Regency Reader Question
I’ve just finished & enjoyed Rose Lerner’s well-researched “True Pretenses” set in a country town in 1808. In it, the hero invited the well-born heroine out to dinner at a hotel. What were the “rules” that governed dinner in restaurants? What sort of chaperonage would be expected? Where (in London) would a gentleman take a lady for dinner? Any advice would be welcome!
| Source of Question | Reg Rom Book |
Thanks Georgie for the question!
Gentlemen of London could get meals at their clubs, many coffeehouses, inns, and hotels. For market or provincial towns, the most likely place for a meal outside of the home would be a posting inn.
For a gently born young lady, a chaperone was expected every time she was in public with few exceptions (The Lady’s Guide to Complete Etiquette (1800)). In most cases, it was expected the chaperone would be a married lady or widow. If the young lady was older (on the shelf, or close to) and in the country, the rules may be somewhat more lax…but a single lady with a single gentleman of no relation dining out in a hotel? Only if she wanted to be considered a woman of loose morals.
Generally, dining outside the home (or a dinner party) for a young lady would be very unusual except when a). with a party (like Vauxhall, etc) or b). travelling. Typically, a private parlor would be reserved for well shod families to keep them from rubbing elbows with the masses in inns, coffeehouses, etc. I could see an occasion for a governess or unaccompanied spinster to be forced to have a meal in a posting inn by herself, and certainly a meal shared with a brother, father, etc would be okay. But dining with a non related single male? That would surely signal her fall from grace.
By the Victorian era, dining outside the home would become more commonplace, and ladies luncheon halls and dining rooms catering to women only would be available (http://www.victorianlondon.org/food/dickens-restaurants.htm). As for locations that a man might take a woman to dinner…the choices were definitely limited. Hotels, because they catered to travelers, were among the more common eateries especially for those upper orders. The Picture of London has a whole section (1803) devoted to hotels that specialized in accommodating families of the nobility/gentry.
Restaurants were limited, and mostly catered to working classes, and meals at event locations like Almacks or Vauxhall would have been generally light. In a provincial town, a married lady unconcerned with exposing her virtue to riff raff might comfortably dine in the local inn or tavern (http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html), but an unmarried woman or unaccompanied married woman “mixing” with male company would have been decidedly odd, if not scandalous.
I haven’t read Rose Lerner’s True Pretenses (but based on the reviews, will be adding it to the stack!), but the synopsis places the heroine’s age at 30…certainly on the shelf and old enough to be called a spinster. From all I have read, Lerner is an excellent researcher…but she is also okay with bending the accuracy a bit to fit around her story. That’s pretty standard for the less traditional Regency (ie sex included); traditional Reg Roms tend to be a lot more rigid in abeyance to history, conventions, tone, etc with the understanding that romps do get a bit flirty with history.
My guess would be she bent the rules of propriety a bit to serve a purpose (either to show her characters in a certain light, or to move the plot forward), but don’t take this as an accurate representation of the era.
Restaurants are really the realm of the working class; their rise was concurrent with the industrial revolution and the need for food away from home (as work was a greater distance from home). Women’s entrance into dining halls directly corresponded to their presence in the work force.
Some old London restaurants: http://londonist.com/2013/11/ten-of-londons-oldest-restaurants-that-you-can-still-try
A bit about the history of restaurants: http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html
