HomeRegency LifeTo be an Accomplished Lady

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To be an Accomplished Lady — 6 Comments

  1. I have read these before but am always ashamed that here in the States we don’t learn more than one language, unless, we “elect” to study such. Even though I took more 2 years in Latin and 3 years of Spanish and German, I do not speak any of these languages. I do note that English seems to be needed and/or required in just about all the other nations of the world. I do not play a musical instrument but I would have loved to have been afforded the opportunity. (I do sing.) I am skilled in all types of needle work, crafts and/or sewing and, having a college education plus reading the paper, watching or listening to the news, can converse on politics, etc. But managing a household: don’t we all do this, even if single and living alone, we must budget our income and expenses and plan for needs. Thanks for the reminder of how much was required of women in the past. Unless rich we continue to need so many skills. Just that we now must know all these electronic devices also. Smiles.

  2. Being an American it would amuse you to realize I attended one of those former boarding schools – a bit younger than the Regency – it was founded shortly before the US Civil War. It survived the crash of the private schools, unlike many, and was still an active school. Though it had lost boarding in the 1980s. I was on particularly good terms with the librarian so was allowed into the school archives – I saw one of the grade results/ bill for future classes for a girl who would have attended in the late 1870s. She had an hour of guitar, music class (piano and harp), French classes, literature, a poetry class, a formal tea class/ event every Friday, a note that she had successfully mastered German the prior term and no longer needed it, and that she had successfully mastered art and a fee needed to be paid if she wished to keep up practice in her free time, history class, parlour-work (embroidery and such from what I was told), and Latin (it was a Catholic school). She also had a math class and science class – I was allowed to see the textbooks for that period of time and they were decidedly simple compared to the ones my father owned from the same period of time that the boys would have been using. But I was told by the librarian that even those would have been considered somewhat ‘pushing’ it. They got away with it because it was a Catholic school and were a touch scandalous to start with, and the Victorian era had made it just a tiny bit more acceptable. I have always used that knowledge when I am reading books of the time period – Regency and Victorian – to understand what a proper young lady of refinement and culture would have known. It’s lovely to see that it wasn’t wrong. Of course, to see a class listed as costing eight dollars… Yeah, still don’t have a handle on that.

  3. Just a quick note that keeping the household accounts was a much more laborious job than we would think of it being, today. Back then, the British Pound had not been decimalized (as I recall that was in the early 1970’s). There were pounds, shillings, and pence. A pound was twenty shillings (a guinea was twenty one shillings), and each shilling was twelve pence (pennies). So two hundred and forty pence to the pound!

    That means you would add up the pence in sets of twelve. Each set of twelve adds to the shilling total. Once you reached twenty shillings you had a pound. You would have to get to be very good at your twelve-times and twenty-times multiplication tables! Certainly it was more complex than the decimalized one to ten to one hundred we have to deal with today.

  4. Pingback:Ann’s Education ~ In Search of Ann Walker

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