What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  Having once been presented, the young girl embarked on an extraordinary round of balls and dances and similarly festive affairs—when she came out in 1849 Lady Dorothy Neville attended “50 balls, 60 parties, 30 dinners and 25 breakfasts.” All this was with a serious goal in mind. If the girl did not get herself married within two to three seasons she was considered a failure; at thirty a hopeless, permanent spinster. Men, even a man like the crass Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, were apparently aware that they were supposed to focus only on the “eligible” girls. Recounting a stroll with two sisters, he says, “I afterwards found out that I had been giving all my attention to the youngest, who was not out, and had most excessively offended the eldest. Miss Augusta ought not to have been noticed for the next six months, and Miss Sneyd, I believe, has never forgiven me.” Someone else commiserates with the absent Miss Sneyd: “To be neglected before one’s time must be very vexatious,” adding, “But it was entirely the mother’s fault. Miss Augusta should have been with her governess.”

  In May or June came the two great annual sporting events of the season—the Derby, which had to be shared with the masses because of its overwhelming popularity and for which Parliament always adjourned, and then Ascot, some thirty miles from London, a much more exclusive horse race altogether. July witnessed the Henley Regatta along with various climactic cricket contests—notably between Oxford and Cambridge, and between Eton and Harrow—at “Lord’s” on the outskirts of London. And now, suddenly, as the eponymous young M.P. and hero of Phineas Finn notices, a new air of expectancy would begin to manifest itself in society, for “everyone around him seemed to be looking forward to pleasant leisure days in the country. Men talked about grouse, and of the ladies at the houses to which they were going and of the people whom they were to meet.” Naturally, for it was only a short time until August 12, which, when it came, signaled alike the end of the season, the adjournment of Parliament, and the retreat of everyone who was anyone to the north—August 12 marked the opening of the grouse season. The fashionable deserted London altogether at this point. If you were lucky, you went north to your “grouse moor” in Scotland or else wangled an invitation from someone who had one, thereby inaugurating a period of some months devoted to the persecution of small animals that would last until people went “up” to “town” again the next winter. Partridge shooting began on September 1, and the pheasant season opened October 1, while “cub hunting,” the preseason practice hunting of immature foxes with inexperienced riders, got under way at approximately the same time. On the first Monday of November there came the traditional opening of the fox-hunting season.

  And then it was back to town to start the whole thing all over again.

  Basic Etiquette

  The Gentleman

  1. In riding horseback or walking along the street, the lady always has the wall.

  2. Meeting a lady in the street or in the park whom you know only slightly, you wait for her acknowledging bow—then and only then may you tip your hat to her, which is done using the hand farthest away from her to raise the hat. You do not speak to her—or to any other lady—unless she speaks to you first.

  3. If you meet a lady who is a good friend and who signifies that she wishes to talk to you, you turn and walk with her if you wish to converse. It is not “done” to make a lady stand talking in a street.

  4. In going up a flight of stairs, you precede the lady (running, according to one authority); in going down, you follow.

  5. In a carriage, a gentlemen takes the seat facing backward. If he is alone in a carriage with a lady, he does not sit next to her unless he is her husband, brother, father, or son. He alights from the carriage first so he may hand her down. He takes care not to step on her dress.

  6. At a public exhibition or concert, if accompanied by a lady, he goes in first in order to find her a seat. If he enters such an exhibition alone and there are ladies or older gentlemen present he removes his hat.

  7. A gentleman is always introduced to a lady—never the other way around. It is presumed to be an honor for the gentleman to meet her. Likewise (and it is the more general rule of which this is only a specific example), a social inferior is always introduced to a superior—and only with the latter’s acquiescence. Elizabeth Bennet is horrified when the obtuse Mr. Collins insists on introducing himself to Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. She tries to persuade “him that Mr. Darcy would consider his addressing him without introduction as an impertinent freedom, rather than a compliment to his aunt; that it was not in the least necessary there should be any notice on either side, and that if it were, it must belong to Mr. Darcy, the superior in consequence, to begin the acquaintance.”

  8. A gentleman never smokes in the presence of ladies.

  The Lady

  Her rules of conduct are perhaps simpler.

  1. If unmarried and under thirty, she is never to be in the company of a man without a chaperone. Except for a walk to church or a park in the early morning, she may not walk alone but should always be accompanied by another lady, a man, or a servant. An even more restrictive view is that “if she cannot walk with her younger sisters and their governess, or the maid cannot be spared to walk with her, she had better stay at home or confine herself to the square garden.”

  2. Under no circumstances may a lady call on a gentleman alone unless she is consulting that gentleman on a professional or business matter.

  3. A lady does not wear pearls or diamonds in the morning.

  4. A lady never dances more than three dances with the same partner.

  5. A lady should never “cut” someone, that is to say, fail to acknowledge their presence after encountering them socially, unless it is absolutely necessary. By the same token, only a lady is ever truly justified in cutting someone: “a cut is only excusable when men persist in bowing whose acquaintance a lady does not wish to keep up.” Upon the approach of the offender, a simple stare of silent iciness should suffice; followed, if necessary, by a “cold bow, which discourages familiarity without offering insult,” and departure forthwith. To remark, “Sir, I have not the honour of your acquaintance” is a very extreme measure and is a weapon that should be deployed only as a last resort.

