Jane Austen goes dancing

What could Jane Austen and similar unmarried gentlewomen of the Regency Age, look forward to? There were certainly a host of activities that could fill and kill time, but what could be anticipated with some pleasure? One of the few prospects was the Ball or the Assembly. Roughly, the former would be held in the house of a local worthy, who would ‘give’ the occasion and would rightly be the centre of attention, and the latter would be a commercial operation run from a large assembly hall or large local establishment.

Both public and private balls were a key part of Jane’s social life, and the life of all unmarried people of her class. There would be at least one large rectangular room, with dancing from about 9pm until early the next morning, with supper and some allied amusements like whist for the non-dancers, and normally another, separate room. Jane often liked it when there was a separate anteroom for the sitting and chatting. Jane makes it clear that chairs and dancers were needed for a good evening;

There was the same kind of supper as last year, and the same want of chairs. There were more dancers than the room could conveniently hold, which is enough to constitute a good ball at any time.

Jane attended five balls in the winter of 1796,always looked forward to the next one, and reported back to her sister Cassandra in one of her many chatty and gossipy letters written from home (see left) . The first ball that had taken place at the Harwood family residence at Deane Park, not far from their much more modest home in Steventon. The Harwood Ball was a private affair with invited guests only, and a step above the assembly room affairs.

Today, we might assume that the ball was a good way of mingling freely with the opposite sex; but there was no mingling and nothing was free. Nothing about the activity was spontaneous. It was not an eighteenth century discotheque, except perhaps in one respect. It was a ruthless meat market, to use a phrase that Georgians would have understood. A single man at a ball was advertising his desire for marriage; a single woman is doing the same, but with an asymmetry of power that made it much harder work for women, as Jane regularly noted.

In order to converse with men outside your family circle you had to dance with them, so competent dancing skills were vital . Books were published to guide would-be dancers.  The steps and movements were complicated and could not be varied, and the social rules were as rigid as the dance itself. Only practice beforehand or a course of lessons would be enough.

Jane always listed her dance partners in her letters to Cassandra. They are social contacts with men, some more desirable than others, but all with significance. Dancing with people you did not like was ‘a dance of mortification, as Austen said in Pride and Prejudice Jane wanted some control over who she danced with yet stay within the etiquette of a Regency Ball.

On one occasion, she managed to avoid ‘to my inexpressible astonishment’ the company of John Lyford. He did not ask her to dance but she had to actively try to avoid it – ‘I was forced to work hard for it’. If she had refused Lyford she would have been obliged to refuse everybody else and the evening would be ruined. Later in the evening it was just about possible to claim tiredness, as these balls were punishingly physically affairs and not the cool and sedate events shown in television dramas, but the rule generally held. The wrong man could spoil the evening;

I had an odd set of partners : Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Street, Col. Jervoise, James Digweed, J. Lyford, and Mr. Briggs, a friend of the latter. I had a very pleasant evening, however…

The ‘however’ is the key word here. There were two J. Lyfords, father and son, but this was probably the son that she managed to avoid at an earlier assembly. Assuming the partners were in chronological order, at least he was near the end of the evening.

Jane would always have a chaperone. A mother would be ideal, but in at the Harwood ball it was James Austen, Jane’s elder brother. The fact that they spent some of the evening coaching James in the skills of dancing shows the importance of this social skill; but his most important role at the ball was to act as a counterbalance for his sister, a single woman. He could not help her out by dancing with her to avoid unwanted partners. It was frowned upon to dance with close family – this was a mating game after all, but his presence was still vital. She did not resent it, despite ‘modern’ feelings on the restrictions on women. Indeed she loved the presence of her brother at such events – ‘a ball is nothing without him’.

Dancing brought some freedom. Some dances, like minuets, involved watching other people dance and therefore couples would have been able to talk while public attention was elsewhere. There was some scope for touching as well; both parties wore gloves, which expanded opportunity by making it acceptable, but also dulled sensation.

