SOURCE: Lane, Maggie. “Mealtimes, Menus, Manners.” In Jane Austen and Food, pp. 25-54. London: The Hambledon Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Lane traces the changing customs governing dining practices in Austen's time and explains how various foodways served as indications of social class.]

The society of which Jane Austen wrote being both more leisured and more formal than our own, the timing and nature of the meals which punctuated daily life, and the conventions and etiquette attaching to them, naturally differed in various ways from those we are familiar with.

At Chawton the breakfast hour was nine o'clock, but this seems to have been unusually early. Possibly it was so arranged that Jane might settle to her writing without delay; more likely, given her self-effacement and accommodating spirit, the entire household of brisk and well-organised women preferred early hours. At Godmersham the clocks striking ten was the signal to go in to breakfast. The planned excursion from Barton Park to Whitwell, in Sense and Sensibility, begins with the whole party assembling at Barton Park for breakfast at ten. But it is not only in leisured circumstances that breakfast is taken rather late. Even in the London home of a man of business, Mr Gardiner, the usual breakfast hour is ten.

When Catherine joins the Tilneys for their last breakfast in Bath it must be nine, since ‘the clock struck ten while the trunks were carrying down, and the General had fixed to be out of Milsom Street by that hour’. (NA [Northanger Abbey], 155) With a longish journey ahead, an early breakfast would be reasonable. But even at Northanger Abbey the breakfast hour would appear to have been nine, since Catherine is woken by the housemaid's opening the shutters at eight, and receives a strong hint from General Tilney about early rising when she eventually makes her appearance in the breakfast-parlour. The General, of course, requires strict punctuality at meals. His combination of greed and dictatorialness overrides his concern to be thought fashionable.

A late breakfast hour, like a late dinner hour, was often a pretension to fashion. The consequent variation between neighbouring houses might lead to awkwardness. Breakfast is over at Longbourn when Elizabeth receives Jane's note informing her of her being unwell. Resolving to visit her sister at Netherfield, Elizabeth debates with her parents, waits for Catherine and Lydia to put on their outdoor clothes, walks the three miles to Netherfield, and finds the ladies there just about to begin breakfast. At Uppercross, ‘the morning hours of the Cottage were always later than those of the other house’ and Mary and Anne ‘were not more than beginning breakfast’ when they are interrupted by a party from the Great House, including Captain Wentworth, who has already ridden the three miles from Kellynch before taking breakfast with the Musgroves.

The generally late hour left time for considerable activity before the first meal of the day. At Chawton Jane Austen herself used the interval between rising and making the breakfast to practise the piano in solitude. Caroline Austen found it hard to account for why her aunt kept up her practice in this way. Perhaps the uninterrupted mechanical playing over of simple tunes (Caroline says the music was ‘disgracefully easy’) was nothing more than a means of inducing her creative juices to flow in readiness for the morning's writing. With nobody else in the room she would ‘live with’ her characters, decide their development and compose sentences in her mind. Her ideas thus stimulated, her share of the household work dutifully accomplished for the day, her body refreshed by the meal, she would be ready to begin work immediately breakfast was over.

When she was away from home Jane frequently wrote letters before breakfast. In London she even went shopping. ‘At nine we are to set off for Grafton House, and get that over before breakfast’, she wrote at half past seven in the morning from Henry's house in Henrietta Street. (L [Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra], 323) When travelling, a whole stage of the journey could be accomplished before the travellers broke their fast. After making an early start from Chawton in May 1813, ‘Three hours and a quarter took us to Guildford, where we stayed barely two hours, and had only just time enough for all we had to do there: that is, eating a long comfortable breakfast, watching the carriages, paying Mr Herington, and taking a little stroll afterwards … We left Guildford at twenty minutes before twelve (I hope somebody cares for these minutiae) and were at Esher in about two hours more’. (L, 306) Had a light breakfast already been taken before they left Chawton, I think Jane Austen, with her care for words, would have found it impossible to call a second such meal at Guildford breakfast, at least without making some pertinent comment.

Georgiana Darcy, too, travels on an empty stomach, arriving at Pemberley (we know not from where) only to ‘a late breakfast’. At variance with both these instances is the scene in Mansfield Park in which the travellers Henry Crawford and William Price are served a substantial breakfast, earlier than the rest of the family, to speed them on their way.

An early breakfast might also be provided when the young men of the family were going to hunt. James Edward Austen-Leigh found it worth recording that at Steventon, on hunting mornings, his uncles ‘usually took their hasty breakfast in the kitchen’.¹ This struck him as decidedly different from Victorian custom.

