The Regency Review III, by Lady A~, Authoress of 'The Bath Novels of Lady A~'.

Having been quite stuck up a chimney in my last Regency review-of-two, it is fitting that my third little amble through the period should now wind its way down the more refined lanes of English architecture. Fashioned more out of individual taste than by popular demand, and largely owing to the singular style of its architects, the Regency became a landmark era of architectural design; and elegance was its very fitting catchword. From the modest houses of the 'residential squares' of spa resorts to the sweeping prospects of John Nash's grand terraces in town, the finessing of architectural detail spurned a host of theatrical effects. And from classical moldings and cupolas to 'vistas of white or cream-coloured stucco', the evolution of Regency architecture soon singled out its select group of architects-extraordinaire. John Buonarotti Papworth was one such gentleman early admitted to this group, and was renowned for both his views of elegance, coupled with an acute sense of social awareness. Here he expounds his novel theories upon the improvement of laborers' cottages in his work Rural Residences:

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"The habitations of the labouring poor may be rendered ornamental, and the comforts of them increased, at a very trifling charge beyond the cost of common buildings; towards this purpose the annexed plate is designed for four cottages, connected with each other, and under one roof; a mode of building that admits a considerable saving of expense...

The porch in which the husbandman rests after the fatigues of the day, ornamented by some flowering creeper, at once affords him shade and repose; neatness and cleanliness ... bespeak that elasticity of mind, and spring of action, which produce industry and cheerfulness..."

Whether or not the fatigued husbandman did indeed rediscover the 'spring' in his step from such commodious order, Papworth was soon bounding off in another direction, fashioning rural retreats for the gentry. Here he extols his thoughts upon a 'cottage orne':

"The cottage orne is a new species of building, ... and subject to its own laws of fitness and propriety. It is not the habitation of the labourers, but of the affluent; of the man of study, of science, or of leisure; it is often the rallying point of domestic comfort, and, in this age of elegant refinement, a mere cottage would be incongruous with the nature of its occupancy. The lawn, the shrubberies, the gravel walks, and the polish that is given to the garden scenery, connected with such habitations, require an edifice in which is to be found a correspondence of tasteful care: perhaps it is essential that this building should be small, and certainly not to exceed two stories; that it should combine properly with the surrounding objects and appear to be native to the spot, and not one of those crude rule-and-square excrescences of the environs of London, the illegitimate family of town and country."

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Other acclaimed architects associated with the Regency were George Basevi, Decimus Burton, Sir John Soane and Henry Holland. Though the latter died in 1806 (before the Regency began) he has a distinct association with the era. As the son-in-law of  'Capability' Brown, the celebrated landscape gardener, Holland built Claremont [in Esher, Surrey], the house in which Princess Charlotte spent her married life, and the famed Whig men's club, Brooks's, in St James's Street. It was through his association to Brooks's that he was introduced to the Prince of Wales and this brought about Holland's next commission: the rebuilding of Carlton House, the Prince's London residence. Holland also had a hand in redesigning the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, which was later designed again, and there his distinct cupola paid tribute to the 'Indian domes of Repton and Nash'.

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The nonpareil of Regency architecture is, undoubtedly, John Nash. As the architect to the Prince Regent, he began his illustrious career in the office of Sir Robert Taylor. After going bankrupt in 1783, he re-established himself designing country houses in 'classical, Gothic and picturesque styles', and in 1796 entered into a partnership with Humphry Repton, who became one of the Regency's most notable landscape gardeners. In 1798 Nash acquired the Prince Regent's patronage and in 1811, as one of his most significant works, he developed Regent's Park into a preeminent residential area. Incorporated into this grand scheme were 'Regent's Canal, churches, artisans' houses, shops and arcades, and the layout of many surrounding streets'.

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Tom Moore, the poet, wrote:

"[The Prince] is to have a villa upon Primrose Hill, connected by a fine street with Carlton House, and is so pleased with this magnificent plan, that he has been heard to say 'it will quite eclipse Napoleon'. "

The villa was never built, but Crabb Robinson, the noted diarist, recorded his opinion upon Regent's Park:

"I really think this enclosure, with the new street leading to it from Carlton House, will give a sort of glory to the Regent's government, which will be more felt by remote posterity than the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo."

