Regency Period Quotes

heir eyes met. They both smiled, aware that they were in public, where anyone could see them on the street and in the window. But the rest of the world did not matter. For that moment, everything else vanished. He was there, she was there, no trouble could touch them.

In her twenties she developed a deep affection for romance, especially enjoying the works of Nora Roberts, Mary Balogh and, most recently, Rose Gordon, Courtney Milan, Lauren Royal, Danelle Harmon, and Diane Farr. You can thank those authors for leading a sci-fi tomboy into writing historical romances set in the Regency period.

Nation would triumph over all its adverse Fortune. Some eminent

The poetical term fête galante refers to a new genre of paintings and drawings that blossomed in the early 18th century during the [French] Regency period (1715-1723) and whose central figure was Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Inspired by images of bucolic merrymaking in the Flemish tradition, Watteau and his followers created a new form, with a certain timelessness, characterised by greater subtlety and nuance. These depict amorous scenes in settings garlanded with luxuriant vegetation, real or imaginary: idealised dancers, women and shepherds are shown engaged in frivolous pursuits or exchanging confidences. The poetical and fantastical atmospheres that are a mark of his work are accompanied by a quest for elegance and sophistication characteristic of the Rococo movement, which flourished during the Age of Enlightenment, evidenced in his flair for curved lines and light colours. The flexibility of the fête galante theme proved to be an invitation to experimentation and innovation, and the genre was to inspire several generations of artists, occupying a central place in French art throughout the 18th century. Works by other highly creative painters, such as François Boucher (1703-1770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), illustrate their very personal visions of the joys of the fête galante as first imagined by Watteau.

It didn’t take peering at the brass plates at the bottom of the paintings to guess who they must have been: my very own Lord and Lady Uppington, presiding over Uppington Hall in paint as they once had in the flesh. One could almost picture them stepping out of their frames to play host, sweeping aside the tourists and signaling the silent harp into song. The re-enactors were all wrong; from their costumes, they were late Regency, 1820 or so, rather than the pre-Regency period in which I was interested. There was a wide gap between the two, in style and in outlook. But the servants would probably have looked very much the same, in their livery in the Uppington colors, and so would the pre-Victorian Christmas decorations. If I ignored the “party guests” and the other tourists, it was just possible to picture what it might have been like two hundred years ago, when Lord and Lady Uppington had held Christmas at the family seat. I paused, struck by the symmetry of it. It would have been almost exactly two hundred years ago, wouldn’t it? December 1803 to December 2003. It would have been Colin’s ancestors’ first Christmas together after the mad upheaval of their marriage the previous spring. There would have been candles, just as there were now, and the smell of oranges and cloves. There would have been gaily gowned ladies and excited children and tables laden with ratafia biscuits and dried fruit and the inevitable sticky sweet slices of mince pie….

acknowledgements Huge thanks, obviously, to the superhuman Jane Austen for her books. Besides those masterpieces, I also reviewed (obsessively) the BBC 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice, as well as Emma (1996), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Persuasion (1995), and Patricia Rozema’s gorgeous revision of Mansfield Park (1999). I’m also indebted to Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew for period information. The World of Jane Austen, by Nigel Nicholson, who also useful, and I scoured the Web site Jessamyn’s Regency Costume Companion for clothing information. Despite the research, I’d be surprised if I didn’t make mistakes, but they’re sure to be my fault, so please don’t blame my sources. Special thanks to the amazing Amanda Katz for her inspired editing, as well as to Nadia Cornier, Cordelia Brand, Ann Cannon, Rosi Hayes, and Mette Ivie Harrison. And can I just say again how much I love Bloomsbury? I do. Everyone there is so cool. And also quite attractive (though that hardly seems fair, does it?). And honey, you know that this Colin Firth thing isn’t really serious. You are my fantasy man and my real man. I need no other fella in all the world besides you. It’s just a girl thing, I swear.

The upper classes adopted affected forms of talking, which was mocked by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, where the heroine, Catherine Morland, says, ‘I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible’, to which the well-read young clergyman, Henry Tilney, replies, ‘Bravo! – an excellent satire on modern language.