‘Every generation has its improvements’, remarks Mary Crawford. (MP [Mansfield Park], 86) One pre-breakfast activity not so often indulged in during Jane Austen's lifetime was weekday family prayers (as opposed to grace at table). But Jane did experience the tradition in its full solemnity at Stoneleigh Abbey in July 1806. There the old mistress, Mary Leigh, had recently died, and the property had passed to the Reverend Thomas Leigh, Mrs Austen's cousin, with whom the Austens were staying. ‘At nine in the morning we meet and say our prayers in a handsome Chapel, the pulpit &c now hung with Black’, wrote Mrs Austen. ‘Then follows breakfast …’²

In the country gentlemen often took a brisk walk to work up an appetite for breakfast. This is what John Knightley does when staying in Highbury, taking his two young sons. James Austen frequently walked the mile from his home at Deane to Steventon to visit his parents before breakfast, thus calling forth his wife's reproaches. On the first morning of his visit to Barton Cottage, Edward Ferrars walks to the village to see his horses, returning full of admiration for the surrounding country-side. He does not invite Elinor or Marianne to join him, and they don't appear to expect it. No doubt women were generally assumed to be occupied with the preparations for breakfast. Female walking was usually reserved for a later part of the day, but there might be exceptional circumstances, such as being on holiday, when normal habits were broken. At Lyme, Anne and Henrietta agree to stroll down to the sea before breakfast. They are joined after a while by Captain Wentworth and Louisa, who then remembers she has some shopping to do in the town. It is only ‘after attending Louisa through her business, and loitering about a little longer’, that they return to the inn for breakfast, doubtless with appetites as well as complexions enhanced by the sea breeze. (P [Persuasion], 104)

At an inn, or for travellers leaving home, breakfast might be a substantial meal: Henry Crawford and William Price fortify themselves with boiled eggs and pork chops before setting off from Northamptonshire for London. Parson Woodforde's choice at an inn included ‘chocolate, green and brown tea, hot rolls, dried toast, bread and butter, honey, tongue and ham grated very small’.³ But it was what Thomas Love Peacock, in his novel Headlong Hall (1816), called the ‘ordinary comforts of tea and toast’ which most people on most occasions found sufficient, and which suited the elegance of the age.

Georgian breakfasts were quite distinct both from the robust meal of bread, ale and cheese enjoyed by former generations, and from the hot dishes of kedgeree, devilled kidneys, scrambled eggs and so forth under which the sideboards of Victorian and Edwardian country houses groaned. Georgian breakfasts were dainty meals of varieties of bread, cake and hot drinks, served (if the house were grand enough to possess one) in the breakfast-parlour rather than the dining-room, and eaten off the new fine china. General Tilney boasts about his breakfast set. ‘To his uncritical palate, the tea was as well flavoured from the clay of Staffordshire, as from that of Dresden or Sêve. But this was quite an old set, purchased two years ago.’ (NA, 175) Mrs John Dashwood envies her mother-in-law's set of breakfast china as being ‘twice as handsome’ as her own. (S & S [Sense and Sensibility], 13)

It was the introduction into this country of tea, coffee and chocolate (from China, Ethiopia and Mexico respectively) which had revolutionised breakfast. All had arrived about the middle of the seventeenth century, and had been drunk first in public meeting houses in the middle of the day, before becoming established in the homes of the upper classes at allotted hours. Of the three new drinks, tea became and remained the most popular in England. Between 1693 and 1793 its consumption increased four hundredfold. As a new luxury item which people soon could not live without, it attracted a tax, was very expensive and was kept under lock and key. Jane Austen estimated that the consumption of tea at Godmersham was 12lb. a quarter. Much smuggling went on, one of those who received contraband supplies being Parson Woodforde.

Tea had not yet been cultivated in India, all supplies coming from China in Jane Austen's day. There was a choice of green tea (which Jane Austen mentions in a letter, and which Arthur Parker, in Sanditon, claims acts on him ‘like Poison’ (MW [The Works of Jane Austen], 418), or brown, the latter being subjected to a lengthier drying process. When tea was first introduced from China, Chinese porcelain bowls or dishes from which to drink it were imported too. Later in the century cups with handles were manufactured in Europe and were soon preferred, but the expression ‘a dish of tea’ lingered on. Jane uses it in a letter of December 1798 when, to celebrate her twenty-third birthday, her three-year-old nephew George was given his first taste of the beverage. Later the expression was heard only in the mouths of the old or the vulgar. ‘I could not tell whether you would be for some meat, or only for a dish of tea’, says Mrs Price when William and Fanny arrive after a two-day journey (preparations are in hand for neither). (MP, 379)

