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Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are channelling our inner Colin Firths and emerging soaking wet from the lake of history to bring you a special guide to love and courtship in Georgian Britain. To help us navigate this topic with sense and sensibility, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, she's a Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow in History and History of Art
at Oxford Brookes University, where she studies the history of gender and emotions in 18th and 19th century Britain. Indeed, she's the author of The Game of Love in Georgian England, Courtship, Emotions and Material Culture. Perfect for us is Dr Sally Holloway. Welcome, Sally. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Delighted to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, actor, improviser, author and podcaster, a quintuple threat
You'll know her from the award-winning podcast Griefcast, which is now a beautiful book, and you'll have seen her on all the telly, including Catholic News For You, QI, and Would I Lie To You? But more importantly, you'll remember her from our podcast episodes on the European witch craze, Malleus Maleficarum, and Agrippina the Younger. It's the wonderful Cariad Lloyd. Welcome back, Cariad. Oh, Mr Jenner, what a pleasure it is to finally be invited to your salon. I blush indeed. My countenance is not so fair.
And to meet Miss Sally as well, whose work I have admired from afar, I must confess. Tis more than one could ask for on such a fine and temperate morning. Oh, I'm so excited. LAUGHTER
We're fully committed. Yes, she is also a member of Jane Austen improv show, Austentatious, and will speak like that at any opportunity. I was going to say, this is a reflex for you, right? I mean, Austentatious, a brilliant improv comedy troupe. That means, I'm guessing, you're already an expert on Georgian social mores.
I definitely wouldn't use the word expert, Mr Jenner, as kind as you are to my expert skills. No, no, I am more of a flitterer of such affections. I know a little bit, but definitely not as much as the excellent professor. So, what do you know?
This is where I have a go at guessing what our lovely listener will know about today's subject, and I'm willing to bet quite a lot. Listeners will have at least watched one Jane Austen adaptation. They get blooming everywhere. Maybe you swoon over Rickman and Winslet in Sense and Sensibility, or Colin Firth and his sexy see-through shirt in Pride and Prejudice, or perhaps you're one of the astonishing 82 million people who watch
or the slightly fewer number of people who were charmed by Mr Malcolm's List, still a very nice movie, or maybe you fell for Anya Taylor-Joy's Emma or Dakota Johnson's sort of Fleabag-style mugging in Persuasion, there's Love and Friendship, my favourite, with the very funny Kate Beckinsale.
Basically, there's loads and loads of stuff. This is one of the most romanticised eras in British history, and I say romanticised in both meanings of the word. But what were the real rules and rituals of courtship in Georgian Britain? What did a man of good fortune do when in want of a wife?
Well, today we are going to lay out a how-to dating guide. So we're going to crack on, and Dr Sally, basics first for our listeners who aren't entirely familiar with the Georgians as an era. Who, what, when, why, how? What are the Georgians? So Georgian Britain, it's the period from about 1714 to 1830. It's when it's ruled by the Hanoverian kings, George I, II, III, IV.
And we commonly refer to the era generally as the long 18th century. So it's a time of massive social and cultural change. And we're going to be talking about the typical journey that a so-called ordinary person might go on as they search for a spouse. If we're going to have a dating guide, we need to have a couple. So let's imagine our typical middle-class London living singleton, Cariad, what's his name? Oh, Mr. Barnaby Sykes, surely. Yeah.
Mr. Barnaby Sykes. And Barnaby is thinking of finding a wife. It's that time. And what do you think his motivation is for joining the marriage market, Cariad? I can only imagine, dear Mr. Jenner, that he is looking to improve his circumstances somewhat.
Normally that's what it is in Georgian. I'm struggling to keep up the constant Georgian voice because it's quite difficult to answer a question. Mr Sykes, well, it depends what his parents do really, doesn't it? And what he needs to get to make sure he keeps where he is or moves upwards. Not entirely to do with love, who's in his circle that he would think would be a good wife, bearer of children and hopefully...
Bring in some cash. Sally, are we agreeing with Cariad's analysis there for the middling sort? I think actually it's a lot more about romantic love than you think. So yes, it is important to make a strategic match, but a strategic match with someone who you are in love with. Ah.