Some grammar schools were founded even earlier, in the medieval period, including Winchester College (1382) and Eton College (1440), which was granted a monopoly 10 miles around Eton ‘so it may excel all other grammar schools…and be called the lady mother and mistress of all other grammar schools’.

Busy most part of the afternoon in making some mead wine, to fourteen pound of honey, I put four gallons of water, boiled it more than an hour with ginger and two handfulls of dried elder-flowers in it, and skimmed it well. Then I put it into a small tub to cool, and when almost cold I put in a large gravey-spoon full of fresh yeast, keeping it in a warm place, the kitchen during night.

Whitewash, a solution of lime and chalk mixed with other additives, was brushed on interior and exterior walls like paint. It took several days to set, forming a white surface that could be coloured with other substances; in some areas animal blood or vegetable dye was added to give exterior walls a pink colour. Whitewash was a cheap way of decorating rooms. More expensive options included textile hangings, wallpaper, painting and wainscoting. In 1817 William Holland was decorating parts of the vicarage at Over Stowey. His daughter’s bedroom had wallpaper, but he hired a painter for some of the woodwork, inside and out:

At the age of seven Jane Austen was sent away to Oxford with her sister Cassandra and her cousin Jane Cooper to be taught by a private tutor. 59 In the summer of 1783, after the tutor and her pupils moved to Southampton, all three girls fell ill with typhus, and Jane Austen nearly died. She and her sister recuperated at home and then joined their cousin in 1785 at the Reading Ladies’ Boarding School, but were removed at the end of the following year, putting a stop to their tuition. By the time Jane Austen was eleven years old, her formal education was over.

In March 1810 Louis Simond gave a vivid description of the more normal winter smog: It is difficult to form an idea of the kind of winter days in London; the smoke of fossil coals forms an atmosphere, perceivable for many miles, like a great round cloud attached to the earth. In the town itself, when the weather is cloudy and foggy, which is frequently the case in winter, this smoke increases the general dingy hue, and terminates the length of every street with a fixed grey mist, receding as you advance. But when some rays of sun happens to fall on this artificial atmosphere, its impure mass assumes immediately a pale orange tint…loaded with small flakes of soot…so light as to float without falling. This black snow sticks to your clothes and linen, or lights on your face. You just feel something on your nose, or your cheek,—the finger is applied mechanically, and fixes it into a black patch! 66

From the 1790s, as a protest against the French Revolution, fashionable women cut their hair short in sympathetic imitation of victims’ hair before they were guillotined.

Along with their servants, wealthy families moved ‘up to’ London from their country establishments, renting a house or staying in their own property for ‘the Season’, which coincided with parliamentary sittings. Benjamin Silliman explained that ‘in England, down means from London, and up, to London: they speak of going down into the country, no matter in what direction. The Londoners talk of going down to Scotland. Is this a figure of speech unconsciously adopted because London is the great fountain supplying all the kingdom with streams of wealth and knowledge. Perhaps the country might dispute the claim.

All weddings were morning events, since canon law decreed that they could be solemnised only between 8 a.m. and noon – a rule that held until 1886.

The wealthy might have had ice, but water itself was not widely drunk because palatable supplies were not readily available. Elizabeth Ham recalled that for supper at her boarding school at Tiverton in Devon, ‘we had a little bit of bread with a little bit of cheese on it, and a little cider in a little mug. No one in these days ever dreamt of drinking water.’ 123 Devon was a county that made prodigious quantities of cider, but the main drink in England was ‘small beer’, also referred to as ‘small ale’ or ‘common beer’. Woodforde called it ‘table beer’, while strong ales were just ‘beer’ or ‘strong beer’. Small beer was safer than water, and because of its low alcohol content, it was not intoxicating.

