What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
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A TOUCHSTONE BOOK
Published by
Simon & Schuster
New York
London
Toronto
Sydney
Contents
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
The Basics
Currency
The Calendar
Hogsheads and Drams: English Measurement
England
London
The Public World
Precedence: Of Bishops, Barristers, and Baronets
The Titled
How to Address Your Betters
Esq., Gent., K.C.B., etc.
Status: Gentlemen and Lesser Folk
Society
Society and “The Season”
Basic Etiquette
How to Address the Nontitled
“May I Have This Dance?”
The Rules of Whist and Other Card Games
Calling Cards and Calls
The Major Rituals
Presentation at Court
The Dinner Party
The Ball
The Country House Visit
Money
Being Wealthy
Entail and Protecting the Estate
Bankruptcy, Debt, and Moneylending
Power and the Establishment
The Government
Britannia Rules the Waves
The Army
The Church of England
Oxford and Cambridge
Schools
“The Law Is a Ass”
Lawyers
Crime and Punishment
Transition
The Horse
Please, James, the Coach
The Railroad
The Mail
The Country
Life on the Farm
The Midlands, Wessex, and Yorkshire
Who’s Who in the Country
Shire and Shire Alike: Local Government in Britain
“The Theory and System of Fox Hunting”
Vermin, Poachers, and Keepers
Fairs and Markets
The Private World
“Reader, I Married Him”
Sex
An Englishman’s Home
Houses with Names
Furniture
Lighting
How the English Kept Clean
“Please, Sir, I Want Some More.”
Pudding!
Tea
Drink and the Evils Thereof
Women’s Clothing
Men’s Clothing
Servants
The Governess
A Taxonomy of Maids
Victorian Recycling
The Grim World
The Orphan
Occupations
Apprentices
The Workhouse
Disease
Doctors
Death and Other Grave Matters
PART TWO
Glossary
aBOUT DANIEL POOL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
FOR MY PARENTS
AND
FOR LISA S.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the aid of a number of individuals. The staff of the General Research Division of the New York Public Library were of enormous assistance in suggesting materials that might answer the author’s questions and in helping to locate rare or arcane publications. He is particularly in debt to Ms. Catharine Halls, whose extensive knowledge, unfailing resourcefulness, and patient good humor turned his fruitless inquiries into productive ones, lengthy searches into short hunts, and hesitant queries into research infinitely more informed and efficient than it could otherwise possibly have been. The reference staff of the Butler Library at Columbia University were also uniformly painstaking and imaginative in helping him to find ways to locate sources of information and answer troublesome questions.
He owes special gratitude to his parents and brother Eugene for reading the manuscript of this book at various stages. It is a pleasure, in addition, to acknowledge the assistance of Peyton Houston, who not only read the manuscript but commented in detail on it with his characteristic shrewdness and practicality.
Malaga Baldi proved that all the terrible things the writer had heard about literary agents were untrue, at least in her case, and she has been untiring in her backing for the book. To Bettina Berch he owes great support ab initio and an introduction to Malaga. His editor, Gary Luke, read the manuscript, edited it, offered useful advice and understanding and still remained enthusiastic about it.
Jeffrey Miller had the brilliant idea for the book in the first place, which is perhaps only to be expected of a man whose cookie always has the best fortune in it. Without the generous financial support of the David S. Korzenik Foundation, this book would not have appeared at all. Margaret Hornick taught both by example and by patient questioning how to complete a project as daunting as this seemed at the outset. The author is in debt to her consistent good cheer and kindness. A number of readers, notable among them George Newlin and Bruce Knapp, have been kind enough to call the author’s attention to slipups in the hardcover version, which are corrected herein. He is grateful for their assistance and is, of course, solely responsible for any errors that may remain.
Finally, Jill Bennett has been unfailingly supportive and encouraging about this volume. It is not the first such project of the author’s that she has supported, and if it can afford her a pleasure in some small way equal to that which her friendship has given him since the days when she managed to get the piano at Highland Avenue for all of $10, the author will be very pleased.
Introduction
What were the assizes?
Would Trollope’s Plantagenet Palliser, the duke of Omnium, have been outranked by an earl—or a countess?
What was ague?
Why did Miss Havisham keep wax and not tallow candles burning in her house during her long vigil?
What was in the gruel that Scrooge ate to ease his cold?
What were the steps of the country-dances that Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy danced?
How did you play whist, publish the banns—or tell a housemaid from a parlormaid?
