The Victorian Response to the Telephone

The Victorian response to the telephone is that they are in many ways terrified of the invasion of privacy. You have to introduce yourself by letter or you have to be introduced by someone else, and then the telephone arrives and you can phone anyone. And so the phone immediately causes problems for etiquette. So right from the inception of the telephone, there's a bunch of etiquette rules which are already being violated and changed as a result. Some of them are fantastically weird. Was it improper to be undressed while on the phone to someone else? Yes, it's the answer to that. Absolutely. Could you catch diseases down the phone? It was a really common question because germ theory is only 25