It seems likely that the Austens' habitual breakfast drink was tea, since writing from Bath, where she was holidaying with Edward, Jane warns Cassandra, ‘The coffee-mill will be wanted every day while Edward is at Steventon, as he always drinks coffee for breakfast’. (L, 68) Jane was perpetually more preoccupied with the state of the tea and sugar stores than with coffee, which she rarely mentions in her letters. Visiting foreigners praised our tea but were very scathing about our coffee. ‘The English attach no importance to the perfume and flavour of good coffee. … Their coffee is always weak and bitter and has completely lost its aromatic flavour’, wrote André Parreaux, while Charles Moritz likened it to ‘brown water’.⁴

The third fashionable drink, chocolate, is mentioned only once by Jane Austen, in the Juvenilia, but the gourmet General Tilney, at whose breakfast-table there is more variety than Catherine Morland has ever before seen, drinks cocoa at that meal. Arthur Parker also loves his cocoa, but in the evening, when he ‘coddles and cooks’ it himself over the fire. ‘Cocoa takes a great deal of boiling’, he explains. (MW, 417) Chocolate, which was bought in cake or roll form and grated originally into hot wine, latterly milk, had been a favourite drink of Dr Johnson—Jane's admiration for whom is not likely to have stretched to his table manners. ‘He took his chocolate liberally, pouring in large quantities of cream, or even melted butter’, recalled his friend and hostess Mrs Thrale, adding that when he could get them he would eat seven or eight large peaches before breakfast began.⁵

Chocolate, or cocoa, must have been considered by Jane Austen and her family as too luxurious and reprehensibly self-indulgent for everyday consumption. In all the Austen family papers chocolate is mentioned only twice, once at a wedding and once at a rather grand place, Stoneleigh Abbey. Here, Mrs Austen reported to a daughter-in-law in 1806, breakfast consisted of ‘Chocolate Coffee and Tea, Plumb Cake, Pound Cake, Hot Rolls, Cold Rolls, Bread and Butter, and dry toast for me’.⁶

Toast was the mainstay of the British breakfast, then as now. It had been invented, foreigners thought, to enable the butter to be spread more easily in our cold rooms. Toast was made in front of the fire by the consumers themselves, rather than by their servants. Toasting the bread and boiling the water for tea in a kettle over the same fire would have comprised Jane Austen's duties in making breakfast at Chawton. Perhaps she also washed, dried and put away the breakfast china too, as many ladies preferred to do for themselves.

On holiday in Bath Jane Austen took rolls for her breakfast; whether she also ate Bath buns for that meal is not known, though she did write mockingly of ‘disordering my Stomach with Bath bunns [sic]’, that the expense to her Aunt Leigh Perrot of having her to stay might be lessened. (L, 101) Giving the recipe for Bath buns in a cookery book of 1782, ‘send them in hot for breakfast,’ advises Elizabeth Raffald.⁷ In the eighteenth century they were decorated not with simple crushed sugar, as today, but with comfits made by dipping caraway seeds into boiling sugar up to a dozen times until they were thickly coated.

The other breakfast dish noticed in the novels is the French bread served at Northanger Abbey. This was not the crusty white baguette we think of today, but more like brioche—a soft yellow loaf or rolls made by enriching yeast dough with butter, milk or eggs. It was the most highly-regarded bread of the eighteenth century. Pure white bread was in any case unknown before the steel-milling process was invented in the mid nineteenth century, taking much of the flavour, goodness and character out of flour.

Two special kinds of breakfast were the public breakfast and the wedding breakfast, the latter a term which has remained in use until recently, although the celebratory meal long ago shifted to much later in the day. Nor were public breakfasts necessarily anchored to an early hour; like many other eighteenth-century rituals, they too got later and later but retained the same name. Outdoor, summer events, with music as well as food and drink, they were profit-making occasions organised by the proprietors of pleasure-gardens. To keep the company select, tickets for them had to be bought in advance. A favourite entertainment of Fanny Burney, they were regularly held at Vauxhall and Ranelegh in London, and at Sydney Gardens in Bath. The Austens' home in Bath actually overlooked Sydney Gardens. Jane Austen joked to Cassandra that if they lived there they need not fear being wholly starved.