This whole ideology of love became much, much more important during the 18th century, particularly for middling and genteel people like Mr. Barnaby Sykes. People like that would have found that love was being celebrated right across culture. You know, in the novels they read, in the poetry they read, in the art they saw, in philosophy. And it wasn't this sort of frothy idea, but actually something that was really important in revealing your morality and your refinement as a civilised person. Oh.
Oh, that's interesting. But there is that line from Matthew Bolton, don't marry for money, but marry where money is. So funny because it also sounds a bit like a Michael Bolton lyric. And I'm like, are Matthew and Michael related? How old do you think our bachelor, Mr. Barnaby Sykes, is? And what's the age range of ladies that he is seeking to match with? So I imagine Barnaby being like 21. 21.
And I think girls were sort of on the scene from 17, 18. Sally? That's a pretty good guess. Yeah, I mean, women were typically, you know, 23, 24. Men were mid-20s, maybe 26, 27, 28. So our young romantic hopeful, Barnaby Sykes, has decided to fall in love. But how does he find a date? Middling and genteel people, family and friends were really important. And you might meet someone...
at one of their houses, you know, in a group of friends that you were all going to the theatre together. You might- Card party. Card parties, yeah, gaming or visits for tea or cake or dinner, or you might meet people walking to church and back.
Or if you were much poorer, you might meet someone at a fair. It wasn't completely calculated, but it also doesn't mean that you could do anything you wanted for love. You were just sort of gently shepherded into the right direction. For me, the funniest thing is how much walking they did. Like the walking around the room. It's like when you think of the levels you go to when there isn't a television to watch. And the promenades as well, like going for a promenade in town was such a thing. So much walking. Walking out in public squares, walking through town, walking around in front of other people.
Yes, because then also if you're being gently shepherded, what you're saying is I was out walking with Barnaby Sykes. And everybody saw me out walking with Barnaby Sykes. There's no point walking with Barnaby Sykes if no one can see you doing it. Oh my God. We've got our Barnaby Sykes. The lady he's chatting to is rather boring, but he spots a hot young lady on the other side of the room.
And she is called Cariad. He does see past the children squabbling and Mr. Henriksen going on again. The finest pair of eyes he has ever set upon it was, of course, Miss Lydia Misschester. OK.
Alright, so we've got Barnaby and Lydia. They've met across a crowded room and their families are willing to drift them in. But what's the next stage of Georgian dating then? He might sort of open it by offering her some gifts to see how interested she is and how well they're received. So if she's like, alright, thanks. He's like, well, back away. But if she's like...
And like, what is it like brooches, necklaces? Like how much money does he have to spend? You've gone big there, Carrie. Well, I want to know. I want to know what's been turned out my door. Well, I've studied one guy who he offers this woman sweets and she accepts them. But then the next day she puts her head down and walks past him on the other side of the street. Oh, it wasn't a successful offering. That is brutal. You're dead to me. You're dead to me. There we go.
God, that's harsh, isn't it? Because I feel like the blokes have got to invest a bit here, haven't you, when you're not sure? Sweets is one option, but that can backfire. Cariad's brooches, is that a bit too fancy or is brooch good? Only once you're much further in. So you'd open with something quite cheap, like a ribbon. Oh. And then escalate towards the end, offering things like...
rings and jewellery. A new trim for your bonnet, Miss Misschester. Oh, indeed. Thank you so much, Mr Sykes. And green to match my eyes. You are kind. Yes, that sort of thing. But building up to hopefully like emeralds, basically. The things that you selected varied massively according to social class. So if you were poorer, you might gift things that you could collect for free.
like posies of flowers that you collect from a meadow, coins that you'd engraved by hand. You'd smooth it to a blank face and then engrave, you know, someone's initials on it. Oh, wow. I've sanded off the king and I've put I love you on it. Oh, thank you, sir. It's all right. I'm afraid Mr Sykes is coming at any moment. I must excuse myself. Oh, my God. That's really creepy, the coin. And then...