In Georgian times lunch hardly existed, although for those who breakfasted early, a small snack might be eaten. In towns many shops sold pies and pastries, while street sellers offered shellfish and other ready-to-eat items. Dinner was the main meal, eaten at any time in the afternoon between two and five o’clock. The timing of dinner was related to the hours of daylight, since the cooks needed to work in daylight, especially for formal dinners with guests where preparations could take hours. Dinnertime for the elite became later and later, and in contrast to the meagre breakfast, a formal dinner could be a dazzling array of food. The first course, served on the table all at once, had numerous dishes, and was followed by a second course with a smaller selection of meats and fish, along with savoury and sweet items. Finally, a selection of nuts, sweetmeats and occasionally fruit constituted the dessert course, at which point the servants withdrew.

To display their higher status, professional men like clergy, lawyers and physicians had formerly worn voluminous, full-bottomed wigs – the big wigs of society – but by the late 1770s most gentlemen preferred smaller wigs, sometimes with pigtails or queues.

William Pitt the Elder, who died in 1778, once declared: ‘The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail – its roof may shake – the wind may blow through it – the storm may enter – the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter! – all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!

In June 1773 Mrs Austen wrote: ‘I suckled my little girl thro’ the first quarter; she has been weaned and settled at a good woman’s at Deane just eight weeks; she is very healthy and lively.’ 53 Deane village was 2 miles from their parsonage at Steventon, and years later James Austen-Leigh, the nephew of Jane and Cassandra, mentioned this peculiar start to their lives: Her [Jane’s] mother followed a custom, not unusual in those days, though it seems strange to us, of putting out her babies to be nursed in a cottage in the village. The infant was daily visited by one or both of its parents, and frequently brought to them at the parsonage, but the cottage was its home, and must have remained so till it was old enough to run about and talk…It may be that the contrast between the parsonage house and the best class of cottage was not quite so extreme then as it would be now, that the one was somewhat less luxurious, and the other less squalid.

In upper-class families, it was usual to call the eldest unmarried daughter ‘Miss’, so those who did not know the family well might be unaware of her Christian name,

There was no tradition of babies being given soft toys and other playthings apart from rattles. Instead, they were sedated with proprietary soothers, especially Dr Godfrey’s Cordial. Such concoctions contained opium, morphine and a mercury compound like calomel and were widely advertised,

Better-off families kept their tea in special lockable tea-caddies to prevent it being pilfered by the servants. It tended to be used sparingly, so that it was made as a fairly weak drink, to which milk and sugar were added.

Clothing for men and women changed markedly, in both styles and fabrics, over Jane Austen’s lifetime. Following the French Revolution grotesquely elaborate fashions gave way to naturalistic styles, imitating the Classical world. Ladies wore simple gowns based on Greek and Roman styles that were copied from the many archaeological finds then being unearthed at places like Pompeii and Herculaneum. Men’s fashions were influenced by more practical military dress, which resulted in sober clothing, more suitable for country life than the extravagance of the urban fashions of the preceding period.

Short jackets known as spencers (after the 2nd Earl Spencer who started the trend) 12 became popular from the 1790s. This type of double-breasted jacket had no tails, though they were often put on over a traditional jacket with tails.

In 1795 a tax of one guinea on hair-powder was made payable by the head of each household, and this triggered a radical change in men’s hairstyles. Instead of paying the tax, the Whigs cut their hair short, in a style called à la guillotine, after those forced to have their hair cropped before being executed during the French Revolution. Those Tories who paid the tax were called guinea-pigs.

A few years later, when she was fourteen, Holland elaborated: ‘She has a thirst after knowledge of every kind to the greatest degree. She has made great proficiency in Latin and Greek and is making the same advance in French and Italian…It is a pity she was not a boy for then such studies would turn to better account…I know not where this will end but is not a likely mode to get her well married.’ 56 Holland’s own daughter Margaret was given a basic education at home, with private tutors for music and French, but she never married. In spite of her education, Elizabeth did marry in 1825, at the age of twenty-eight, becoming the wife of John Sandford, Archdeacon at Wells in Somerset.

