Touch and sociability [ Communication ]
… heroine, Charlotte Montgomery, notes: ‘Dancing introduces a kind of familiarity that would be quite inadmissible in a drawing room. When a gentleman solicits the honour of your hand, it is not a figure of speech; your hand really belongs … to him, for the time; and if he persists in taking it a little after the time, it would be very ill-natured to withdraw it – unless one did not like him. For my part I found something so admirably persuasive in the touch of a man I do … boundaries of this more polite world, and its precise requirements of masculine conduct, were hardly set in stone. Fanny Burney records meeting a Mr. Thomas Barlow in 1775 at the home of some of her relations where her grandmother was taking …
Conduct | Conventions | Dance | Gender | Kissing | Propriety | Touch
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