Finally Thursday! The weekend is calling!
And wouldn’t we like to answer with a nice lie-in, especially the week after the time change? But no – not this time. Socializing is on my horizon.
(Please click on the image to enlarge the actual images of calling cards I found online.) Despite the fact that some of the people I will be seeing I actually want to see, I still feel like it’s time to bring back the early 19th and 20th century social call. This, dear ones, did not take place on anything so gauche as a telephone, oh, no, this was a visit during visiting hours. One walked briskly through the neighborhood and one presented one’s calling card – as elegant a little piece of stationery as one could afford – to indicate that one was disposed to a moment of sociability, if the recipient had the time.
The recipient had the option of being at home or regrettably away, even if they were slouching in their peignoir eating chocolates or whatever people did instead people back then.
Okay, yes, laugh at me but I actually DO like people, within, you know, reason, and it might be nice to be more sociable if visits lasted, as they did back then, for a mere FIFTEEN MINUTES.
Think of it! Fifteen minutes. People went ALL the way to an acquaintance’s home, dressed to the nines, and…only stayed for a quarter of an hour. Honestly, I cannot imagine why there were wars back then – surely no one actually had to endure each other’s company long enough for any real dissent! (Hah.) And while the rules of socialization were labyrinthine and the Victorians were prisoners of the social dance as surely as they were the other trappings of the Beau Monde, it still seems like it would solve so many problems to have At Home days and fixed times when you were required to engage in socialization. I would have one day where I made lovely baked goods, sat down and read a book, and endured being interrupted all day, just to get it out of the way.
Once the telephone arrived, society veered in the direction of business cards for reasons I still don’t understand, and people now of course leave messages for each other on social media – to which my sporadic visits are something of a social obligation that I enact poorly as well. ::sigh:: As I gird up my social loins for the weekend, I think wistfully of Ye Olden Days when people (not of my class or race, but a girl can dream) could drop off a card and a gift to someone and perform a social nicety without actually ever going inside of anyone else’s house.
Honestly… making calls was the best, and calling cards were sometimes works of art. I don’t know why we don’t bring them back.