What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  St. James’s Street—Her Majesty’s drawing room.

  THE MAJOR RITUALS

  Presentation at Court

  It marked the formal entrance of a young girl into fashionable society, her “coming out”—after which she was free, indeed, required, to marry. Young men were presented, too, after they left Oxford or Cambridge or had outgrown the awkwardness of adolescence. It might also mark a great occasion in your life, such as getting married, and, as presentation was a prerequisite to attending a court ball or concert, you had to be presented at some point if you were socially active, since everyone who was anyone attended at least one court function a year. In addition, Thackeray suggests, it was a means of certification for the morally dubious, such as Becky Sharp: “If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until she has put on a train and feathers and has been presented to her Sovereign at Court. From that august interview they come out stamped as honest women.”

  Ladies were presented at “drawing rooms,” men at “levees,” both of them held at St. James’s Palace. The requirements for presentation were very strict. Persons of rank could be presented; so, too, could the wives of clergy, military men, naval officers, physicians, and barristers, “these being the aristocratic professions.” Wives of general practitioners, solicitors, businessmen, or merchants (except bankers) could not be presented, and at least during Victoria’s reign, no divorcees or other ladies of a questionable past.

  Men had to wear buckle shoes, knee breeches, and a sword. For ladies, dress was to include a train precisely three yards long and feathers to be placed at the back of the lady’s head but that “must be high enough to be visible to Her Majesty when the lady enters the room.” Neck and shoulders were to be bare no matter how cold the weather or august (or elderly) the lady unless a doctor’s certificate had been obtained.

  And when the great day actually came—?

  Her train folded over her left arm, her wraps left behind in her carriage, a lady about to be presented was ushered into the long gallery at St. James’s, where she awaited the summons to the Presence Chamber. When the time came, she entered the room by the door pointed out to her and made her way to the throne, having let down her train, which was spread out immediately by the attendant lords-in-waiting. A card bearing her name was handed to another lord-in-waiting, who announced her to Her Majesty. The lady then curtsied until she was almost kneeling, whereupon she kissed the queen’s hand, unless the lady were a peer’s daughter or a peeress, in which case the queen kissed her on the forehead. The lady then arose, curtsying once more to the queen and also to any other members of the royal family present, and then backed out of the room, not turning her face away from the queen.

  Fitting a fire screen between a gentleman and the fire.

  The Dinner Party

  This evening the Veneerings give a banquet,” announces Dickens in Our Mutual Friend. “Fourteen in company, all told. Four pigeon-breasted retainers in plain clothes stand in line in the hall. A fifth retainer, preceding up the stair-case with a mournful air—as who should say, ‘Here is another wretched creature come to dinner; such is life!’—announces, ‘Mis-ter Twemlow!’ ”

  Dinner parties were an ordeal—if not for the guests, then certainly for the hostess. They were given enormous space and attention in contemporary etiquette books for the upwardly anxious, perhaps with good reason, given the opportunities dinner parties offered for improving the acquaintance of those who could be helpful in one’s way up the social ladder in a society whose middle class was increasingly upwardly mobile.

  The dinner party began, naturally, with the selection of guests, a process that involved choosing people who would not fight or be socially uncomfortable together—the poor curate and the titled M.P., for example, could be expected to be an unhappy mix. Since the purpose of the enterprise was conversation, perhaps a total of ten guests all told would be fixed upon as a good number. The invitations were sent out (two days to two weeks in advance, depending on the grandeur of the event) by the lady of the house, and some form of reply was expected in return.

  At the appointed hour, generally in the neighborhood of 7 P.M., on the appointed day, the guests arrived, although, after mid-century it was mandatory that one be precisely fifteen minutes late. The guests were then shown into the drawing room. (Note that the Veneering servant escorted Twemlow “up” the stairs, since the drawing room in a London town house was always on the first—our second—floor.) Everyone stood about making polite chitchat while waiting for the late arrivals. There was no shilly-shallying here, since this was a staging area for an assault on the food and not a cocktail party. Drinks were not served, and loquacity was not encouraged. The host and hostess circulated discreetly to make sure that the appropriate gentlemen were paired off with ladies of appropriate status and then arranged in order of precedence for purposes of the formal promenade in to dinner. This, since it often involved very tricky questions of status and rank, was probably in many cases the hostess’s most nerve-ranking moment during the whole evening, and, if she were uncertain, she would be well advised to consult Debrett’s or Burke’s at this point to get her ranks straight. In The Prime Minister, the problem is complicated by the fact that two “young” people are of the party, and Mr. Wharton, the father of the girl, dislikes the boy, her suitor. Trollope tells us that Mrs. Roby pairs off several couples with no difficulty. “All that had been easy,—so easy that fate had good-naturedly arranged things which are sometimes difficult of management. But then there came an embarassment. Of course it would in a usual way be right that a married man such as Mr. Happerton should be assigned to the widow Mrs. Leslie, and that the only two ‘young’ people,—in the usual sense of the word,—should go down to dinner together. But Mrs. Roby was at first afraid of Mr. Wharton, and planned it otherwise. When, however, the last moment came she plucked up courage, gave Mrs. Leslie to the great commercial man, and with a brave smile asked Lopez to give his arm to the lady he loved. It is sometimes so hard to manage these ‘little things,’ said she to Lord Mongrober as she put her hand upon his arm.” While this was going on, the guests would be able to check discreetly that their formal attire—black pants, waistcoat and jacket, with white tie, shirt, and gloves for the gentlemen; formal evening dress for the ladies—was in order.

