OVER THE COURSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, England saw the publication of numerous social instruction handbooks, household manuals, cookery books, and restaurant guides focusing on the proper methods for dining. These dining handbooks provide a systematic account of the most minute details for both attending and hosting a dinner party, including such information as how to word the invitations, ornament the table, order the courses, or arrange guests according to precedence. To the extent that formal dining becomes standardized in the conduct literature, a dining taxonomy begins to emerge–a classificatory system whereby formerly idiosyncratic aspects of this social experience are codified, or reduced to a code, and routinized, or rendered routine.¹

While the content of handbooks (the social conventions) is arranged into a taxonomy, something more interesting can be seen to appear as well: conventions for the dining taxonomy itself. That is, within the large body of Victorian dining handbooks, there is not only a striking repetition of content from one handbook to the next, but also a repetition of narrative styles, patterns, and devices that imply that the procedures under discussion are universal phenomena, divorced from human agency, interpretation, and variable social circumstances.² In other words, these handbooks render the conventions natural.

Of course, as Norbert Elias emphasizes in his classic sociological text The Civilizing Process, “nothing in table manners is self-evident or the product, as it were, of a ‘natural’ feeling of delicacy. The spoon, fork and napkin were not invented one day by a single individual as technical implements with obvious purposes and clear directions for use” (92). Yet, this conception of dining practices as natural is emblematic of the nineteenth-century conception of etiquette. Although each custom is the result of a gradual process of standardization taking place over centuries and registering changes in social preferences and needs, by the nineteenth century, Elias explains, “the standard of ‘civilization’ which in reality had been attained only quite recently was taken for granted” (81).³

This article builds upon Elias's findings and contributes to our understanding of how social behaviors become regularized in the social instruction genre by suggesting that dining etiquette's apparent self-evidence in Victorian dining handbooks is largely a function of a specific set of textual operations that convey routine. Focusing on the particular ways in which handbooks elaborate social codes, I argue that it is not simply the very existence of systematized knowledge that constitutes a taxonomy, but rather the repetition of information in a recurrent style of objective writing that lends an effect of taxonomy.

Even though the majority of Victorians could neither afford such handbooks nor the utensils and foods they touted, this form of writing creates the impression not only that dinners should proceed in a precise, orderly fashion but also that they routinely do proceed as narrated. Elias's concept of habitus sheds light on the implications of handbooks' presentation of social practices as natural, or what he would describe as “second nature” (117). Based upon changes he sees in etiquette books' prohibitions from the fourteenth through the nineteenth century, he argues that, over time, the individual internalizes these prohibitions as “self-restraint” and “an individualized pattern of near-automatic habits is established and consolidated” (375). Habitus, then, is not only manifested in outward social behavior–or, as I am arguing, in textual operations–but also signals a “regulation of the affects in the form of self-control” (157).⁴

My work suggests a similar progression toward heightened regulation of individual behavior in Victorian dining handbooks. Indeed, one of my claims is that, as the nineteenth century progresses, there is a movement toward increased specificity of proper methods and, accordingly, less tolerance of deviance. But what is most significant, I argue, is the role that narrative plays in this process of constraining the possibilities of acceptable social behavior. For it is by building upon prior texts' presentation of each convention as natural that each subsequent text is able increasingly to delimit dining practices. Thus, whereas Elias interprets patterns in etiquette books as indicative of the development of actual social habits, I regard such texts as contributing to an appearance of habitus, a textual effect that functions as an especially powerful prescriptive mode.⁵

Using a narratological approach, I argue that each dining convention becomes part of the habitus of conduct literature through repetition and iterative narrative.⁶

Gérard Genette's explanation of repetition as an abstraction allows me to theorize the taxonomic methodology of the social instruction manual and explain how it conveys the kind of routinization associated with habitus. Genette suggests that repetition operates by “eliminat[ing] from each occurrence everything belonging to it that is peculiar to itself, in order to preserve only what it shares with all the others of the same class, which is an abstraction: ‘the sun,’ ‘the morning,’ ‘to rise”’ (113). It is largely by deemphasizing the unique characteristics of social situations in favor of a narrative that highlights the customs and rituals of the event to dine that handbooks render dining behavior seemingly habitual.

