Thanks for visiting! This is the Austen Connection newsletter. You can see all of the Austen Connection conversations including the podcast here. If you are not signed up yet you can take a few seconds to sign up for free, or support at any level - below - and get all of the conversations dropped right into your inbox.
Hello, friends!
Lately we’ve been thinking way too much about the real life of the Regency.
And what’s got us thinking about this is not only the recent discussions about what’s historic and what’s not in the recent Persuasion film, but also a big book - Robert Morrison’s history The Regency Years: During which Jane Austen writes, Napoleon fights, Byron makes love, and Britain becomes modern.
It appears, friends, that in Jane Austen’s real times it was of course (we know this, but we forget!) not just manners and romance among the privet hedges but also was an awful lot of chaos, and violence, and injustice based on gender, on race, on class, on ability, and on whom we chose to love.
So we gather here today beloveds to look at the Regency, in all its realness. Because it’s interesting to remind ourselves that all was not dancing and decorum in the real Regency.
Here’s our list of some serious Real Regency things - just a few - that you can often see in the subtext of Austen but that you might not find in the bold glare of the screen version of your favorite Jane Austen adaptation.
And please let us know - what is your favorite adaptation? Can you name one that does reflect some of the Realness of the Regency era? Let us have it!
Sex, sex workers, lady rakes and libertines
Let’s paint a picture here. While your favorite Jane Austen adaptation emphasizes a strict code of conduct and restraint where young people are chaperoned and courtships take place in public rituals, Robert Morrison breaks down Regency Sex by the Numbers: Morrison includes reports from Guardian Society figures from the year 1817, in just three London parishes, including:
360 brothels
2,000 prostitutes
59,050 residents
Henry Thomas Kitchener, author of Letters on Marriage, wrote, according to Morrison’s history, that there were 50,000 women working in London as prostitutes and out of those he guessed 2,000 of them were educated.
So then how do characters like Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters fit into this Regency free-for-all?
One thing that is going on behind these Regency scenes is that an ideological battle was taking place - between the free expression of sexuality and strict codes of conduct. And the actions and attitudes of Austen characters, from Elizabeth Bennet and the Bennet sisters to the Bertram sisters and also Henry and Mary Crawford, plus all those proposal and courtship scenes, take place right at the crossroads of these battles.
Looking backward from today, it’s tempting to see this as the battle between the Victorians and the Modernists, between Puritan-style repression and artistic free-love and liberty.
But that view is is too simplistic - because the attempt to reign in sexual libertinism was also an attempt to reign in the harm and damage that was frequently inflicted by wealth and privilege on those that had no safety net.
Class complicates this battle of morality, friends. Because the rich guys could get away with anything, and Jane Austen for one had had enough.
Morrison writes that attitudes about women and sexual desire shift in the mid-18th century - and that for centuries women had been seen, drawing from the Eve myth (thank you, Milton and Paradise Lost), as more “libidinous” than men. But in the 18th century a shift was taking place and women began to be viewed as “delicate, passive receptacles.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. This passive view of “elegant females” is being propagated, behind the scenes of Pride and Prejudice, by the conduct books like John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters and Mary Brunton’s novel Self Control. And also with Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (which was published in 1766, but by 1814 was in its 14th edition, according to Morrison) - and this is seen in Pride and Prejudice with Mary Bennet and Mr. Collins both brandishing these sermons.
This was a battle, and it was between two forces: The Rakes - think Lord Byron in real life and Wickham, Willoughby, and Henry Crawford in Austen; and the Evangelicals - think Mary Bennet, and Mr. Collins.
Lady rakes!
We have on the side of the Rakes, not only Willoughby, Wickham and Henry Crawford breaking hearts, but we also have Lydia Bennet, and also: Mary Crawford, who in this day and age we’re always tempted to like! We have lady rakes!
Other Real Regency Lady Rakes, to list just three obvious ones, include Lady Libertines like:
Real-life Lady Caroline Lamb, and her novel Glenarvon
Real-life Duchess of Devonshire, and her novel The Sylph
Real-life Claire Clairmont, half-sister of Mary Shelley, who labored away pursuing Percy Shelley in a love triangle with Shelley and Shelley, and then pursued Byron, with whom she had a child, Allegra.