You'd insert a stay bus down the front of your corset. They'd be engraved with things like hearts and flowers and initials. And sometimes some of them have little secret compartments in the back that you could unscrew and put a lock of your hair, bringing the two bodies together, the body of the woman who wears it and the body of the man whose hair is in it. So two hearts next to each other and then a bit of hair to make it creepy. Yeah, it was like, yeah. You say two hearts, what you mean is a woman's body and some hair? Yes, against it.
Barnaby and Lydia have not had a smooch yet. Are they holding hands at this stage? Yeah, people hold hands and, you know, women in their diaries talk about sneaking off to a back room for kisses with men. Oh, OK. And Cariad, we're going to show you some specific types of love tokens that were gifted by wealthier individuals. And we're going to show you some images now and you can describe them for us. Oh, I'm excited. I hope it's a lock of creepy hair. Whoa!
It's not far off a lock of creepy hair. Wow. So it's two... Well, one is a locket where someone has painted very small a mouth, but they have not painted anything else. So I assume they're saying, look, here is my lips for you. But it looks super creepy. And there's a brooch where someone's only done an eye and it seems to be surrounded by pearls and it seems to be crying diamonds. Okay.
I guess in those times that was romantic, but it looks really weird. Why is it crying diamonds? It's a woman's eye and it's about the purity of her love. And then the lips are for kissing. Do you kiss the locket? Yeah, people kiss their love letters. They kiss their gifts. They kissed, you know, lips in pictures like this.
It's all about creating that feeling of being together and creating an emotional bond at a distance, at a time when you couldn't just send someone a text. Lovely. All right. So we've got various gifts you can give, but let's move on to another tool of courtship rituals. And this is a really big one. This is very important, actually. Cariad, if you really fancy someone and you're trying to lock them down and make this legit, what do you do next? Oh.
Oh, so it's not a gift? It's a gift of sorts. I'm thinking more of communicating your thoughts. Oh, a love letter? Yeah, a love letter. Ah, a love letter. A missive, sorry. A love missive, I would have said. Romantic epistle. Sorry. After the gift giving, or perhaps parallel to the gift giving, is the...
writing your thoughts and feelings and declaring your love on paper? Yeah. Once a couple embarked on a romantic correspondence, that was a sure sign that they were on the road to an engagement. You didn't just correspond with anybody in that vein. And some dads wouldn't let men correspond with their daughters until they had proven to them that they had the means to marry. He's not coming around here with his letters? Do we know what he's intending?
Keep your second-class stamps to yourself, please, Mr Sykes. My intentions are good, sir. Yeah, oh, my God, I didn't realise. I thought those letters were, like, casual. It was, like, the opposite. It was serious. And women in these letters, they described how hesitant they were to start this correspondence because they knew the degree of commitment that it entailed. So a lot of it is women saying...
oh, I'm not sure about this. The increase of the letters importance is also to do with rising literacy rates. This is an era where more people can read and write. So letter writing is becoming this really, really important way of forming a person's identity and formulating their feelings. And the letters could be sent much, much more quickly because of the professionalisation of the postal system and improvement of the country's road networks. So it's becoming more immediate.
and more intimate. The letter itself was a really important sort of gift, just like the tokens we've been talking about. So it had to be written on really good quality paper. So it might be gilded with little gold leaf around the edges, be several pages in length, with loads of postscripts at the end. So at the end of them, it often says, you know, PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5, because you want to give this impression that you just can't tear yourself away from the page. You hang up.
No, you hang up. No, you hang up. No, you hang up. PS1. My PS4. Exactly. Oh my God, that's so interesting. The time you're putting into this, Lassa, is the time that you're putting into your lover. It's a material device, you know, through which you're building this relationship.
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All right, so we've got quite a sort of important script of dating here. Where are they learning how to do this? Are mum and dad explaining it? Are they reading it in books? I mean, to some extent it comes from literature. So, I mean, if you were very devout, people made a lot of references to the Bible, Book of Common Prayer, things like Paradise Lost. That was a way to show their piety and perhaps, you know, have a few theological debates with your lover, you know. LAUGHTER
Not to brag, but I've just finished Paradise Lost. So if you want to chat through some of the main themes, I can send you my essay. It's showing you're clever. You know, it's showing your wit and your skill and your education. You're having these debates in writing. It's showing are you literally on the same page with this person or not? You know, are you compatible with them or not? And the other thing to mention here, Carianne, is these letters, they're not private.