This methodology can also be explained and understood by means of another narratological concept, “iterative narrative,” a “mode of custom and repetition” that narrates what happens on a regular basis (Genette 117, 118). In the simplest terms, iterative narratives often function as “situation-descriptions” (Bal 113) or “typical or illustrative scenes” (Genette 111). Even as handbooks' iterative narratives are marked by an extreme specificity when it comes to procedural matters, they are, at the same time, characterized by a number of generalities.⁷

As Genette writes: Genette's discussion of the problems associated with iterative narrative in fiction gets to the heart of its effectiveness in handbooks: “diagrammatic barrenness” is precisely the point of description in a handbook. For it is by offering “invariant features common to all the units of the series” that handbooks become applicable to a multitude of social scenarios and, in turn, possess the capacity to shape individuals' social behaviors. Nineteenth-century dining handbooks narrate the order in which the courses of a dinner should proceed in a similar kind of “fixed timetable” to the one Genette imitates here: first soup, then fish, then meat, and so on. What bears emphasizing is that while the social instruction genre certainly lends itself to a mode of abstraction, this way of writing emerges distinctly in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, I argue, even as dining handbooks contribute to the creation of a dining taxonomy, the narrative devices that they use repeatedly imply the prior existence of one. HANNAH GLASSE'S THE ART OF COOKERY (1747), an eighteenth-century household manual, is a useful starting point for my analysis, for it enables me to demonstrate a contrast between nineteenth-century dining handbooks and prior works. The primary difference that I want to emphasize is that eighteenth-century handbooks are more idiosyncratic and less likely to offer a detailed dining taxonomy. In other words, they lack the repetition that I am suggesting is characteristic of nineteenth-century handbooks, when considered as a group. Instead, as is evident in the very title of one such work, Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), eighteenth-century handbooks tend to assume that the reader is already familiar with proper dining. Indeed, owing to this assumption, in the preface to The Art of Cookery, Glasse refuses to address the very social practices that Victorian writers would explicitly regularize in their works a century later: As Glasse's repetition of the word “nor” suggests, her book is marked by vacancies where nineteenth-century handbooks would typically provide conventions.

Glasse's reluctance to offer instructions is characteristic of eighteenth-century handbooks' supposition that the lady of the house has her own habits, preferences, and methods. Although Glasse's reticence stems from her awareness of her audience (she does not to want to offend her lady readers), it raises important assumptions about the primacy of individual “Judgment.” As Philippa Pullar points out, prior dining handbooks, going back to the Middle Ages, were also vague about their instructions since they were written for those who presumably already knew the proper way to cook and present food (101). Here, Glasse lends so much value to the lady's knowledge of proper methods that she constructs a parallel between “Directions” and “Nonsense.”

Yet on the first page of the 1774 edition of her work, Glasse does exactly what she had not wanted to in her 1747 edition: she includes a large, folded, tear-out diagram for “The Order of a Modern Bill of Fare,” divided by month and course and organized according to the placement of the dishes on the table.

Without surrounding explanation, this model seems to be self-evident. By means of the apparent symmetry of each course, Glasse makes dinner appear formulaic: three courses with eleven choices each. This type of detailed, organized menu, which speaks to changes in readers' wants and expectations, would become prevalent in nineteenth-century works, when the presumption was that the mistress herself did not know what to serve, let alone how to cook.⁸ For example, the 1851 work What Shall We Have For Dinner? written by Lady Maria Clutterbuck (Catherine Dickens), provides forty pages of bills of fare in the hope of “rescu[ing] many fair friends” from the “domestic suffering” of deciding what the nightly meal should be (introduction).

