… is from page 22 of the late Gertrude Himmelfarb’s learned 1995 volume, The De-Moralization of Society:
If Victorians were concerned with the “small morals” of life – table manners, toilet habits, conventions of dress, appearance, conversation, greeting, and all the other “decencies” of behavior – it was because they saw them as the harbingers of morals writ large, the civilities of private life that were the corollaries of civilized social life.


If Victorians were concerned with the “small morals” of life – table manners, toilet habits, conventions of dress, appearance, conversation, greeting, and all the other “decencies” of behavior – it was because they saw them as the harbingers of morals writ large, the civilities of private life that were the corollaries of civilized social life.