  The servant then announced that dinner was served.

  The couples in order of status then proceeded “down” (in the town house the dining room would be on the ground, or entry-level, floor) or “in” (in the country house, dining and drawing rooms were generally both on the ground floor) to the dinner that would follow. Typically, the hostess would have arranged it so that the man of the house took the highest-ranking lady by the arm. Mrs. Roby, the hostess, takes the arm of the highest-ranking gentleman, Lord Mongrober, in The Prime Minister. They then led a grand procession of couples into the dining room, where, with any luck, a damasked tablecloth awaited them along with a butler and two footmen.

  The man of the house seated his escort on his right, it having already been arranged, of course, for men and women to alternate down the table. They would not necessarily be able to see each other once seated; the epergne might have made its appearance in polite society by now, a great heavy, many-armed candlesticklike thing which sits ornamentally in the center of the table to add an “accent.” Like the plate and various other objects and pieces of furniture, e.g., the sideboard, it might well serve the purpose of conspicuous display that the dinner party has, perhaps, in part been given to fulfill. “Hideous solidity was the characteristic of the Podsnap plate,” says Dickens of their dinner party in Our Mutual Friend. “Everything was made to look as heavy as it could and to take up as much room as possible. Everything said boastfully, ‘Here you have as much of me in my ugliness as if I were only lead; but I am so many ounces of precious metal worth so much an ounce—wouldn’t you like to mel
t me down?’ A corpulent straddling epergne, blotched all over as if it had broken out in an eruption rather than been ornamented, delivered this address from an unsightly silver platform in the centre of the table.”

  In the event it were summer or there were only a little chill in the air, a fire lit in the room some hours earlier might have been allowed to die down; in the event it were freezing, a roaring fire might be needed throughout dinner. To avoid roasting half the guests and freezing the other half in this latter event, a fire screen would be placed in front of the fire to shield those nearest from its direct blaze, or, probably less frequently, a horseshoe table might be used, with the open part of the shoe encircling the fire itself. Sometimes a guest was simply neglected, however. At Plantagenet Palliser’s Matching Priory in Can You Forgive Her? we are told Alice Vavasor “occupied one side of the table by herself, away from the fire, where she felt cold and desolate, in the gloom of the large half-lighted room.”

  Then the eating began.

  In Can You Forgive Her? Trollope describes a modest country repast for a much humbler gathering than that assembled at Matching Priory, a group numbering the unattached Mrs. Greenow and the rustic Farmer Cheesacre among its members. “The dinner was exactly what a dinner ought to be for four persons. There was soup, fish, a cutlet, a roast fowl, and some game.” They got off easy. A typical dinner given for a substantial group of, say, twelve, could easily run to ten courses—not counting dessert, coffee, and walnuts—and would probably be on the order of the repast described by the contemporary author of London at Dinner. “A delicate soup and turtle are handed round—nothing on the tables except flowers and preserved fruits in old Dresden baskets, a bill of fare placed next to every person, a turbot with lobster and Dutch sauces, carved by an able domestic on the side-board, and a portion of red mullet with Cardinal sauce are offered to every guest; cucumber and the essential cruet stands bringing up the rear. The ‘flying dishes,’ as the modern cooks call the oyster or marrow pates, follow the fish. The entrees are carried round, a supreme de volaille aux truffes, a sweetbread au jus, lamb cutlets, with asparagus, peas, a fricandeau à l’oseille. . . . Either venison, roast saddle of mutton, or stewed beef à la jardinière are then produced, the accessories being salad, beetroot, vegetables, French and English mustard. A Turkey poult, duckling, or green goose, commences the second course, peas and asparagus following in their course; plovers’ eggs in aspic jelly, a mayonaise of fowl succeeding; a macédoine of fruit, meringues à la crème, a marasquino jelly, and a chocolate cream, form the sweets. Sardines, salad, beetroot, celery, anchovies, plain butter and cheese, for those who are gothic enough to eat it. Two ices, cherry-water and pineapple cream, with the fruit of the season, furnish the dessert. Two servants or more, according to the number of the party, must attend exclusively to the wine; sherry, Madeira, and champagne, must ever be flowing during dinner.”

