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THE BEST CIRCLES
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The Cresset Library
The Best Circles
Leonore Davidoff
Britain by Mass Observation
Arranged and written by Tom Harrison and Charles Madge
China: A Short Cultural History
C. P. Fitzgerald
From Ploughtail to Parliament
An autobiography
Joseph Arch
A Short History of Ireland
J. C. Beckett
Wittgenstein
W. W. Bartley III
Cover: Hush! by James Tissot
Courtesy of The City Art Gallery, Manchester
LEONORE DAVIDOFF
--
The Best Circles
SOCIETY ETIQUETTE
AND THE SEASON
NEW INTRODUCTION BY
VICTORIA GLENDINNING
London Melbourne Sydney Auckland Johannesburg
The Cresset Library
An imprint of Century Hutchinson Ltd
62-65 Chandos Place, London WC2N 4NW
Century Hutchinson Publishing Group (Australia) Pty Ltd
16-22 Church Street, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Victoria 3122
Century Hutchinson Group (NZ) Ltd
32-34 View Road, PO Box 40-086, Glenfield, Auckland 10
Century Hutchinson (SA) (Pty) Ltd
PO Box 337, Bergvlei 2012, South Africa
First published 1973 by Croom Helm Ltd
This edition first published 1986
© Leonore Davidoff 1973
Introduction © Victoria Glendinning 1986
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Davidoff, Leonore
The best circles.—(The Cresset library; 2)
1. Upper classes—Great Britain—History
2. Great Britain—Social life and customs
I. Title
941.081 DA533
ISBN 0 09 168761 6
CONTENTS
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INTRODUCTION TO THE CRESSET LIBRARY EDITION
Victoria Glendinning
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi
PREFACE 1]
Introduction 13
II Society and the Season in the Nineteenth Century 20
Ill The Anatomy of Society and Etiquette 37
IV Change and Decline 59
Variations: Extra-Society and Anti-Society 71
VI Women and Work 85
APPENDIX: ‘Society’ in two other Cultures 101
NOTES 103
BIBLIOGRAPHY 118
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 12]
INDEX 123
INTRODUCTION TO
THE CRESSET LIBRARY EDITION
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This is a book about upper-class women — perhaps I should say
ladies — and how they controlled and regulated social life and social
contacts in Victorian and Edwardian England. We are perhaps too
quick to think of all nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women
as the oppressed victims of a male-dominated society. That is the con-
ventional feminist view — and of course there were thousands of bored,
unhappy girls and women, unfitted to the only career open to them,
whose intelligence and aspirations were wasted and frustrated.
But those who wholeheartedly embraced the career of marriage to
a prosperous and prominent man and entered ‘Society’, at whatever
level, found themselves with a demanding whole-time job. In the
very best of the ‘best circles’, political hostesses had real influence on
affairs of state. It was in a social setting that alliances were formed
and decisions informally taken, and social life was run by women, its
leaders and ‘filters’. Even in the new streets of suburban villas, as
Leonore Davidoff describes, bourgeois ladies formed their exclusive
circles and could decide to cold-shoulder some families and promote
the fortunes of others. All the energy and ingenuity of the female sex
could be exploited in this subtle form of social control; not the least of
its purposes was to see that the younger generation met only ‘suit-
able’ mates.
The idea behind The Best Circles, then, is that social activities
which sound to us just crazily complicated ways of using up time and
money were, in fact, highly functional. Most ladies did not feel they
were wasting their time paying morning calls, giving ‘At Homes’,
chaperoning their daughters at balls, working out who should go
down to dinner with whom, and whether or not they should bow to
Mrs X when they met her on the street. This was their work, and
their duty. The ‘primacy of social goals’ for such women, in a moral
rather than a materialistic sense, is one of Dr Davidof?’s chief dis-
coveries — though it is perhaps the confusion of morality with feelings
Vill INTRODUCTION TO THE CRESSET LIBRARY EDITION
of social superiority that the modern reader finds most offensive in
Victorian values.
The Best Circles first appeared in 1973, before “women’s studies’
was a common phrase in this country, and before writing and
publishing books for women, by women, and about women and their
history had become as familiar to the general reader as it is today.
The book stands out now, as it did in 1973, because it is as readable,
as Clear, and as cleverly illustrated as many a lighter work, while
being based on solid academic research. But it is not only a book for
women, but for anyone fascinated by the domestic and social detail
of the past and by the broad sweep of changing fashions and trends.
It is a book about how a certain set of people behaved; and some of
the ritualized social behaviour which came under the heading of
‘etiquette’ seems now ridiculous and incredible.
Dr Davidoff is a sociologist, which gives her historical writing its
particular tone. She defines ‘Society’ as ‘a system of quasi-kinship
relationships which was used to “‘place’’ mobile individuals’ in a
period when industrialization, new money, and the population shift
from country to city were making upheavals in the social system.
Networks of ‘quasi-kinship relationships’, as she observes, are as
important in the East End as in Belgravia; forming such networks is
part of being human. But the tribal customs of the rich, the well-
bred, and the influential developed to a point of baroque ritual
impossible for other classes in the decades she is considering.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of us felt that Britain was
becoming, or could become, a ‘classless society’. This has not hap-
pened. One odd result of our currently stratified society is that the
formal hierarchies described in this book actually seem rather less
extraordinary to me now than they did when I first read it in 1973.
With perspective, one can even see the thin residue of the activities
described in The Best Circles still in operation in 1986. Historical
periods and patterns of behaviour do not have neat cut-offs, like
slices of bread; they leak into one another, both backwards and
forwards. There would still, in the mid nineteenth century, have
been dowagers who embarrassed their demure Victorian grandchil-
dren by the frank manner and crude speech of the more robust
eighteenth century. And there are plenty of ladies in their seventies
and eighties around today who experienced the Season very much as
Dr Davidoff describes it in this book; the last batch of debutantes to
be presented at Court (though not wearing a train and feathers, after