As for the wedding breakfast, this was the other Austen occasion when chocolate made an appearance. Caroline Austen's description of her sister Anna's wedding, to Ben Lefroy at Steventon in 1814, gives a good picture of the simple celebrations customary at that level of society. The family began the day with ‘a slight early breakfast up stairs’, by which Caroline must mean in their bedrooms or dressing-rooms, since all the sitting- and dining-rooms at Steventon Rectory were on the ground floor. Between nine and ten they set off for the church, the women in a carriage and the men on foot: the distance was half a mile. Apart from the immediate family of bride and groom, says Caroline,

I am sure there was no one else in the church, nor was anyone else asked to the breakfast, to which we sat down as soon as we got back … The breakfast was such as best breakfasts then were: some variety of bread, hot rolls, buttered toast, tongue or ham and eggs. The addition of chocolate at one end of the table, and the wedding cake in the middle, marked the speciality of the day. … Soon after breakfast, the bride and groom departed. They had a long day's journey before them, to Hendon; the other Lefroys went home; and in the afternoon my mother and I went to Chawton to stay at the Great House, then occupied by my uncle Captain Austen and his large family. My father stayed behind for a few days, and then joined us. The servants had cake and punch in the evening, and I think I remember that Mr Digweed walked down to keep him company.⁸

In Pride and Prejudice Mrs Bennet offers the servants punch to celebrate Lydia's wedding; these are the only references I have been able to find in Austen writings to servants consuming, as opposed to serving, food or drink—except for Lady Denham's complaints in Sanditon about the cost of provisioning the servants' hall, and Mrs Norris snaffling jellies from Mansfield to take back to her own cottage with the excuse of having a sick maid to nurse. But does the maid actually get to eat the jellies? Mrs Norris prevents Dick Jackson from partaking in the servants' dinner at Mansfield Park, and gloats over the fact that the servants at Sotherton are not allowed wine at their table. Mrs Norris herself is the chief beneficiary at her niece Maria's wedding, getting to drink ‘a supernumerary glass or two’ that evening. (MP, 203) Evidently the custom was to drink the young couple's health long after they themselves have departed.

It is notable that the two families from Chawton did not attend the wedding of their niece Anna, despite the distance being but half a day's journey—just as Mr Knightley, oddly, does not attend the wedding of his friends Miss Taylor and Mr Weston. His own wedding to Emma is marked by no ‘finery or parade’, to the very definite approval of their author. (E [Emma], 484)

Caroline Austen herself, looking back from the 1870s, was struck by the simplicity of her sister's wedding. She concludes her account with the exclamation, ‘Such were the wedding festivities of Steventon in 1814!’ Modest though they were, however, they were more than mark the weddings of either Charlotte Lucas or Maria Bertram, both of whom drive directly from the church door to their new homes without any wedding breakfast at all.

After breakfast women who did not have any more pressing household cares to attend to would usually take up some sewing, which they referred to as ‘work’. From about twelve or one they might make ‘morning calls’ on their friends. Emma mentions twelve o'clock as being the earliest time one might expect callers; Mrs Gardiner and Elizabeth leave the inn at Lambton to wait on the ladies of Pemberley after Mr Gardiner's own departure at noon; and Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe always arrange to meet at the Pump Room at one.

‘Morning’ had a different meaning then. The waking hours of the Georgians were divided by dinner, the period before dinner being known as morning, however long that might be, and the period from dinner on as evening. So when the gentlemen of Godmersham had a long meeting at Sittingbourne to attend and the house hours were adjusted accordingly, Jane wrote, ‘We breakfasted before 9 & do not dine till [frac12] past 6 on the occasion, so I hope we three shall have a long Morning enough’. (L, 89)

‘We three’ are of course the ladies left at home. The sexes were very often (though not invariably) apart during the morning, pursuing their duties and their pleasures independently. Morning visits were a chiefly female activity, though Frank Churchill accompanies Mrs Weston on hers, and Bingley even calls on Mr Bennet alone. Evening brought the sexes together again, in a situation of greater formality.

Clothes too were divided into either ‘morning dress’ or ‘evening dress’. Nothing was specified for afternoon, because the concept of ‘afternoon’ had become detached from its literal meaning. During Jane Austen's lifetime it referred only to that small portion of the early evening between the end of dinner and, an hour or two later, the drinking of tea. ‘Morning’ then in Jane Austen is virtually synonymous with our ‘day’; when she wants to refer specifically to what we call ‘morning’, she uses the term ‘forenoon’.⁹

Dinner had originally been a midday meal, taken very sensibly by a hard-working population midway through the labours of the day. (Plain people have continued to refer to their midday meal as dinner until within living memory, as the term ‘school dinners’ attests.) As the eighteenth century progressed, and as the idle rich became more numerous and more ostentatious in their idleness, the hour for dinner became later and later, floating through what we should call the middle of the afternoon (which seems the most inconvenient time of all) until it settled at six or seven. The whole point of the movement was that fashionable people were always out of synchrony with the others, for as soon as the others caught up, the fashionable people would set back their dinner hour even later. A great deal of snobbery attached to the subject, the only possible justification for which was that it was cheaper to cook, serve and eat the main meal of the day in natural light, which therefore suited the more impoverished gentry.