This book grew from a wish to answer some of the questions that nag any half-curious reader of the great nineteenth-century English novels, those sometimes daunting but enjoyable works of Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontës, or Trollope. Today’s reader is apt to find himself or herself puzzling over references to aspects of everyday English life that are now long vanished but that the contemporary author took for granted that his—contemporary—audience knew.
Such a reader, typically, wants either to know a quick bit of information—what was a dormouse, or a costermonger, or the lord chancellor?—or else background on some nineteenth-century English institution or set of practices that figure in the novel, fox hunting perhaps, or marriage, or the rites of the Church of England or the seasons in farming.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first section aspects of English life that figure significantly in the major nineteenth-century English novels are treated at a length of several pages or more. These are the sections for the reader who wishes to know more, say, about farming, or whether canons outranked deacons or vicars in the Church of England, or why peop
le wound up in debtor’s prison when they were bankrupt, and so on. In short, it describes the major institutions and practices of nineteenth-century English life that are likely to be unfamiliar to today’s reader. At the same time, the reader or student of nineteenth-century English life or literature often has a question about a very specific matter that turns up in his or her reading—what were the “assizes” referred to in Far from the Madding Crowd, for example, or the “articles” by which Oliver Twist is “bound” to the cruel undertaker in Dickens’s great novel. Such words are explained in the second half of the book in a glossary that explicates their meanings and connotations with specific reference to the needs of the contemporary reader.
In the course of research and writing, the book by its nature evolved into a partial picture of certain aspects of nineteenth-century English life and customs. Fox hunting, farming, marriage, sex, the conduct of business affairs, or parliamentary practice—the specific details of these and other social practices or customs of the era are provided here to the reader who may have as much interest in the history and habits of the time as in its literature. Because the book addresses primarily the interests of the reader of literature, it ignores some of the prominent concerns of the day—the student of Chartism, factory conditions, or the Crimean War, for example, will find little or nothing on these matters here because they are not treated in the “great” nineteenth-century novels.
“Now, what I want is Facts.”
CHARLES DICKENS:
Hard Times (1854)
PART ONE
CURRENCY
Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You know what they are?” Mr. Dombey asks his little son Paul. Paul, Dickens tells us, knew, but the average reader of today is not always likely to be so knowledgeable.
In the 1800s, British money was calculated in units of pounds, shillings, and pence. These were the units of value—like the American mill, cent, and dollar—in which all transactions were reckoned, regardless of whether the value was represented by a bookkeeping entry, by coin, by bank notes, or by notations written on a check. The actual physical instruments of currency were paper bank notes and gold, silver, copper, and bronze coins like the sixpence, the crown, the sovereign, the shilling piece, and the penny. Thus, for example, the physical units called pennies were used to measure the value created by an equivalent number of pence. (The guinea, uniquely, was a unit of physical currency that also became an abstract measure of value as well; that is, long after the actual guinea coin itself stopped being minted in the early 1800s, prices for luxury items like good horses and expensive clothes continued to be quoted in guineas as if it were some independent unit of value like the pound.)
Sovereigns and half sovereigns were gold; crowns, half crowns, florins, shillings, sixpences, and threepences were silver; pence, ha’pence, and farthings were copper until 1860, after which they were bronze. The coins were issued by the Royal Mint, but the bank notes got their names from the fact that they were not issued by a government agency but by a bank, in fact—after the mid-1800s—only by the bank—the Bank of England. Until then banks all over the country issued their own bank notes (or promises to pay), which circulated more or less like money. Private banks in the provinces are by one estimate believed to have cranked out about £20,000,000 worth of notes between 1810 and 1815. With the Bank Charter Act of 1844, however, the government gave the Bank of England a monopoly on the issuance of bank notes. As the currency of other banks subsequently disappeared from circulation, “bank note” or “note” in consequence became synonymous with the paper issued by the Bank of England.
To abbreviate their money, Britons used the symbol £ for pound, s. for shilling, and d. for pence, although five pounds, ten shillings, sixpence could be written £5.10.6. “Five and six” meant five shillings and sixpence, and it would have been written “5/6.”
It is very difficult to know what a pound or shilling from 1800 to 1859 is worth in 1990s America, and, as any economist will volubly inform you, the fact that the Victorians had no Hondas and we have no candles, i.e., we don’t buy the same goods and don’t have the same economic needs, makes the purchasing power of the two currencies fundamentally incommensurable. Nonetheless, intrepid estimates in the last ten years have put the pound’s worth in the neighborhood of $20, $50 or $200.