Poorer families could not even afford tallow candles, but might make rushlights, which were not taxed. Writing at Selborne in 1775, where he was curate, Gilbert White explained that after obtaining rushes for the wicks, their outer coating was peeled off except for one strip supporting the inner pith. After drying, the rushes were drawn through waste cooking grease and fat:

Ice helped to chill food and drinks and enabled iced dishes to be made, including ice creams and sorbets. When she was staying at Lyme Regis in September 1804, Jane Austen wrote satirically to Cassandra: ‘Your account of Weymouth contains nothing which strikes me so forcibly as there being no ice in the town. For every other vexation I was in some measure prepared, and particularly for your disappointment in not seeing the Royal Family go on board…but for there being no ice what could prepare me? Weymouth is altogether a shocking place.

The wealthy had ice-houses in their gardens, in which ice could be kept successfully for much of the year.

The place is an austere, wartime England. In the north Hampshire village of Steventon, Jane Austen was born in December 1775, and just 12 miles away in the cathedral city of Winchester, she died in July 1817. Such a short distance separates her birth and death, yet during her lifetime of forty-one years she travelled more than most women of this era, westwards as far as Dawlish in Devon, eastwards to Ramsgate in Kent, southwards to Portsmouth and probably as far north as Hamstall Ridware in Staffordshire. 1 England was the only country she knew, and for most of her adult life, that country was at war.

Some children were breastfed by their mothers and then handed to foster-parents after weaning. This is how Jane Austen and her siblings were brought up, fostered for several months (possibly by a woman called Bessy Littleworth) until deemed old enough to return home.

Jane Austen’s England was not an overcrowded country – in 1801 the entire population was approximately that of London today.

The law governing marriage was Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, which decreed that after 25 March 1754 marriages were valid in law only if they had been advertised by banns or sanctioned by a special licence and were conducted by an Anglican clergyman in a church. Marriages also had to be recorded in a register. A marriage conducted in any other way was not legal, and the person performing it was guilty of a felony and liable to transportation.

whereas Jews and Quakers, exempt from the Act, were allowed to marry according to their own customs. Not until 1837 could couples legally marry in register offices, or in their own chapels if a civil registrar was present.

In Somerset, Holland grumbled about one educated girl, Elizabeth Poole: ‘This little girl is very clever and learns surprizingly and writes Latin letters but I should not like any woman the better for understanding Latin and Greek. All pedantick learning of this kind makes them conceited

Smoking chimneys were so common that specialist workmen, ‘chimney doctors’, offered to remedy such problems.

Lighted candles were carried in holders to avoid spilling the hot wax, but walking too fast with the candle or walking through a draught could easily extinguish the flame. Outdoors, candles were put into protective metal lanterns (or ‘lanthorns’) with pierced sides or panels of thin translucent horn or sometimes of glass.

Candles, made and sold by licensed chandlers, were heavily taxed, which encouraged their clandestine manufacture. 75 The best-quality ones were of beeswax – some were made from thin sheets of beeswax wrapped round a flax or cotton wick and others were laboriously manufactured as solid candles. 76 Such candles were favoured by the wealthy and the Church, and they were better for chandeliers (often called ‘lustres’) in public buildings like theatres, where the light would be reflected and magnified by the numerous pieces of glass (‘drops’). Beeswax candles might also be mounted in candelabra or candlesticks, or fixed on wall brackets. Also of high quality were candles of spermaceti, a waxy oil from the head of sperm whales. Unlike beeswax candles, these could be made in moulds. Both beeswax and spermaceti candles burned slowly and brightly, producing little smoke or smell.

Table manners were of importance to the higher classes, although the poorest were more concerned with survival than etiquette. In a book on manners, the Reverend John Trusler warned how to avoid appearing low class or impolite: ‘Eating quick, or very slow, at meals, is characteristic of the vulgar; the first infers poverty, that you have not had a good meal for some time; the last, if abroad [dining out], that you dislike your entertainment: if at home [and eating slowly], that you are rude enough to set before your friends what you cannot eat yourself.