I will return to the subject of dinner and its timing, but the point to be made first is that as the meal grew further and further away from breakfast, so some sustenance was required to fill the gap. The name of the snack or meal which came to occupy this slot seems to have a dual provenance. Dr Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 defines ‘lunch’ or ‘luncheon’ as ‘as much food as one's hand can hold’: a pie, pasty or hunk of bread would fit this category, and no time is specified for eating it. Henry Brooke uses the word in this sense in The Fool of Quality, written in 1760, when he writes ‘A large luncheon of brown bread struck my eyes’. Johnson's Dictionary has also an entry for ‘nunchin’ as ‘a piece of victual eaten between meals’. The etymology of this derives from ‘noonshine’, meaning a drink, and by extension a snack, taken at noon. Another variation is ‘nooning’, used by Susanna Whatman in 1776, both of which tie the word to a time of day more closely than Dr Johnson's definition.¹⁰ Jane Austen uses the word ‘noonshine’ in a letter written in June 1808 from Godmersham: ‘The Moores came yesterday in their Curricle between one & two o'clock, & immediately after the noonshine which succeeded their arrival, a party set off for Buckwell …’ (L, 195)

‘Noonshine’ was easily corrupted into ‘nuncheon’, which word Jane Austen uses on just one occasion, in Sense and Sensibility, to describe the hasty meal of cold beef and porter which Willoughby swallows at Marlborough on the road from London to Cleveland. From nuncheon to luncheon was an easy next step, and thus noonshine and lunch conjoined—semantically as well as conceptually. The word ‘luncheon’ is likewise used only once by Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth and Jane travel back from London, Lydia and Kitty meet them with the family carriage at the George Inn in an unnamed town, and order ‘the nicest cold luncheon in the world’, which consists of ‘a sallad and cucumber’ and ‘such cold meat as an inn larder normally affords’. (P & P [Pride and Prejudice], 222, 219)

It is interesting, perhaps significant, that both these instances refer to meals taken at an inn. Jane Austen never uses the terms, either in letters or novels, when food is taken in the home at midday. (Caroline Austen refers to ‘luncheon’ at Chawton Cottage, and the division it made in the way her aunts' activities were arranged: ‘working’ before luncheon, walking or shopping afterwards—but she is almost certainly imposing her own later terminology.) The verb ‘to lunch’ did not appear until the 1830s and was at first considered very much a vulgarism.

During Jane Austen's lifetime, in a domestic context, refreshments would be offered without giving them any name, an awkward state of affairs which could not, and evidently did not, long continue. So when Mr Knightley and Mrs Elton discuss the arrangements for the strawberry party to Donwell, they manage to do so without the word ‘luncheon’ ever passing their lips: ‘cold meat’ and ‘a great set-out’ are their respective expressions, while their author merely refers to ‘the cold repast’. (E, 355, 361) Similarly, when the party of Bertrams and Crawfords set off after breakfast to drive the ten miles to Sotherton, they are taken almost immediately on arrival into the dining-parlour, ‘where a collation was prepared with abundance and elegance’, before beginning their tour of the house and garden (MP, 84). And when Elizabeth and Mrs Gardiner pay a morning call on the ladies of Pemberley, the first awkward attempts at conversation are relieved by ‘the entrance of the servants with cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the finest fruits in season’. (P & P, 268)

These are very formal occasions. Much more relaxed and friendly is the series of visits Edmund pays to Mansfield Parsonage to hear Mary Crawford play the harp, when sustenance is provided (in the same room) by ‘the sandwich tray, and Dr Grant doing the honours of it’. (MP, 65) At Godmersham, too, a tray, its burden unspecified, would be brought in to the company in the middle of the day.

