Chapter 2: Meetings, Partings, and Forms of Address

Every conversation has to start and stop somewhere, and the eighteenth century had firm, if flexible, customs for both. This chapter covers the phrases you'll use most — because you'll use them in nearly every interaction — and the system of titles that told listeners exactly how a speaker regarded the person across from them.

2.1 Meetings and Greetings

The single most useful greeting in your kit is a simple one: How do you do? It was the standard opener of the period, asked and answered by everyone regardless of rank, and it survives today in the casual "How ya doin'?" A second common "compliment" (the period's own word for a polite exchange) was to ask after the other person's household — How does all at home? — a natural opener in a world where illness and accident touched every family. A Virginia dialogue recorded by the traveler Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1796 opens exactly this way: "How does your father, old fellow?"

Latrobe also captured a warmer variant, combining the greeting with an expression of pleasure at the meeting:

How do you do Mr. Booker, I'm right heartily glad to see you.

For character interpreters greeting guests as strangers, the most versatile line in this entire book may be this one:

I have not the honor to know you, Sir/Madam. I am ____________.

It's an authentic way for a gentry or middling character to introduce themselves to someone they've never met, and it does double duty: it's period-accurate, and it gives you a natural place to say your character's name.

A person of lower standing approaching someone above them in rank had a different, more deferential opener available:

Pray, good Sir/Madam, if I may be so bold...

And running underneath nearly every one of these exchanges was the your servant family of phrases — a formula so common that it functioned as much as a piece of etiquette as an actual claim of service:

Sir, I am your most obedient servant. I am heartily glad to see you.

In a conversation between social equals, good manners required the second speaker to return the compliment — to affirm, in effect, that they were the servant of the first party. A shopkeeper greeting a customer might say, "Sir, your humble servant; I'm very glad to see you," and expect something similar back.

2.2 Partings and Farewells

Farewells followed the same call-and-response pattern as greetings. The your servant formula worked here too:

First party: ...and so, your servant, Sir. Second party: Sir, I am yours. / Your servant, Sir. / Yours, Sir.

Your servant could be dressed up almost indefinitely for extra politeness — your humble servant, your obedient servant, or, laid on thick, your most obedient and humble servant.

For a plainer, more adaptable option — especially useful for middling and lower-class characters — variations on good day worked just as well, again with a returned civility:

First party: I wish you a good day, Sir/Madam. — or, less formally — Good day to you, friend. — or, plainer still — Good night to you, Robin. Second party: The like to you, Sir/Madam/friend. — or, again — Your servant.

2.3 Common Forms of Address

By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Virginia had no resident nobility to speak of, so its system of address ran almost entirely on a few workhorse titles, applied according to rank, occupation, and relationship.

Mr. Traditionally reserved for men who could rightly be called "gentlemen," the title had loosened considerably by 1770 — a London magazine complained in 1765 that it was "equally claimed by the son of a peer, or a porter, an opulent merchant, or the master of a green stall." In Virginia, county justices, members of the Assembly, and colonial officials below the governor were addressed as Mr. unless they held a more specific title, and prosperous merchants and tradesmen were often called Mr. as well, especially by one another. Mr. was never used alone — always with the surname (Mr. Jones), or with the name of an office (Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Mr. Attorney).

Colonel. A Virginian who held a militia colonelcy was addressed by that title plus his surname — Colonel Byrd — outranking the default Mr.

Mrs. and Mistress. By 1770, Mrs. (still sometimes pronounced Mistress, with the two pronunciations apparently coexisting) belonged to the wives and widows of the same officeholders and prosperous tradesmen who rated a Mr. — Mrs. Anderson, Mistress Holloway.

Miss. Unmarried gentry and middling women under about fifty were addressed as Miss plus surname (Miss Blair). Older unmarried women of the same class were more often called Mistress. In some families, "Miss" plus the surname referred specifically to the eldest unmarried daughter, with younger sisters called by their first names or "Miss" plus their first name — though this custom wasn't universal.

Sir and Madam. Used alone, these were the everyday titles of respect for gentlemen and gentlewomen across nearly any situation — a servant to a master, a wife to her husband, a child to a parent, a shopkeeper to a customer.

Kinship terms. People routinely addressed relatives by their relationship rather than by name — cousin, sister, aunt, uncle, neighbor, and, notably, friend for a stranger or acquaintance you wished to treat warmly. Step-relations and in-laws frequently used the same terms as blood kin: stepbrothers called each other Brother, and a son-in-law might address his wife's father as Father plus the father's surname (Father Page).

2.4 Putting It Together

Try building a short opening for your character: a greeting, an inquiry after the guest's health or family, and a form of address suited to how your character would size up a stranger's rank. A middling tradesman meeting a well-dressed visitor, for instance, might land on something like:

Your servant, Sir. I hope I find you well? — How does all at home?

...while an enslaved house servant addressing the same visitor, in a scene depicting the household's actual social order, would use a very different register — deferential, careful, without the reciprocal "your servant" a social equal could expect in return. Both are period-accurate; neither is interchangeable with the other. Choosing correctly is the whole point of this chapter.