3 The perils of the cold-call
Woe betide those who knocked on a door without a well-crafted calling card
Few commentators satirised the code of behaviour that governed polite society in Regency England more acutely than Jane Austen. And Austen brought that razor-sharp eye for detail to bear in her novel Northanger Abbey. The author describes how Catherine Morland knocks on Miss Tilney’s front door and hands the servant her calling card. The servant returns and “with a look that did not quite confirm his words”, informs Catherine that Miss Tilney is out. “With a blush of mortification,” Austen tells us, “Catherine left the house.”
As Austen’s words reveal, by the 19th century, the private home was increasingly viewed as just that: private. Visitors could only gain entry via the etiquette of the calling card – and if their card was rebuffed, humiliation awaited.
In fact, in the highest stratum of society, the entire process of knocking on a front door was governed by a strict set of rules. “Morning visits” were between 11am and 3pm. And to avoid the indignity of a snub, visitors might send their footman ahead with their card. The card itself was a vital conveyor of information – for, as John Young writes in 1879’s Our Deportment, “its texture, style of engraving, and even the hour of leaving it” offered critical clues as to the visitor’s social position.
It wasn’t just callers who had to adhere to a strictly defined etiquette. In the 1825 Footman’s Directory and Butler’s Rememberancer, Thomas Cosnett advises footmen not to shut the door until the visitor had walked away, for to do so “whilst they are still in the front of it, is disrespectful and a breach of good manners.”