Jane always looked forward to balls; it fitted in with her social life which consisted of being in ‘company’. A lot of energy and time went into what was to be worn, especially caps. She made and altered clothes, turning a domestic time-killing activity into something that had a point. She also held clothes back for this special occasion – ‘my china crepe is still kept for the ball- because it was a place where you would be judged’.

‘Judged’ is the key word here. People were on show. On January 14 1801, Cassandra reports back on the Chilham Ball, and was told off light heartedly for dancing with Mr Kembler four times- ‘why not rather dance two of them with some elegant brother officer who was struck with your appearance as you entered the room?

When the obsequious Sir William Lucas attempts to compliment Mr. Darcy, he says: “’I have been most highly gratified indeed, my dear Sir. Such very superior dancing is not often seen. It is evident that you belong to the first circles

It was all about rank. Jane knew about these issues when meeting somebody through dancing. Although jokingly, social status was never far away. On one occasion she danced;

twice with a Mr. South, a lad from Winchester, who, I suppose, is as far from being related to the bishop of that diocese as it is possible to be,’

The Bishop of Winchester was Brownlow North

What happened in the ballroom stayed in the ballroom. Although you would have had to have been formally introduced in order to dance at all, having danced with somebody gave you no more rights after the ball was over and certainly not on next meeting. In December 1808, Jane describes meeting somebody who she had danced with;

We have always kept up a bowing acquaintance since, and, being pleased with his black eyes, I spoke to him at the ball, which brought on me this civility; but I do not know his name, and he seems so little at home in the English language that I believe his black eyes may be the best of him.

Her decision to acknowledge him was within her power. Dancing did not imply a new relationship; this was impossible, considering the number of partners people had over a season.

Physical sacrifices were made in order to attend dances. Despite her eyes hurting, Jane attended a ball, where she knew there was dust in the room and her need to keep her eyes open all night would exacerbate the condition. When she wrote to Cassandra, her eyes were still hurting, but there was no question that is was worth it.

The number of dances, like the society, the room and the quality of the supper, varied. When there were more or fewer dances than usual, she commented on it;

There were twenty dances, and I danced them all, and without any fatigue.

There were only twelve dances, of which I danced nine, and was merely prevented from dancing the rest by the want of a partner. We began at ten, supped at one, and were at Deane before five. There were but fifty people in the room.

Dancing took youth and strength, two attributes that made you good marriage material.

The number of people and a gender balance were vital for a good evening. On one occasion there were only eight couples and twenty-three people in the room. Jane was concerned that all women should have the opportunity to dance.

Assemblies needed private transport. Carriages came before marriages, but owning private transport was expensive. It required in vehicles, stabling, servants and taxes, and needed an income of about £1000 per year in the 1790’s. The Austens were on the cusp of carriage company; at times they had one and other times not, and it deeply affected Jane’s lifestyle. How did you get to the ball, and get back at 4.am, without private transport? No eligible man or woman arrives at the ball on foot or donkey cart. Jane would regularly attend the Thursday assembly in Basingstoke It was their nearest large town, but a carriage was needed to get there, and they did not have one by November 1798, when she comments how pleased she is that the Basingstoke Assembly had declined just as their ability to get there had been reduced;

Our assemblies have very kindly declined ever since we laid down the carriage, so that disconvenience and disinclination to go have kept pace together.

This may have been a convenient excuse for what must have been a social blow, although favours from friends were possible. Jane often stayed with the Bigg-Wither family at Manydown Park after the Basingstoke Ball, and sometimes they would be lent a chaise, but they were vaguely unsatisfactory options. In her novels, Austen identified the exact type of private transport as a way of pinpointing people’s social status, so she knew exactly what her own was – fading gentry.

Jane Austen features as one of the seventeen interesting Georgians in my new book.

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Turtle soup for the rich, and flavoured hot water for the plebs. Soup in the Regency

All of the classes, both the prosperous and the starving, ate their soup in the Regency. For the rich, as wealthy man- about- town Rees Gronow noted, the big evening meal started with soup, and then everybody developed a huge appetite and an even bigger thirst.