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Nash was made Deputy Surveyor-General between 1813-15, and had also become the Prince Regent's personal architect during that time. Between 1815-1823 he set to work on giving the Regent's palace at Brighton, the Royal Pavilion, an ornate makeover in the 'Hindoo' style, at a cost of nearly two-hundred thousand pounds. The extensions and additions incorporated the Great Kitchen and the Long Gallery (and its staircase). In 1817, the Music and Banqueting Rooms were added. After a 'new sixty-ton dome' was fashioned for the palace, and the entire center part of the building reworked, some critical commentary followed the progress. Mr. Croker of the Admiralty stolidly remarked:

"It is not so much changed as I had been told ... But in the place of the two rooms which stood at angles ... with the rest of the building ... have been erected two immense rooms, sixty feet by forty; one for a music-room and the other for a dining-room. They both have domes; an immense dragon suspends the lustre of one of them. The music-room is most splendid, but I think the other handsomer. They are both too handsome for Brighton, and in an excessive degree too fine for the extent of His Royal Highness's premises. It is a great pity that the whole of this suite of rooms was not solidly built in or near London. The outside is said to be taken from the Kremlin at Moscow; it seems to me to be copied from its own stables, which perhaps were borrowed from the Kremlin. It is, I think, an absurd waste of money, and will be a ruin in half a century or sooner."

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Fortunately Mr. C's foreboding of rack and ruin was itself waylaid to dust, and a Victorian critic made due account of the chinoiserie-styled music-room in proper praise:

"No verbal description, however elaborate, can convey to the mind or imagination of the reader an appropriate idea of the magnificence of this apartment...
 
The windows, which are so contrived as to be illuminated from the exterior, are enriched with stained glass displaying numerous Chinese devices, and similar decorations, in green gold, surround them...

At the [cupola's] apex, expanding in bold relief and vivid colouring, is a vast foliated ornament, bearing a general resemblance to a sunflower, with many smaller flowers issuing from it in all luxuriancy of seeming cultivation. From this, apparently projected from the calyx, depends a very beautiful lustre of cut glass, designed in the pagoda style, and sustaining by its chain-work an immense lamp in the form of the ... water-lily. The upper leaves are of white, ground glass edged with gold, and enriched with transparent devices derived from the mythology of the Chinese; the lower leaves are of a pale crimson hue. At the bottom are the golden dragons in attitudes of flight..."

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The erstwhile critic, Mr. Croker, did however set his seal of approval upon the Pavilion's new kitchens:

"The kitchen and larder are admirable -- such contrivances for roasting, boiling, baking, stewing, frying, steaming and heating; hot plates, hot closets, hot air, and hot hearths, with all manner of cocks for hot water and cold water and warm water and steam, and twenty saucepans all ticketed and labelled, placed up to their necks in a vapour bath."

In 1819, the last improvements to the Pavilion came in the additions of the King's Apartments, and in 1821, Buckingham House became Nash's next palatial project, never to be completed. After it was ordered that it be rebuilt as a royal palace, time ran out on George IV (formerly the Regent) and his personal architect. In 1830 the King died amidst a great groundswell of personal unpopularity, which likewise, and predictably, underwrote Mr. Nash's (regally affiliated) professional demise.

But fond friends despair not! Before dear Prinny goes up in a veritable puff of smoke in his palace, alongside his gifted architect and his glorious era, I shall, in my next review, continue to meander into the Regent's imaginative and extravagant world. I invite you all, most cordially, to join me there, at a later date, in unveiling the politics of  landscape gardening, the Picturesque movement, and the fashions and pleasures of the affluent in both town and country.

Source: Richardson J., The Regency, (Collins, 1973.)
Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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The Regency Review II, by Lady A~, Authoress of 'The Bath Novels of Lady A~'.

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In my last review of the English Regency, amongst other diversions, we took a fine whirl about the pursuits of the Prince Regent in the lap of his London luxury, and as seen through the eyes of those partaking in the fare. In this little review, we continue our journey with those who actively indulged in the delights and novelties of this era, and left such colorful accounts of these that they live vividly in history today.

