by Judy Jones
YOU SHOULD PARDON THE
EXPRESSION—STRAIGHT
One of the quainter, and more confusing, fixtures in your nineteenth-century novel is the local clergyman. On the one hand, it was apparently hard to arrange an evening of whist without deferring to the rector; on the other hand, his wife always seemed to show up wearing someone’s cast-off frock. Or was that the vicar’s wife? And why, pray tell, wasn’t the curate invited?
RECTOR: The head clergyman of a country parish, who had rights to the parish lands and owned its tithes. He held his post for life and could pass it on to his sons. In the eighteenth century, most rectors were the children of farmers and tradesmen, with no social status to speak of, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century, enough of them had made a killing in local agriculture to turn the clergy into a fit calling for the younger sons of gentry. As a result, the nineteenth-century rector was usually an educated gentleman, who in theory at least, was the social equal of the local squire, with whom he was expected to play cards and go grouse hunting. He functioned as if he were a landowner and often devoted most of his time to raising crops profitably while his underpaid assistants ran the church. In reality, however, most rectors had neither the independent income, nor the knack for turning a profit from parish lands, necessary to keep up a gentleman’s lifestyle. They were often dependent on upper-class patrons who treated them like poor relations. The classic example of this type of rector is, once again, the insufferable Mr. Collins, who spends his life fawning upon his patroness, the Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
VICAR: A sort of freelance parson who stands in for a dead or absent rector or who heads a parish in which the tithes belong to someone else (e.g., the local squire). The vicar lived in a vicarage instead of a rectory, collected an allowance or salary in lieu of tithes, had no control over the land, and was only a transient (which is to say, he hadn’t been established in the neighborhood for generations). In terms of education and breeding, however, he was the equal of a rector and, if he had a big enough independent income, could one-up him. After tithes were abolished in England in 1936, the terms “rector” and “vicar” became synonymous.
PARSON: A very general term (thought to derive from the French personne, which, reassuringly, means “person”) for the head of a parish—i.e., a rector or a vicar— or for any Protestant minister below the rank of bishop who has enough authority to conduct religious services.
CURATE: Assistant to the rector or vicar, who usually did most of the tedious church work of the parish. Members of the “inferior clergy,” curates were known for being poor, insecure, and a little uncouth; in your novel, the curate will probably have a large brood of ragged children for whom the gentle heroine is constantly making up baskets of provisions. Don’t confuse the English curate with the French curé, or “parish priest.” (And le vicaire is conversely, le curé’s assistant.)
BEADLE: A minor parish officer who along with various nonecclesiastical tasks, ushers people in and out of Sunday services, delivers messages for the parson, and generally keeps the parishioners, especially the small boy parishioners, in line. In short, a sort of church constable.
SEXTON: A kind of dignified janitor, who takes care of church property, rings the church bells, and digs the graves. THE DRINKS: WHAT TO SERVE WITH THE
OYSTERS, THE SOUP, THE FISH, THE
SAVOURY, THE GAME, THE TRIFLE,
AND THE CIGAR
First, you need to know that upstairs, the lords and ladies drank wine, bottles and bottles of it. Oh, a gentleman in need of fortification might have the occasional brandy or, if the day was hot and he was in a democratic mood, a beer, but wine was, for centuries, the traditional beverage of the upper classes. In the nineteenth century, when French wines became available again for the first time in a hundred years and vintage wines were all the rage, any gentleman worthy of the name was expected to keep a well-stocked cellar, to provide six or seven varieties with dinner, and to deal with them as a connoisseur. As Routledge’s Etiquette for Gentlemen put it back in 1865, “How to eat soup, and what to do with a cherry-stone are weighty considerations when taken as an index of social status; and it is not too much to say, that a man who elected to take claret with fish, or ate peas with his knife, would justly risk the punishment of being banished from good society.” We agree, in principle … but what’s claret?
CLARET: The British term for any red Bordeaux wine (luckily, they call their Burgundy Burgundy). Claret has a special niche in the English heart because back in the Middle Ages, when Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry Plantagenet, Bordeaux and its vineyards became British possessions. Ever since, claret has been the preferred table wine in upper-class British households. Even during the Francophobic eighteenth century, when the English monarchy tried to replace the French wine trade with that of the Portuguese, the French managed to smuggle claret into England by shipping it via Portugal. Still, claret didn’t really come into its own in England until the nineteenth century and the onset of the vintage-wine obsession. Claret was served with several different courses at Victorian dinners, and it was standard practice to have a few bottles on hand for high tea. Toward the end of the century, when society began to regard the seven-wine dinner as a bit excessive, claret, along with champagne, became the all-around dinner wine, and some young lords even began to substitute it for port as an after-dinner drink.