Some hosts did offer food that we would now discard, and just before Christmas 1778 Woodforde unashamedly set before his guests a dinner that included ‘part of a ham, the major part of which ham was entirely eaten out by the flies getting into it’. 142 Even so, his guests also stayed for supper, and ‘We were exceeding merry indeed all the night.

in June 1799 Woodforde wrote: ‘Very cold indeed again to day, so cold that Mrs Custance came walking in her Spenser with a bosom-friend.’ 27 He meant that she had a large handkerchief or scarf at her throat to keep her warm, a fashion that arose because of the low necklines and acquired the name ‘bosom-friend’.

Personal hygiene, or lack of it, would undoubtedly shock us today, with the overpowering body odours and the stink of clothing, stale with sweat and often musty from damp houses. Some people smelled rather worse than others, particularly if employed in a noisome industry. This was an era before anti-perspirants, before the widespread use of soap, before a time when people washed their bodies and changed their clothing on a regular basis, and when virtually nobody immersed themselves in baths or showers. Everyone would have smelled, even genteel women like Jane Austen, who in mid-September 1796 admitted to Cassandra: ‘What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.

At times like these, reality won’t do. I need time traveling vikings who seem suspiciously clean for the time period. I need regency rakes; mafia psychopaths; sweet, burly bakers in small towns.

The Reverend William Holland, a Somerset clergyman whose background and status were similar to that of Jane Austen’s father, was forthright in his views about some of the lower classes: ‘They expect to be kept in idleness or supported in extravagance and drunkenness. They do not trust to their own industry for support. They grow insolent, subordination is lost and [they] make their demands on other people’s purses as if they were their own.

In 1709 Daniel Defoe roughly summarised the social strata as ‘The great, who live profusely; the rich, who live plentifully; the middle sort, who live well; the working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want; the country people, farmers, etc. who fare indifferently; the poor that fare hard; the miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.

In James’s time, smallpox was sometimes called the Speckled Monster. Throughout recorded history, it killed ten percent of the population. As a youngster, before being variolated (intentionally infected with smallpox as a preventative measure), Edward Jenner was “prepared” by being starved, purged, and bled, and afterward he was locked in a stable with other ailing boys until the disease had run its course. All in all, it was an experience he would never forget—one that later inspired him to experiment and discover that immunization with cowpox prevented smallpox. In 1801, after he pioneered vaccination, Jenner issued a pamphlet that ended with these words: “…the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice.” Unfortunately, almost 180 years went by before his prophecy came to pass. In Juliana, James was too optimistic in hoping smallpox vaccinations would soon be made compulsory. England didn’t pass such a law until 1853, and the World Health Organization (WHO) didn’t launch its campaign to conquer smallpox until 1967. At that time, there were fifteen million cases of smallpox each year. The WHO’s plan was to vaccinate everyone everywhere. Teams of vaccinators traveled the world to the remotest of communities. The last documented case of smallpox occurred just eight years later, in 1975. After an anxious period of watching for new cases, in 1980 the WHO formally declared, “Smallpox is Dead!” Jenner’s dream had come true: The most feared disease of all time had been eradicated.

Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), the considerably influential Swiss-French political thinker, activist and writer on political theory and religion,708 whose ideas influenced the liberal movement in Spain, the liberal revolution in Portugal in 1820, the Greek war of independence soon after, and revolutionary movements stretching from Belgium, to Poland to as far as Brazil and Mexico over the same period also had his views on the matter. The only short text that he wrote before his death on the expedition of Algiers, while wishing for the victory of French forces and refusing ‘to respect the quality of sovereignty in a barbarian’, the Dey of Algiers, castigated the expedition as a political ploy on the eve of a crucial general election.709 But Constant, after dismissing the quarrel between Charles X and the Dey as an ‘affaire d’honneur’, declared that he would support the expedition ‘if it led to the ‘colonization’ of the Regency: for it to become an ‘affaire nationale’, he contended, ‘an undisputed, indisputable colonization should be the prize of victory and the fruit of the sacrifices risked’ by the Bourbon regime.710 Constant final hours on this earth must have been filled with glee as the news of the French entry into Algeria reached him on his death- bed. Pro or anti Regime, all welcomed the news of the expedition.