THE CALENDAR
London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. . . . Fog everywhere.”
Yes.
And fog enveloping the reader of Bleak House trying to make out when on earth Michaelmas Term was—to say nothing of Boxing Day, Lady Day, Hilary Term, Whitsunday, Twelfth Night, and all the rest of those nettlesome English holidays. Yes. Well—church feasts, folk festivals, law terms, and academic terms at Oxford and Cambridge—here they all are:
Twelfth Night
January 5
Epiphany
January 6
Plough Monday
First Monday after Epiphany
Hilary Term (law courts)
Begins in January
Hilary Term (Cambridge)
Begins in January
Hilary Term (Oxford)
Begins in January
Candlemas
February 2
Lady Day (a quarter day)
March 25
Easter Term (Oxford)
Easter Term (Cambridge)
Easter
In March or April
Easter Term (law courts)
Begins after Easter
Ascension
40 days after Easter
Whitsunday (Pentecost)
50 days after Easter
May Day
May 1
Midsummer (a quarter day)
June 24
Trinity Term (law term)
Begins after Whitsunday
Trinity Term (Oxford)
Begins in June
Lammas (Loaf Mass)
August 1
Michaelmas (a quarter day)
September 29
Michaelmas Term
Begins in October
Michaelmas Term
Begins in October
Michaelmas Term
Begins in November
All Hallows, All Saints
November 1
All Souls
November 2
Guy Fawkes Day
November 5
Martinmas
November 11
Christmas (a quarter day)
December 25
Boxing Day
Generally, first weekday after Christmas
A few words of explanation:
1. The word term designated alike the academic sessions of Oxford and Cambridge and the periods during which the high courts (King’s Bench, Exchequer, and Common Pleas) sat; vacation the time when they were not in session. The academic terms appear to have lacked fixed dates from year to year, and Cambridge, as the calendar indicates, had one less term than Oxford. Beginning in 1831, the law terms were fixed at January 11–31 for Hilary Term, April 15–May 8 for Easter, May 22–June 12 for Trinity, and November 2–25 for Michaelmas. The law terms were abolished in favor of sessions in 1873.
2. In 1752 the British joined the rest of Europe by switching from the Julian (thereafter called Old Style) to the Gregorian calendar. This meant going from Wednesday, September 2, 1752, directly to Thursday, September 14, 1752, and dropping eleven days permanently. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, we are thus told that “Lady Day was at hand, and would soon be followed by Old Lady Day, the end of her term here,” the incidence of the same quarter day being calculated differently under the two systems of figuring.
3. Quarter days marked off three-month periods of the year on which rents were traditionally due, servants might be hired to begin a term of labor, and so on, as the passage above from Tess indicates. Dickens in The Pickwick Papers describes the renters in Southwark as “migratory, usually disappearing the verge of quarter-day.”
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4. Since there are occasional, sometimes rather knowing, references to the reigning monarch in some of the novels, it may be helpful to be reminded of the dates of their reigns.
George III
1760–1820
George IV
1820–30
William IV
1830–37
Victoria
1837–1901
For the last ten years of his life George III was insane. His son, later George IV, was declared prince regent during this period, which was accordingly known as the Regency era.
HOGSHEADS AND DRAMS: ENGLISH MEASUREMENT
Until 1826 Britain stumbled along with a variety of quaint Anglo-Saxon measurement systems like the quartern, the hogshead, or the furlong that were harder and harder to use as industry and commerce grew more modern and widespread. Accordingly, Parliament drew itself up and promulgated the Imperial Statute System of Weights and Measures. The Imperial system of measurement left basically unchanged the units for measuring weight and distance but altered others, resulting in a queer patchwork of modern and archaic means of measurement. Like the corresponding American measurements, the English foot was twelve inches, and the mile, 5,280 feet. There were some additional units of measurement specific to England, however. Thus, in between the foot and the mile came the furlong, equal to 660 feet. (It was the old measure of a standard plowed field’s length, i.e., one “furrow long”.) The pound was an equivalent unit of weight in both England and the United States, too. However, the British both before and after 1826 also used the stone (fourteen pounds) as a unit of weight. Eight stone in turn constituted a hundredweight (abbreviated cwt). (In The Return of the Native Susan Nunsuch uses wax from the hundredweight of honey she has to make a doll of Eustacia Vye into which to stick pins.)