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The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion
[etiquette, Edgar Allan Poe interest]

The Canons of Good Breeding; or, the Handbook of the Man of Fashion


Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1844.

Cloth 32mo, 224pp. Front cover detached with loss of cloth at the corners; lacking cloth backstrip, revealing a nice decorative flourish at the tail of the waste paper lining. Signature of James or Jonas Willard. An early (and possibly the last) reprint of this work on men's etiquette, first published in 1839 and reprinted in 1841: About 10 copies of any edition recorded in OCLC.

Notable for some of its progressive perspectives, including that “It is by intimate society with accomplished women, that men become accomplished...  Men, like chameleons, take their hue from what they lie on.” Dancing and boxing are both noble exercises. The Southern Literary Messenger said that it “gravely recommends profane swearing and hard drinking as gentleınanly accomplishments” and was “unfit for whom we did not wish to see imbued with the principles of Machiavel” (Jan. 1845, p.57)

It was famously reviewed by Edgar Allan Poe in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (full text linked here.) Bemused, agitated and enthusiastic in turn, he wrote of its “certain air of literature-ism;” and that “ in a compass so small, we never before met with an equal radiancy of fine wit, so well commingled with scholar-like observation and profound thought.”

But Poe concludes the book's meritous remarks are "suspiciously super -abundant" and must be the "excessively-elaborated production of some partially-educated man, possessed with a rabid ambition for the reputation of a wit and savant, and who, somewhat un-scrupulous in the mode of attaining such reputation, has consented to clip, cut, and most assiduously intersperse throughout his book, by wholesale, the wit, the wisdom, and the erudition" of others; stitched together under the "minute supervision and correction by some person whose habits and education have rendered him very thoroughly competent to the task.”

Literary critics have suggested Canons as a source for Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," especially the chapter, "On the General Manner,” which cautions readers against pleasure-seeking as escapism, “because pleasure and vice are intimately related. Either a careless pleasure is the parent of a serious woe, or, more to the point of "The Masque of the Red Death," such pleasures are often motivated by great distress.”

(See: Gerber, Gerald E. “Additional Sources for ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’” American Literature 37, no. 1 (1965): 52–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2922875.)