Live Like a Regency Heroine: Replace Servants with Overpriced Appliances
/Apologies for the lack of posting last week, dear readers. I took a much-needed jaunt to Monterey, where I avoided all sites of interest and locked myself in my hotel to edit my latest project. I almost felt like a Regency heroine, even though I was wearing pajamas most of the time -- as an unmarried lady with no male relative or servant to escort me, I instead confined myself to my rooms and wrote. It would get old v. fast, but for a few days, it was wonderful. But the point of this post is not Monterey -- instead, it's about servants during the Regency. In every Regency romance I've ever read, at least one of the protagonists had servants to attend to their every need (it is a fantasy, after all -- and how many of us fantasize about working twelve hours a day in a factory or toiling as a milkmaid?). Even the smallest middle-class households had at least a stout maid or footman to do the heaviest work; without any mechanized help for laundry, cleaning, cooking, or other chores, keeping up a household was endlessly grueling. But how could a family afford to hire so many servants?
The answer: human labor was incredibly cheap by today's standards. A maid could be hired for £6-8 per year, in addition to room, board, and a few articles of clothing -- roughly equivalent to only £450 ($730) per year today. As an example of what the purchasing power of those pounds was, a lady could buy roughly 12 pairs of silk stockings, or three pairs of walking boots; she could not even think of buying a cashmere shawl, which could approach a price of £60 (nearly £3370/$5480 today -- this was back when all the cashmere actually came from Kashmir and had to make its perilous way to England by sea).
Obviously, to live like a Regency heroine today, I would need to pay someone much more than $730/year to wait on me (I would also have to start wearing silk stockings instead of Uggs, but that is another matter). However, the advantage (or disadvantage, if you are a Luddite) of the Industrial Revolution is that we now have appliances to replace many of the tasks that servants used to do.
The appliance I'm currently salivating over is the Breville One-Touch Teamaker (and no, I'm not a shill for Breville - I found this on my own). It has all the bells and whistles one could ever want in a teamaker: an automatic start timer, a keep-warm function, and settings to control the exact time and temperature of steeping, since different teas require different brewing times and water temperatures. At $249.99, it seems absurdly expensive for a teamaker; after all, my teakettle, which cost approximately 15% of that, has held up for years. But, to look at it another way, the teamaker costs 1/3 of what it would have cost to hire a maid for a year, and she would have brought me hot tea whenever I wanted. With that (questionable) logic, I've almost convinced myself that it's worth the purchase. And the teamaker won't listen in on my conversations and spread my affairs to the entire ton, so that's a definite point in its favor.
Have you splurged on something lately that helps you to live like a Regency heroine? Should I buy the teamaker, or keep up the drudgery of boiling water on the stove?
As far as I know, the Regency did not have anything like "Top Chef" (they were rather short on televisions, after all). But, they did have one of the very first celebrity chefs - Marie-Antoine Carême. According to Venetia Murray's book "High Society", Carême's father was a stonemason with fifteen other children; and so, when Carême was eleven, his father took him to Paris, "fed him supper in a tavern and abandoned him in the street." Awfully nice of dear old dad to give him supper first, right?
Prinny's kitchen at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton was the ultimate in modern convenience - so ultimate that he once served dinner in the kitchen itself to show it off to his guests. Prinny and his household went through an astonishing quantity of food, and Carême was in charge of making sure that the food all reached the table at the right time. And he didn't just cook - like many of today's celebrity chefs, he wrote several popular cookbooks, and his techniques influenced generations of chefs.
One of the authors I follow on Twitter is Courtney Milan, who has released a series of excellent historicals over the past year and has another book, UNVEILED, coming out in January. If the cover alone wasn't enough to seduce me, I'm quite intrigued by the premise - the hero has just found information to get the heroine (and her brothers) declared illegitimate, which means that he will inherit their father's dukedom while the duke's kids will be cast out of society. But, as these things happen, the hero and heroine meet and fall in love despite all that.
Sounds lovely, right? So I was quite saddened for Ms. Milan when my Twitter feed gave me all the details of a review for her book that went horribly awry.