No, I guess not, because you always have to have a chaperone, right? So even when you're walking, someone should be walking a little behind you, older sister or mother or aunt or someone. So I guess your letters are being read...
So is that why then you're going a bit more in code? You're hoping the parents haven't read Paradise Lost. They won't know what I'm talking about. That's why you're going more in code through the gifts. You can't spell it out in writing because everyone's reading your letters. Right, yeah. As a woman, your friends would read a man's letters, your mum might read them, your aunties might read them, and then they might help you write the response as well. Wow. And then often you'd send it unsealed. So this was before people used envelopes.
you'd send it not sealed. So then again, everyone could open it and read it all through. Oh, wow. So it's not even secure communication, right? It's not even WhatsApp. They're just sending anything. The server was completely open. Wow. The lack of security on the old sending back your message is a bit worrying. Yeah.
People said things in their letters like, oh, I've got so much to say to you, but perhaps I'll save it for when we're in person because they didn't want to write it down because everyone's going to, you know, don't want everyone else to read it. The next thing we were going to talk to you about, Cariad, was poetry. That's another huge element of the courting here is the either writing your own or...
or quoting your sort of favourite poets, quoting bits and bobs. And actually, we've got a cotton trader called Joseph Strutt, where he's not even really trying to woo the lady he loves. He's just sort of listing the virtues he's demanding in a wife. He's like, this is what I'm looking for. You must meet all these criteria, wisdom, virtue, modesty, prudence, all the hot ones. But Cariad, we thought maybe you'd like to read us Mr. Joseph Strutt's poetry. Oh, yes. Mr. Strutt, cotton trader. Mm.
Already he's on thin ice morally, isn't he, to judge everybody else for being wise and prudent and morally high. He's probably quite come to be well off. On the back of everybody else, yep. But this is his poetry. Where's he from? Birmingham, I think. Birmingham like that. So young, so blooming, and so void of art, a certain conquest makes of every heart. So sweet an air, such dignity of mine, an eye of form so fair is seldom seen.
But these will fade, and where's the substitute? Where of so fine blossom is the fruit? Sorry, Mr Struth. My love, you're young, study with nicest care. So make yourself as wise as you are fair. Good sense you have, let virtue be your guide. Walk hand in hand with prudence by your side. Let every word and every action show what steps you follow, what paths progress.
Pursue. Pursue is how they used to say it. Beautifully done. I love the switch midway through. I thought, to be fair, to the people of Birmingham, I would stop. I just realised after I said that, he's from Derby. Sorry. LAUGHTER
So young, so blooming, so void of heart. No, he won't do it again. Yeah, so he's writing a sort of list of things he's looking for in his wife. So he's a bit pushy, really. It's not really courting so much as here are the criteria you've got to meet if you want to land a man like me. You think, Mr Strutter, I shall read this poems and forget Mr Sykes? No! Although you have far more to offer monetarily than he does, my heart belongs to Barnaby and always will. LAUGHTER
I mean, Sally, what is the value of poetry? Why send a poem? What are you hoping to achieve? It's a key vehicle for wooing. You know, it's men are showing off their literary skill, their education, their verbal agility. But it's all really underpinned by the cult of sensibility, which sort of emerged around the 1720s or 30s and peaked around 1770s, 80s. He's showing that he's romantic. He's in touch. He's a person of feeling. That's so funny, though, because he's like picked up on the trend of
I've got to write a poem. It's got to show my feelings. What are my feelings? I need you to be prudent. Those are my feelings, what I want you to be. We've been talking about Barnaby and Lydia. But I mean, the obvious question here, Sally, is do we have evidence of LGBTQ relationships of, you know, ladies who fancy ladies and gents who fancy gents? Because there are dangers and there are perils there, genuine perils. But there must have been.
those sorts of relationships? What do we know of them? Yeah, I mean, of course there were. You know, we do have evidence of really enormously intense romantic relationships between same-sex couples in this period. So one example is the American schoolteacher Charity Bryant, who
She was a tailor as well, and she exchanged all sorts of poems and acrostics with women that she was interested in. And they also exchanged accessories, things like jewellery, like hairpins. And they used rings to signify a lifelong commitment as well. And we have examples in England too. So the Yorkshire heiress Anne Lister is the most famous one. She's often described as the first modern lesbian. In 1821, she gave her partner Marianne Lawton a gold ring. Wow. This is my favourite bit. She turned...
