The Grand Tour Was for Men.This Is What Regency Girls Did Instead | History for Sleep

Bath in 1815, the Regency spa city of Somerset, held roughly 36,000 inhabitants at the census of 1811, its honey-coloured Bath stone terraces such as the Royal Crescent and the Circus rising above the River Avon, its Pump Room serving the hot mineral spring at about 46 degrees Celsius, its Upper Rooms and Assembly Rooms hosting balls, and its lodging houses, bathing chairs, sedan chairs and booksellers crowded with invalids, half-pay officers and families seeking husbands for their daughters. Much of that Georgian city has since disappeared, from the open street drains and the King's Bath crowds to the sedan-chair stands and the old subscription lists of the Master of Ceremonies.Here the video looks closely at the seasonal life of a young gentlewoman travelling with a chaperone through the English watering places: the cost of lodgings and the rules of the Pump Room, the daily routine of drinking the waters and bathing, the etiquette of the ballroom including the number of dances shared with one gentleman and the introductions arranged by the Master of Ceremonies, and the expense of postage when every letter home was paid for by the recipient. It also covers the muslin and silk gowns and wet hems of the high-waisted Regency fashion, the seaside resorts of Brighton and Lyme Regis with their bathing machines, and the Grand Tour of Paris, Florence and Rome that was in practice reserved for young men with a tutor.In 1815 the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in June reopened the Continent to English travellers after more than twenty years of war, yet the Grand Tour stayed a male custom, while girls of the gentry followed the domestic circuit of Bath, Cheltenham, Brighton and the Dorset coast. The Pump Room itself, completed in 1799 and still pouring the water today, remained the centre of the season, the Upper Rooms of 1771 its ballroom.Discover what Regency Bath and the English watering places really meant for a gentry daughter on the marriage market, far from the golden postcard of Jane Austen's novels.