Etiquette Books

The second chapter of my thesis is on etiquette books.
I've long been obsessed with etiquette books. As a child I would regularly borrow an enormous pink edition of Miss Manners from my local library, fascinated by the almost mythical moral quandaries it discussed. It was as removed from my world as any science fiction book, and I became lost in its social possibilities. Later I discovered the Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, and was instantly absorbed in its extraordinarily demanding universe of correct stationery and forms of address. The only stationery we had in our house was a large ruled writing pad from Woolworth's, but that didn't stop me dreaming of engraved calling cards!
So where do etiquette books fit in to my thesis? Well, chronologically they are a good fit with New Thought books - though in reality etiquette and conduct manuals were being printed long before New Thought was even imagined. My suggestion is that etiquette books describe a sense of longing, and also a kind of narrative about class and aspiration. The thrust of the books is every bit as metaphysical as the much more overtly religious New Thought texts.
Etiquette books claim to provide a kind of blueprint to a better life through a minutely codified way of being, and a stark insistence on the improving benefits of a carefully lived civility. Manners and courtesies are the things we cling to in an effort to convince ourselves that there is some kind of superior state of being in this world - they prove (we hope) that we are more than animals. In a settler society like Australia's, etiquette manuals take on an extra element of urgency, describing poignantly a barely-possible world of balls and suppers and lawn parties. The Australian was struggling with an identity crisis as early as the 1850s, and etiquette books were already emerging in this period telling the anxcious social climber exactly how she (and it was invariably a "she" being addressed) should be behaving.
I am mainly relying on a massive 1950s tome called Woman's World, because it is a reliably camp extoller of cliched ideas of refinement. I am contrasting it with Marion Von Adlerstein's infinitely more sophisticated (and more subtly anxious) Penguin Book of Etiquette, published in Australia in 2002.
The chapter is meant to be finished with already, but I am still struggling along with it - I have promised myself it will be done by Wednesday.
Until then, I spend all day every day lost in a fantasy world of perfect manners and the adequate terms of address for a Governer-General's soiree.