What was the most prestigious soup for the high-living nobility and gentry? That came from Barbados, in the shape of the turtle, or more precisely from its precious meat.  Fresh Turtles, when available, were advertised in the newspaper with a time and date when they were available. Turtles could be dressed and sent to the houses of the rich and enjoyed en familie. It was the number one soup. 

Royalty enjoyed turtle soup; it was the only hot item on the menu in 1813 when 900 people led by the Duke of York and all of his brothers bar the Prince Regent celebrated Wellington’s victory at Vitoria in June 1813; then, as if to justify Gronow’s words, there was Port, Madeira and Claret for all; often, the soup was accompanied by a cold alcoholic punch. 

Turtle soup was available in the street; perhaps the best was in New Bond Street, at the Albion   or the confectionary and cook shop of Charles Waud. Perhaps Charles Waud would be a slightly better bet. He was, after all, purveyor of turtles to the King, and that’s what turtle soup was made from. There was, of course, mock turtle soup, which contained a sheep’s head instead of turtle meat, and mocked the poor as much as it mocked the posh version of the soup- sheep’s head was offal.  That sounds obvious, but, as you went down the social scale, it was less and less true. 

He also provided confectionary and sweetmeats to the Prince Regent and his royal bothers and sold theatre tickets to the Theatre Royal in Haymarket. He was top drawer.

Waud   was a great food sourcing entrepreneur.  He provided the food for the Grand Masquerade at Vauxhall Gardens (below) in 1813.  The weather had been awful all day, despite being July, and the 2500 guests were rained on until about 11pm. This did not stop the dancing, drinking and morally dubious behaviour. The Tripod magazine reported that; 

the night becoming more favourable over head than could have been expected about eleven o clock a crowd of the thoughtless dissipated and debauched assembled together under various disguises and dripping trees.

Pleasure Garden Masquerade, Museum of London

They ate at one in the morning. The main dishes were   150 dozen of fowls; 150 dishes of lamb; 200 tongues and hams; 300 lobsters raised pies; 200 Savoy cakes, 250 dishes of pastry; 300 jellies quarts of ice creams; 500 pottles of strawberries and 300 hundredweight of cherries ….

And of course, more alcohol than anybody was counting. All provided by the great Charles Waud.

It was a masquerade, and everybody was in disguise; and lots thought it was hilarious to dress as the poor, and as grotesque characterisations of the poor;

Dustmen, chimney sweepers, waggoners, clowns, harlequins, watchmen, scavengers, jackass men, chambermaids and courtesans were very numerous and excellently supported. Among the best noticed one groups we chimney sweepers who threw soot in the eyes of the company another of coal heavers who d—–d and bl—-d with all the volubility of St Giles’s

Meanwhile, the real poor of St Giles and elsewhere were starving. The worst year of the Regency for hunger was 1814; bread prices were high, the winter was as severe as anybody could remember (the snow did not clear in the south of England until March), and casual work outside for the poor was in short supply.

Soup was needed for the poor. The grateful, obedient poor deserved soup, but not of course, the turtle soup slurped by the rich as a preface to gargantuan eating and drinking. The soup of the poor was prefaced by deference and followed by nothing, or potatoes.

The newspapers overflowed with soup recipes. In January 1814, the Morning Post’s correspondent HUMANITAS (as they often styled themselves) offered this recipe;

In the view of the rich, charity like this carried the danger of moral hazard- the moderately poor could not afford beef, so the abject poor had to be denied it.  With the inclusion of a small amount of beef and some bones, this would have done the job adequately.  It was never a permanent solution to the problems of starvation, but then it was believed that such a thing was neither possible nor very desirable. The poor were given the scrapings at the bottom of the culinary barrel and the rich were entitled to feel good about it.

Two days later, the same newspaper was pleased to announce a local resident-possibly HUMANITAS himself- had been feeding twenty families a day on soup for one penny a quart. It was given a meaty flavour by the   pot liquor from Mr Austen’s Beef Shop in St Martin’s Court, who provided the liquid from the bottom of a soup pot that had had meat in it. It was not made clear whether the same twenty families were to live on this soup forever or twenty families live on it for one day only.

