Boyle's Court and Country Guide

If there was one book certain to be in the home of every social aspirant of the Regency era, it would have been Boyle's Court and Country Guide.

First published, I believe, in 1792, this little book--updated about every three months--was a guide to everyone in Regency society, where they lived and their occupation or rank. The listings were organized in the first half of the book by street name.

If you wanted to rent a house for the Season, you could ensure that the street you chose was occupied by illustrious neighbours.

The second half of the book was organized by names. If you met someone at a rout or ball, as soon as you returned home you could discover their address, the name and location of their country estate, and ensure that their acquaintance was worth cultivating.

These samples are from an 1821 issue of the guide. In the back of the book is a list of the 'best' hotels and coffee-houses (also clubs) of London. By 1824, this list had expanded to include boarding-houses.

In 1821, Eliza Boyle is listed as offering the services of the Court Guide; it may have been her husband who began the publication. Three years later it appears her son, G. H. Boyle, has taken over the operation. A unique service is advertised in the front of the book. It is a paid delivery service for visiting cards, invitations etc.

The 1857 issue of Boyle's followed the same basic pattern of earlier issues, but also it contained wonderful advertisements, and I'm wondering what year that began.

Boyle's Court Guide continued to be published for some 140 years until it was absorbed about 1934 by Webster's Royal Red book. Google Books has some 1821, 1824 and 1857 issues for free download, and Westminster City Archives have some issues, if you can access them. If you have access to the Getty Research Institute, they have many more issues. (I don't have that access, but I'd love to see some of the issues from the early 1800s.)

Much like a Regency socialite, I will have Boyle's Court Guide at hand, when next I am contemplating Regency society!

'Til next time,
Lesley-Anne

Love's Vocabulary

Valentine's Day is coming, and so it seems appropriate to discuss 'Love's Vocabulary'. It is a common phrase; a Google search will bring up hundreds of results. But one writer in the early 19th century had an interesting take on the idea, and wrote elegant, scathing definitions of the words that describe the participants, the emotions, and the activities involved in the romantic state we call 'love'.

Sun -- All comparisons of one's mistress to the sun, the stars, etc. are out of date. They are all so hackneyed, that even poetry rejects them. One modern poet, indeed, has ventured to compare his mistress to the sun, because, like him, she was a common benefit, and shone on all alike."

We don't know the name of the writer of this brief, clever glossary. It was first published, I believe, in the April and May issues of the Lady's Monthly Museum for 1801. Portions appeared a year later in The Lady's Magazine and Musical Repository, without any attribution. Then in 1811, selections from the same essay were published in an American magazine, The Lady's Miscellany and Weekly Visitor.

Women are not always cast in a good light:

Coquette - One who wants to engage the men without engaging herself, whose chief aim is to be thought agreeable, handsome, amiable; though a composition of levity and vanity.

But neither are men:

Danglers - An insipid tribe of triflers, with whom the women divert themselves, in perfect innocence, when they have nothing better to do. They are in a class of beings beneath their monkeys, parrots, and lap-dogs.

The entries speak of manipulation:

Absence - "How dear is my absence from you going to cost me! How tedious will the hours seem!" This signifies precisely, "If I was always with you, my stock of fine speeches would be soon exhausted. I should have nothing new to say to you: when I see  you again, you will like me better."

And of pain:

Cruelty - This expression does no so much signify the insensibility of a mistress, as the impatience of a lover.

And the writer seems to have a particular point to make about:

Matrimony - A term, which is the stale topic of ridicule to witlings, libertines, and coxcombs; and a term of the utmost respect among the virtuous and sensible. It is, like patriotism, the most noble motive, and the most infamous pretext. It is the paradise of the wise, and the hell of fools. At present, the fashion is, properly speaking, to commit matrimony; since on the footing that things are, it is rather a crime than a virtue; since, often, no nobler a view determines to it, than sends a highwayman to Hounslow heath; to wit, ---the taking of a purse. Sordid interest is now the great master of ceremonies to Hymen, of which it pollutes the sanctuary, and dishonours the worship. Parents who sacrifice their children to it are worse than the Ammonites, who burned theirs in honour to Moloch; at least the pain of those wretched victims was momentary; whilst the pain of those sold for interest is a lingering one, and often as sure as death.

I hope you have enjoyed these excerpts from the 'Vocabulary' of this astute, insightful writer; I wish we knew his/her name. I wonder if it is one we would recognize.

