Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [144]
Jane Beekman (1760-1841), by John Durand, c. 1768. Miss Beekman’s genteel upbringing is apparent not only from her fashionable clothing but the book she holds, open to a page in Latin from Erasmus. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society) By the mid-1770s there were eighty-five coaches, chaises, and phaetons in New York, and the sixty-nine families to whom they belonged ranked among the city’s richest and most powerful.
But stylish clothes and carriages alone weren’t enough. Refinement also demanded superior diction, posture, and gesture—knowing which, the gentry flocked to elocutionists, music teachers, singing masters, dancing masters, and dentists. Gentlemen practiced the lazy nasal drawl and elaborate slang of London bluebloods. “Split me, Madam,” they declared. “By Gad.” “Dam me.” Ladies learned to blush at such talk and studied the techniques of genteel correspondence.
Ultimately, the only way to assess one’s own progress toward refinement was by comparison with other aspirants in a suitable setting. New York’s biggest social event—the occasion when pretensions to refinement came under the keenest scrutiny—was still the Governor’s Ball, which took place every year at the fort following public celebrations of the King’s Birthday. During the 1750s and 1760s formal dancing assemblies, a fixture of polite society in Britain, became very influential in New York as well. Like the Governor’s Ball, they were selective. Admission was by invitation only, and the “managers” of an affair bore the solemn responsibility of ensuring that only the right kind of people got in.
“Turtle-feasts” were much in vogue too. “There are several houses, pleasantly situated on the East River, where it is common to have turtle-feasts,” one visitor reported. “These happen once or twice in a week. Thirty or forty gentlemen and ladies meet and dine together, drink tea in the afternoon, fish and amuse themselves till evening, and then return home in Italian chaises . . . a gentleman and a lady in each chaise.”
Intimate card parties became quite fashionable, whist and backgammon being all the rage at court. Private eating and drinking clubs remained a fixture of city taverns, though literary and scientific “societies,” which multiplied rapidly after mid-century, were considered more respectable. The New York Harmonic Society sponsored musical recitals and benefit concerts featuring the works of Handel, Bach, Corelli, Haydn, and other fashionable composers. Even the besotted members of the Hungarian Club were capable of a “great deal of talk about attraction, condensation, gravitation, rarification [and] the mathematical and astronomical problems of the illustrious Newton,” Dr. Hamilton admitted. “I was tired of nothing here but their excessive drinking, for in this place you may have the best of company and conversation as well as att Philadelphia.”
Chaperoned “routs” and “frolics” not only allowed young men and women of genteel families to socialize among their own kind but helped inculcate appropriate rules of courtship and marriage. Refined young bachelors learned to expect sexual favors only from serving girls or prostitutes (though that too was frowned on in some quarters). Without a chaste reputation, conversely, young women of quality couldn’t hope to find acceptable husbands.
Even at their funerals, refined New Yorkers knew, they would be on trial. Lest they appear stingy or unsociable, they took care to set aside enough money to provide mourners with an abundance of food, drink, and tobacco. In time, gifts of gold rings, silk scarves, silver spoons, and gloves for pallbearers and other important guests became practically mandatory; private family vaults created an especially favorable impression. As a result,