In London, for men of around his own age and status it would nearly always be surnames, even between very close friends, or possibly nicknames, especially if they'd been at school together. First names were normally only used between family members or people who had known each other since childhood.
At work you'd be more formal and address people as 'Mr Smith' 'Mr Brown' even if they were your equals.
For men who were older and/or of higher rank, or to whom you just wanted to be polite, 'sir' was nearly always correct.
Even if things were different in Utah, I imagine he'd soon fall back into his former habits once he was back in London.
Hmm, well, as I said, I think he'd fall back into 'London' habits quite quickly. It's how everyone around him will be behaving. He was an adult when he left, so he knows the correct ways of doing things, and he's in his mid thirties now, so too old to be 'different' just for the sake of it.
I don't know, I know a guy who was English, went to Cambridge and then moved to Germany for about 15 years, he now speaks with a slight German accent and forgets a lot of the words for things in English. 15 years is a long time...
If you're talking 19th century, "Utah" didn't really exist. It didn't become a state until 1896, and before that was basically a loose conglomeration of various different communities - you had the Mormon settlers doing settler-y and farmer-y things, camps of people looking for gold (or silver, usually), fur trappers, etc etc etc. Basically just about anything you would have found anywhere in the West in that time, only some of them were more religious than most.
So you'd have to be a lot more specific when you say that he was "in Utah" then. Was he in Salt Lake? In a mining town? Exploring the wilds?
The region was certainly called Utah Territory, but it was lines on a map and not a cohesive unit. The population makeup of the town he was in would make a huge difference, because you could just as easily have a mining town full of rowdy, drunken men as you could a small farming town full of highly religious settlers.
It would make a big difference in the social makeup of the town, since luxuries and easterners would come in to settle on the train, so generally more "civilized" than the rough mining towns and more mixed than the religious communities. And, of course, southern Utah is more southwestern, less settled, more free range and Indian territory, more Hispanic, etc. Surnames and nicknames were the most common form of address in general; in some western cultures, like the cowboy culture, calling a man Mr. xx was actually insulting. If you're curious about the different norms, try reading some of the literature by people who were there; http://www.online-literature.com/bret-harte/ http://london.sonoma.edu/ http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1390
I don't know whether it's possible to search Project Gutenberg by copyright date, but if so, that might be a good place to start. There were a lot of rather light US novels written then contrasting the colorful speech and manners of the westerners with the more cultivated East Coast.
I think it was one of his books that made a big deal about the westerners' ragtime as being sort of a political statement, like rock music was a few decades ago. ;-)
Going to second the "where in Utah" question. Was he in/around the Salt Lake Valley? Further south, in St. George? Somewhere in the middle? The territory itself was not nearly as homogenous as the modern-day state has a tendency to be. Is he near the Salt Lake or Utah Valleys? Is he out in the sticks? Is he closer to Nevada?
Additionally, why did you choose Utah? Is it just for the sake of finding a 'frontier' territory? I ask because the cultural setting in the main population centers was profoundly different from most of the rest of the frontier. Just looking for forms of address common to frontier America at that point in time won't get you what was common in Utah (I strongly doubt you'd have people calling each other 'Brother' and 'Sister' in your average mining camp, for instance).
You know, I almost forgot because it's too obvious, but THE iconic statement on how to address a westerner is found in The Virginian, a Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister "When you call me that, you smile."
"from London originally, but relocated to America out of nothing more than boredom while in his early 20s. He spent some time in New York, and eventually grew bored of that as well and wandered off to Utah to see what was going on out in that direction. "
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At work you'd be more formal and address people as 'Mr Smith' 'Mr Brown' even if they were your equals.
For men who were older and/or of higher rank, or to whom you just wanted to be polite, 'sir' was nearly always correct.
Even if things were different in Utah, I imagine he'd soon fall back into his former habits once he was back in London.
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So you'd have to be a lot more specific when you say that he was "in Utah" then. Was he in Salt Lake? In a mining town? Exploring the wilds?
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Surnames and nicknames were the most common form of address in general; in some western cultures, like the cowboy culture, calling a man Mr. xx was actually insulting.
If you're curious about the different norms, try reading some of the literature by people who were there; http://www.online-literature.com/bret-harte/
http://london.sonoma.edu/
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1390
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Try here and scroll down to Raine, William MacLeod, 1871-1954
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/r
I think it was one of his books that made a big deal about the westerners' ragtime as being sort of a political statement, like rock music was a few decades ago. ;-)
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Additionally, why did you choose Utah? Is it just for the sake of finding a 'frontier' territory? I ask because the cultural setting in the main population centers was profoundly different from most of the rest of the frontier. Just looking for forms of address common to frontier America at that point in time won't get you what was common in Utah (I strongly doubt you'd have people calling each other 'Brother' and 'Sister' in your average mining camp, for instance).
ETA because random HTML tags need to go away.
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"When you call me that, you smile."
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1298
"from London originally, but relocated to America out of nothing more than boredom while in his early 20s. He spent some time in New York, and eventually grew bored of that as well and wandered off to Utah to see what was going on out in that direction. "
Have you tried googling "remittance men"?
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