The man who fed the poor and maintained social order with this cost-efficient way of avoiding starvation, was, of course, Charles Waud of New Bond Street.

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Forging Money in the Regency- the sad case of John Binstead, 1815

On June 26, 1815, a young man from Sussex, John Binstead, entered a hosiery shop in Friday Street, Cheapside. Binstead was not alone; he had a companion, who was watching events from the back of the shop. Binstead examined the stock of socks, boots, gloves and coats. The owner, Robert Romanis explained that Binstead ‘came to my house, and purchased some goods from William Must, a person in my shop’- many London retailers, even upmarket ones like Romanis, lived on the premises, and the shop/warehouse/ home distinction was less clear in the regency than today. The goods cost £4 7 shillings and Binstead offered a banknote for £10, drawn on the Chichester bank of Ridge, Murray and Ridge, known as the Chichester Old Bank.

Until recently, paying with paper was common in our society, but in 1815 this apparently inoffensive habit was relatively new. This type of transaction was still quite novel in Regency England. Paper had replaced gold for transactions through an act of parliament of 1797 which took Britain off the gold standard and obligated more people to use paper.

A genuine banknote; could be forged with materials found in city street

The problem was its authenticity. Was it a forgery? Mr Romanis would have done a rapid calculation in his head. On the plus side, this was a learned young gentleman, who was spending his ‘money’ at the most upmarket hosier in Cheapside, who sold to both individuals and trade, including the East India Company. Most utterers of forged notes were women, who would appear at grocers or haberdashers and try to charm their way into having their notes accepted in exchange for small items and change in real currency. The other argument in his favour was that this was a £10 note. The poor could not be seen with them without creating instant and justified suspicion, but the large denomination notes were different. Most forgeries were £1 or £2 notes, which criminals actually preferred.

This crowning argument was when one of Romanis’s assistants whispered in his ear that he knew one of the gentlemen, presumably the one lingering in the background. The transaction was completed. Binstead was asked to endorse the cheque and provide ID by writing his name and address on the back of the piece of paper. He did so by adding a lie ‘Henderson, 16, Great Portland-street’- a prestigious address, deliberately chosen to create confidence

What did Romanis receive for his physical goods?  It was a mostly handwritten piece of paper with these reassuring words on.

“N. e, 1765,  Chichester Old Bank.

“I Promise to pay the bearer, on demand, Ten Pounds, here, or at Messrs. William, S. Fry, and Sons, bankers, London, value received. Chichester , the 16th day of February, 1815.

The fact that the cheque was drawn on a provincial bank would not have been a problem, as the cheque could be redeemed in London by a partner bank, in this case Fry’s . Romanis went there the next morning and was told that it was a forgery. One of its servants said this at the Old Bailey Trial.

WILLIAM DINMORE . I belong to the house of Fry and Co. bankers. The Chichester Old Bank notes are paid at our house. Mr. Murray signs notes for the house drawn upon us. The signature of this note is not his signature. This is not a Chichester note.

Romanis then visited Great Portland Street, and every other London street with the word ‘Portland in it’, but with highly predictable results.

Romanis then accompanied Thomas Fogg, a marshal man of the City of London to Arundel in Sussex where they tracked down Binstead to a local inn. He admitted his guilt and threw himself on to their mercy. It is not clear how they tracked him down; it seems to have been connected to the fact that the other person was known to the shop assistant; this is perhaps why they went to Arundel to find him rather than Chichester.

Binstead was not a typical forger and utterer of banknotes. For a start, he did both of the crimes himself and secondly, made no attempt to defend himself against a capital crime. The most remarkable difference was his method of making the notes. Forgeries were produced by criminal gangs who only needed the most basic of engraving tool to make a banknote. The equipment and the paper could be bought in any street. Sometimes individuals could make banknotes in their own homes by scratching out an outline on a piece of tin. Binstead had gone one step further and actually drawn the notes – he was a drawing teacher by trade, and a gifted one too, as he had fooled the Star Inn Gosport to take one, as well as Robert Romanis. He had made the monochrome note with a camel hair brush and some pencils. He admitted to making about £100 worth of notes (not necessarily of £10; notes could be drawn for any amount) and uttering them successfully.