Next week, Diane Gaston, award-winning author of Regency Historical Romance, will visit to talk about 'Regency Army Officers'. She will also be giving away an autographed copy of  the first in her series, Gallant Officer, Forbidden Lady, to a randomly chosen commenter. Please join us then!



'Til next time,

Lesley-Anne

The Devil is in the Detail Or, How not to write a Regency novel by Lynn Shepherd, Guest Blogger

If you decide to write a novel set in the Regency you have one real labour of love before you, and that’s to negotiate a veritable minefield of complex etiquette. There were so many rules governing social interaction – particularly between men and women – that it’s very easy to get the details wrong, and commit an unintentional howler.

I became very much aware of this when writing my Jane Austen pastiche, Murder at Mansfield Park. You would have thought that simply mimicking what Austen does would be a sufficient guide, but even if you manage to do this without mishap, there are some delightful nuances that Austen employs, which we’ve since lost. For example, a man could not shake a woman’s hand unless she first offered it to him, and when you understand that, there’s an added poignancy to the scene at the end of Emma, when Frank Churchill speaks to Emma for the first time after his secret engagement has come to light:

“I have to thank you, Miss Woodhouse, for a very kind forgiving message in one of Mrs Weston's letters. I hope time has not made you less willing to pardon. I hope you do not retract what you then said." "No, indeed," cried Emma, most happy to begin, "not in the least. I am particularly glad to see and shake hands with you--and to give you joy in person."

I employ this same convention in my own novel, as a way of signposting the subtle shifts in the relationship between my heroine, Mary Crawford, and the detective ‘thief-taker’, Charles Maddox, whom she first dislikes, then fears, and finally comes to respect. This scene marks the lowest point in their relationship:

He would have taken her hand, had she offered it, but she remained seated, and would not catch his eye. He said nothing immediately, but took a seat on the bench beside her. “I see we do not meet as friends, Miss Crawford. I am at a loss to know how I have so far forfeited your good opinion.”

Of course you might reasonably say that very few readers will pick up on such a fine distinction, but those who do will gain an added pleasure from the scene. More to the point, the more things like that you get wrong, the more the reader’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ comes under threat. I may be a purist, but I firmly believe that you can only create a viable illusion of authenticity by remaining completely faithful to the conventions of the period. In fact one of the most telling measures of the vast social distance between my thief-taker and the Mansfield family is his willingness to use the precise niceties of social convention to his own advantage – to observe them when it suits him, and flout them when it doesn’t, as in this Regency version of an ‘interrogation scene’:

“It appears you have little regard for the niceties of common civility, Mr Maddox,” Maria replied archly. “I dare say you will sit down whether I give my permission or no.” “Ah,” he said with a smile, as he sat down beside her, “there you are wrong, Miss Bertram, if you will forgive me. There are few men who are more watchful of what you term ‘niceties’ than I am. Many of my former cases have turned on such things. In my profession it is not only the devil you may find in the detail.” Maria replied only with a toss of her head; she seemed anxious to be gone, but unable to do so without appearing ill-mannered. Maddox smiled to himself – these fine ladies and gentlemen! It was not the first time that he had seen one of their class imprisoned by the iron constraints of politeness and decorum.

Much fun was had in the writing of scenes like this, as I’m sure you can imagine. But it’s not only custom and practice you have to observe as a Regency writer, but the ‘iron constraints’ of contemporary diction.

I spent an enormous amount of time studying Jane Austen’s style, in an effort to pull off what is – admittedly – a rather presumptuous act of literary ventriloquism. Some of that was about catching the rise and fall of her sentences – a difficult thing to describe, but every author has their own unique ‘rhythm’, and Austen more than most. Some of it was also about the tone she uses – the mix of ”playfulness and epigrammatism”, as she herself described it. You see this most obviously in her characteristic ‘balanced’ sentences, where the first half appears to be perfectly straight-faced, only to shift suddenly into delicious irony. This example comes from Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice:

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine."

The other area that can be a bear-trap for the unsuspecting is the vocabulary. Many words we use now were also common in Austen’s day, but the context in which they appear has sometimes radically changed. So even if you word-check everything you want to say against Austen’s novels (which I did), you can still make a faux pas if you don’t check the context as well. For example, you might want to refer – as I did - to the ‘atmosphere’ in a room, and be relieved to find that the word does indeed appear once or twice in Austen. However, if you look at these references more closely you’ll see that they all refer either to the weather, or to the physical nature of the air (‘poisonous atmosphere’), and never in our more general sense of ‘mood’.

