Flamboyance, tobacco and snuff were out but a wary attitude to marriage was in.

A pocket lifestyle guide from 1835 to be auctioned this month provides an insight into the aspirations and anxieties of young men about town on the eve of the Victorian era.

Like today’s men’s magazines, The Young Man’s Own Book furnished its readers with advice on everything from relationships and how to deal with the inlaws to personal hygiene, good manners and what to wear.

Charles Hanson, the auctioneer who found the book in the attic of a farmhouse in Derbyshire, said: “The authors of this book were the style gurus of the day.

“We think of magazines like FHM and GQ as mould-breaking and trail-blazing publications, but it was really no different 173 years ago. The well-to-do young man of William IV’s era was every bit as fashion-conscious and vain as the young man of today, if not more so.”

The book recommends “every young gentleman to avoid taking snuff or chewing tobocco. The latter is characteristic of vulgarity and the first is a filthy practice. Snuff takers are generally very dull and shallow people.” On gentleman’s dress, it states: “Fearless and flash men may wear a black cravat, a short coat, waistcoat and large hat fiercely cocked. Others may paint or powder themselves so much and dress so finically to supppose they are women in boys clothes.”

Marriage presents a hornet’s nest of social and financial hazards, even once the prospective groom has ensured that his wife is “free from deformity and hereditary disease”.

The book advises: “On your wedding day wear a sober smile to remind you, though most men marry, few live happily . . . Be careful she is not surrounded with hungry relations, for if she be they will throng about you like horse leaches and will pluck you bare.”

The book is expected to attract bids of several hundred pounds when Hanson’s Auctioneers, of Derby, offers it at a sale on May 28.