The Regency Widow With Eight Children: How Violet Bridgerton Would Really Have Lived

Mayfair in 1816 was the most fashionable quarter of Regency London, a city of roughly one million people, where the Grosvenor estate's brick terraces ran from Grosvenor Square and Upper Brook Street down to Park Lane and Hyde Park, where aristocratic families arrived each spring for the London Season, where butlers, footmen, housemaids and stewards kept great townhouses running on coal fires and tallow candles, and where the summer of 1816 turned cold and wet after the eruption of Mount Tambora, the "Year Without a Summer." Most of those private palaces have since been demolished or turned into offices, and the climbing boys who once swept their flues have vanished entirely.Here the video looks closely at the household economy and the law that shaped the life of a Regency widow of rank. Under coverture a married woman owned almost nothing in her own name, and the marriage settlement usually replaced her common-law dower of a third of her husband's land with a fixed jointure, paid on quarter days such as Lady Day on 25 March. After Waterloo, falling grain prices and the Corn Law of 1815 left landed estates short of rent, so widows' incomes often arrived late. Guardianship of children followed the father's will, while servants' wages, from about ten pounds a year for a housemaid, were set by the estate steward.The Chimney Sweepers Act of 1788 set the minimum age for apprentice climbing boys at eight, yet parish workhouse children were routinely sent up London flues as narrow as nine inches. A House of Commons select committee examined the practice in 1817, but climbing boys were not effectively abolished until the Chimney Sweepers Act of 1875.Discover what life in Regency Mayfair was really like behind the ballrooms, bonnets and Bridgerton glamour, for the widows, servants and climbing boys who lived inside its walls.