PORT: The drink of choice of the upper class; a sweet, red, fortified wine originally from Oporto, in Portugal. Although early port was simply mediocre Portuguese table wine, Portugal (as Britain’s oldest continuous ally) always got such favorable trade agreements, and shipped so much wine to England, that eventually the English got used to the stuff. The cult of port, however, didn’t start until the nineteenth century, by which time the Portuguese had learned two important things: One, if they put the wine in a flat-sided bottle and left it lying around for a long time, it tasted better; and two, adding a little brandy not only helped it “travel,” but also provoked an altogether more enthusiastic response from the consumer. Before long, the British nobility was passing the port, tenderly decanted, with the venison, the game, the cheese, and again with dessert; and gentlemen looked forward to tossing off another glass or two (which in the parlance of the day meant at least a bottle apiece)after the ladies had retired to the drawing room. This, by the way, was vintage port that had been aged at least twenty years, the absolute minimum before the wine was considered fit to drink. It was traditional for the well-heeled Victorian father to lay down a pipe of port (about 140 U.S. gallons’ worth) at the birth of his son or godson, to be opened after the boy’s twenty-first birthday. The equivalent gesture today, in terms of generosity, might be to present the boy with a kilo of cocaine.
HOCK: Although “hock” originally referred to wine from the area around Hochheim, Germany, it became a general British term for any white Rhine wine. In Victorian times, hock’s place was on the dinner table, in its traditional green glass, next to the claret with the roast meat course and the dessert.
SACK: At various points in British history, sack referred to a dry white wine from Spain or the Canary islands, or to a heavy, sweetened, amber-colored wine from any of several Mediterranean wine-producing regions. Very popular in Shakespeare’s day, it eventually gave way to sherry-sack, or sherry.
SHERRY: The world’s most popular fortified wine. Sherry comes from Spain, although the British are, in a way, its adoptive parents. Real sherry, according to them, comes from Andalusia, Spain (the name “sherry” is an anglicization of Jerez, the capital of the sherry region), the way real champagne comes from the Champagne region of France. The British have always preferred the finos, the light, dry sherries, which make the best aperitif. Americans, by contrast, are mainly familiar with the olorosos, the second, and inferior, type of sherry, which is sweet, heavy, earthy, and the basis for brands like Harvey’s Bristol Cream. There’s no such thing as a vintage sherry, but finos can be very elegant; the Victorians used to like them with t
he fish and soup at the beginning of a meal, and again at the end, with dessert. They believed sherry should be properly decanted and served in ordinary wine glasses, never in those thimble-sized “sherry glasses” common today. Amontillado, which you probably remember from Edgar Allan Poe’s horror story, is a medium-dry sherry, halfway between a fino and an oloroso.
MADEIRA: A heavily fortified white wine from the Portuguese island of Madeira. This was one of the first fortified wines to make it big in England, having arrived in the seventeenth century along with the Portuguese bride of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza. (Actually, Catherine brought the whole island as part of her dowry, but Charles, who was having a cash-flow problem at the time, settled for money instead.) Catherine loved to sip Madeira in the morning as she munched a slice of Madeira cake; before long all the fashionable ladies of the kingdom got into the habit of tossing off a little glass to get the day started, a practice that lasted well into the Victorian era. As a result, Madeira, besides being a standard dessert wine, had a reputation as a ladies’ drink. For the record, Madeira comes both dry and sweet; malmsey, in a butt of which George, Duke of Clarence, was allegedly drowned by order of his brother, later Richard III, was one of the sweet varieties.
SAUTERNE: The greatest of the white Bordeaux wines, grown in the Sauternes region of the province of Bordeaux. It is a sweet, intense, fruity wine served, then and now, with dessert.
TOKAY: Another sweet dessert wine; as you can see, the end of a Victorian dinner was a little like the climax of a fireworks display, with five or six wines being presented simultaneously, along with the cakes. This one is golden brown and comes from the town of Tokay, or Tokaj, in Hungary.
NEGUS: Back in Samuel Pepys’ time, this was a simple mixture of wine, water, and sugar named for one Colonel Negus, whose accomplishments are somewhat vague. Johnson and Boswell drank about a bottle of negus apiece every night. Later, because port was the wine most commonly used to make the concoction, “negus” came to mean mulled port.
MEAD: A sweet, fermented honey or honey-flavored wine the Babylonians were drinking back in 2000 b.c. (For your trivia collection: They declared mead the official wedding drink, stipulating that the bride’s parents be required to keep the groom well supplied with “the wine of the bee” for the month following the marriage; that month became known as honeymonth, hence our honeymoon.) It was a great favorite of the ancient Britons, who believed in its powers as an intoxicant, a medicine, and an aphrodisiac. For centuries, making mead was a sort of cottage industry in English monasteries. It began to die out, partly because Henry VIII suppressed the monasteries and partly because the English honeybee went into a slump. Samuel Pepys caught Charles II drinking metheglin, a kind of spiced mead, as late as the seventeenth century, but the wine became virtually extinct after that. Two reasons to know what it is: You’re sure to run across the term somewhere in English Lit., and recently, in a fever of nostalgia, mead-making became a British cottage industry all over again.
