We'll Eat Again in Quotes

Living in style: a Duchess conceives it to consist in taking her breakfast at three o'clock in the afternoon—dining at eight—playing at Faro till four the next morning—supping at five, and going to bed at six—and to eat green peas and peaches in January. (Pierce Egan, Life in London, 1821)

A dinner of boiled fish, and of plain vegetables destined to be mixed by way of sauce with all one eats – a piece of roast beef cut from the hardest and most tasteless part of the carcase... Chairs with rush bottoms, sometimes covered with a cushion, which the least movement causes to fall to the ground. (A foreign visitor describes the British home circa 1850. Things hadn't changed much in the 1950s.)

Rejecting all dishes whereof Lady Tippins partakes: saying aloud when they are proffered to her, 'No, no, no, not for me. Take it away!' (Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens, 1864 A Victorian banquet was like a tasting menu or buffet, and you didn’t have to eat everything. There might be a printed menu so you knew what was coming up.)

Don't, when you drink, elevate your glass as if you were going to stand it inverted on your nose. Bring the glass perpendicularly to the lips, and then lift it to a slight angle. Drink sparingly while eating. It is far better for the digestion not to drink tea or coffee until the meal is finished. Drink gently, and not pour it down your throat like water turned out of a pitcher.  It is not proper to drink with a spoon in the cup; nor should one, by-the-way, ever quite drain a cup or glass. (The White House Cook Book, 1887)

You had to have, when you ate, one food brought in after another, each with fresh plates and different kinds of instruments to eat them with, as if on purpose to take time and trouble the servants. (Crewe Train, Rose Macaulay, 1926)

The 1910s dining table, which would be dotted with olives, salted almonds, sugared green peppermints, and chocolates in cut-glass bowls or silver dishes. (Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion, 1954)

I seem to remember that, in those far gone days, the waiter took his order from just one of the diners, usually the one who would be paying the bill. So, say, wife and children would say what it was they wanted and Father would relay the order to the waiter, editing it as required… When a couple was out together, the convention was that the man would order and pay, all those years ago. If a group of men were dining out together, other than at their club, again, it would be assumed that one of their number would be the host, (even if they shared the cost afterwards) and he would be the one to place the order. (A friend writes.)

More here, and links to the rest.

History in Quotes

Time-travel paradox

Or is this historiography? Or alternative narratives? It's about how change happens, and how we think about it, and how we try to make others think about it... (Oh, and can we make change happen by pretending it already has? Popular in the 80s.)

This narrative that says that everybody before about 5 minutes ago was UNAWARE but now we are AWARE and YAY. (Dominic Fox ‏@domfox)

I tell my son my pink shirt is of an era. He doesn’t know what an era is, he’s ten years old. (Peter Andre)

People call terrorism "medieval". But it was a far less destructive age than our own. (@JonathanFoyle)

The moment we left the middle ages behind and set out on the track to modernity. (BBC trailer for programme, 2013 If you want to know what "Whig history" is, this is it.)

The past is never dead. It's not even past. (William Faulkner)

Britain between the wars - an era whose dying embers lasted until the late 1960s. (Steerforth)

The past has its past. (Time magazine on Mad Men, and putting 50s objects in a 60s interior)

It is a fallacy to believe the past is dead; it lives with us all the time and should teach us to inform all our present actions. (Spinoza)

Times have changed, people are different, that other generation is hypocritical and rigid but WE are not. (Moira Redmond on Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians)

Much as we would love to believe that we saucy and imaginative moderns are responsible for introducing misbehavior into a previously fun-free world, Miss Manners is afraid that the population, even back then, consisted of actual human beings. (Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour)

But one possible value that a gadfly like me can have is in noticing, over time, certain fashions and repetitions in thought and behaviour – certain cultural tics – and pointing them out. (David Aaronovitch Aug 2011)

1962 —The future still approached, although architect Charles Moore says that it “came and went in 1957”. (Web)

The present fashion of putting off marriage until the woman is about 35 and the man 40 or over is utterly unnatural and unwholesome. (As somebody said in 1919)

They looked up and the times had changed... (Amazon review of John Le Carré's The Looking-Glass War)

That most distant of periods, the day before yesterday. (Guardian 2008)

The world has not changed as much as we would like to think. (The Week, Sept 2011)

Some of the things that people face in some parts of the world, we have lived through in our lifetime in our world. It makes one wonder why they don't take advantage of our experiences. (friend JP, 2011)

South Asians and Arabs and their diasporic peoples are Elizabethans still. (Yasmin Alibhai Brown)

The 21st century is unevenly distributed. (@theunisbates)