Historians have discussed a number of factors that would help explain the changing nature of the dining handbook genre and its movement toward increased specificity, order, and regularity. First, dining habits were undergoing changes from the eighteenth to nineteenth century. Leonore Davidoff explains that “in the nineteenth century, with the decline of public places of amusement for respectable families, dinner became the apogee of the social day” (Best Circles 47). Second, meal times and modes of serving were also changing (Family Fortunes 385). With the transition from service à la francaise, in which all foods appear on the table at once and are passed around by guests, to service à la russe, in which most foods are placed on the sideboard and served to guests course-by-course by servants, the public needed to be educated in a new way of dining.⁹

Third, publication practices were changing. As Margaret Beetham suggests, “the systematic reproduction of cooking instructions in commercial forms of print was symptomatic of a much wider process by which oral knowledges were gradually superseded by print” (20–21). Moreover, although both conduct books and cookery books can be found beginning in the middle ages, what makes the mid-nineteenth century unique in a broad historical context is the increasing number of works on social instruction targeted for the first time at the middle and working classes.¹⁰ In the preface to her Modern Cookery (1845), Eliza Acton explains this relationship between the broadening of the readership and changes in the level of specificity cookery books provided: her book offers “such thoroughly explicit and minute instructions as may, we trust, be readily comprehended and carried out by any class of learners” (x).

Even prior to Acton, however, as early as 1835, it was expected that a household manual would include detailed models, as Anne Cobbett explains in The English Housekeeper (1835). Throughout her book, Cobbett problematizes the idea of a book that offers paradigms for behavior, as Glasse had. Yet, aware of the expectations associated with the burgeoning household manual genre, she provides them anyway. Although Cobbett recognizes that “it is difficult to prescribe any set of rules for adjusting the different departments of household management,” like Acton she must do so if her book is to be of any assistance to the reader (1). Cobbett explains:

Cobbett raises many of the same issues as Glasse and is equally wary of offering static procedural paradigms. Here, she uses the words “ought” and “should,” which she otherwise avoids, only to suggest that someone else can better prescribe rules for setting the table. Similarly, she consistently implies that living models prevail over textual ones and, in doing so, directs her readers away from her book. Cobbett's conflicted stance on whether to provide conventions or to defer to the reader's knowledge reveals that her book belongs to the transitional phase between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century handbooks. What is significant is that she both offers advice on nearly every aspect of household management (recipes, table arrangement, proper serving, bills of fare, and kitchen organization) as Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861), Cassell's Household Guide (1869–71), and Tickletooth's The Dinner Question (1860) would, and shies away from doing so, as earlier writers tended to. When Cobbett does provide a model for table arrangement in her chapter entitled “Bills of Fare,” she avoids directly prescribing behavior and abandons the voice of authority. Interestingly, in doing so, she writes in language that is characteristic of the iterative. In other words, the effect of Cobbett's reluctance to prescribe conventions is a narrative style that I am suggesting is the quintessential nineteenth-century style for presenting a taxonomy of proper dining.

While I cannot attribute direct causality from one handbook to the next, I want to begin to establish a pattern of thematic and narrative elements that will be repeated in other handbooks by including the following quotation from Cobbett's description of a fashionable dinner. Cobbett writes:

First, I want to emphasize that Cobbett's description of the increasingly popular mode of serving, service à la russe, as well as its attendant paraphernalia, conveys the proper order of courses: soup, fish, meat, made dishes, vegetables, omelets and confectionery, with wine always in abundance.

The proper order of courses is often reflected in handbooks' organization, the order in which the various aspects of dining appear. For example, the headings of the contents section of Nancy Lake's Menus Made Easy; or, How to Order Dinner and Give the Dishes Their French Names, first published in 1884, are: “Soups,” “Fish,” “Entrées,” “Removes,” “Roasts,” “Vegetables and Salads,” “Eggs and Omelettes,” “Entremets,” “Savoury Entremets,” “Ices,” “Sauces and Garnishes.” This formal arrangement occurs in some way in most handbooks, whether in the table of contents of cookery books or in the order of prohibitions in later etiquette books, as I discuss below.¹¹

The fact that handbooks' structure replicates the unfolding of a dinner not only serves as a kind of mnemonic device but also highlights the extent to which formal features can reify the routines of dining.