Yes, the Lady Libertines might have more at stake and more suffering at hand than their male-identifying counterparts - but like their Libertine male cousins, they do operate from a position of privilege that powers their carelessness.
It’s a class thing: Rakes and Privilege
And Austen for one is not here for any of it.
These rakes like Byron, Shelley, and the Prince Regent himself were able to simply ignore social strictures of their day. They “reveled in almost unfettered sexual freedom” of the “libertine creed,” writes Morrison. “The Regency era was the last great brazen huzzah for rakes” before the Evangelical forces won out for the Victorian age.
Yes these rakes are present in the adaptations, but in the Real Regency they were a dominant force, and part of the power base.
So next time you are enjoying your Austen adaptation’s rolling bucolic countryside drive into an English Great House like Mansfield Park, just remember that Austen was de-fanging, parodying, and turning upside down the immense powers of rakery, privilege, exploitation, and carelessness exemplified by the gentleman sitting on top of it all - whether it’s Mansfield’s Henry Crawford, or the Prince Regent himself, chief rake of the Regency.
Evangelicals? Yes, Evangelicals
Sometimes it can be a little confounding to find such strong forces of morality and decorum - a la Fanny Price - within a larger body of Austen’s work that can also present such table-turning subversiveness on privilege, power, and religious customs.
Austen was de-fanging, parodying, and turning upside down the powers of rakery, privilege, exploitation, and carelessness exemplified by the spoiled gentleman sitting on top of it all - whether it’s Mansfield’s Henry Crawford, or the Prince Regent himself, chief rake of the Regency.
And then we have Austen’s own real-life comment about Evangelicals, as she wrote in a letter to her niece Fanny, who was interested in a young man who identified as Evangelical.
Austen writes to Fanny: “I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason & Feeling, must be happiest & safest.”
Did we catch this? Austen says nothing about doctrine here, nothing about belief. (In another letter she says she dislikes Evangelicals.) Rather she lifts up the concepts of happiest and safest!
Because that, friends, is what it was about. It was not about morality or doctrine. It was about a way to navigate the world and survive, and you could do a lot worse - just ask Mary Shelley! - than to connect with your Evangelical person.
And probably what we have with these feelings is that while Evangelicalism in America in the past centuries has risen to be a dominant force, at this time in England it is very much an alternative force. And what it’s an alternative to, is just that kind of privilege, wealth, and profligacy that has the power to exploit both in public and in personal life.
So Austen’s holding up of this happiest and safest is inspired by the excesses and exploitations, sexual and otherwise, of the aristocracy and the privileged classes, which were hard to get around and away from, and Austen’s heroines, from Fanny Price to Elizabeth Bennet, portray for us this entrapment and this need to navigate around it.
And not coincidentally her most famous instances of this kind of entrapment comes from clergymen: Hello, Mr. Collins, and Mr. Elton.
So, again, as always, Austen even in this very letter to her niece Fanny is urging reason, and urging a sensible, astute middle way: Be aware of the exploitations of entitled men, astutely navigate around these people.
But also to be avoided are piety, dogma, and self-righteousness, which are quite simply no fun. Pursue your happiness! Happiest and safest!
Don’t be a Lydia. Also don’t be a Mary.
Celebrity mania, drugs, and vampires
He was stalked, his image was stolen and then sold, he was gazed at by the Regency equivalent of the paparazzi, through telescopes aimed at his vacation residence in Lake Geneva, he caused public scenes by women like Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously wrote that he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know”: Lord Byron might have created the Idea of Celebrity during the Regency. The original Harry Styles.
Robert Morrison describes the “mania” that greeted Byron at Lake Geneva: “well-wishers, groupies, and detractors gloried in his scandalous celebrity, waylaying him on his evening drives, and watching his house through telescopes from the opposite side of the lake.”
Like we still do with the Harry Styles of the world, people projected their imaginations on to him, which gave him an outsized power that even a person living on the inside of this kind of chaos can barely understand.