He was sentenced to hang.  He was now on death row, awaiting his verdict. He still had reason to hope. Most death penalties, for any crime stood a good chance of not being carried out. He had been totally cooperative; he took the police officer to Chichester to showed him the brushes that he had used to draw his money. Five respectable witnesses had given Binstead a most excellent character for honesty, sobriety, and integrity, and the Chichester bankers Mr Ridge himself asked for mercy, because of Binstead’s  youth and good character.

From 13 September to 26 November he waited and hoped. On the next day the man whose trial came after his, John Elmes, who had passed a £10 note in London around the same time had his death penalty reduced to twenty-one years transportation. Binstead, however, was sentenced to be hanged until dead outside Newgate Prison. In the terminology of the Georgian Bloody code, it was to be a ‘simple execution’

A Newgate hanging

Why had he been selected? Well, there was no more invidious property crime that subverting the currency- technically it was treason. In 1815 there was a relatively low number of 58 executions in England and Wales (1814-74; 1816- 83). There were six for forgery and four for uttering, so currency crime made up 17% of all executions. Extreme deterrence was needed now and then, and Binstead fitted the bill. He was both an utterer and a forger. His accomplice had never been caught, and Binstead may have been deemed uncooperative in tracking him down. He had also made a lot of banknotes, and showed promising signs of getting away with it. He was too clever to be allowed to live.

Poor Binstead must have suffered. His defence at the trial was that he did not know they were forged, a comment completely contrary to everything else he said and did. He must have been crumbling. His failure to grass up Mr Jordane would have saved his own neck, and one plausible answer was that he simply did not know where Jordane was.

Cotton in action- the man in white, appropriately

He had eight days to wait for his hanging and during that time he came under the scrutiny of the gaol’s ‘ordinary’ (resident chaplain) Horace Cotton ( more about him here and below ). Cotton’s task was to help the condemned man’s launch into eternity to be as respectable as possible. This would start with a bloodcurdling sermon about the wages of sin the day before and then the chance to die well, with humility and resignation and without the fear of death. Binstead passed the test, spending the final night in prayer and contemplation with the house robber who was condemned with him. His only request that, after death, that his hands might not be applied to persons who came to be rubbed for the wen’ – a skin disease.

On December 5, 1815, Binstead was hanged outside the debtor’s gate at Newgate, cleanly and efficiently, but certainly a victim of the inconsistent and vengeful system that punished randomly and viciously because it could do nothing else.

A Protest against the Death penalty for forgery, signed by the hangman, Jack Ketch, produced by William Hone

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Horace Cotton: The extraordinary Ordinary of Newgate

Please consider my two books on the Georgian and Victorian Era

The Dark Days of Georgian Britain– a political and social history of the Regency. More details here

Passengers – a social history of Britain 1780-1840 told through travel, transport, roads and hospitality. More details here

The Sun-Spot Panic of 1816

‘This year has been a very uncommon one. The spring was exceeding cold and backward or rather there was no spring, the summer was cold and wet, or rather we had no summer. The crop was very bad and unproductive. The harvest was very late, the crop was not well got in’

Dairy of Thomas Lucas, Stirling, Scotland, 31 December 1816

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When the vulgar and uneducated Georgian masses peered at the sun, what did they see? They saw a great ball of fire which provided daylight and warmth for all, and grew the food. Civilisation would end if the sun ever went out, and fires did go out; their vague recollection of Christian end-time stories told them that the the fading of the light would be the first sign of Armageddon.

Their betters, as their name implied, knew better. The Sun was no kind of fire, although they did struggle to explain how its energy was created. It was a star which revolved around its axis every twenty-four days (actually nearer twenty-seven). Its diameter was estimated at about 880,000 according to the Manchester Mercury and other papers (867, 000 in reality). It produced both heat and light, which people strongly believed were the same thing, but had not yet proved to everybody’s satisfaction. It was about 96 million miles from earth, it was estimated, and they were wrong by only a few million. It needs to be remembered that the (rich) Georgians were scientific!

