Bridging History
How did we get from togas to tights? 
I remember, a very long time ago, sitting in Middle School history class, absolutely puzzled as to how we had gone from Ancient Rome to Medieval Europe. One minute, there were men in togas, saying “Ave!” and stabbing Caesar and the next thing I knew it was yokels in jerkins lifting a flagon at the local alehouse while Evil Prince John (I knew all about Prince John from “Robin Hood”) was being bullied by his barons and signing major charters.
In a word, huh? Sure, there might have been some under the table note-passing going on, but I didn’t think I’d missed that much. And while we were at it, how had we gotten from Egypt to Greece to Rome? Each of the eras we studied existed as an island in a sea of historical uncertainty. We hopped from one to the other without ever touching down in the middle.
Maybe that’s part of why historical transition fascinates me so much. How did we get from Georgian panniers to Empire bodices?
From Prinny’s excesses to Victoria’s pruderies? From Edwardians to flappers?
The question this raises for me is: what happens to the people who are caught in the middle, who don’t yet know that they’re meant to be one or the other? Most of these names, of course, are labels applied retroactively, by historians, once the dust has settled: Georgian, Regency, Victorian.
Even once that dust has settled, it remains unclear where the patterns lie. When I was in grad school, it was a running joke that everything was “long”. You had the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1815, which bumped up against the Long Nineteenth Century, which was reputed to run from 1789-1914.
So what was it? Did 1789 through 1815 belong to the eighteenth century or the nineteenth? Or ought that period to be considered something else entirely?
Most of my books have been set smack in the middle of that transitional period, the pinching place between the Long Eighteenth Century and the Long Nineteenth. (To be very specific, I’ve spent most of my time in 1803 and 1804.) I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain to people that despite the similarity in the dress code, 1803 is not the Regency; different rules and mores apply.
Nothing, however, brought home to me the long, slow shuffle from Georgian to Regency like reading Jane Austen’s letters.
Relatively few of them remain (thanks to her sister Cassandra’s industrious epistolary destruction, we have only one hundred and sixty extant). They begin in the 1790s and go on through her illness in 1817. I read them one after the other as I was researching The Mischief of the Mistletoe, and was struck by the distinct change in tone from beginning to end. Some changes, of course, may be accounted for by the authoress’ own aging process. She’s a sprightly twenty-something in her earlier letters; ill and cranky in the later ones. But there is also the whiff of a changing zeitgeist, from a world in which a young Jane can write about being too hungover to hold her pen steadily to a far more restrained set of social norms. There’s a big gulf between 1796 and 1817.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I’ve been reading up recently on the Great War.
I’d never really stopped to consider how Downton Abbey became the House of Elliot, how Edwardians gave way to the Bright Young Things. As opposed to the slow cultural shift I saw in Jane’s letters, this one does seem to have happened quite that rapidly. Certainly, there were precedents before World War I for the hard partying that gained traction after 1919—but the move to a new set of social mores is far more abrupt, caught beautifully by Juliet Nicolson in her book The Great Silence, which moves month by month through 1919 and 1920, showing a society in rapid transition.
Which historical shifts have caught your interest?
I remember, a very long time ago, sitting in Middle School history class, absolutely puzzled as to how we had gone from Ancient Rome to Medieval Europe. One minute, there were men in togas, saying “Ave!” and stabbing Caesar and the next thing I knew it was yokels in jerkins lifting a flagon at the local alehouse while Evil Prince John (I knew all about Prince John from “Robin Hood”) was being bullied by his barons and signing major charters.In a word, huh? Sure, there might have been some under the table note-passing going on, but I didn’t think I’d missed that much. And while we were at it, how had we gotten from Egypt to Greece to Rome? Each of the eras we studied existed as an island in a sea of historical uncertainty. We hopped from one to the other without ever touching down in the middle.
Maybe that’s part of why historical transition fascinates me so much. How did we get from Georgian panniers to Empire bodices?
From Prinny’s excesses to Victoria’s pruderies? From Edwardians to flappers? The question this raises for me is: what happens to the people who are caught in the middle, who don’t yet know that they’re meant to be one or the other? Most of these names, of course, are labels applied retroactively, by historians, once the dust has settled: Georgian, Regency, Victorian.
Even once that dust has settled, it remains unclear where the patterns lie. When I was in grad school, it was a running joke that everything was “long”. You had the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1815, which bumped up against the Long Nineteenth Century, which was reputed to run from 1789-1914. So what was it? Did 1789 through 1815 belong to the eighteenth century or the nineteenth? Or ought that period to be considered something else entirely?
Most of my books have been set smack in the middle of that transitional period, the pinching place between the Long Eighteenth Century and the Long Nineteenth. (To be very specific, I’ve spent most of my time in 1803 and 1804.) I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain to people that despite the similarity in the dress code, 1803 is not the Regency; different rules and mores apply.
Nothing, however, brought home to me the long, slow shuffle from Georgian to Regency like reading Jane Austen’s letters.
Relatively few of them remain (thanks to her sister Cassandra’s industrious epistolary destruction, we have only one hundred and sixty extant). They begin in the 1790s and go on through her illness in 1817. I read them one after the other as I was researching The Mischief of the Mistletoe, and was struck by the distinct change in tone from beginning to end. Some changes, of course, may be accounted for by the authoress’ own aging process. She’s a sprightly twenty-something in her earlier letters; ill and cranky in the later ones. But there is also the whiff of a changing zeitgeist, from a world in which a young Jane can write about being too hungover to hold her pen steadily to a far more restrained set of social norms. There’s a big gulf between 1796 and 1817.On the opposite side of the spectrum, I’ve been reading up recently on the Great War.
I’d never really stopped to consider how Downton Abbey became the House of Elliot, how Edwardians gave way to the Bright Young Things. As opposed to the slow cultural shift I saw in Jane’s letters, this one does seem to have happened quite that rapidly. Certainly, there were precedents before World War I for the hard partying that gained traction after 1919—but the move to a new set of social mores is far more abrupt, caught beautifully by Juliet Nicolson in her book The Great Silence, which moves month by month through 1919 and 1920, showing a society in rapid transition.Which historical shifts have caught your interest?
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