Byron had a brand and he stayed on brand, through his writing, his public appearances, and his numerous affairs with fascinating women, including his own half-sister Augusta Leigh, and one daughter conceived through his marriage with the brilliant Annabella Milbanke, Ada Lovelace, whose name recognition is catching up with Byron’s thanks to her innovations in math.
Austen even in this very letter to Fanny is urging reason, and urging a sensible, astute middle way: Be aware of the exploitations of entitled men, astutely navigate around these people. But also to be avoided are piety, dogma, and self-righteousness, which are quite simply no fun. Pursue your happiness! Happiest and safest! Don’t be a Lydia. Also don’t be a Mary.
For Morrison, the dark, brooding, handsome but emotionally-unavailable hero begins with Milton’s Satan, makes its way through countless gothic villains, lands on Mr. Darcy, and keeps going right up to Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Twilight’s Edward Cullers.
And again this circles right back to Byron, and his vacation with Percy and Mary Shelley near Lake Geneva.
They stayed in the house of John William Polidori, who apparently initiated the ghost-story contest between the four, which led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And it also resulted in The Vampyre, by Polidori, apparently based on a vampire tale told by Byron to the group.
This vampire tale, as described by Morrison, involves the attractive Ruthven, who “penetrates and devours women without the constraints of guilt or even of time, and in doing so he exposes the vampire as both enthralling and appalling.”
Hello. This description could also be used to describe Byron, and all the other Rakes of the Regency.
Morrison calls this a “potent male fantasy” inspired by the sexually fluid Lord Byron, but of course it’s also a potent female fantasy. Just ask Anne Rice or Stephanie Meyer.
Gay Marriage
And speaking of that sexual fluidity - yes, Byron seems to have conducted affairs with men in Europe, as it was illegal (unlike lesbian love; see: Anne Lister) in England.
The author of The Monk, Matthew Lewis, was thought to be gay, and worked on his inherited West Indian plantations to improve the situations of enslaved people on his properties (while also failing to free those people) and also was able to pursue gay relationships there.
“Homosexuality was one of the most explosive topics in Regency Britain …” writes Morrison, and he describes a male brothel operated by James Cook and “a man named Yardley” in 1810, at the White Swan public house at Vere Street, near Clare Market. What a great setting for a television series.
This brothel-house contained a Christian chapel for wedding ceremonies, and a “celebration room” wherein John Church, an Independent minister, officiated some of the weddings, probably the first gay marriages.
But the best, most comprehensive, and most inspiring example of gay marriage arising from the Regency era is the later secret marriage of Anne Lister to her long-time companion Anne Walker, which we’ve discussed before in its portrayal through the television series Gentleman Jack.
The two conducted a secret wedding on Easter Sunday, 1834, at Holy Trinity Church, where they took the sacrament together and embarked on a union that lasted until death, and the site exhibits a plaque commemorating their marriage, and is a popular destination for gay weddings to this day.
Justice, or rather Injustice
Debates about the slave trade and the impact of the slave trade itself was perhaps the most important question of the day during the Regency, just as the impact of white supremacy of our history and culture might be also the most important question of today. The East India Company was taking British privilege and power and exporting it in destructive ways throughout India and China, leading to the Opium crisis.
And then there are the lives of the thousands - by some estimates about 10,000 - Black residents of 18th and 19th century Britain left out of so many of our representations of these stories but yet very much living and working, free and unfree, some in the background and some becoming legendary - including the heiress and niece of Lord Mansfield, Dido Elizabeth Belle, the nurse Mary Seacole, and the wealthy West Indian entrepreneur Dorothy Kirwan Thomas. Many of these histories are being uncovered by historians like Gretchen Gervina and David Olusoga.
Meanwhile also at home in England is crime and punishment and way too much of both.
Crime, writes Robert Morrison “had a tighter grip on London in the Regency than in any previous or subsequent period …” Gangs roamed the streets that a young Charles Dickens would in the coming decades find himself bumping into, and “Resurrection men” robbed graveyards on behalf of London’s Guy’s Hospital, which used cadavers to practice medicine with.