The poor’s ignorance about the sun (nor indeed the knowledge of their social superiors) did not matter until the summer of 1816. Astronomers had been watching sunspots through telescopes for two hundred years, and the average English gentleman would have been able to assuage the fears of the masses from about 1750.

Sunspots became democratic in 1816; they were so numerous that they could be seen by all everybody with a piece of coloured glass as protection, and sometimes even without it on a hazy early morning (there were lots of them in 1816, another mystery). When they looked, the poor, who struggled to eat and did not buy a spyglasses or telescopes, drew different conclusions to the rich. The great moving blanknesses on the disc would put out the sun and the end of the word was nigh. There was a particular panic on July 18, 1816, the day when an Italian prophesied the end of the world. The Italian astronomer gave a few months notice  of the sun going out, and the newspapers all printed the same scoffing refutation.

A typical letter to the newspaper. Just the beginning, mind. They went on for ever.

The scare was easy to refute. The experts had all the facts.  The Morning Post on the very day that the sun was due to go out pointed out that the two summers of 1718 and 1719 were both the hottest on record and the last time there were so many sunspots. The year 1812 was spotless, and the weather and the harvest were calamitous. Most years had sunspots, and they could be tracked across the disc; they proved that the sun revolved around its axis. The sunspots were not lakes of water, or like a hole appearing in an old suit, suggesting the whole textile was worn.  ‘It would be useless to accumulate more facts to show that the spots on the sun ought not to create any uneasiness’, sniffed every newspaper in the land.

Frederick William Herschel, with the sun on his mind

This negative knowledge of sunspots was all they had. They did not know what sunspots were; Herschel’s view that they were solar mountains, some three hundred miles high, was treated with respect; some letters to the Gentleman’s Magazine suggested they were the shadows from other stars; but they did know that they could not make the sun go out.

The poor and ignorant were condemned out of hand by every amateur gentleman astrologer with a spyglass, but there was some justification for the concerns of the masses. The weather in Europe and North America had been appalling since the beginning of the year. Thomas Lucas of Stirling noted the events in his diary;

Several spots or holes in the sun has been observed by astronomers this summer and the summer has been uncommonly rainy but it is not pretended that the great and almost incessant rains that we have had of late is on that account.

Lucas was a surgeon, an educated middle-class man who knew the world was not ending, but his diary comment flagged up a real phenomenon. Something had gone wrong with the weather. It rained all of the time, temperatures were low, and the sky was dark and the seasons were not proceeding as they normally did. It was not only bad, but unpredictable beyond the experience of anybody living.  The Leicester Journal (July 1816) commented that ‘such inclement weather is scarcely remembered by the oldest person living’.  It was also cruel; spring brought repeated thaws and freezes, killing off the harvests and killing them again when replanted.  There was a dry yellow fog in the sky, which did not recede as the day warmed up, which made the sunspots easier to see, and to blame. You did not always need a piece of coloured glass; everybody could panic now.

Nobody really knew what was happening until the 1880s; the climate change was caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora a year earlier that caused a temporary lowering of the average temperature by about 1.5 percent, enough to cause a  climate catastrophe,  and is well documented. This was the ‘Year without a Summer’ in Britain and ‘Nine Hundred and Frozen to Death   in the USA’  

Chester Chronicle

The sun spots vanished in August and reappeared in September. They were even larger than those of June, and the world did not end then either. But this was definitely temporary climate change; it caused global starvation, including Britain, and increased pandemic diseases. Just imagine how bad permanent climate change would be?. Or is that ‘will be’?

Please consider my two books on the Georgian and Victorian Era

The Dark Days of Georgian Britain– a political and social history of the Regency. More details here

Passengers – a social history of Britain 1780-1840 told through travel, transport, roads and hospitality. More details here