Marianne's wedding ring from her husband on her finger. So it was already on there, but Anne turned it around in order to make this new promise of marriage over the top of the one that she'd already made. Wow. So it's interesting because you can see that in some cases they're appropriating these rituals used by straight couples, like the exchange of a ring to form a marriage, even if it didn't have the same sort of legal backing. Yeah.
But I mean, the evidence is much more difficult to find because, you know, so often the letters were destroyed and they're obviously not going to be shared around family and friends in the same way as the ones that we've been talking about. And often we do have to rely on evidence in a legal context. So things like trials for assault or indecency between men. But yeah, couples did exchange letters and they did exchange tokens and they did use these in similar ways to build really intense relationships.
Well, we've got Barnaby and Lydia before he takes her up the aisle. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Before they walk up the aisle. We, I guess, need to talk about one of these sort of really fascinating facts that historians of the 18th century know quite well, but I think people are quite surprised to hear. Let's see if you know this one. Cariad, what percentage of Georgian brides were pregnant on their wedding day? Oh, wow.
Maybe higher than we think? What would you think is a sort of normal guess that people might say? Someone who's terrible with percentages, like genuinely. 40%? Yeah, I think that's about right. It's just over a third, isn't it? It's a good guess. But what would happen if the marriage did not take place? Yeah, I mean, one recourse that she would have had, Lydia...
Say she became pregnant and then she thought they were about to get married and then he deserted her. She could sue him for breach of promise for financial damages for her hurt. And it was aggravated by factors like pregnancy. He still wouldn't have to marry her, though. So she'd still be... Well, sometimes juries could order enormous damages in the hope that that would...
make them conduce him to offer his hand because he'd think oh my god I'm about to be utterly utterly ruined unless we get married which is a great way to start any uni absolutely brilliant forced by a jury of your peers it was that or bankruptcy so I thought my darling my dearest darling PS I will marry you
So Lydia could sue Barnaby even if she were not pregnant? Yeah. Wow. He'd breached his contract to marry. Therefore, she could sue him for damages, but also for her hurt feelings. Wow. I mean, the settlements issued by the courts were big. I mean, they're quite a lot of money, aren't they? I mean, they're 250 quid, which was probably two years earnings for a middling...
person. That's a lot of money to cough up at once. It shows sort of in one sense the courts are sort of tipping the balance of power towards women. You did have that legal recourse if you needed it but also it was because of this presumption that women suffered much more than men.
from romantic hurt. So men in many ways were expected to get over it, whereas women often biologically incapable of getting over it in some ways in popular culture because they were so much more sensitive and consumed with feeling. The sort of Miss Havisham effect. Yeah. Let's assume Lydia and Barnaby have not thrown it all away. Love has won out in the end. Hooray! Hooray!
What's the wedding going to look like, Cariad? Very different to ours. It's not what you expect. It's not the white dress necessarily. It would be like a nice dress, basically made from perhaps some nice new material if you could afford it. And it wouldn't necessarily be white. It would be flowered and it wouldn't necessarily be like on a Sunday like we have. And I know that Pride and Prejudice ends with the double wedding.
I think that wasn't that uncommon, was it? To like, you shared it with things or it happened on a normal day that you got married. It wasn't like, this is our wedding. Everybody needs to clear their schedules. You all need to pay £500,000 to come and stay in a country hotel that's miles from where you live. Like it wasn't that kind of affair, was it? No, it's a bit more under the radar. A bit more just you, a few friends, your parents, maybe. Might buy some new clothes. Didn't have to. And if you did, you wouldn't just wear it once. You'd then continue wearing it afterwards and...
