There’s something that’s puzzled me for a long time in reference to Lady Helena Investigates. In reviews and emails, readers have frequently called Lady Helena Investigates a “Regency” novel (and often then gone on to mention Georgette Heyer).
After a lot of thought it occurred to me that “Regency” has perhaps become reader shorthand for novels that feature lords and ladies, big country houses, and so on. OK—but if I read a novel that began Sussex, 1881, the Regency era wouldn’t spring to mind.
So I thought I’d give a quick Jane’s guide to the nineteenth century—which was a fascinating hundred years of huge social and technological change.
In 1800 most people lived in the countryside; although the (First) Industrial Revolution had begun and manufacturing work was drawing more and more people toward towns and cities, the economy (in the US and Europe*) was basically an agrarian one. Transportation was horse-drawn; if you didn’t have a horse, you walked.
From a reader’s point of view the first 15 years or so of the century are often referred to as the Napoleonic or Napoleonic War period, because the dominant news of the day was Napoleon 1st’s drive to conquer as much of the globe as possible. That’s when all those red-coated soldiers were stationed around England causing female hearts to flutter, as in Pride and Prejudice (and other Jane Austen books).
The Regency period overlaps a bit with the Napoleonic period; the actual historical Regency was from 1811 to 1820, when the future George IV was Prince Regent because George III suffered periods of insanity. A writer trying to capture the Regency era would talk about the ton when referring to high society, would clothe her heroines in gauzy gowns and just a petticoat and stockings underneath (please note, no underwear around her bottom—and daring women omitted the petticoat). Men would take snuff and fight duels and then everyone would go to a ball and perform dances based on English country dancing (in long lines or circles of dancers). America was busy fighting wars (with Spain and Britain mostly) and starting to expand its territory away from the Eastern seaboard.
You have to jump forward nearly two decades from the Regency period to get to the early Victorian. The bit in between saw the Prince Regent become George IV and lose his only daughter in childbirth (the baby also died). The Crown then passed to William IV, the uncle of Queen Victoria, who had ten illegitimate children by his mistress; unfortunately, all his legitimate children were stillborn or lived only a short time.
So Victoria became queen in 1837, married Albert three years later and began to pop out princes and princesses, and the Victorian age was well under way. By that point the Age of Steam was well established; train and steamboat travel was still fairly novel but certainly a thing. If you read a novel set in that era the heroine would wear an off-the-shoulder evening gown, and outdoors she’d wear a bonnet and carry a shawl. In America they were settling the Midwest, forming large plantations in the South with slave labor, and by the 1850s digging gold and shooting at each other in the West. In Europe they were having revolutions. Fun times.
The early Victorian morphed into the mid-Victorian period; interestingly both America and England had a break point in 1861. In that year the American Civil War started and Prince Albert died, leaving Victoria a disconsolate widow who stayed in seclusion for much of the rest of her life. A mid-Victorian heroine would wear a crinoline, and by that point underwear was definitely necessary as skirts could easily be caught by a gust of wind. Railroads proliferated all over England. If you went to a ball you’d be dancing the waltz.
From the 1870s onward we enter MY period, the late Victorian. Women wore bustles and hats instead of crinolines and bonnets. Technology was booming and the economy was boom-and-busting. In the US this was the era of the rise of big business, the establishment of an extensive rail network, homesteading, cowboys, and mail order catalogues. The rich were getting richer and more extravagant. By this point women were thoroughly repressed into the “little wifie” so loved by Dickens (an early-to-mid-Victorian) and starting to kick against the bars of their cage—this was when feminism really started to get going.
You could send a telegraph across the Atlantic and travel across it in ease and style by ocean liner if you had enough money. If you were poor, you were probably trying to emigrate from Europe to America. If you were a native American, you were fighting a losing war in the western part of the United States. America was beginning to dominate as an industrial economy, but for the most part Americans looked to Europe for culture. London was the world’s greatest city in the opinion of everyone except the Parisians.
From around the 1880s to the end of the century and beyond, it was the Gilded Age in America: truly enormous fortunes, truly enormous houses, truly amazing dresses. Your American heroine, armed with her amazing dresses and oodles of cash, would be traveling to Europe to snag a titled husband. The English fought back with snobbery and rules of society that were probably more arcane than at any other time in history. The rich were idle, and the servant class was huge. It was an awesome time as long as you were rich.
Are you thinking Downton Abbey? Actually, the Downton story begins in the Edwardian era, so after the death of Queen Victoria (in 1901) and is not Victorian at all (except for the Dowager Countess who is there to represent the Victorian generation). But late Victorian to Edwardian was in some ways one long continuum in which the gap between rich and poor widened but life did become a bit easier for the poor due to political reforms, growing medical knowledge, greater literacy and so on.
Social mobility was increasingly possible, and the middle classes grew in wealth and power during the whole Victorian/Edwardian period. For the upper classes there was a fifty-year-long summer of parties and balls and country house weekends and travel and hunting and more parties and balls—only to be brought to a crashing end by the First World War.
Phew. So to sum up: my books are set in the late Victorian; Lady Helena Investigates begins sixty years after the Regency period ended. Admittedly she lives in an eighteenth-century house in a slightly backward rural area whereas Nell belongs to the cutting edge of the American merchant class, so I’ll forgive the mistake! Also, Helena doesn’t talk much about her clothes because she doesn’t really care what she wears, so you don’t get that context.