The case seems to be that, except on the most formal occasions, such food was eaten not in the dining-room, but in whichever room the family used for sitting in the morning. Even at Pemberley the meal is taken in the saloon, which was the room assigned to receiving morning visitors. As the meal had no name, it is not surprising that it had no fixed hour but was offered whenever guests appeared. There was never a definite invitation to ‘come for lunch at one’, for example. Indeed, the food might make its appearance more than once, if there was a series of callers. This is certainly the case in the humble Bates household, where on different occasions baked apples and ‘sweet-cake from the beaufet’ are pressed on their visitors. ‘Mrs Cole had just been there, just called in for ten minutes, and had been so good as to sit an hour with them, and she had taken a piece of cake and been so kind to say she liked it very much; and therefore she hoped Miss Woodhouse and Miss Smith would do them the favour to eat a piece too.’ (E, 156)

Even if no visitors called, the family would require some refreshment between dinner and breakfast, but Jane Austen rarely considers it worthy of mention. Two instances are given very much in passing. One is the ‘cold meat’ eaten at Northanger Abbey between morning and evening service on a Sunday. The other occurs soon after Anne Elliot's arrival at Uppercross Cottage:

A little farther perseverance in patience, and forced cheerfulness on Anne's side, produced nearly a cure on Mary's. She could soon sit upright on the sofa, and began to hope she might be able to leave it by dinner-time. Then, forgetting to think of it, she was at the other end of the room, beautifying a nosegay; then she ate her cold meat; and then she was well enough to propose a little walk.

(P, 39)

‘Her’ cold meat rather than ‘some’ cold meat gives the impression of a routine; and, as with the other examples, there is no suggestion of adjourning to the dining-room. Nor does her husband join her; when the gentlemen are out shooting or fishing, as Charles Musgrove often is, they do not feel obliged to return to the house in the middle of the day. Whether they take a ‘lunch’ with them, or repair to an inn, or bear their hunger manfully, Jane Austen gives no hint.

There is little reference to what is drunk with food at midday. Willoughby takes porter, but that is at an inn. Frank Churchill refreshes himself with spruce beer on a hot day at Donwell. Otherwise, we are not told. Emma and Harriet would require something to wash down the cake, but to boil the kettle for tea would involve a lot of bustle in the Bates household that we do not hear about. It is more likely that mead, beer or fruit cordial were customarily served at this time of day, cold drinks that would be ready for visitors at any time they called.

The food itself was invariably cold and, once it had been brought into the room by servants, could be managed by the family themselves. Although there is a waiter in attendance at the George Inn, Lydia takes on the responsibility of dressing the salad; even indolent Dr Grant dispenses sandwiches. Lady Catherine, deigning to take some refreshment at Hunsford Parsonage, ‘seemed to do it only for the sake of finding out that Mrs Collins's joints of meat were too large for her family’, which suggests they were carved on the spot by the assiduous Mr Collins. (P & P, 169) Cold food and little or no waiting relieved the servants of much work, leaving them free to concentrate on the all-important dinner.

Writing from Steventon in 1798 to Cassandra at Godmersham, Jane informs her, ‘We dine now at half after Three, and have done dinner I suppose before you begin.—We drink tea at half after six.—I am afraid you will despise us’. (L, 39) By 1808, however, she was writing from Southampton, ‘We never dine now till five’. (L, 237) Presumably, to warrant mention, both occasions marked a shift, perhaps of half an hour. They seem to have taken place almost involuntarily, especially so in view of Cassandra's absence. As the Austens certainly did not increase their pretensions to fashion as they grew older—rather the reverse, they kept much less company at Chawton than they had at Steventon—they could only have been flowing with the tide. Their experience is a striking example of the gradual shift in dinner-time which took place within individual families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

At any one moment in this period, however, the degree of fashion of a family could be decided by its dinner hour. The first quotation above, despite its tone of humour, indicates exactly that. Jane Austen was very much aware of the snobbery attached to the subject as early as 1792, when the juvenile piece ‘A Collection of Letters’ was written. Though the dinner hour of Maria Williams, the ‘young lady in distressed circumstances’ who is the heroine of the fragment, is not specified, her rich neighbour Lady Greville, who dines at five herself, frequently and deliberately interrupts Maria and her mother at their dinner by impertinent messages to come out and speak to her at her carriage door. Since her ladyship would have required an hour to dress for dinner, the Williams's dinner probably begins at three.

Eighteenth-century memoirs are replete with references to the significance of the hour at which a person dined. Boswell knew of a London mercer who had settled in Durham and impressed the locals by taking his dinner at two or three o'clock instead of at one. ‘How little and how poor he would seem’, commented Boswell in 1776, ‘to a fashionable man in London who dines between four and five.’¹¹ But the movement was unremitting. In 1789 Horace Walpole wrote, ‘I am so anti-quated as still to dine at four when I can, though frequently prevented as many are so good as to call on me at that hour because it is too soon for them to go home and dress so early in the morning’.¹²

