Humphry, Mrs., -1925

Mrs. Humphry (d. 1925) was a British writer on etiquette. Her full name and exact dates of birth and death are not clearly recorded in publicly available sources, and verifiable information about her is quite limited. Two of her works are held in the collection: Manners for Men and A Word to Women. Both deal with everyday standards of conduct and social courtesy, offering guidance on behavior and speech to male and female readers respectively. In subject matter her writing continues the tradition of British etiquette books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, relying mainly on practical rules and admonitory advice and serving the middle-class demand for norms of social interaction at the time. Today such works are consulted chiefly as historical sources for the social manners and gender attitudes of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, while few detailed records of her own life have survived.