Sparteye, what a great post. Did you work your way thru college & law school waiting on tables?
As to your pop quiz, when the guests were seated at table, each was expected to begin making polite conversation with the person on his/her right (ladies and gentlemen alternated and it would have been a most serious breach of propriety if a man were seated next to his own wife). The male guest of honor, or the highest-ranking male guest was seated at the right of the hostess, so she started conversing with him. About midway thru the meal, the hostess would "turn the table" by switching to the guest on her left, and the rest of the diners followed suit.
Two things that occur to me: 1. You omit the fact that following the last of the courses you list, the hostess rose and the ladies left the table, to take coffee in the drawing room while the men circulated the port or cognac and maybe enjoyed cigars, joining the ladies in due course.
2. The oysters served as openers were de rigueure; oysters, in the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th, were eaten in quantities and frequency unheard of today. Of course, they were plentiful and cheap then. Diamond Jim Brady, a well-known financier and man-about-town (his mistress was Lillian Russell, whom he presented with a gold-plated and diamond-encrusted bicycle), used to start dinner nearly every day with 4 or 5 dozen oysters. No wonder the urology dept. at Johns Hopkins Hospital is called the Brady Institute; he did such a number on his urinary tract that he needed extensive treatment there around the turn of the last century and got such good results he gave them a huge wad of money and they named the department for him.
