The codification of nineteenth-century etiquette

Abstract Etiquette has only marginally attracted the attention of politeness scholars. This article aims to fill a knowledge gap as it explores the concept in a more systematic way, using nineteenth-century prescriptive metasources from four countries (Britain, France, Italy and the United States). Etiquette is found to form a complicated, all-encompassing body of tendentially amoral, mandatory norms, adapting the minutiae of court protocol to private settings. Since the conventions of etiquette