  How to Address the Nontitled

  It must not be Lucy any longer, Lord Lufton; I was madly foolish when I first allowed it.” This quote from Trollope’s Framley Parsonage shows that it was just as problematic to converse with people informally as it was to get their titles straight. That is, there were rules even within the family and among friends as to how you addressed people, titled or not, and a breach of these rules could be a blunder in etiquette as severe as sending the wrong lady down to dinner first at a dinner party.

  To his wife, the man of the house was quite often “Mr.———,” just as he called her “Mrs.———.” (To call one’s husband “Thompson” was not a sign of good breeding, however; to call him “T.” was hopelessly vulgar.) Daughters customarily addressed their parents as “mama” and “papa” (the accent in well-bred circles being always on the second syllable); as the unspeakable Mrs. General instructs the heroine in Little Dorrit, “Papa is a preferable form of address. . . . Father is rather vulgar, my dear.” However, this was not true for males. The boys would call their parents “father” and “mother.” When outsiders spoke of the family, the eldest daughter was differentiated from the other daughters by being called “Miss” followed only by her surname, while the other daughters were spoken of by “Miss” and the Christian name, if not by both Christian name and surname. Thus, the traveling Dorrits are entered on a hotel register as William Dorrit, Esquire; Frederick Dorrit, Esquire; Edward Dorrit, Esquire; Miss Dorrit; Miss Amy Dorrit.

  Outsiders, even women friends, at least in Jane Austen’s time, generally addressed the women of the family as “Mrs.” or “Miss,” as the case might be, followed by the surname, until a great deal of intimacy had been achieved. It was sufficiently rare for these formalities to be dropped that in Vanity F
air Thackeray mentions as a sign of remarkable sudden sympathy that “the girls Christian-named each other at once.” If the speaker were male and the lady—young or not—an unmarried woman, use of a first name was unpardonable, as poor Lucy instructs Lord Lufton, unless the two were—or were about to be—engaged. “Mrs. Greenow—may I say Arabella?” begs Farmer Cheesacre in Can You Forgive Her? “Mr. Cheesacre!” says Mrs. Greenow. “But mayn’t I? Come, Mrs. Greenow. You know well enough by this time what it is I mean.” “My dear young lady—Miss Brooke—Dorothea!” gushes Mr. Casaubon in atypical rapture when Dorothea accepts his marriage proposal, “this is a happiness greater than I had ever imagined to be in reserve for me.”

  When Casaubon subsequently introduces Dorothea to his cousin, Will Ladislaw, Casaubon as we would expect, observes the proper formalities. “Dorothea, let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Ladislaw. Will, this is Miss Brooke.” The introduction by Casaubon of Ladislaw as “Mr.,” notwithstanding Will and Dorothea’s youth, is not excessively formal. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet habitually refers to the men of the younger generation courting her daughters as “Mr.” Darcy and “Mr.” Bingley. (Not unlike the formality of “Miss” for young women.) Young males enjoyed a peculiarly informal yet potentially intimate relationship with their female cousins. As Trollope noted, “Cousins are Tom, and Jack, and George, and Dick . . . cousins are about the same as brothers, and yet they may be lovers.” Among themselves gentlemen would habitually address one another by surname only. Someone like Casaubon would normally deviate from this observance only when, as in his introduction of “Will,” the person addressed was within the family circle.

  To the servants the master and mistress of the house were “sir” and “madam,” and the unmarried daughters would be “miss,” the boys—depending on age—usually either “master” or “sir.” Catherine Linton is confused on her first visit to Wuthering Heights when she meets Hareton Earnshaw and—uncouth though he is—he seems to act as if he has some right of proprietorship to the place. “I thought he had been the owner’s son. And he never said, Miss: he should have done, shouldn’t he, if he’s a servant?” she asks. The family, on the other hand, would address the butler by his surname (“Horrocks” is Sir Pitt Crawley’s butler in Vanity Fair), and the housekeeper as “Mrs.,” even if she were unmarried. The cook in grander households was also “Mrs.”; otherwise just “Cook.” Other indoor servants were generally called by their first names only, and sometimes even that dignity was denied them. In some families, a string of underservants in succession in the same position all might be called by the same first name because the family did not want to be bothered learning a new one each time a replacement was hired. (Footmen were invariably John, Charles, or James.) Or a serving woman named Mary might become Alice if a wife or daughter in the employer’s household were named Mary, and sometimes the reason for a name change seems to have been pure whim. When Mr. Dombey hires Mrs. Toodle as a wetnurse, he instructs her, “While you are here, I must stipulate that you are always known as—say as Richards—an ordinary name, and convenient. Have you any objection to be known as Richards?”

  The first quadrille.