But you might wear silver and white, especially if you're very wealthy towards the end of the century. But yeah, it wasn't until the Victorians you had this big white wedding. And what about honeymoons, Sally? Do you go on a big honeymoon? Do you go to Paris? Do you take two weeks off to go and tour the counties? You might have a little honeymoon, but it wouldn't necessarily be on your own. The bride's sister often went with her. Oh, nice. Oh, lovely.
Just to help sort of ease her into this new role as a wife. It was quite a shock to the system, I think, for a lot of people being completely on your own with a partner when you'd only just married them and, you know, you've got a new family, new life, new household. If you think like Mr and Mrs Rushworth in Mansfield Park, they go on a little honeymoon to Brighton, but her sister's there too. Well, that makes sense. Oh, who's that, Barnaby? Why, my sister Amelia travelled in the luggage while she is so small. It is not a problem, is it, Barnaby, if she attends with us to Brighton? Barnaby, Barnaby, come.
So what do you know now? This is where Cariad and I fan ourselves flirtatiously and binge on bonbons. And Sally's going to tell us something we need to know for two uninterrupted minutes. And without much further ado, Dr. Sally, can we have the nuance window, please? OK, I think the key thing to remember about marriage in Georgian England was that for the vast majority of people, there was no way out of it.
So that's why it was so important to make a prudent choice that was informed both by sentiment and by pragmatism. So one account of a wedding that was sent from a woman to her friend in the 1770s that I found, she described it as the indissolvable knot which nothing but death can sunder, which is actually really foreboding. You know, the real danger of matches that were driven too much by lust, like with Mr. and Mrs. Bennet,
is that they fizzled out and then you were stuck for the rest of your life tolerating someone with whom you were just fundamentally incompatible. Marriage also completely changed the balance of power between men and women. So during courtship, women were thought to have the upper hand as they sat in judgment of suitors who tried to woo them with letters and gifts. But once the knot was tied, women were then in a much more subordinate position to the patriarch and the head of the household.
And some complained in their diaries that they were cajoled by degrees to lose their liberty during courtship until they had nothing to do but quietly submit. So actually finding a match that ticked all of those boxes, love, rank, religion, similar disposition, comparable fortune, similar age, someone who could make you happy, the stakes dropped.
had never been higher. Amazing. Thank you so much. Carrie, any final thoughts on that? I just think it's similar to now, isn't it? Like, you know, although you can get divorced, divorce is a very painful and difficult, expensive, emotionally painful experience. So it's the same thing as it was thus as ever, like finding someone who not only do you just fancy at the beginning, but you're willing to spend the rest of your life with literally till death do us part, if you've said that. It's not a simple process.
And listener, if after today's episode you're desperate for more gorgeous Georgians, why not listen to our episode on the experiences of black people in Georgian England or our election special as well. And if you want more chaotic romances of the romantic poets, check out our episodes on Lord Byron and Mary Shelley. They're both very messy drama queens.
You'll find them all on BBC Sounds. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But all that's left for me to say really is a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the amazing Dr Sally Holloway from Oxford Brookes University. Thank you, Sally. Thank you very much.
much and in comedy corner we had the fabulous cariad lloyd thank you cariad why mr jenna and miss holloway it has been more than a pleasure i must say and i hope to encounter you again very soon and to you lovely listener join me next time as we form the perfect union of comedy and history with another whirlwind historical engagement but for now i'm off to go and launch my new dating app the look of love where you can only post tiny miniatures of your eyes bye
Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox, and we would like to tell you about the new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. In this series, we're going to have a planet off. We decided it was time to go cosmic, so we are going to do Jupiter! Jupiter!
It's very well done that because in the script it does say in square brackets wrestling voice question mark. And once we touch back down on this planet, we're going to go deep. Really deep. Yes, we're journeying to the centre of the earth with guests Phil Wang, Chris Jackson and Anna Ferreira. And after all of that intense heat and pressure, we're just going to kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice.
And also in this series, we're discussing altruism. We'll find out what it is. Exploring the history of music, recording with Brian Eno and looking at nature's shapes. So if that sounds like your kind of thing, you can listen to The Infinite Monkey Cage first on BBC Sounds.