Here, however, I want to focus specifically on the way in which a series of narrative devices that appear in Cobbett's description can be seen to imply that the courses and practices of the fashionable dinner are customary–not simply in other handbooks but in practice. The introductory sentence, “A fashionable dinner is arranged as follows,” foregrounds the fact that Cobbett is narrating once what happens many times. That this narrative is iterative is heightened by the achrony of the sentence: the fashionable dinner appears timeless and ahistorical or, in Gerald Prince's terms, “a dateless event” (1). Cobbett's use of passive voice and her avoidance of direct reader address contribute to this effect of universality, as if dinners habitually take place as she describes. By eliding the subject of the actions, as in the phrase “handed round,” she also seems to suggest that the acts are performed invisibly. The phrase “[c]andles, plateau, epergne or vases, in the centre of the table,” makes these items seem simply to appear customarily and on their own, without human agency. Instead, what appears to have agency is the taxonomy itself.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in Beeton's Book of Household Management (1859–61). Critics such as James Buzard have focused on Mrs. Beeton's work as remarkable for its breadth of concerns and, consequently, for the extent to which it is able to codify a wide range of middle-class domestic practices. As Beetham notes, Beeton is responsible for many innovations in the “systematic presentation” of household information, including an orderly structure, layout, and index (21). At the same time, Beetham and others have recognized that certain aspects of Mrs. Beeton's work are not original and that she based several aspects of her book upon Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery (1845), including the form of her recipes.¹²

In addition, Alan Davidson has pointed out that Tabitha Tickletooth (the pseudonym of the actor Charles Selby) published the humorous work The Dinner Question (1860), which has a similar expanse of concerns as Beeton's Book of Household Management, a year before Mrs. Beeton's work was published in book form.

While critics have made important points about the fact that the content of Mrs. Beeton's book and the form of her recipes overlap with other works, I want to suggest that her narrative devices and mode of expression in her descriptions of how to dine can also be regarded as a commonality shared with Victorian dining handbooks. In her explanations of the conventions for a range of social behaviors, from hiring servants to visiting neighbors, at times Mrs. Beeton prescribes directly, using words such as “must” and “should.” Such words signify that she is aware that these practices are performed in ways she would not deem proper, and that she is providing a corrective.¹³

Often, however, she combines such phrasing with iterative narrative–a forceful form of writing that implies that models are already established and habitual.

Notice the way in which Mrs. Beeton's description of the dinner party resembles Cobbett's:

Note, in turn, how the description in the anonymous work Social Etiquette, The Art of Cookery and Hints on Carving (1860) echoes Beeton's: This remarkable similarity in wording, style, and content implies that taxonomies are perpetuated, in part, through shared discourse. In other words, the effect of routine is certainly heightened when writers are not only offering similar content in the same narrative style but also borrowing passages from one another.¹⁴

Like Cobbett's, Mrs. Beeton's and Social Etiquette's narratives of a fashionable dinner are also marked by a series of verbs in the present tense, such as “the host offers his arm” or “the lady begins to help the soup.” These verbs imply perpetuity and habitude, as if dinners always proceed according to this model and as if the gentleman and lady of the house always act as Mrs. Beeton describes them. Coupled with the use of passive voice, as in the phrase, “[the dessert] is placed on the table” (Beeton 13), the effect of these techniques is a social machine that operates regardless of individual agency or idiosyncrasy.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY HANDBOOK AUTHORS continued to write in a mode that regularizes social experience by reducing it to a series of iterative steps, which divorce objects and practices from the processes by which they appear. London at Dinner; or Where to Dine (1858), an anonymous work, is an example of another handbook that obscures human agency in its use of generalizing iterative.¹⁵ In the author's account of the book's methodology, he proclaims his use of what we would now call iterative narrative: “Without wishing to particularise any great dinners given during the London season, it may suffice to give you a brief account of the average of the best mounted houses” (25). In other words, he implies that his book consists of what Mieke Bal would call “situation-descriptions” providing general details that are exemplary of a multitude of personal experiences (113).