Such nonsense was excellent material for Jane Austen's satire. It is at its most pointed in The Watsons, a fragment comprising the abandoned beginning of a novel, written some time between 1803 and 1807. Both the earliest and the latest named dining hours of her fiction occur in this piece. The Watson family dine at three; their would-be fashionable bachelor neighbour Tom Musgrave dines (somewhat exaggeratedly) at eight. Like Lady Greville before him, Tom contrives to call at the most inopportune moment, ‘as Nanny at five minutes before three, was beginning to bustle into the parlour with the Tray & the Knife-case’. The same servant has to answer a rap at the door and, though charged by her mistress not to let anyone in, is unable to withstand Tom and his friend Lord Osborne. The meal is kept waiting while they converse until

they were interrupted by Nanny's approach, who half opening the door & putting in her head, said ‘Please Ma'am, Master wants to know why he be'nt to have his dinner.’ The Gentlemen, who had hitherto disregarded every symptom, however positive, of the nearness of that Meal, now jumped up with apologies, while Elizabeth called briskly after Nanny ‘to tell Betty to take up the Fowls.’—‘I am sorry it happens so’—she added, turning good-humouredly towards Musgrave, ‘but you know what early hours we keep.’ Tom had nothing to say for himself, he knew it very well, & such honest simplicity, such shameless Truth rather bewildered him.

(MW, 346)

Nevertheless he continues to make himself offensive over the subject of hours. Invited to dinner with the Watsons on another day, “With the greatest pleasure,” was his first reply. In a moment afterwards—“That is if I can possibly get here in time—but I shoot with Lord Osborne, & therefore must not engage.—You will not think of me unless you see me.” And so he departed, delighted with the uncertainty in which he had left it.’ (MW, 360) Much extra effort is made in the kitchen on his behalf, but he fails to turn up. On another occasion he calls in the evening specifically to boast of being on his way home to an eight o'clock dinner. Invited to share their supper, ‘which to a man whose heart had been long fixed on calling his next meal a Dinner, was quite insupportable’, he is obliged to leave a pleasant party to go home to his solitary meal. (MW, 359)

After the humble Watsons, the next earliest dinner hour in the fiction is the four o'clock of Barton Cottage. Though this is also a modest household, where the price of candles might be considered significant, it is unlikely that the Dashwoods would have changed their hour from what they had been used to at Norland: that would be too degrading. The early hour is more likely attributable to its being the earliest-written of the novels. Emma and her father also dine at four, but in this case it is not difficult to guess that it is Mr Woodhouse's attachment to ‘the fashion of his youth’, and his general dislike of late hours, which determine the time. It is exceedingly good of Emma, with her regard for elegance and propriety, to humour him in this.

At Mansfield Parsonage they dine at half past four. Five is the hour at Northanger Abbey. The masters of both these establishments relish their dinner and do not want to be kept waiting. For all her unpretentiousness, Mrs Jennings is among the later diners at five o'clock, but then, not surprisingly, hours were always later in London than in the country. People who spent most of their time in town would often import their late hours to the country; we can see the effect of this in the difference between the half past six dinner at Netherfield and that at Longbourn two hours earlier.

The first custom associated with dinner was a complete change of costume—at least for ladies. This is what signified the end of the ‘morning’. Byron refers sardonically to ‘that hour, called “half-hour” given to dress / Though ladies' robes seem scant enough for less’.¹³ The fashionable Bingley sisters require as much as an hour and a half's preparation: ‘At five o'clock the two ladies retired to dress, and at half past six Elizabeth was summoned to dinner.’ (P & P, 35) Catherine Morland is more expeditious; when she wants a little time to herself to explore the Abbey, she goes up to dress an hour, rather than half hour, before dinner. Jane Austen does not refer to any change on the part of men except the repowdering of the hair which Mrs Robert Watson thinks essential in her husband. That is not to say that changes were not made. Men who had spent the day in field sports would certainly have required a complete change of dress. Tom Musgrave, who calls one evening on the Watsons dressed for travel (he has just returned from London) apologises for being in a state of ‘dishabille’. (MW, 357)

Jane Austen's people lived at a time of transition regarding the conventions governing the entrance to the dining-room. Formerly it had been the rule for all the ladies to enter together first, followed by the men. Later etiquette dictated that each gentleman should offer an arm to his chosen—or allotted—lady to take her in; the host always escorting the female guest of highest social standing. At the dinner party given by Emma for the Eltons, we can observe a combination of both customs. ‘Dinner was on table.—Mrs Elton, before she could be spoken to, was ready; and before Mr Woodhouse had reached her with his request to be allowed to hand her into the dining-parlour, was saying, “Must I go first? I really am ashamed of always leading the way”.’ In another moment Emma and Jane Fairfax ‘followed the other ladies [there is actually only Mrs Weston unaccounted for] out of the room, arm in arm, with an appearance of good-will highly becoming to the grace and beauty of each.’ (E, 298) Yet at this party numbers are equal and each lady could have taken a gentleman's arm had it been customary to do so.

