Part of my nerd-girl fantasies involve just waking up one day in the Regency era of England. I would stroll the gardens of my manor house and a handsome man in breeches would come up, and we’d have a witty conversation. Then that night we’d dance together at a ball and kiss under candle-lit chandeliers. The next day I would ride some horses, be nice to servants who served me a lavish meal, wear a lovely empire-waisted dress and lament the way some members of the gentry treated lower classes. The day after that, I would marry the handsome guy in breeches (who would be rich) in a lovely village church. Everyone would cheer as we exited and got into our marriage carriage.
But the realistic part of me thinks that if the real me really were in the Regency era, it would have been less Jane Austeny and more rampant diseasy. I recently finished reading the book “Longbourne” by Jo Baker, which is sort of a retelling of “Pride and Prejudice” from the servants’ point of view (along with an aside about the Napoleonic wars which was super violent and not at all what one is prepared for in reading a Jane Austen take-off). It made the world of Ms. Austen’s novels much more real. Like how the main character servant had to wash all the menstrual napkins of all five Bennet daughters, all of whom had their period at the exact same time. (And yes, men, women who spend a lot of time together really do all menstruate at the same time. [See: my roommate/BFF and me when we lived together in college.] So like if we still lived in caves, a fertile caveman could come in and impregnate everyone all at once, which is very efficient evolutionarily but can make for a house full of PMSing drama queens nowadays.)
Just the thought of a life without tampons (or adhesive pads, for that matter) can make a modern woman shudder. But let’s start with my life from the beginning, set back about 200 years. First thing, I would be motherless. My mom almost bled to death in childbirth and had to get a ton of transfusions and stuff. Hence why I am an only child. And maybe my dad would have remarried, and I would have had an evil or lovely stepmother because he’d have to make a male heir so we could keep our house for the next generation. Or did that apply to non-rich people? Did Regency middle-classish people have to worry about entails and heirs?
Next, I probably would have flat-out died when I was 7 or 8 years old. I had repeated bouts of scarlet fever at that age. This was the same disease that made them burn everything in “The Velveteen Rabbit,” which was written about 100 years after the Regency time period. So it was killing kids pretty good for a while. But thanks to antibiotics and tonsil removal, I survived. In the early 1800s, however, they probably would have just put some leeches on me and called it a day when I croaked.
If I had survived all that scarlet fever 200 years ago, then I would have been way ugly. I had four years of braces as an adolescent. Four. Years. Because, and I quote my orthodontist, “all those teeth have a hard time fitting in such a small mouth.” So I would have been just another snaggletoothed, cavity-ridden Brit. Also, I had super bad acne. In Jane Austen times, there would be no dermatologist to fix it, and no make-up to cover up the spots during flare-ups. And no mascara. I need mascara. I have really blonde eyelashes and look very, very tired without it.
This leads me to a whole host of other hygiene things that would be missing: effective soap, toothpaste indoor plumbing (that’s a big one) and refrigeration. And the comforts - central heating and cooling, cars and planes, the internet - doesn’t that sound like an awful world?!
I really like the idea of the dresses, but you’d have to wear a corset underneath. After watching a lot of period pieces, part of me is intrigued about what kind of cleavage it could give me. If it can give Keira Knightley some round, uplifted ta-tas, maybe it could do something for me, too. But the squishing factor - yikes. And not just of the boobs, but of the ribs and stomach and all those organs in there.
Finally, I think Regency-era me would be really bored. I like having a career. It seems like English women portrayed in books in the early 1800s just did needlepoint all day. And then to entertain each other at night, they played piano and sang. Yawn. Although I wouldn’t mind being able to take a nap every day, I’d probably go stir crazy. But because I probably would be ugly without the help of modern medicine or orthodontia, I likely wouldn’t get married. So I’d be a spinster, and I don’t know if that would leave me more or less free to do things outside of embroidery.
So I conclude that the real Regency era was really only good for attractive, rich people who didn’t menstruate. Which I guess isn’t that different from modern times, after all.
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