Another snare for the unwary is ‘assume’ and ‘presume’. Austen only ever uses the word ‘assume’ in the sense of ‘taking on’ or ‘putting on’, and not in the modern sense of ‘making an assumption’. She uses ‘presume’ in the latter case, so I had to do the same (though one instance of ‘assuming’ did slip through the net, so it just shows you how stern you have to be with yourself!).

My own personal favourite here is the word ‘intriguing’. I had a wonderful sentence in my mind in which my thief-taker refers to one of his (female) subjects as “intriguing in both senses of the word”. But when I dutifully forced myself to look the word up, I found that while ‘intriguing’ in the sense of ‘plotting’ is perfectly acceptable in 1811, ‘intriguing’ in the sense of ‘fascinating’ does not come into use until 1909. It cost me dear to press the delete key on that one!

Like I said, you can call me a perfectionist, and I’m sure that there’s hardly one reader in a thousand who would have noticed. But if an author’s worth pastiching, they’re worth pastiching properly. Or at least I think so!

Lynn Shepherd is the author of the award-winning book "Murder at Mansfield Park". She has a doctorate in English Literature from Oxford University, and has published an academic work on the ‘Father of the English novel’, Samuel Richardson. Her next book – another ‘literary murder’ – will be published in 2012. Her website is www.lynn-shepherd.com, and you can follow her on Twitter at @Lynn_Shepherd.

Pitfalls and Witty Rejoinders: Regency Etiquetteby Maureen Mackey

In today’s world, where no phrase is too offensive for a bumper sticker or movie dialogue, and restaurant owners have to post signs requiring their patrons to wear shoes and shirts, the etiquette rules of early 19th century England may seem rather quaint.


But while it's true that some of the rules seem archaic, others clearly illustrate that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

I base my opinion on a thin book, published in London in 1834 by Charles William Day, titled Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society with a Glance at Bad Habits.

This guide covers many topic in etiquette, including the subject of polite address in conversation:

“Do not repeat the name of the person to whom you are speaking, as --'Indeed, Mr. Stubbs, you don't say so, Sir,' or "Really, Mrs. Fidkins, I quite agree with you, Mrs. Fidkins.' It is a sufficiently bad habit in an equal, but in one of lower rank it becomes an impertinence.”

Also, “Do not strain after great people — for, although they like the homage, inasmuch as it flatters their vanity, yet they despise the dispenser of it.”

Alas, Jean Harlow, 1930s film actress, evidently didn't have a copy of Hints. A story has it that the famous platinum blonde met Margot Asquith, fawning over her and repeatedly addressing the older woman as “Lady Margott.” Finally, an irritated Lady Margot explained, “My dear, the 't' in my name is silent, as in Harlow.”

Ouch. But besides straining after great people, you apparently should be careful how you describe them, as well.

“Do not say a person is 'affable' unless he or she be of very high rank, as it implies condescension. ROYAL personages are 'gracious'.”

Oscar Wilde was a master of these and other subtle distinctions. Once, at a dinner party, he bet he could provide a witticism about any subject that was offered.

“Queen Victoria,” suggested another guest.

“Ah,” said Wilde, “but she is not a subject.”

Etiquette surrounding meals also takes up a large part of the book. Rules abound about when to use, or not use, a knife, and also about gloves.

Ladies apparently never wore gloves at dinner unless their hands were unsightly, while waiters were instructed to swathe their fingers at all times in clean white gloves, taking care to mind their thumbs.

“There are few things more disagreeable than the thumb of a clumsy waiter in your plate,” seems to be overstating the case, since most of us can probably imagine many things more disagreeable than a gloved thumb on a Spode platter.

However, some things were permitted in moderation, such as picking your teeth.

“Do not pick your teeth much at table, as, however satisfactory a practice to yourself, to witness is not a pleasant thing,” the guidebook allows, with admirable understatement.

Smoking, especially in mixed company, was deeply frowned upon.

“If you are so unfortunate as to have contracted the low habit of smoking, be careful to practise it under certain restrictions; at least, so long as you are desirous of being considered fit for civilised society . . . The tobacco smoker, in public, is the most selfish animal imaginable; he perseveres in contaminating the pure and fragrant air, careless of whom he annoys, and is but the fitting inmate of a tavern.”