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It was well known how very fond of Brighton the Prince and his devotees were. His grand oriental palace, the Royal Pavilion, was a monumental tribute to the place and pleasures. Everything about the Regent's life in and out of London was elegant and lively. Thomas Creevey the notable diarist recorded a dash of it, while in Brighton:

"Nov. 1st. We were at the Pavilion last night -- Mrs Creevey's three daughters, and myself -- and had a very pleasant evening ... About half-past nine, which might be a quarter of an hour after we arrived, the Prince came out of the dining-room. He was in his best humour, bowed and spoke to all of us, and looked uncommonly well, tho' very fat. He was in his full Field Marshal's uniform. He remained quite as cheerful and full of fun to the last -- half-past twelve -- asked after Mrs Creevey's health, and nodded and spoke when he passed us ... The officers of the Prince's regiment had all dined with him, and looked very ornamental monkeys in their red breeches with gold fringe and yellow boots. The Prince's band played as usual in the dining-room till 12, when the pages and footmen brought about iced champagne punch, lemonade and sandwiches ...
     The Prince looked much happier and more unembarrassed by care than I have seen him since this time six years ... Now that he has the weight of the Empire upon him, he is quite alive ...
Nov. 2nd. We were again at the Pavilion last night ... The Regent sat in the Musick Room almost all the time between Viotti, the famous violin player, and Lady Jane Houston, and he went on for hours beating his thighs the proper time for the band, and singing out aloud, and looking about him for accompaniment from Viotti and Lady Jane. It was a curious sight to see a Regent thus employed, but he seemed in high good humour ..."

And what would a bird's eye view of the Regency be without the celebrated Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth's account of it. In 1813 she came to England and conquered it, queening it at every glittering social occasion:

"We have been to a grand night at Mrs Hope's ... rooms really deserve the French epithet superbe! All of beauty, rank and fashion that London can assemble I believe I may say in the newspaper style was there ... The Prince Regent stood holding converse with Lady Elizabeth Monck one third of the night -- she leaning gracefully on a bronze table in the center of the room ... About 500 people were at this assembly -- The crowd of carriages so great that after sitting an hour waiting in ours, the coachman told us there was no chance of our getting in unless we got out and walked."

In 1818, paying another visit to England, but in a very different round of engagements, Miss Edgeworth then found herself staying with Joanna Baillie, the authoress, in the village of Hampstead.

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"For 6 or 7 miles as we approached Hampstead the whole country seemed to be what you might call a citizens paradise -- not a fools paradise, though a fastidious man of taste or an intolerant philosopher might think them synonymous terms. No, here are means of comfort and enjoyment more substantial than ever were provided in any fools paradise. Then such odd prettinesses -- Such a variety of little snuggeries and such green trellises and bowers and vinecovered fronts of houses that look as if they had been built and painted in exact imitation of the cottages in the front and side-scenes of Drury-lane ...
     Joanna Baillie and her sister, the most kind cordial warm-hearted creatures, came running down their little flagged walk to welcome us ...
     Wednesday morning. Breakfast time in this house is very pleasant. These two good sisters so neat and cheerful when we meet them in the morning -- delicately white tablecloth -- Scotch marmalade -- Excellent tea and coffee -- Everything at breakfast and at dinner at all times so neat and suitable! ... They told us the history of Mrs Fry the quaker who goes to reform the people at Newgate. They know her intimately. She is very rich -- very handsome, a delicate madonna-looking woman -- married to a man who adores her and what is much more to the purpose, supplies her with money and lets her follow her benevolent courses (I did not say whims) as she pleases."

In that same year our Miss E. also secured herself an invitation to the great country house, Bowood, which was very different to the rustic charm of Miss Baillie's 'snuggery':

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"Breakfast at 1/2 after nine -- Breakfast very pleasant tho a servant waits -- but he is an Italian, a Milanese -- seems like a machine who understands only what relates to his service -- stands by a round table placed in front of a stand of flowers -- on this table large silver lamp tea urn -- Coffee urn and all necessary for tea and coffee to be made by him. On the large round table at which we sit there appears ... mixed cut glass and beautiful china -- meat sweetmeats -- cakes -- buns -- rolls &c. in each or china basket -- numbers of cut glass ewers and cut glass sugar basins. Milanese watches all who enter -- salvers them with tea and coffee -- and cups are changed and all continually supplied without hands crossing or any I'll trouble yous. I am a convert which I thought I should never be to this system. Conversation goes on delightfully and one forgets the existence of the dumb waiter."

Undoubtedly the 'dumb waiter' had a great deal to say to his peers below stairs about Miss Edgeworth's high life above him, and some of it might have troubled her indeed! And some due thought to the classes that served the Regency gentry and the aristocratic hierarchy is starkly delivered in this exceprt from an essay on social consciousness, entitled The Praise of Chimney Sweepers', by Charles Lamb:

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" ... to see a chit no bigger than one's-self enter, one knew not by what process, into what seemed the fauces Averni -- to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades! -- to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered day-light, and then ... running out of doors, to come just in time to see the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious like some flag waved over a conquered citadel! I seem to remember having been told, that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew."