  Service was either à la française or—increasingly as the century wore on—à la russe. The former meant that the dishes were left on the table for the guests to serve themselves, which, among other things, posed embarassing difficulties for the gentlemen who had not mastered the mandatory art of carving. A la russe, on the other hand, involved having the footman appear discreetly at your elbow with the dish of the moment, from which you could then serve yourself, whereupon the footman retired, leaving the table free of serving dishes.

  As the gentlemen began on their first course (or awaited its delivery by the silent footman), they were supposed to embark on polite conversation with the lady on their right. They then tucked themselves into the soup, after which the first of the wines was served, perhaps claret. The custom of “taking wine”—which called for catching the eye of someone else, looking meaningfully at them, and raising one’s glass in their direction while they raised theirs eloquently back—would have vanished by the 1860s except in eccentric rustic households. In Pickwick, on the other hand, which, the author informs us, takes place in 1827, the custom was still apparently going strong. “Glass of wine, sir,” says the “stranger” at dinner, to which Mr. Pickwick replies, “With pleasure,” “and the stranger took wine, first with him, and then with Mr. Snodgrass, and then with Mr. Tupman, and then with Mr. Winkle, and then with the whole party together, almost as rapidly as he talked.”

  It was hard to get good help, as everyone sadly acknowledged. However, if the hostess had adequately prepared for the evening, the help should have been able to rise to the occasion. (The need of having men to serve at dinner sometimes necessitated pressing the gardener or groom into service when there were few male indoor staff, occasionally with inelegant or disastrous results.) The butler was in charge of the actual service of the meal, seeing to the wine himself and overseeing the carrying of the plates by the footmen. (They might often have had to carry dishes a considerable distance in a great country house, sometimes with silver covers to keep them warm, since the Victorians hated kitchen smells and—where possible—located their kitchens so far away from dining areas that it was no small trick to keep the food warm in transit.) There was no noise. The dining room would have been carpeted to eliminate the sound of the footmen’s feet clattering against the oak floors; special non-creaking shoes for the help were also suggested in this connection. The footmen did not need to be told what to do—all this had been thoroughly explained earlier so that the main purpose of the evening—food and conversation—might proceed uninterrupted. If there were problems with the service, too bad. One did not ever talk to or about the servants during dinner.

  Notwithstanding the vast number of dishes, guests were not expected to eat everything. It was understood that the board groaned under a plentitude of dishes and that even the fattest and most overstuffed red-faced Victorian could not ingest everything offered him. However, one was to eat certain things in a certain way. “In London it is not the custom to put the knife in the mouth,” says Herbert Pocket to Pip in Great Expectations when he first arrives in London. This may seem like Pocket’s facetious banter to a present-day reader, but the advice was echoed perfectly seriously by contemporary etiquette books. It had evidently been customary to eat peas, for example, in this manner. When Pocket tells Pip not to do so, it is because the custom still lingered in certain country areas. Fish was always eaten with a fork in the right hand, a piece of bread in the left—no knives. (Both fish and after-dinner fruit knives—the good hostess knew this—had to be of silver. In this pre-stainless-steel age it was found that fish and fruit juices discolored steel.)

  Eventually the main courses came to an end. Now the tablecloth would be removed and dessert and champagne wines would be served. After the dessert, the ladies withdrew to the drawing room. Thus, Mortimer, we are told, leaves the Veneering dinner party to get a message after the meal “as the disappearing skirts of the ladies ascended the Veneering staircase.” The ladies would proceed to the drawing room for coffee or tea, while the gentlemen circulated the port clockwise (or “way of the sun—through the button-hole,” that being on the left, as the “stranger” puts it in Pickwick).

  The gentlemen might even smoke, something that was never done by a gentleman in the presence of a lady, even with her permission. This period of separation of the two sexes was not necessarily a long one—perhaps only half an hour. Weighty subjects might be touched on or racy stories told by the men, and an American guest was horrified in 1810 to discover a chamber pot being withdrawn from the sideboard and put to use—the conversation flowing freely all the while—during this period.

  Eventually, however, the host would perceive that his guests were becoming too free in their speech and suggest that it was time to join the ladies. They then made their way to the drawing room where they would enjoy coffee, tea, and mixed conversation for perhaps an hour. It then being about eleven o’clock, the carriages were called for, the ladies handed down by the gentlemen and—if it were the London season and they were “in town”—it was now time for the main event of the evening—the ball.


  The Ball

  The ball was one of the highlights of the social season. Precisely how it differed from an ordinary dance does not seem to have been a matter on which there was general agreement; one commentator suggested it had to do with the number of people in attendance: 200 to 500 participants made an event a ball, fewer made it merely a “dance.” Perhaps having an orchestra rather than just a piano player was key, too, and having more elaborate decorations. In any event, people had them and seemed generally to recognize them when they did.

  Invitations from the lady of the house went out three to six weeks in advance:

  Monday, January 4

  Mrs. St. John Cholmondeley requests the pleasure of Mr. Charles Beaurhamp’s company at a Evening Party. on Monday. January 28.