to say, can help us live the good life.

  George Grove was born in Clapham, just south of London, in 1820. Though far from rich, he managed to get a decent education, and at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a Scottish civil engineer. Soon he began working on the Birmingham–London railway. His passion, though, was music. His earliest musical memories were of hearing his mother play parts of Handel’s Messiah on the piano. As a boy he was a regular at the Clapham parish church—partly, no doubt, for the doctrine, but largely to hear the music there, since the organist was especially fond of Johann Sebastian “Bawk.”1 When he worked in London, he heard as many concerts as he could, and he spent hours at the British Museum copying out long-neglected scores.

  When he finished his apprenticeship he qualified as a graduate of the Institution of Civil Engineering and traveled first to Glasgow, then to Jamaica and Bermuda, working as an engineer on building projects. Jamaica was under direct British rule in the heyday of the Empire, and Grove played his part in the imperial project. As his biographer tells the story—in an attempt to make him sound humane—“It is characteristic of Grove’s considerateness that he was most anxious to get his white men away from the spot on the earliest possibility before the setting in of the unhealthy season.”2 Grove was a product of his age, when a white European life was worth more than a brown or black life.

  Back in England, Grove worked on the new railway station at Chester, but he also made a point of hearing as much music as possible at the cathedral. When he heard the organist there playing a Bach fugue, he knew he had found a kindred spirit, and the two became fast friends. Together they started a singing club. Eventually Grove came into contact with some of the highest-profile civil engineers working in Britain, including Isambard Kingdom Brunel. On their urging—he facetiously says “they forced me”3—he became secretary of the Society of Arts in London at a time of great cultural excitement, since London was preparing for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Grove was responsible for much of the planning, and after the Exhibition, he became secretary in charge of the Crystal Palace, the gigantic glass structure that had been built for the event. He spent the rest of his life hosting concerts—first with a wind band, then with a full orchestra—at the Crystal Palace. He routinely chose the program and wrote program notes for the concerts, signing them simply “G.”

  Grove had many notable friends—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Henry Morton Stanley, Benjamin Jowett, Clara Schumann, Arthur Sullivan (“a constant visitor at his house”)4—and he hosted a wide range of programs, including the great Germans and Austrians of the Classical period, the French Romantics, and up-and-coming British composers. Bach—no longer “Bawk”—was a particular passion. Bach’s reputation among the general public was not high in the mid-nineteenth century; he was regarded as learned but difficult. But for Grove, writing in the Spectator for a music-loving audience, Bach was marked not by learning but by “feeling, tender passionate sentiment, a burning genius, and a prodigious flow and march of ideas.”5 Grove also championed Franz Schubert, then little known in Britain. Sullivan and Grove traveled to Vienna to track down Schubert manuscripts and discovered music thought lost, which was first played at one of Grove’s Crystal Palace concerts.

  His writing talent made him a natural to become assistant editor of the Bible Dictionary being prepared by William Smith. He threw himself into the task, quickly providing a list of two hundred topics he might write on that started with just the letters A and B. He even paid two visits to the Holy Land to do research for the project, and as he worked on his contributions, often sat up until sunrise. He ultimately contributed around eleven hundred pages to the dictionary. He became the editor of Macmillan’s Magazine, one of Victorian England’s most popular periodicals, and did the job for fifteen years, securing contributions from the likes of Bret Harte, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, W. H. Lecky, Thomas Henry Huxley, George Eliot, George Meredith, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Margaret Oliphant, William Morris, and even the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev.6

  As Grove later recalled, “One dictionary led to another.”7 In 1874, the Macmillan publishing house approached him with an idea for a new dictionary of music, and he resigned his secretaryship of the Crystal Palace to devote himself to the project. In January 1874, Macmillan published a prospectus for a two-volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The publishers noted that interest in music had grown by leaps and bounds over the previous twenty-five years—the years, by no coincidence, during which Grove had been proselytizing in London—and that people were now curious about an art they had long neglected. But where to get answers? “There is no book in English,” they wrote,

  from which an intelligent inquirer can learn, in small compass, and in language which he can understand, what is meant by a Symphony or Sonata, a Fugue, a Stretto, a Coda, or any other of the technical terms … or from which he can gain a readable and succinct account of the various branches of the art, or of the use and progress of the pianoforte and other instruments, or the main facts and characteristics of the lives of eminent musicians.8

  TITLE: A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (A.D. 1450–1889) by Eminent Writers, English and Foreign: With Illustrations and Woodcuts

  COMPILER: Sir George Grove (1820–1900)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, A to Zwischenspiel; last volume devoted to the index

  PUBLISHED: London: Macmillan, 1879–99

  VOLUMES: 5

  PAGES: xxxv + 3,312

  TOTAL WORDS: 3.5 million

  SIZE: 9½″ × 6″ (24 × 15.5 cm)

  AREA: 1,325 ft2 (125 m2)

  PRICE: £5 5s.

  LATEST EDITION: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 29 vols. (New York : Grove’s Dictionaries; London: Macmillan, 2001); Grove Music Online, 8th ed.