And there was too much of punishment as well - the Bow Street Runners were government- sanctioned, violent thief-catchers, enacting the notorious Regency-era “Bloody Code” that pegged more than 200 major and minor crimes with death penalty punishment, according to Morrison, and inspiring a young Lord Byron (yes, that one) to ask in his first speech to the House of Lords: “Is there not blood enough upon your penal code?”
Back in Lake Geneva with Byron and the Shelleys, opium in the form of laudanum fuels the creative ghost-storytelling, and in England it’s a favorite with the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Regency, Morrison writes, provides the opportunity for introducing recreational drug use into British society and elsewhere.
Meanwhile the disparities in class and wealth were leading to riots, which would see perhaps its worst manifestation in the violent 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, when a calvary charged at a rally of about 60,000 people, killing hundreds. This was a culmination of tensions that had been building for decades, during which time Jane Austen was writing and publishing - tensions perhaps referred to briefly in Northanger Abbey.
We don’t find much to do with crime or punishment, drugs or riots, in our favorite Austen adaptations. But British novelist Jo Baker includes some of this background of disparity and instability in her retelling Longbourn, which remixes Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the domestic workers, and alludes to the disturbing flogging of a soldier among the visiting militia. Once you’ve read Baker’s beautiful retelling, you’ll look very differently and with an enhanced understanding on that one line in Pride and Prejudice about the ball preparations and the shoe roses being obtained by proxy.
Cheapside!
And one of our favorite little details in Robert Morrison’s history are the tidbits we get about places like Cheapside - a favorite touchstone among Pride and Prejudice adaptation watchers. It gets a couple of mentions in Morrison’s history, and our favorite comes from the poet Robert Southey whom Morrison quotes as describing Cheapside as one of the “less fashionable areas” of London, and a place for “drapers, stationers, confectioners, pastry-cooks, seal-cutters, silver-smiths, book-sellers, print-sellers, hosiers, fruiterers, china-sellers,—one close to another, without intermission, a shop to every house, street after street, and mile after mile.” (Morrison here is quoting from Southey’s Letters from England.)
And not only that, but Cheapside came with a seedy sexual connotation as well, as Morrison offers the detail that Thomas Tegg was a Cheapside publisher whose specialty was reprinted porn, working with the artist Thomas Rowlandson and selling prints for wealthy patrons including the Prince Regent, according to Morrison.
So that perhaps contextualizes and emboldens Elizabeth’s reference to her Uncle and Aunt Gardiner’s Cheapside association, especially when you remember that she makes the reference boldly while standing in the gardens of Pemberley - thus potentially “polluting the shades of Pemberley.”
Get over it, Lady Catherine. We choose Cheapside.
Politics, race, revolution and Jane Austen’s 15 percent
One thing that might seem beside the point but is very much on point is this: Representation by the people for the people was not yet a thing during the real Regency. This is so easy to forget!
The late 18th and early 19th centuries were oppressive, dangerous times to be breathing while Black, or Asian, or female, or poor, or gay, or young, or any other identity, in England, that did not come with privilege and power. And they weren’t even pretending otherwise.
“The House of Commons was not there to represent the people,” writes Morrison. Oh no.
“That was a foreign and incendiary idea. Land was the historic foundation of the British constitution, and the House of Commons was there to guard and extend the interests of the men who owned it—those whose birthright, education, and affluence entitled them to be leaders among men.”
Land and land ownership was the historic foundation of power. It’s not just about pretty houses and privet hedges!
Remember this when we encounter the Darcys and the Knightleys and the Pemberleys and the Donwell Abbeys of Jane Austen’s world.
“The only people eligible to vote,” writes Morrison, “were men over the age of twenty-one who fulfilled certain conditions of property ownership.”
And this group by the way was, according to Morrison, less than 15 percent of the population.
Any reformers we know about - you might think of revolutionary writer Tom Paine, political scientist Mary Wollstonecraft - were outside of Parliament; and then you had Tories and Whigs inside Parliament, mainly respectful of status quo, as Morrison says, “in all its exclusivity.”
