Women of the Time

'Tis true, your budding Miss is very charming,
But shy and awkward at first coming out,
So much alarmed, that she is quite alarming,
All giggles, blush; half pertness and half pout;
And glancing at Mamma, for fear there's harm in
What you, she, it, or they may be about,
The nursery still lisps out in all they utter-
Besides, they always smell of bread and butter.

Byron, of course, was Byron; there were thousands of amiable (and honourable) suitors who had no especial objection to the smell of bread and butter.

It has been hinted that the strictly brought-up girl of the Regency-like the strictly reared Victorian girl-married without knowing the 'facts of life'. One of the 'dangerous' ideas being bandied about at the time of the French Revolution was that young women should be taught botany, and it was opposed by many mothers as indecent. Today the mere notion of courting a young woman who does not know where babies come from seems as bizarre as that of tavern-crawling with a girl who is unaware that gin will make her drunk. It is very hard to believe that more than a handful of young women, in any generation, have ever reached the marriage bed in total ignorance of what awaited them. How girls did, in fact, acquire their basic knowledge is a nice point for speculation. No hint is to be gained in the pages of Jane Austen. Her heroines flirt, as all young women were expected to flirt, they become engaged, they marry; but whether they learn the facts from parents, chaperons, servants, friends, or suitors is unrevealed. Although one is loth to suggest any more books about Jane Austen, there is perhaps room for a last thesis entitled: 'Who told Jane Austen's heroines?'

In more sophisticated society, innocence was short-lived. Women used red, yellow and blue powder, and falsified their figures in the most curious places. Hazlitt has a drooling picture of Regency belles, devotees of 'the naked fashion, parading the streets. Their muslin vests, he says, are drawn tightly round their waists 'to disclose each full swell, each coy recess, obtruding on the eye each opening charm, the play of the muscles, the working of the thighs .. . moving pictures of lust and nakedness against which the greasy imaginations of grooms and porters may rub themselves. . . .'

Happy it is that poets do not have greasy imaginations.
These ladies who so debauched the minds of the lower classes continued to spend much time debauching their own minds, as their mothers had done, on lachrymose novels, sighing over love's young (frustrated) dream. Readers whose taste had passed beyond mere tears went on to stronger, stuff-the mock-Gothic novel, morbid and overheated, with lost heirs gibbering in dungeons and crazed abbesses torturing their novices. The style of love-making in these tales was guyed by Thomas Love Peacock in Nightmare Abbey:

Let us each open a vein in each other's arms, mix the blood in a bowl and drink it as a sacrament of love. Then we shall see visions of transcendental illumination and soar on the wings of ideas into the space of pure intelligence.

Jane Austen, that ironic moralist, mocked at the vogue for sensibility, and upheld the conventions of middle-class matchmaking, while simultaneously poking fun at them. In Sense and Sensibility Marianne Dashwood, at the ripe age of sixteen, is exasperated by the insufferable dullness of her sister's suitor, Edward Ferrars. Like most suitors of his day, Edward has been called upon to read aloud to the family of his intended. Evidently his was not a very inspired performance. Marianne exclaims to her mother:

'O mama! How spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!'
Her mother admits that Edward would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. 'I thought so at the time,' she says, 'but you would give him Cowper.'

To which Marianne retorts:
'Nay, mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!-but we must allow for difference of taste . . . but it would have broke my heart had I loved him to hear him read with so little sensibility!'

Jane Austen's pleasure is to break Marianne of her sensibility, until she is fit to be married to tedious old Colonel Brandon. Falling in love with the dubious Willoughby, Marianne is determined not to be so old-fashioned as to disguise her passion, for 'to, aim at the restraint of sentiments that were not in themselves illaudable appeared to her not merely an unnecessary effort but a disgraceful subjection of reason to commonplace and mistaken notions'. The two dance nearly all their dances together and hardly speak to others, conduct which in a modern ballroom would pass unnoticed but which, in Jane Austen's circles, 'made them exceedingly laughed at'. And Marianne commits a further indiscretion, which shocks
her sister Eleanor, by accepting the gift of a horse from her suitor.

The most comical courting scene in Jane Austen is the proposal by the famous clergyman, Mr Collins, to Elizabeth Bennet; no quotation can do it justice. Mr ColHns is rejected, but almost at once proposes to Charlotte Lucas, who accepts him, thus showing that imbecility in men, while not an enhancement of their charms, is no .bar to acceptance.

Jane, like Charlotte Lucas, was no Romanticist, but she did" write to her niece saying, 'anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection. .. . Nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without love.' Which seems clear enough. What also seems clear enough from her novels is that no woman with a glimmering of intelligence will marry a man who has not a solid financial backing. 'A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our daughters!* Mrs Bennet exclaims. Thousands of mothers would have exclaimed the same thing in the same circumstances, and Jane Austen would have been the first to condemn tliem for letting their daughters make romantic, but penniless unions. How much did Jane Austen really disapprove of her Lady Susan for saying: 'I could not.. . force Frederica into a marriage from which her heart revolted; and instead of adopting so harsh a measure merely propose to make it her own choice by rendering her thoroughly uncomfortable till she does accept him'?
Which, of course, was little different from the Paston technique.

