Old-fashioned mores and manners

I'm not very good at following the stuff mentioned in the title, but I was raised to it -- that is, I was sent to a school that emphasized them.

As a result, I have a weakness for books that stress them. What era covers that? The early twentieth century, really -- the Edwardian era.

Everything published before 1923 is in the public domain, so there's a treasure trove out there, if only you know what to look for. Project Gutenberg has done its most excellent work, but it's accessible only if you know the author or the book's name...

So I'm a fan of a little site called Arthur's Classic Novels. Someone (presumably "Arthur") has collected the bestsellers lists from the first two decades of the twentieth century and posted the e-texts of each of those novels (most of 'em, anyway) on his site.

There are some real potboilers among them, but there also are some gems.

And there are ones which are somewhere in between, which some may enjoy. For instance, I quite enjoyed Jeffrey Farnol's My Lady Caprice. And the Williamsons' The Princess Passes made for an interesting read, though I'm sure that many contemporary readers would read all sorts of subtexts into it that probably weren't intended...

On the other hand, there are some novels which are less fun -- Lady Baltimore is pleasant enough until it gets onto the issue of race. Then it horrifies.

Still, hits and misses are to be expected, and best of all is the price -- free. The best-liked novels of twenty years of a mass readership would have cost quite a bit, a century ago. Now we can just download them, read them, and decide whether they're worthy or not...

Update: I know I said I wouldn't get political, and I won't, but I thought of this because I had a thought in an e-mail I sent to a friend last night -- to what extent should the old-fashioned virtues like honour and integrity guide public policy.

It's come up lately in the foreign policy sphere, and there are differing views on the extent to which it should govern our actions.

Given that a sense of honour regarding Belgian neutrality arguably significantly helped pitch the British Empire into the First World War -- a calamity Britannia never recovered from -- it certainly once did have a strong pull.

Now... well, it's a tough call. We are all steely-eyed pragmatists, or at least pretend to have some of their mindset. (Not that it wasn't present back then -- raison d'etat and so on. "England has no eternal allies or foes, only eternal interests.")