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… is from page 22 of the late Gertrude Himmelfarb’s learned 1995 volume, The De-Moralization of Society [2]:
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.