About Hints on Etiqette

A book of dining, flirting, dancing and smoking, celebrating the 175th anniversary of The London Library.


With nineteenth-century fashions constantly changing, but the importance of the baffling social codes entirely rigid, a newly-prosperous and bewildered middle class was in dire need of careful guidance and advice. With the help of his mysterious lady friend, Charles William Day has a kind-hearted mission: “If these ‘hints’ save the blush upon one cheek, or smooth the path into ‘society’ of only one honest family, the object of the author will be attained.” Here is a book which walks the hopeful reader through the finer details of dining, smoking, dancing, flirting, card-playing, walking and talking.

The books in “Found on the Shelves” have been chosen to give a fascinating insight into the treasures that can be found while browsing in The London Library. Now celebrating its 175th anniversary, with over seventeen miles of shelving and more than a million books, The London Library has become an unrivalled archive of the modes, manners and thoughts of each generation which has helped to form it.

From essays on dieting in the 1860s to instructions for gentlewomen on trout-fishing, from advice on the ill health caused by the “modern” craze of bicycling to travelogues from Norway, they are as readable and relevant today as they were more than a century ago.