Summary

Venezuelan Manuel Antonio Carreño’s 1853 Manual de urbanidad y buenas maneras quickly became a bestseller in the Spanish-speaking world and its currency continues into the 21st century. Since its first publication, the Manual and the abridged Compendio version have been printed, reprinted, updated, satirized, adapted, and used as the ultimate word on manners, civility, and morals throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The history of the Manual de urbanidad is the history of a publishing sensation, as well as a history of aspirations, values and social changes in the societies that embraced the book.

This article offers a brief biographical overview of Carreño’s life before analyzing the contents of his original Manual, including consideration of authorial intent. The vast majority of the text offered detailed rules on behavior in a wide range of settings and situations, but, for Carreño, good manners were founded on and tied to both Catholic morality and the responsibilities of citizenship. The book became a classroom text and standard reference work, which was also plagiarized and adapted. While 19th-century versions remained remarkably unchanged, in the 20th century, new social norms, new technologies and new places of sociability influenced updated versions. At the same time, 19th-century versions continued to be republished and mined for material. In the 21st century, Carreño’s text has continued to be republished and updated but also modified, satirized, and used for inspiration for other texts and public interventions.

Carreño’s text has offered generations of readers certainty about how to handle every social conundrum; Carreño’s name became synonymous with good manners and a shorthand for his books even as Carreño himself, as a Venezuela author, disappeared from view. Since 1853, Carreño’s Manual, and its many versions, has shown remarkable continuity and, at the same time, malleability as a text. Each country and each generation continue to find their own “Carreño.”