Ian Jack, in his sympathetic essay on shyness (We used to think shyness was refined, 17 September), recalls an occasion when his 80-year-old cousin rejected his attempt to kiss her goodbye: “Och, you surely haven’t learned that habit.”
The evolution of tactile contact among familiars may have crept slowly from London to Scotland but it also evolved gradually in England. In one of Dorothy Osborne’s letters to her great love, Sir William Temple, written in the early 1650s, she refers to an acquaintance who was “famous for a kind husband” but whose one fault was that “he could not forbear kissing his wife before company, a foolish thing that young married men, it seems, are apt to… ’tis as ill a sight as one would wish to see, and appears very rude, methinks, to the company”. The highly intelligent Osborne was no prude but manners have moved on and today, in London at least, she and Ian Jack’s cousin would be kissed on both cheeks within an hour of making a new acquaintance, let alone meeting old friends and relations.
Paul Rayment
London
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