So next time you read or watch a story retelling Elizabeth and Darcy, remember all of this weight and this “exclusivity” that comes attached to Mr. Darcy and our Austen heroes. The weight of legitimacy, race, land, wealth, and power. And remember what is obviously absent for everyone else, even a young “elegant female” of the gentry.
So when Darcy botches that first proposal - we can see Elizabeth declaring that he is the last man in the world whom she could could ever be prevailed upon to marry. Perhaps she is rejecting it all - she’s rejecting landed power, authority, gender and class status, and even libertinism, vampirism, and dogma. She’s rejecting it in favor of inherent kindness, grace, and humanity. And most of all she’s defying expectation. Darcy needs to be put in his place before Lizzy can fall for him.
It’s fiction. It’s not history.
So when Darcy botches that first proposal - we can see Elizabeth declaring that he is the last man in the world whom she could ever be prevailed upon to marry. Perhaps she is rejecting it all - she’s rejecting landed power, authority, gender and class status, and even libertinism, vampirism, and dogma. She’s rejecting it in favor of inherent kindness, grace, and humanity. And most of all she’s defying expectation. Darcy needs to be put in his place before Lizzy can fall for him.
It’s the fictionalizing of this story that allows these tables to be turned, that allows Lizzy to upend this weighted structure in favor of following her heart. But also to follow her own moral code.
All the history, the politics, the disparity, is there - it’s there in Austen. Her stories address these things - not necessarily directly and perhaps not enough; but she stayed in the places she knew well, and peeled back the layers and the fabrics of custom to reveal the human experience in its essence.
Austen was finding very subtle ways to navigate it all in life, and in art. That - basically, the art, the philosophy, the humanism, and also quite possibly the escape from it all that we to this day look to Austen for - seems to have been what interested her.
She deployed fiction and story to not only revision her world, but also to transcend it. And we’re still using that fiction to transcend our complicated surroundings - today.
So, go do it friends! Transcend!
And remember as you watch and read these stories, the weight of that history that was Austen’s present-day going on in the background. Austen is always helping us find our way to common sense, connection, happiness, and safety. And love.
Thank you to so many of you who are writing and engaging with us here at the Austen Connection, and we’re so glad. Keep the emails and shout-outs coming. You can bypass the social media scene entirely and just Reply or comment for the group right here!
Meanwhile, stay well, stay in touch, and have a beautiful week free of rakes, disparities, and Regency trash and rather full of Regency escape and power and love.
Yours very truly,
Plain Jane
Cool links and Community
This entire post is riffing off of the history in Robert Morrison’s The Regency Years: During which Jane Austen writes, Napoleon fights, Byron makes love, and Britain becomes modern.
Regency histories that include the lives of people that have been left out of Regency histories: Gretchen Gervina, David Olusoga, and Bea Koch in her book Mad & Bad; Real Heroines of the Regency.
Jo Baker’s Longbourn, one of the few Austen retellings to directly address the point of view of the working class - let us know about others in the comments!
More about the life and love of Anne Lister from the York Civic Trust
The Bonnets at Dawn podcast has a wonderful episode about Byron
Sanditon on PBS - because Austen is fed up with rakes like Edward Denham.
Join us!
Join Sarah Rose Kearns, the Austen Connection, and friends this Saturday for the “Persuasion mini-conference” and a discussion on the many creative, diverse ways we are remixing the story of Persuasion! See you there!
Mansfield Park, Horror Story
Looks like someone took our advice and made Mansfield Park into a horror story - Bodies, Bodies, Bodies does not announce itself to be a Jane Austen adaptation, but please: It’s a bunch of young people getting up to no-good in an impressive mansion while the parental types are away. And if there are a couple of princessy mean girls, rich clueless guys, rakish rich boys, and one shy misfit - then Jane Austen is going to want a credit.
A shout-out!
The Austen Connection podcast got a shout-out! on SoNovelicious - check it out!
Thanks so much! And your newsletter looks terrific - just subscribed and looking forward to reading!
Oh my god, this was incredible! I loved it so much. Apologies if this is lame but I wanted to share my own newsletter (bookcrumbs) because I think you might like it. Every week, I recommend one novel along with a film and song pairing that I think fits it's flavour profile. Maybe check it out?