So much for the goings on upstairs. Downstairs and out on the farms, respectable working folk were consuming vast quantities of beer (in 1876 alone, they downed thirty-four gallons for every man, woman, and child in the country). Beer drinking was not only respectable, it smacked of patriotism; nearly everyone brewed his own at home (or rather, her own—brewing was considered woman’s work) from local English barley. What’s more, it was a lot safer than drinking from the typhoid-ridden public water systems, which is why ten-year-old boys at Eton and Harrow drank beer for breakfast as a matter of course. Naturally, with a lifetime of beer drinking—and custom-beer drinking at that—behind one, some very specific tastes arose, such as:
BITTER: A traditionally English and still very popular type of draught, or keg, beer (although now you can find it in little bottles) that is light, dry, strong, and relatively high in both hops and alcohol content (compared, that is, with the lager-type beers favored in the United States; bitter is neither the strongest nor the bitterest beer in England). Always ordered as “a pint of bitter,” which will get you a tankard, and never to be confused with bitters, the root extract used to spike a cocktail.
PORTER: A dark brown, heavily hopped brew with a 6 to 7 percent alcohol content (most U.S. beers average 3 to 6 percent) and a taste of roasted malt. Porter, which was originally called “porter’s beer” or “porter’s ale,” probably because it started out as a drink for porters and other common laborers, was an exception to the nineteenth-century trend toward lighter, less alcoholic beers, and it became one of the great pop hits of its time. Rumored to be more healthful than beer, it was a big favorite with actresses and singers, who swore by its salutary effects on their voices, and one election campaign revolved around the slogan “Peace, Plenty, and Porter.” It turned out to be just a flash in the pan, though; today porter is virtually extinct.
STOUT: An even stronger, more heavily hopped version of porter. This one managed to hang on, thanks to the Guinness family, with whom the word “stout” is now more or less synonymous.
As for the class distinctions of beer (which, by the way, is the same thing as ale in Britain), they’re a little trickier than those of wine. Although, on the whole, beer was a working-class drink, it did have its fans among the upper echelons, including the residents of certain colleges at Oxford and Cambridge—most of which had their own breweries—who became famous for producing a very dark, semi-lethal collector’s item called “Audit Ale.” Moreover, the rise of the big English breweries around the beginning of the nineteenth century changed the whole picture. Great fortunes were made, and with them great families, whose members suddenly bore titles and sat in the House of Lords. Under the circumstances, beer drinking pretty much had to become socially acceptable. Today, among beers, anything goes, with the possible exception of a sweetish variety called “mild,” which still has a faintly low-class image.
Meanwhile, sailors and other rough trade, when they weren’t drinking beer, were downing:
GROG: Any liquor, but especially rum, that’s been diluted with water. Grog was named after Admiral Edward Vernon (whom the sailors called “Old Grog” because he always wore a grogram coat), who gave the order that the daily rations of rum aboard Her Majesty’s ships be diluted. Pretty soon, taverns catering to sailors had taken up the practice, and grog became what one settled for when one couldn’t afford a stiffer dose.
And at the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, the wretched rabble were killing themselves with bad English gin. GIN had been promoted back at the start of the eighteenth century by William of Orange, who considered it the perfect drink for the workingman, forgetting, for the moment, that the only decent gin was still being produced in Holland and was much too expensive for poor people. So the lower orders bought what they could afford, lured by the promise of getting “drunk for a penny, dead-drunk for two-pence, and straw for nothing” (meaning that the pub owner would drag them to the cellar to let them sleep it off), and for the rest of the century, gin drinking leveled the poor like a plague. By the mid-nineteenth century, the gin epidemic had begun to taper off, except for the curious defection of many respectable working-class women from beer to gin, after which gin was nicknamed “Mother’s Ruin.” THE CARRIAGES: WHEELS OF FORTUNE
In the nineteenth century, one’s carriage, or carriages, had as many social connotations as one’s car, or cars, do in Los Angeles today. (Of course, back then, one had to be at least moderately upper crust to own a carriage at all.) Yet most of us, faced with the mention of a cabriolet, are at as much of a loss as Jane Eyre would have been at the mention of a Volvo station wagon. The following guide may be of some help; keep in mind, however, that all carriages were custom-made, and hybrids abounded.
PHAETON: Any of a bewilderingly large family of four-wheeled open carriages that marked the carriage’s turning point from means-of-transportation to status symbol. The earliest models, the eccentric and risky Highflyers, inspired the prince regent—and everyone else—to take up driving as a sport. La
ter, when the regent, now George IV, became too fat to climb into the original version, a low phaeton (pronounced “FAY-ut-en”) was devised. Drawn by docile ponies, the low phaeton became the only acceptable vehicle for a lady to drive.
Phaeton
CURRICLE: A racy little Italian import, also fashionable during the Regency, when young gentlemen prided themselves on being accomplished “whips.” Two-wheeled, and drawn by a pair of horses instead of just one, curricles were built for speed. They were used for both town and country driving and became very popular in the trendy aristocrat’s version of drag racing.
CABRIOLET: The sports car of its time; superseded the curricle as the carriage for the fashionable man-about-town. Considered the perfect bachelor’s carriage, it held two passengers comfortably, sheltered by a hood with a curtain that could be drawn for privacy. Relatively economical since it was pulled by only one horse, the cabriolet nevertheless allowed for a certain amount of ostentation: One could— and did—equip one’s carriage with the largest, finest horse one could find, accessorized, in case anyone missed the point, by the tiniest available groom.
Cabriolet