No one would accuse William Cobbett of being a Romantic cist, but he does enter a plea for more sympathy towards young men carried away by passion-'it is a species of insanity that assails them'. When a sufferer takes his life-a thing which happens more frequently in England than in all other countries put together, says Cobbett-his mortal remains ought to be dealt with more kindly than is the custom. He cites the case of a youth named Smith, of Manchester, who, on being spurned by a young woman, hanged himself, whereupon his body was thrust into a hole at the wayside and transfixed by a stake.
Cobbett's specifications for a wife, as detailed in his Advice to Young Men, are refreshing and forthright. The qualities to be looked for, in order of importance, are: (1) Chastity; (2) Sobriety; (3) Industry; (4) Frugality; (5) Cleanliness; (6) Knowledge of Domestic Affairs; (7) Good Temper; (8) Beauty. With chastity there can be no compromise-who would be content with 'moderate chastity' in a wife?

'Free and hearty girls' may be amusing enough to laugh and talk with, but they are not to be considered as wives. A gormandizing woman is bad, a guzzling one is worse. If she tips off the liquor with an appetite and exclaims "Good! Good!" by a smack of her lips she is fit for nothing but a brothel'. On the other hand, if her jaws move in slow time, if she squeezes rather than bites her food, if she cannot make up her mind whether to eat it or leave it, she is incorrigibly lazy. 'Get to see her at work on a mutton chop or a bit of bread and cheese,' says Cobbett. If she deals quickly with them, yet without giving the appearance of gormandizing or guzzling, she will make an industrious wife. Also to be avoided is laziness of the tongue, 'a sort of sighing out of the words instead of speaking them; a sort of letting the sounds fall out, as if the party were sick at stomach'.

Cobbett condemned sauntering, soft-stepping girls. He is not the man to echo Byron's complaint against the gait of the English miss:

She cannot step as does an Arab barb,
Or Andalusian girl from mass returning. . . .

and he would have disapproved of the landlady's daughter who so tormented Hazlitt because she moved in minuet time. His ideal woman walks purposefully, like a latter-day sergeant in the Women's Royal Army Corps, with 'a quick step, and a somewhat heavy tread, showing that the foot comes down with a hearty goodwill; and if the body lean a little forward and the eyes keep steadily in the same direction, while the feet are going, so much the better, for these discover earnestness to arrive at the intended point'.

He tells of a young man in Pennsylvania who was courting one of three sisters. On an occasion when all three were present, one said to the others, 'I wonder where our needle is.' This deeply shocked the young man, and

... he withdrew as soon as was consistent with the rules of politeness, resolved never to think more of a girl who possessed a needle only in partnership, and who, it appeared, was not too well informed as to the place where even that share was deposited. This was, to be sure, a very flagrant instance of a want of industry; for if only the third part of the use of a needle satisfied her when single it was reasonable to anticipate that marriage would banish that useful implement altogether.

Cobbett has much to say on cleanliness. He recalls seeing a picture representing the amusements of Portuguese lovers. Three or four girls, each dressed like a princess, were sitting with as many young men, in gold and silver laced clothes, and all were affectionately engaged in hunting down vermin in each other's hair.

An English girl will have her face clean, to be sure, if there be soap and water within her reach; but get a glance at her poll, if you have any doubt upon the subject, and if you find there, or behind the ears, what the Yorkshire people call grime, the sooner you cease your visits the better.

Cobbett warns, again, against the girl who adorns her body with 'parcels of brass and tin' and other hardware; and also against the girl who, 'when you take her by the hand, holds her cold fingers as straight as sticks'. From such 'God in his mercy preserve me!'

By all the laws of irony, Cobbett should have married an idle slut, but the young Mrs Cobbett, on her husband's rating, was a paragon. He first met her near St John's, New Brunswick, when he was a sergeant of artillery and she was the thirteen-year-old daughter of a sergeant-major of Foot. After sitting in the same room for an hour, he knew that this girl, who had both beauty and sobriety of conduct, was the girl for him. Any lingering doubts were removed when, on an early morning walk, he saw her already out in the snow scrubbing at a wash-tub. When the girl's father was posted to Woolwich, Cobbett 'acted a part becoming a real and sensible lover'. He gave her all his savings (more than £150) and urged her, if faced with any unpleasantness at Woolwich, to hire a lodging with respectable people, to buy herself good clothes and not to work excessively hard. Two years later he arrived in Woolwich and found her working in the household of a Captain Brissac at £5 a year. 'Without hardly saying a word about the matter she put into my hands the whole of my one hundred and fifty pounds unbroken.' And all the time she had been living among young women 'who put upon their backs every shilling they could come at'.