“A FASHIONABLE DINNER IS ARRANGED AS FOLLOWS”: VICTORIAN DINING TAXONOMIES

Abstract

O VER THE COURSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY , England saw the publication of numerous social instruction handbooks, household manuals, cookery books, and restaurant guides focusing on the proper methods for dining. These dining handbooks provide a systematic account of the most minute details for both attending and hosting a dinner party, including such information as how to word the invitations, ornament the table, order the courses, or arrange guests according to precedence. To the extent that formal dining becomes standardized in the conduct literature, a dining taxonomy begins to emerge–a classificatory system whereby formerly idiosyncratic aspects of this social experience are codified, or reduced to a code, and routinized, or rendered routine. While the content of handbooks (the social conventions) is arranged into a taxonomy, something more interesting can be seen to appear as well: conventions for the dining taxonomy itself. That is, within the large body of Victorian dining handbooks, there is not only a striking repetition of content from one handbook to the next, but also a repetition of narrative styles, patterns, and devices that imply that the procedures under discussion are universal phenomena, divorced from human agency, interpretation, and variable social circumstances. In other words, these handbooks render the conventions natural.