Throughout London at Dinner, iterative narrative lends order to a previously erratic social phenomenon, eating out. By providing all readers with the same information and opinions about restaurants and dinners, this book attempts to create a collective knowledge base. Emphasizing the extent to which it fosters sameness, its cover depicts the dining experiences of various animated creatures, such as turtles, pigs, and fish, as well as different classes of people. In a rambling style that seems dependent upon what happens to be connected in the author's consciousness, London at Dinner discusses restaurants according to food preference, neighborhood, and class. The author has a broad definition of what counts as dining out, for he includes analyses of a variety of “dining-houses” and experiences, both public and private: coffee houses, chop houses, hotel dining rooms, taverns, clubs, bachelors' chambers, private homes, royal banquets, castles, and aristocratic entertainments. It soon becomes apparent that London at Dinner is equally interested in how to dine, for it also contains advice on what to eat at the Lord Mayor's table, what to serve at a supper, how to order at a tavern, and how to run an effective household. In case he should offend the sensibilities of his readership by presuming to offer conventions for proper behavior, the author avoids didacticism by means of a descriptive style that metamorphoses into a prescriptive mode.

I will quote from one of its “brief account[s]” to demonstrate how London at Dinner takes the reader through nearly every detail involved in the first course of a dinner and, in the process, classifies the variety of elements of the formal dining-out experience (25). First, the author describes pre-dinner etiquette, how and when to arrive and what to expect upon entering.

Next, he provides an overview of the food that appears, including how it is served. The narrative devices and content of this dinner narrative sound remarkably similar to Cobbett's and Beeton's books. Overall, this account of the etiquette for both attending and hosting a dinner displays standard dining handbook features: the temporal unfolding of the dinner party, the order and content of the courses, and the way in which the food is served.

What makes these iterative narratives different is that London at Dinner inserts a fictional reader, or narratee, into the various dining scenarios it describes by means of the second-person pronoun, “you.” One effect of this use of “you” is to make explicit what is implicit in other handbooks: the goal of handbooks is not only to provide the conventions for how dinners are served but also for how diners behave. In her discussion of the narrative techniques of Victorian novels, Robyn Warhol explains that narrators' direct address of the narratee by means of the word “you” can be an “engaging” strategy, a way “to encourage actual readers to identify with the ‘you’ in the texts” (29) and “to picture themselves in the scenes that the narrator's descriptions have evoked in their minds” (64).¹⁶

Of course, as Warhol points out, not all readers will be able to identify with the figure or experience a narrator invokes (27). Yet I want to suggest that, through the use of “you,” London at Dinner creates an illusion that social experience can be routinized. By including all readers in one group, and by encouraging readers to imaginatively rehearse the proper way of behaving, this technique suppresses the experience of the individual dinner guest or host. In implying that this is what happens to you when you attend a dinner, this language regularizes each type of dinner and objectifies each diner.

Similarly, Social Etiquette is both self-conscious about its methodology and uses the pronoun “you” in iterative narratives. Here is an example from Social Etiquette's narrative of how to comport oneself at a dinner party, which displays a similar set of practices as London at Dinner:

This account is different from others because it devotes attention not only to the proper way of behaving but also the proper way of thinking. Paradoxically, although the author admonishes the reader not to think about how to behave, he or she tells the reader what to do, how to act, what to think, and how to feel.

Social Etiquette accounts for a variety of possible scenarios so that the reader will not be confused should the situation be other than the most common.

In taking into account a multiplicity of scenarios surrounding the order of precedence that can all be considered proper, the author asks that the reader become familiar with a large body of knowledge so that he or she may appeal to it for guidance in social situations. This passage's repetition of the word “or” speaks to a further subtlety of iterative narrative: not only does the author narrate once what happens many times, but he or she also includes many narratives in one. The author does something similar throughout the book, often through the use of if-then statements. The more situations Social Etiquette considers in an effort to address a range of socially acceptable ways of comporting oneself, the more it is able to offer rules. Put another way, the author admits variance but in doing so renders it conventional.

