Author's note: I prepared an earlier draft of this essay while concurrently holding fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Humanities Center, and I wish to thank both foundations for their vital support.

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10. Ibid., pp. 189–90.

11. See Lane, Roger, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Lane's study might profitably be compared to Blok, Anton, “Selbsthilfe and the Monopoly of Violence,” in Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, ed. Gleichmann, Peter R., Goudsblom, Johan, and Korte, Hermann (Amsterdam: Sociologisch Tijdschrift, 1977), pp. 179–89Google Scholar. Racial attacks in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constitute a major exception.

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16. Delattre, Roland A., “The Rituals of Humanity and the Rhythms of Reality,” Prospects 5 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1980), 37–8, 39Google Scholar. Delattre, following Victor Turner, emphasizes that the storehouse of ritual resources and energies makes it a ritual powerhouse; but the other extreme is also true, that in the way agiven system restricts alternatives and solidifies support for an established order, it may serve as a ritual prisonhouse.

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19. The most complete (but by no means definitive) bibliography of American etiquette books lists 236 separate titles, a number issued in multiple editions, published in the United States before 1900. Some books, however, were published under more than one title, so that the list contains repetitions. See Bobbitt, Mary Reed, “A Bibliography of Etiquette Books Published in America Before 1900,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 51 (12 1947), 687–720.Google Scholar

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50. I base some of these observations on an English study, Hepworth, Mike, “Deviants in Disguise: Blackmail and Social Acceptance,” in Cohen, Stanley, ed., Images of Deviance (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1971), pp. 199, 201, 203.Google Scholar

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58. Issues of sincerity and hypocrisy are sensitively explored in Halttunen, Karen Lee, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

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60. Longstreet, , Social Etiquette of New York, p. 9Google Scholar; a similar passage occurs in White, Annie Randall, Twentieth Century Etiquette (Chicago: Wabash, 1900), p. 25.Google Scholar

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83. For example, Conkling, , American Gentleman's Guide, p. 301.Google Scholar

84. Cooke, Maud C., Social Etiquette or Manners and Customs of Polite Society (Philadelphia: J. H. Moore, 1896), p. 48.Google Scholar

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88. In this connection see Gordon, Margaret T., Riger, Stephanie, LeBailly, Robert K., and Heath, Linda, “Crime, Women, and the Quality of Urban Life,” Signs 5 (Spring 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, supplement on “Women in the City,” S144–60.

89. Smiley, , Modern Manners, p. 33.Google Scholar

90. Cooke, , Social Etiquette, p. 31.Google Scholar

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94. Ibid., p. 250. Italics added.

95. For examples see Pinkerton, Allan, Thirty Years a Detective (1884; rpt. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1975), pp. 125, 134–5, 190–1.Google Scholar

96. Goffman, , Presentation of Self, p. 251.Google Scholar

97. Here I would disagree with Gouldner, Alvin, who argues that the world of “impression management” emerges only in the twentieth century with the consumer culture of advanced capitalism; The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic, 1970), pp. 381–2Google Scholar. Goffman himself, of course, is notably vague as to historical contexts.

98. De Valcourt, , Illustrated Manners Book, p. 122.Google Scholar

99. On this subject see Cuddihy, John Murray, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).Google Scholar