Mourning in "The Ladies' Monthly Museum"The Death of Princess Charlotte

I have been reading about Princess Charlotte of Wales, daughter of our Prince Regent and his unloved wife Caroline of Brunswick, lately. The book I just finished was 'Becoming Queen Victoria' (by Kate Williams) which had a useful, if somewhat dramatic, take on the life of the erstwhile Princess.

Then I found, in The Ladies' Monthly Museum of November and December 1817, coverage of her death, and the outpouring of national grief that followed it. The reaction was similar to that which occurred on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, but there was much more reason for the public reaction.

Charlotte was the last hope of a nation depressed by the illness of its king, and tired, disgusted and disheartened by the behaviour of the Prince Regent. There was a belief that she would be the monarch they had been waiting for, a queen who would right all the wrongs perpetrated by her forebears, exclude her dissolute uncles from the throne, and make her people--burdened by economic hardship--happy. And then it was all cut short on November 6, 1817 and The Ladies' Monthly Museum lamented:

The sudden, unexpected, and melancholy death of the only presumptive Heiress to the Crown of England in direct succession (after being delivered of a still-born son,) in the bloom of youth and beauty, in the height of her happiness, in the midst of conjugal endearments, beloved and respected, with the prospect of attaining the pinnacle of human greatness, has excited a general sentiment of sympathy and sorrow throughout the country; absorbed every other consideration; and for a time exclusively fixed our attention upon the character of illustrious victim, and the future consequences of her loss.

The Museum took an idealized engraving of the princess and turned it into a keepsake that no doubt was framed by many, and enshrined:

Following this portrait was a twelve page "Memoir of the Life, Death, and Funeral, of her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte Augusta." In the same issue, in the column titled Epitome of Public Affairs, was a five page article on the funeral of the Princess. It includes information on the body's preparation for burial (!), minute details of the coffin ('massive handles with enriched chased borders'), and the activities of each half hour of Wednesday, November 19, the day of the funeral.

There were regular articles in this issue of the Monthly Museum (A New System of Mythology, Comic Use of a Retentive Memory) but they were interspersed with further outpourings of grief:

Even the Fashion Notes for which The Ladies' Monthly Museum was notable were all about mourning clothes. "...it is soothing to our feelings to perceive the general respect paid to her memory by all classes of people, no person of decent appearance being seen out of mourning."

The walking dress is black bombazeen with black crape trim. Worn over it is a pelisse of black Levantine. The French bonnet is of black Leghorn. The evening dress is black crape over black sarsnet. trimmed with jet beads. All the jewelry is of jet.


The Museum always included a 'Costume Parisiennes' column. This month it begins:

"The latest accounts from Paris announce that the French court have gone into mourning for our Princess, for eleven days, and all the English of distinction have paid her memory a similar mark of respect:..."

'The more things change, the more they stay the same' -- we may not wear mourning clothes any more, but the reaction to tragedy has not altered in the last two hundred years.

But on to more cheerful matters--next week, award-winning, multi-published Regency author Janet Mullany will visit to blog about Brighton. Please join us then!

'Til next time,

Lesley-Anne

The Female Mentor On Gentleness and Affability

"How much more attractive must a young woman appear, who is content to tread the path which Nature has prescribed, than one, who, by overleaping the barrier which divides the sexes, seems to defy opinion, and oppose constraint!"

The sentiments above sound Victorian to me; in fact, I want them to be Victorian. But they appeared in the Ladies' Monthly Museum in 1801 under the column title The Female Mentor with no author attribution. The writer of the piece must have been a man. I would hate to think that another woman would write such oppressive and offensive advice to young women.

"...the evil [loss of softness and sensibility], alas! is of a more dreadful nature, and aims at the subversion of domestic peace; for we no longer behold that pliancy of temper which cemented the bonds of connubial love."

I had rather thought that sentiments like those expressed in this article were born of the Victorian temperament, and if I had not seen the date 1801 would have placed this article in the 1830's or even later. The fact that they were published just after the turn of the century, I find sobering. After the excesses and openness of the eighteenth century, I rather thought that women had some degree of freedom, at least of thought, if not of person. To find them already oppressed by convention, and repressed by false morality, I find utterly depressing.

"What man of delicacy or refinement would wish to unite himself to a female whose happiness was derived from controversy and debate, and who, instead of discharging her domestic duties, thought them beneath the dignity of an enlightened mind?"

 Readers and writers of Regency fiction must be aware of this early infiltration of fierce propriety and enforced decorum. Free thinking young women--independent, lively and confident--were even early in the nineteenth century under attack. Of course unconventional souls existed, as they have in every age, and we write about them and read about them with relish. But only a few of the female characters created by an author in a work of fiction can be original thinkers; the rest cannot deny the paths that were being proscribed for them. Attitudes in Georgette Heyer's work that are sometimes descried as Victorian or Edwardian may, after all, have been Regency attitudes.

"How essential, then, to the happiness of society in general, is the practice of affability, gentleness, and ease; and how peculiarly unamiable is the female character which has lost the relish to delight and please!"

Thank heaven for Mrs. Wollstonecraft and her 'Vindication of the Rights of Women'. In light of this article, she takes on the aura of a voice crying in the wilderness. The Female Mentor says of her "...instead of endeavouring to destroy all distinction between the sexes, [she should have] recommended those virtues which peculiarly adorn her own." At least, young women--if they could get their hands on her work--had a point of view to contradict the appalling sentiments of this article.

"Controversy and disputation seem such unamiable propensities in beings whom Nature designed to engage, that we could hardly believe it possible they could so far forget their station, as blindly to follow such mistaken advice."

Heroines of Regency fiction must tread a delicate balance. They must be aware of the divergent opinions around them, from Wollstonecraft to The Female Mentor, and they must be true to themselves. But always they must be believable people of the period they inhabit. The Regency period is diminished in my eyes by articles such as this.

I hope to recover my spirits by next week,

'Til then,
Lesley-Anne