One can only hope that that stack started to smoke all the indulged inhumane inside into oblivion. Poor little 'chit'! And chimney sweepers were but the least of the horror of child labor. During the Regency, and thanks to the coinciding effects of the Industrial Revolution, children were sent to work in the mines to haul trucks of coal that warmed the hearths, but evidently not the hearts, of the callous upper classes. Indeed, this indifference to the suffering of the indigent masses, eventually so spurred on social unrest amongst them that it did, very expediently, begin the course of popular education. Though the aristocracy and the middle class could avail themselves of public and grammar schools, and the privileges of Cambridge and Oxford, the working classes, too, were, at last, given the chance of a basic education. Mr. Rush the American Minister reported as much to the Secretary of State upon the last session of Parliament:

Photo: courtesy Arnoldius

"Education. I notice the report to the House of Commons, by which it appeared how this great work is advancing in England; for that, whilst in 1812, the number of schools, under the national school system, was only 52, and the pupils 8000, this report shows that the former had risen, in 1818, to above 1400, and the number of pupils to 200,000."

In my next review of this fascinating era, we venture into the bewitching houses and gardens that universally capture our imagination to this day. From landmark architecture and landscape gardening to furniture and fashion, the elegance of the Regency in all of its most popular glory will be revealed in very dashing detail!

Sources: Richardson J. The Regency (Collins, 1973.)
Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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‘Capital Improvement’, by Lady A~, the authoress of 'The Bath Novels of Lady A~' Collection

My compass for anything and everything historical is always set on the English Regency period, an era made hugely popular and famous in contemporary times thanks to the ‘mistresspieces’ of the late, great Jane Austen. Hence, I like to call it, the ‘Regaustenian’ era of English history. Besides the fascinations of the writer herself and the obvious allure of her novels, the Regency created an ideal backdrop for someone of Jane’s singular mindset—and her satirical-political commentary. It was an era that uncannily mirrored our own and, in many ways, set the trends for the things that have become an integral part of modern society and popular culture. One of those ‘things’ was the very intriguing ‘improvement’ trend, which permeated through Regency society from the top down, beginning in the eighteenth century. The very enlightened Prince Regent was a great ‘improver’ of everything, from parks to palaces, and even Jane’s family got caught up in the craze when the grounds of the rectory at Steventon, too, underwent ‘improvement’. Landowners all over the Empire, from the aristocracy to the gentry, were employing the principles of improvement. From landscapes, gardens and agriculture to art, music, manufacture and science, just about everyone was wanting to improve something. Essentially it was the beginning of the consumerist society that we have all evolved in to, today. And, as surely in our own social hierarchies, the trend began to divide Regency society into distinct groups—the meritocrats and the mercenaries. Not unlike the worldly Crawfords in Mansfield Park, there were those that used their wealth and influence to effect changes that were as brash and they were reckless. Only think of the ‘capital improver…. brought up in a school of luxury and epicurism’, Henry Crawford, whose infamous reputation as a change-merchant spurs the droll Mr. Rushworth into a rash improvement plan of his own. Coopting Crawford into a trip to evaluate the questionably fashionable overhaul of his own ‘noblest old place in the world’, Sotherton, even ‘creep-mouse’ little Fanny Price begins to bewail the effects of its certain outcome—one being the loss of an ancient avenue of oak trees—and to decry it with the libertarian-poet Cowper’s line: 'Oh ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.'

And this was where the improvement divide began to show itself, very clearly, in a ‘moralized landscape’. There were those who instilled ‘merit’ in change and those who did nothing of the sort. Essentially ‘contrivance’ versus utilization. Particularly in landscape design these two camps spiritedly challenged one another and Humphry Repton, mentioned, oddly enough (and perhaps a revelation of Rushworth’s lack of information), several times in the Sotherton conversation in Mansfield Park, became a champion of the utilitarian landscape. He advocated against ‘contrived irregularity’; the sort of quick-fix, disrespectful and dysfunctional, pseudo-natural makeover that the likes of Mr. Rushworth and Henry Crawford wildly support.

