A guide to Regency England for readers of classic literature or historical fiction set in the early 19th century.
England, as it was in the early 1800's, can sometimes be as confusing to a modern reader as travelling to a foreign country. Their clot...
"The present mansion house at Halswell is a very noble and elegant building. It was erected upon the foundation of the old house, by Sir Halswell Tynte, in the year 1689. The front rooms are a parlour, a saloon, and a drawing room, with a library and staircase in each wing, or end. Over the saloon is an elegant room of the same dimensions, having the windows on a level with the floor, and a handsome balcony before them." [A description of Halswell House, Somerset, from The beauties of England and Wales: or, Delineations, topographical, historical, and descriptive, of each county, Volume 18, Part 1, pub. 1813]
By the beginning of the 19th century, Britain already had housing stock that was hundreds of years old. A person living in 1800 would be walking past buildings from the Jacobean, Queen Anne, Elizabethan and Tudor eras, as well as the more recently built houses and cottages of the Georgian era.
Property owners at this time were just as keen on "keeping up with the Joneses" as we are today, and wealthy families thought nothing of knocking down their old house and rebuilding something more in keeping with the latest fashions. If they didn't want to flatten their house entirely, then adding a new wing, or a whole new front facade in a modern style was also very common. In 1807, Maria Edgeworth's father extended the library of their Irish country house:
"Mr Edgeworth enlarged the library this year by breaking through the thick old outside walls of the house, and leaving two square pillars, beyond which a large addition was built. He also laid out for Maria a garden at the west end of the house, close to a new greenhouse, built to match the addition to the library." [A study of Maria Edgeworth, with notices of her father and friends, by Grace A. Oliver, pub. 1882]
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Even when the house was perfect, there were still fashionable improvements to be made to the surrounding gardens, or "pleasure grounds". During the Georgian era, many formal gardens were replaced with more natural landscaping, and any inconvenient blots on the landscape, such as a collection of labourers cottages spoiling the view, could easily be knocked down and rebuilt out of sight.
Jane Austen captured a sense of this spirit of improvement in a speech by Henry Crawford:
"The farmyard must be cleared away entirely, and planted up to shut out the blacksmith's shop. The house must be turned to front the east instead of the north-- the entrance and principal rooms, I mean, must be on that side, where the view is really very pretty; I am sure it may be done. And there must be your approach, through what is at present the garden. You must make a new garden at what is now the back of the house; which will be giving it the best aspect in the world, sloping to the south-east. The ground seems precisely formed for it. I rode fifty yards up the lane, between the church and the house, in order to look about me; and saw how it might all be. Nothing can be easier. The meadows beyond what will be the garden, as well as what now is, sweeping round from the lane I stood in to the north-east, that is, to the principal road through the village, must be all laid together, of course; very pretty meadows they are, finely sprinkled with timber. They belong to the living, I suppose; if not, you must purchase them. Then the stream--something must be done with the stream; but I could not quite determine what. I had two or three ideas."
