author
Reginald Harvey Arnold
Best known for a witty late-19th-century guide to men's dress and etiquette, this little-known writer helped turn social polish into lively, readable advice. His surviving work has endured mainly through the charm and period detail of its observations.
1 Audiobook
Simplex Munditiis, Gentlemen
by Mortimer Delano de Lannoy, Reginald Harvey Arnold
About the author
Reginald Harvey Arnold is a little-documented author now remembered chiefly for Simplex Munditiis, Gentlemen, a book credited to him together with Mortimer Delano de Lannoy. Modern library and bookseller records consistently link his name with that title, and Project Gutenberg preserves it as the work by which he is best known.
The book is a late-19th-century guide to men's fashion, manners, and social behavior, written in a tone that mixes practical instruction with light wit. Because reliable biographical information about Arnold himself is scarce in the sources available online, most of what can be said with confidence comes from the continued circulation of this collaboration rather than from detailed records of his life.
That relative obscurity can be part of the appeal. Arnold survives less as a public literary personality than as the voice behind a period piece on elegance, restraint, and good form—qualities that still make the book an interesting window into the social style of its era.