This ‘fashionable picturesque’, as touted by Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, was contested by Repton who preferred converting estate grounds into natural landscapes from which a host of benefits were derived—from ‘social convenience’ to productive and efficient husbandry. Naturally the latter translated into allowing the much poorer tenants of the progressive landlord, of such a property, to put food on their tables more abundantly and sustain independent livelihoods. Contrast this with the mercenary ‘contrivers’ who often enclosed commons [common pastures] to simply improve the aspect of their view, while turning their tenants into laborers by usurping the public grazing land for the latter’s livestock. In such a light, the lay of the moralized landscape becomes much more distinctive under the influence of improvement.

In Merits and Mercenaries, the first ‘Bath Novel’ of my seven-book The Bath Novels of Lady A~ Collection, I wanted to highlight this trend, in particular, and its allegorical effects through a consumerist society of meritocrats and mercenaries, whose ideals and ideas turn into a veritable ‘war’. My hero, William Halford, for instance, is the epitome of the progressive improvers/meritocrats, and his acts of ‘enclosure’ on his estate are put to good effect in a ‘civic sense of responsibility’, allowing such ‘reclamation’ to ‘benefit all of the community that live off and farm on his land’. Additionally, he also applies this to the renovation of his ancestral home, which has been remodeled with every attention to ‘history, nature and art’. When his house-party guests arrive for the summer it is immediately apparent who blends well into such a milieu and who doesn’t—and why. Indeed, as the reader comes to understand William’s rectitude and libertarian mindset, so too, one is called to think of the characters that Jane Austen crafted working for—and against—such tenets, and how these shaped the characters of her most memorable casts. Darcy immediately comes to mind in this reflection, his Pemberley estate being ‘balanced’ upon the very criteria that inspired William’s just ‘realm’ in M&M, and so revealing the probity and moral nature of the man. In the same vein, Darcy’s aunt, Lady Catherine is exposed as a shameless consumer and Rosings is deliberately set in stark contrast to Pemberley, which has nothing ‘neither gaudy nor uselessly fine’.

In looking at the arrangement of each of Austen’s characters’ respective properties, tacitly or overtly reflecting improvement, one can determine what sort of people live in them, so much so, that the houses become ‘characters’ in their own right; hence, I conjecture, the choice of Mansfield Park as the title of her third (and most complex) novel.

When Fanny is enduring the rigors of ‘grog’ and ‘clatter’ in her slovenly parents’ home in Portsmouth, she is called to think of the ‘elegance, propriety, regularity, harmony … and … peace and tranquility of Mansfield’; again, an implicit reference to the home being in perfect balance with nature and art, so as to inspire order and harmony in ways that reveal the moral compass of those living in it. In Mansfield’s case, Fanny is the character most compatible with such a ‘balance’ in its elegant environment of propriety; the one most susceptible to, and benefiting from, ‘improvement’, while, in Portsmouth, her Mansfield upbringing is physically and psychologically ‘scuttled’ by the disorder and mayhem of her family’s abysmal abode and shiftless values.

Compare this with Austen's explicit expose, in Northanger Abbey, of the effects of improvement in General Tilney’s rapacious and despotic succession-houses’ enclosure: ‘The walls seemed countless in number, endless in length; a village of hot-houses seemed to arise among them, and a whole parish to be at work within the inclosure’. Here the General is doing exactly the opposite of what William Halford progressively effects in Merits and Mercenaries, by forcing the parish to labor in his aptly named ‘forcing-houses’; thus appropriating his tenants’ former livelihoods by his autocratic encroachment. Austen is very obviously drawing an overt parallel with this unjust ‘inclosure’ with the intrinsic nature of the General’s very questionable character and ethics.

Certainly the improvement trend is one of those socio-political, Austenian litmus tests which gets to the heart of class warfare in Austen’s novels and, in so doing, clarifies the significant theme of rational meritocracy versus entrenched elitism in Regency society. It weaves in the fabric of the latter, for good or for bad, the very nature of its morality or immorality and which Austen, then, scrutinizes so superlatively in her delicious microcosms of ‘3 or 4 families in a country village’. Thus the ‘prospect’ of the landscape or the houses established on it, in the light of implicit or explicit improvement, becomes something much more than a mere observation of aesthetic value. It foreshadows the prospects of the families and parties connected to the property, how their relative progressive or consumerist policies will determine their inevitable outcomes, and to which Regaustenian camp they will be ultimately assigned/relegated by so inimitable an author: Austen's most memorable meritocrats or her very machinating mercenaries.

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