And it was in a tavern, actually London’s Traveller’s Club, where legend has it that Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Périgord, a French politician and diplomat during the Napoleonic years, used his sense of humor to extricate himself from the clutches of a man who was clearly etiquette-challenged.

According to the story, Talleyrand was cornered by a rude man who wouldn’t stop talking. Then the French diplomat noticed another man yawning on the other side of the room. Clutching the boorish man’s elbow, he whispered “Hush! you are overheard.”

Talleyrand’s interlocutor could have spared himself embarrassment if he’d read Hints and taken it to heart. As Day puts it:

“If these 'hints' save the blush but upon one cheek, or smooth the path into 'society' of only one honest family, the object of the author will be attained.”

##

Note: In addition to the fore-mentioned Hints of Good Society with A Glance at Bad Habits (Turnstile Press Ltd.), other sources for this article include Wit, The Best Things Ever Said, compiled and edited by John Train, Edward Burlingame Books (a division of HarperCollins), 1991.

Maureen Mackey is a prolific author of Regency romance and romantic suspense. It was while studying English literature and history that she fell in love not only with her future husband but also with 18th century and Regency England. Maureen’s lifelong love of mysteries prompted her passion for writing in that genre as well. When she’s not writing she likes to read, prowl through used book stores, walk her rambunctious Sheltie and spend time with Tom and their two sons. She’s currently working on a time-travel mystery and a Regency novella.

Her latest release is A Rake's Redemption:

Can anything induce an unrepentant rake to abandon his indulgences and reform himself? Prudence Culpepper doubts her childhood playmate, Lord Harry, is capable of changing his irresponsible ways. But a fire, and a desperate chase through the countryside bring out the best and worst in both of them.

The Regency Dance

Before society was overtaken by electronic amusements--television, films, computer games, and the ubiquitous handheld gadgets, people were adept at making their own amusements. Card games, charades, word games, and puzzles abounded. For the musically inclined, playing instruments and singing were a popular way of passing the time. For those with more energy and high spirits, there was dancing.

From the formalities of the minuet and the quadrille through the occasional intricacies of the contre or country dance to the romping jigs and reels, people danced. At the height of the Revolution in France, dancing clubs were popular.
At dancing parties, and dancing schools, with dancing masters and dancing manuals, Regency society danced. And they talked about dancing:

"As dancing is the accomplishment most calculated to display a fine form, elegant taste, and graceful carriage to advantage; so towards it, our regards must be particularly turned; and we shall find that when Beauty, in all her power, is to be set forth, she cannot chuse a more effective exhibition.

"The characteristic of an English country-dance is that of gay simplicity. The steps should be few and easy; and the corresponding motion of the arms and body unaffected, modest, and graceful.

"But with regard to the lately-introduced German waltz, I cannot speak so favourably….There is something in the close approximation of persons, in the attitudes, and n the motion, which ill aggress with the delicacy of woman,…"

So says "Regency Etiquette: The Mirror of Graces (1811) a reprint from R. L. Shep Publications ISBN 0-914046-24-1
Edward Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen's nephew, commented on dancing: "The stately minuet reigned supreme; and every regular ball commenced with it….Gloves immaculately clean wee considered requisite for its due performance, while gloves a little soiled were thought good enough for a country dance; and accordingly some prudent ladies provided themselves with two pairs for their several purposes."

Even poetry inclined to the dance in the book (available for download from Google Books), "The Ball, or A Glance at Almack's in 1829" by G. Yates:

"'Tis Dancing only heightens every charm,
And gives each feature double power to warm;
Like goddesses, it shows us how to move,
And adds a Juno to the Queen of Love."

Mr. Yates further offered:
"To dance as if a person had passed all his life in the study of it, a man of sense should be ashamed of: yet to be totally ignorant of it, and the grace and comportment which, by learning it, is acquired, shows a man of learning either an ill-natured stoic, or ill-bred pedant."

And Jane Austen, as always, may have the final word:

"...To be fond of dancing is a certain step towards falling in Love... "- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Do you enjoy dancing? Do you square dance? It is a direct relative of the 'contre-danse'. Have you tried Regency dancing? Some cities have Regency dance clubs--I wish mine did!

'Til next time,

Lesley-Anne