  Grove was able to draw on his network of musical acquaintances to assemble an unimpeachable roster of contributors, as well as authorities whose names appear nowhere in the dictionary but who answered Grove’s queries by mail or in person. He established a few principles: to minimize technical language; to make the musical examples available to readers, rather than locked away in libraries; and to cover European music broadly, with particular attention to English musicians. He began his coverage in 1450, “the most remote date to which the rise of modern music can be carried back.” Anything earlier he dismissed as “mere archæology.”9 In this he was a creature of his age: early music was not yet in vogue.

  Even as he worked on the music dictionary, he could not resist taking on side projects. “I have no temptation to be idle,” Sir Walter Scott once wrote, “but the greatest temptation when one thing is wanted of me [is to] go and do something else”—Grove understood that urge deep in his bones.10 He wrote a geography primer, as well as monographs on Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert. He also worked to raise money for the Palestine Exploration Fund, hoping to develop scholarly knowledge about the Holy Land.

  Oddly, the highly productive writer found writing wearing. “My botherations often won’t let me work,”11 he complained. He had much to complain about. He suffered the death of several friends and, at the end of 1886, the death of his daughter; he had a deeply unhappy marriage. At times he let hyperbole get the best of
him in complaining about his lot:

  How cruel life is! I declare to you I lead the life of a slave. From the moment I wake up till the moment I close my eyes it is one fight to do what it is impossible to get through. Hard work is a delight, but when it comes to giving up everything that you care for, and being always in anxiety, always in difficulty, never to have a quiet or a good time undisturbed by the thought of masses of duty left undone, then really life is not worth having.12

  But, despite his grousing, the work was thorough. The entry for appoggiatura, for instance, goes on for four pages, with examples from Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor and Fantasia in C Minor, Bach’s Passionmusik, Adelaide, and Suites Françaises, Beethoven’s Andante in F, Haydn’s Sonata in E, and so on. Grove wrote his Schubert article “at least four times over, each time quite differently. Each time I think now I have got it, and then the next morning I find that it won’t do.” It finally appeared in 1882, and has been praised as “perhaps his most remarkable contribution to the Dictionary.”13

  What was going to be two volumes turned into four, appearing in 1878, 1880, 1883, and 1889. Among musicologists in the English-speaking world, “Grove” is now as familiar as “Webster” or “Roget”: the name has come to stand for the book. After his work appeared, Grove was rewarded with a knighthood. Grove—by then Sir George—suffered a stroke early in 1899, and he continued to decline until his death at the end of May 1900. His book, though, remained a fixture in every musician’s library for decades, until its place was taken in 1980 by an even larger New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, not four volumes but twenty, with 22,500 articles. The edition of 2001 hit twenty-nine volumes, the first to be available online.

  Grove informed the more learned members of the cultured world about what they might hear in the world’s great concert halls, but Emily Post was more concerned about how to behave when they got there.

  Born Emily Price to a socialite family in either 1872 or 1873 (the records are unclear), she was educated at home, then spent some time at Miss Graham’s finishing school in New York. “For years I was made to carry a sandbag on my head,” she recalled. “With this I had to curtsy to my governess, who pretended to be my hostess; and then in turn I, playing hostess to her, would smile and bow, and dance and walk across a polished floor without swinging my arms or resting a hand on my hip. And of course I sat bolt upright on a backless chair.”14

  The debutante life seemed to pay off with a marriage to a wealthy banker, Edwin Main Post, in 1892, but all was not well. Edwin, no dutiful husband, had a string of affairs. At the turn of the century any divorce was scandal, but Post v. Post was more scandalous than most. The scandal sheet Town Topics found out about Edwin’s affairs and tried to blackmail him to avoid the details appearing in the paper. He refused, and both Posts had to suffer the embarrassment of being tabloid fodder against the background of police stings. Once on her own, Emily Post was forced to make a living with her pen. Still she had no thought of writing the kind of book that made her famous.

  That changed after a series of letters. “For several days in succession,” she recalled, “the same message was brought to me that Mr. D. of an important publishing house wanted to speak to me about an encyclopedia.” She wanted nothing to do with the importunate salesman. “As I already had five encyclopedias,” she wrote, “I sent word that another was one thing in the world I did not need. Mr. D.’s reply at last made it plain: ‘We do not want you to buy an encyclopedia, we want you to write one.’ ”15

  That got her attention. “Mr. D.” was Richard Duffy of Funk & Wagnalls, and she agreed to meet him over tea and discuss what he had in mind, though she was “unable to imagine what kind of encyclopedia it might be.” When the answer came, though—an encyclopedia of etiquette—“all the lovely balloons of vague fantasy collapsed.” Etiquette, she thought, “meant a lot of false and pretentious fuss over trifles. I refused even to talk about it, and thought the matter closed.” Duffy kept at her, though, and at one point sent her a stack of books about etiquette mostly to show her how bad they were. That tactic worked. “I will write the book for you,” she told Duffy, “and at once! It will be only a little primer—just a few of the essential principles of taste. I’ll begin it tomorrow morning.”16 After eighteen months of work, the “little primer” grew to a typescript of 692 pages.