  “May I Have This Dance?”

  I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage,” says Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey.

  “But they are such very different things!” she says.

  “—That you think they cannot be compared together.”

  “To be sure not. People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.”

  This peculiar business of standing around during a country-dance—likewise, in Pride and Prejudice, during the Netherfield ball Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy get up to dance and then “they stood for some time without speaking a word; and she began to imagine that their silence was to last through the two dances.” is a good deal less puzzling if we realize these were glorified square dances. Although the country-dance dated back to the 1600s in one form or another, by Jane Austen’s time the dance had assumed its quintessential nineteenth-century form, in which three or more couples, the men and women in separate lines some four feet apart, facing one another, danced their way through a series of figures.

  A figure was merely a sequence of movements, like those in square dances in which men and ladies opposite one another advanced and then retreated, or locked arms and swung around, or do-si-doed (from the French dos-à-dos), or wove their way through the other dancers. Depending on the nature of the figures, all the couples might be in motion at once, or only one or two, with the rest following the leading or “top couple” in sequence—each dance could vary considerably in form at the pleasure of the dancers. Those danced by the partners in Northanger Abbey at the Bath Assembly rooms and by Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy at Meryton evidently involved the other couples standing idly by while the top couple or their successors were in motion. This period of inactivity is what allowed time for the long, bantering Austenian conversations. In the case of Emma, it enabled the heroine to eavesdrop on Mr. Elton: “she was not yet dancing; she was working her way up from the bottom, and had therefore leisure to look around, and by only turning her head a little, she saw it all. When she was half-way up the set, the whole group were exactly behind her, and she would no longer allow her eyes to watch; but Mr. Elton was so near that she heard every syllable of a dialogue which just then took place between him and Mrs. Weston.” The number of couples also affected the length of a dance (and, thereby, conversations while dancing). If there were only three couples—the minimum—you might be able to whiz through a dance in five minutes. If there were twenty or more in the “set” of dancers, however, it might take an hour.

  At the other extreme is the country dancing at Mr. Fezziwig’s party for his family and apprentices which the Ghost of Christmas Past conjures up from Scrooge’s part (in which constant movement rather than standing around predominated): “Away they all went, twenty couple at once, hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them.”

  A sure-fire crowd-pleaser that was almost invariably the last dance on a formal program was the “Sir Roger de Coverley.” It also seems to have become associated with Christmas. In Silas Marner, it is the signal to begin the dance at Squire Cass’s annual Christmas party; in A Christmas Carol, as was probably more common, it closes out the evening’s festivities, with the Fezziwigs once again top couple, going through all the figures: “advance and retire, hold hands with your partner; bow and curtsey; corkscrew; thread-the-needle, and back to your place.”

  Dickens could describe the “Roger de Coverley” in such detail because it was the one country-dance whose figures never changed. It was, in fact, the dance American square dancers know as the Virginia reel. Bottom man and top lady retire and advance, bottom lady and top man do the same, the couples then repeat the steps, linking arms, and then the top man and top lady weave their way in and out down their sex’s line, join hands at the bottom and promenade on up—with the next couple repeating the figures until all the couples have gone through the same sequence. It was a natural for sending everyone off into the night in a convivial and neighborly frame of mind.

  As the new century wore on, however, the country dancing of couples dancing in a group gave way to the more intimate—and socially isolating—waltz.

  The waltz was no doubt more suited to the anonymous, citified society that England was increasingly becoming, a society where even the partners—let alone the other couples—were often unknown to each other. The social logic of the waltz, indeed, lay in a direction other than that of the country-dance—attention was focussed exclusively on the couple rather than on the group—and conversation became
secondary to the intoxication of the now constant, swirling movement (so unlike that of the country-dance), as we see in Can You Forgive Her? when Lady Glencora Palliser’s old flame, Burgo Fitzgerald, shows up at Lady Monk’s ball to try quite literally to sweep Lady Glencora off her feet and out of her marriage—“ ‘I will go up to her at once, and ask her to waltz,’ Burgo said to himself.” So he does. “And then they were actually dancing, whirling around the room together. . . . Burgo waltzed excellently, and in old days, before her marriage, Lady Glencora had been passionately fond of dancing. She seemed to give herself up to it now as though the old days had come back to her. Lady Monk, creeping to the intermediate door between her den and the dancing room, looked in on them and then crept back again. Mrs. Marsham and Mr. Bott standing together just inside the other door, near to the staircase, looked on also—in horror.” By the 1850s the country-dance and the minuet had been replaced by the waltz and the only real survivor of the collective dancing of the old days was a descendant of the country-dance named the quadrille. This was a dance performed by four couples, each of which occupied one point of a diamond. The quadrille was used to open virtually every fashionable ball until almost the end of the century—it could be varied in theory, like the country-dance, but in practice it usually consisted of five figures, which collectively incorporated such square-dance figures as the do-si-do. (There was also a complicated variant known as the lancers, after the cavalry units of the same name, which never rivaled the original quadrille in popularity.)