Later handbooks are far less tolerant of variance than Social Etiquette is. The generalizing iterative narratives of earlier handbooks are replaced by narratives with an increased emphasis on the exact methods of proper behavior. For example, Mrs. Humphry's Manners for Men (1897) not only offers conventions for the proper use of eating utensils but also provides extremely detailed rules for eating each of a variety of foods, including asparagus, celery, cheese, strawberries, and almonds. Ward and Lock's “How Hand-Books” Series, published in the 1870s, is another example. Ward and Lock cover a wide range of social behaviors, as their titles indicate: How to Dine; How to Behave; How to Entertain; How to Manage; How to Dress; How to Dance; How to Woo; and How to Travel. These pocket handbooks–2^3/4 by 4 inches–explain the minutiae of social behavior in a step-by-step fashion.

In a sense, as the following excerpt demonstrates, How to Dine resembles the many books of its kind that precede it. Its description of a fashionable dinner consists of an iterative narrative that employs present tense and passive voice.

Yet the author's focus is more thorough than preceding authors' in that this passage not only covers the order of courses but also the specific way to eat each course. The author tells the reader exactly how to sip the soup (“noiselessly sipped from the side of a spoon”) and precisely how to eat the fish (“with a silver fork, assisted by a piece of bread in the left hand”). I read the specificity of How to Dine much as I interpret the variance introduced by Social Etiquette, as a sign that the basic dining behaviors, such as the order of courses, have already become customary in the handbook literature. IN THE 1880s AND 90s, changes can be seen in the narrative methods by which handbooks arrange the elements involved in proper dining, though not necessarily in the conventions themselves. The introductory remarks of Cassell's Household Guide, published in the 1870s, help to explain a difference between mid and late nineteenth-century handbooks: Cassell's emphasis on “scientific order,” “laws,” and “rules” suggests the extent to which, over the course of the century, handbooks become increasingly forthright about offering standardized paradigms for social behavior–“no apology can be needed.” Though earlier handbooks describe etiquette by providing iterative narratives that offer step-by-step details, some later handbooks strip away even the most basic narrative elements, which previous handbooks had abstracted (such as spatiality, temporality, and actants), in favor of offering pure conventions. In The Crisis of Courtesy, in his discussion of the changes that occur in conduct books from 1600–1900, Jacques Carré suggests that over time conduct books gradually simplified elaborate codes of conduct into rules. I have noticed a similar tendency toward simplification in Victorian dining handbooks. For example, lest the reader should miss the lessons that Mrs. Humphry provides in her narratives of proper behavior in Manners for Men (1897), she provides a running marginal gloss, such as “The lady precedes her escort” (61) (in her section on the procession to the table) or “As little noise as possible” (67) (in her section on the proper use of silverware). Other books pare down the context of iterative narrative to the principle behind the iterative, conveying routine, but they do so in a non-narrative and non-iterative manner.¹⁷ That is, rather than narrate what happens at a fashionable dinner, they focus for the most part on what should not happen.

For example, instead of offering descriptions or creating scenes, a book entitled Don't (1880) offers a series of injunctions. Notice the forthright tone in the following excerpt from the chapter entitled “At Table”:

Don't includes similar content as previous books and addresses the reader directly as London at Dinner and Social Etiquette do through their use of the second-person pronoun. However, in focusing on what is not allowed and, to a lesser extent, on what is allowed, Don't assumes a certain level of familiarity with the situation and scene of the dinner party.

The author's economy of language and focus on deviance imply an assumption that the conventions are already established. For example, the author does not bother to specify the order of a proper dinner. Instead, the author's prohibitions follow the order of the courses, and the customary temporal unfolding of the dinner is implicit. The author's explanation in fine print of what a code is also assumes a basic familiarity with the routines associated with a proper dinner:

The author's attempt to convince the reader that the advice in Don't is well-founded highlights not only the arbitrariness of conventions for social behavior but also the idea that conventions do exist. Rather than elaborate “that which is to be done”–the convention–Don't focuses on “the best method” for following the conventions.