  TITLE: Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home: By Emily Post (Mrs. Price Post)

  COMPILER: Emily Post (1872–1960)

  ORGANIZATION: Topical

  PUBLISHED: New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1922

  PAGES: ix + 627

  TOTAL WORDS: 200,000

  SIZE: 9½″ × 6″ (24 × 15 cm)

  AREA: 253 ft2 (23.5 m2)

  PRICE: $4

  LATEST EDITION: Emily Post’s Etiquette: Manners for a New World, 18th ed. (New York: William Morrow, 2011)

  In 1922, Post’s audience was largely made up of the newly rich, as those who climb the social ladder are often eager for information on what is expected of them in their new station. Nowhere was class insecurity greater than in the United States. After the First World War, America found itself a world power, richer than all the others. Many of Europe’s cultural treasures were being snapped up by Americans: European dukes and viscounts with impeccable pedigrees found themselves in dire need of cash, and wealthy Americans were looking for cultural cachet. It therefore made perfect sense that there would be an American market for a book on etiquette. Richard Duffy of Funk & Wagnalls explained at the time that “We Americans are members of the nation which, materially, is the richest, most prosperous and most promising in the world.” And yet, while “America … has her ancient manners to remember and respect,” there were difficulties with “the rapid assimilation of new peoples into her economic and social organism.” The book was necessary: “The perfection of manners by intensive cultivation of good taste, some believe, would be the greatest aid possible to the moralists who are alarmed over the decadence of the younger generation.”17

  Early in 1922 Funk & Wagnalls published Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home: Illustrated with Private Photographs and Facsimiles of Social Forms. Post opened with a meditation on the nature of “best society”—“an ambiguous term,” she warned; “it may mean much or nothing.” For her it was not based on inherited rank or wealth, though she rarely ventured too far down the socioeconomic ladder. She included a heading “Money Not Essential to Social Position,” and she worked to put the less well-off at their ease—“The fact that you live in a house with two servants, or in an apartment with only one, need not imply that your house lacks charm or even distinction”—but she did not consider the possibility that some houses had only one servant, and many apartments had none at all. Post said that “A very well-bred man intensely dislikes the mention of money, and never speaks of it (out of business hours) if he can avoid it,”18 though it was much easier not to mention money if one had a lot of it. Not caring about money can be expensive.

  Some of the advice seems worlds away from twenty-first-century life:

  The younger person is always presented to the older or more distinguished, but a gentleman is always presented to a lady, even though he is an old gentleman of great distinction and the lady a mere slip of a girl.

  No lady is ever, except to the President of the United States, a cardinal, or a reigning sovereign, presented to a man.19

  Alongside the positive advice came the negative. “Do not say: ‘Mr. Jones, shake hands with Mr. Smith,’ or ‘Mrs. Jones, I want to make you acquainted with Mrs. Smith.’ Never say: ‘make you acquainted with’ and do not, in introducing one person to another, call one of them ‘my friend.’ ” And if that is not bad enough: “Under no circumstances whatsoever say ‘Mr. Smith meet Mrs. Jones,’ or ‘Mrs. Jones meet Mr. Smith.’ Either wording is equally preposterous.”20

  Being preposterous was bad, but being vulgar was worse. The lurking bogeyman throughout the book is vulgarity. W
e may expect the proletariat to be vulgar: “A ‘show-girl’ may be lovely to look at,” Post acknowledged, but the moment she opened her mouth and said something like “My Gawd!” her “vulgar slang” immediately convicted her as insufferably low. But even those traveling in the best circles could find themselves among the vulgar. “Acceptances or regrets,” for instance, “are always written. An engraved form to be filled in is vulgar.” Elaborate designs on tablecloths “inevitably produce a vulgar effect.” A man wearing diamonds? “Nothing is more vulgar than a display of ‘ice’ on a man’s shirt front, or on his fingers.” Flowers in the hearse at a funeral were not just vulgar but “very vulgar.” A hat too fancy for the occasion was so vulgar that one might as well have been running naked through the jungle: “Vulgar clothes … are always too elaborate… . The woman of uncultivated taste has no more sense of moderation than the Queen of the Cannibals.” Post archly considered it “unnecessary to add that none but vulgarians would employ a butler (or any other house servant) who wears a mustache!”21

  Conversation was also governed by Post’s rules. How should one speak to the valet (“pronounced val-et not vallay”)? “In a dignified house, a servant is never spoken to as Jim, Maisie, or Katie, but always as James or Margaret or Katherine, and a butler is called by his last name.” Sometimes the rules were complicated, but that is why a book like Etiquette in Society was essential: “A gentleman on the street never shakes hands with a lady without first removing his right glove. But at the opera, or at a ball, or if he is usher at a wedding, he keeps his glove on.” “On very informal occasions, it is the present fashion to greet an intimate friend with ‘Hello!’ … This seemingly vulgar salutation is made acceptable by the tone in which it is said. To shout ‘Hullow!’ is vulgar, but “Hello, Mary’ or ‘How ’do, John,’ each spoken in an ordinary tone of voice, sound much the same.”22