What a Regency Ballroom Smelled Like at Midnight | History for Sleep

Regency London in 1816 was a city of roughly a million people, where the Georgian town houses of Mayfair and Berkeley Square stood a short walk from the crowded meat stalls and chandlers' shops of Clare Market, where Gunter's confectioners sold ices made from packed natural ice, where the Prince Regent's fashionable society kept the London Season from spring into summer, and where tallow and beeswax candles still lit almost every room after dark. Clare Market itself was cleared in the early 1900s to make way for Kingsway and Aldwych, and the candlelit private ballroom vanished with the arrival of gas and then electric light.What follows is a tour of the working side of a Regency ball: the servants' passages behind the green baize door, the kitchens and confectioners that fed a late supper, and the candle trade that supplied a great house. Beeswax candles were a luxury that cost several times more than tallow, and both were taxed by the excise on candles that lasted from 1709 until 1831. Ballroom floors were chalked in decorative patterns so dancers would not slip, while ladies wore high-waisted white muslin and gauze that was dangerously flammable near open flame. A household staff of butler, housekeeper, footmen and hired day labourers worked through the night, often for a few shillings in wages.The ball season of 1816 took place during the Year Without a Summer, when the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815 filled the upper atmosphere with ash and brought cold, rain and failed harvests across Britain and Europe. Londoners lit fires in June and watched unusually vivid red sunsets without knowing their cause.Discover what a Regency ballroom in Mayfair was really like at midnight, from the heat of hundreds of candles to the servants who kept them burning.