Gymkhana, glad to hear you enjoy the board and hope to hear more from you.

In the 19th century and early part of the 20th, the dinner party was a prominent part of life in the upper middle and higher classes, in the UK and to a lesser extent in the US.

The drill for a dinner party was that the guests assembled, around 7:00 p.m., in the drawing room of the host, where they mingled and made light conversation until time for dinner. Meanwhile, the hostess was greeting and chatting and pairing up the guests to go to dinner, letting each one know whom he would be escorting to the table. When the butler announced that dinner was served, the host took the arm of the highest ranking lady and led the way, followed by the hostess with the highest ranking man, followed by the next highest ranking man with the next highest ranking lady, etc.

In a Town [i.e., London] house, the dining room was always on the ground floor, the drawing room on the [English] first floor [US 2nd floor], so one literally went down to dinner. In a country house, where the drawing room would be on the ground floor across the hall from the dining room, one went in to dinner.

The rules of precedence by which the rankings were determined were rigid and invariable and every hostess had to know them inside out. It would be not only an embarassment of the first order, but a positive insult, to allow a lower ranking guest to precede a higher ranking one. This could get really complicated if you had a very mixed company, say with a Colonel of the Blues, the grandson of a marquess, a Baronet, the Dean of Barchester, a barrister who was a QC, an MP, their respective wives, plus the widow of an earl's son and a Harley Street physician who was a knight.

BTW, my information on this, and other recherché data on life as we see it in Jane Austen, Trollope, Dickens, et al., comes from one of my favorite books, which I highly recommend: What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist -- the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England by Daniel Pool. Simon & Schuster 1993