Last year, the British Library published a compact volume called Manners for Schoolboys. It was a repackaging of A manual of manners; or, hints for the proper deportment of school boys, published in 1829 by an obscure schoolmaster named J. Robinson, and appears to have been intended as a joke, since it is described on the cover as being “packed with frank and funny observations on boys at work and play”—not a description that would have been recognized by J. Robinson. Robbie Millen, reviewing it for The Times, classed it among those “historical curios” which the BL will occasionally “republish as classy lavatory books,” though he allows that, in its own time, “it helped, for good or ill, to cement an idea of what an Englishman ought to be.” Obviously, neither he nor the publishers would dream of claiming any such thing for a book on manners today—possibly because they regard manners themselves as out of date.

Lots of people do, in practice if not in theory. One of the many legacies of revolutionary Marxism to the progressive left and, through it, to the popular culture, is the belief that manners are a bourgeois relic that have no place in a world that prizes personal authenticity above all. And even a cursory browse of Robinson’s Mannerswill confirm that, among its other, less politically charged purposes, is instruction in the kind of behavior meant to distinguish middle-class boys (obviously, a whole different set of