Everybody's Book of Correct Conduct, Being the Etiquette of Every-day Life (1893) employs a similar method to Don't. The book consists of a series of statements about propriety that are divorced from the temporal and spatial dimensions of a certain type of dinner. Quite simply, in each chapter there are two recurring headings in large, underlined print: “It is the correct thing” and “It is not correct.” In the section on dinner, for example, the author, M. C., notes:

By repeating the terms “correct” and “not correct” as its structuring principle, much as Don't repeats the word “Don't,” Everybody's Book of Correct Conduct creates the impression that it is responding to confusion about the conventions for proper dining behavior. Like Don't, in its address of the subtleties of eating manners, it seems to be fine-tuning conventional practices. I want to suggest that the very absence of standard narrative devices, which we see in Don't and Everybody's Book of Correct Conduct, implies that the codification of conventions for dining has, to some extent, already taken place in the handbook genre. It seems as though the story of how to dine was repeated in iterative narratives to such an extent that writers began to experiment with a new way of telling it that focuses not on what is repeated but on what should not be repeated. AT THE END OF THE CENTURY, one book stands out for approaching the question of how to dine in a new way. Dinners and Diners: Where and How to Dine in London (1899), by Lieutenant-Colonel Newnham-Davis, is a restaurant guide that uses narratives of personal experience to offer readers assessments of restaurants and conventions for dining out. Rather than employ iterative narrative, it consists primarily of singulative narrative, or “[n]arrating once what happened once” (Genette 114). Davis devotes each chapter to a different restaurant–47 in total–and provides a description of an experience he has had there. By privileging individual experience and character over the taxonomies that the handbooks I have discussed in this article provide, Dinners and Diners may seem to be quite different. This difference can readily be seen through a comparison of Davis's book and a similarly titled work of 1860, Dinners and Diners at Home and Abroad: A Handy Book on Dinners by E. L. Blanchard. For whereas Blanchard focuses rather generally on different types of dinners–including the distinctions between dining houses, philanthropic dinners, and country dinners–Davis focuses on the specific dining adventures of his coterie.

Although each chapter is dedicated to a different restaurant, Davis begins each one not with the restaurant name but with the name of a diner. Here is the opening of Davis's Chapter One, “Princes' Hall (Piccadilly)”:

By beginning this chapter with the personal pronoun “she,” Davis appears to privilege character over subject matter. Yet the characters he describes are social types who enable him to delineate the details of proper dining.

Paradoxically, rather than portray individual experience, Davis's singulative narratives convey social routines and thereby function just as iterative narratives do, as social templates, or generalizing situation-descriptions. In his explanations of how and why he chose the restaurant, who accompanied him, what his companions wore, and how he ordered, Davis conveys, in turn, who should go to each restaurant, what one should wear, how one should order, and so on. In other words, he provides the conventions for dining out. Dinners and Diners can be seen to suggest that new conventions for narrating social behavior are emerging at the turn of the century. More important, by showing us how social paradigms can arise from seemingly unique dining scenes, it also further expands our conception of the narrative guises under which taxonomies can appear.

Whether the narratives contain specific dining details or abstractions, as I have shown, the notion that dining behaviors occur routinely as they are narrated is a function of writers' use of narrative devices and is, as such, a textual effect rather than an actual fact. There is a narratological term for this important distinction between narrative and reality, “pseudo-iterative” narrative, in which the “richness and precision of detail ensure that no reader can seriously believe they occur and reoccur in that manner, several times, without any variation” (Genette 121). My point is that while handbooks may use narrative devices that lend a quality of habituation to social events and practices, this dining taxonomy is a narrative illusion, albeit one that recurs in Victorian writings so frequently that it may appear to be true.