In corroboration that this was not the custom during Jane Austen's lifetime, in none of her own letters, as far as I am aware, does she mention being taken in to dinner by a particular man. As a humble spinster and a younger sister, she was unlikely ever to have been the principal female guest.

As today on formal occasions, host and hostess sat at the head and foot of the table. If the master of the house was absent, a strict hierarchy obtained as to his substitute. In Sir Thomas Bertram's absence, Tom takes his place, but when Tom too departs for the races, Mary Crawford knows for a certainty that Edmund will be at the head of the table. In this respect, though not in the courtesies attached to the position, Mr Woodhouse has abdicated his place as host; when Emma plans her dinner party she assumes that Mr Knightley will take his seat at the other end of the table from herself. The arrival of Mr John Knightley in the house forces a change, much against Emma's will, for ‘she thought it a sad exchange for herself, to have him with his grave looks and reluctant conversation opposed to her instead of his brother’. (E, 292) Her wishes in this respect are foreshadowing of their partnership in marriage—another clue to her feelings that she fails to notice. Etiquette dictates the exchange not in this case because John is the elder, for he is not, but because he is the house guest and related to the family by marriage, whereas his brother is merely (at this date) an old neighbour and friend.

The person who gains most in elevation from the lack of a master of the house is Mr Collins at Rosings. ‘He took his seat at the bottom of the table, by her ladyship's desire, and looked as if he felt that life could furnish nothing greater.’ (P & P, 163)

Strict attention to securing an equal number of male and female guests was not observed. The awkwardness of having an uneven number altogether at table is remarked upon in the novels on more than one occasion, however, though no great measures are contemplated in remedy. The unexpected arrival of John Knightley threatens Emma with a table of nine, which, out of defence to her father's dread of noise, she does not seek to make ten (in the event Mr Weston cannot come, restoring the number to the eight originally planned). Mrs Norris, out of humour at Fanny's being invited to dine at Mansfield Parsonage, remarks ill-naturedly, ‘I must observe, that five is the very awkwardest of all possible numbers to sit down to table; and I cannot but be surprised that such an elegant lady as Mrs Grant should not contrive better!’ (MP, 220) Again, the hostess is favoured by providence, this time in the arrival of Henry Crawford. Virtually the only reason why Sir Walter Elliot is pleased to welcome his daughter Anne to Bath is that she will make a fourth at the regular family table, though it will be one man to three women.

With the exception of the chief male and female guests, who occupied places next, respectively, to their hostess and host, the company chose their own places at table. At the party given by the Coles, Emma is pleased to find Frank at her side—‘not without some dexterity’ on his part. (E, 214) At Longbourn, Mrs Bennet refrains from inviting Bingley to occupy the place of principal male guest next to herself, because she is anxious he should sit by Jane. Darcy therefore is given that invitation, much to the distaste and discomfiture of them both. Meanwhile, had it been admissible for Mrs Bennet to direct the seating of all her guests, we can be sure she would have done so with alacrity. As it is, she has to leave it to chance. ‘Jane happened to look round, and happened to smile; it was decided. He placed himself by her.’ (P & P, 340) These two examples, incidentally, imply that the women are already at table when the gentlemen enter.

As the company processed into the dining-room, the table itself presented, in the 1870 words of James Edward Austen-Leigh, ‘a far less splendid appearance than it does now. It was appropriated to solid food, rather than to flowers, fruits, and decorations. Nor was there much glitter of plate upon it; for the early dinner hour rendered candlesticks unnecessary, and silver forks had not come into general use: while the broad rounded end of the knives indicated the substitute generally used instead of them’.¹⁴

He is speaking, of course, of Jane's youth; the tables at Mansfield and Hartfield, twenty years later, are not necessarily deficient in sparkle. Indeed, there are certainly silver forks at Mansfield, together with napkins and finger glasses; these are all new to Susan Price, and occasion her some nervousness. Even at Portsmouth, however, forks are not dispensed with altogether, though they are made of base metal and not properly cleaned. Rosings too bears ‘all the articles of plate which Mr Collins had promised’ and which are presumably missing from more ordinary establishments. (P & P, 162) In 1808 from Southampton Jane wrote humourously, ‘My mother has been lately adding to her possessions in plate—a whole tablespoon and a whole dessertspoon, and six whole teaspoons—which makes our sideboard border on the magnificent. They were mostly the produce of old or useless silver … a silver tea-ladle is also added’. (L, 243)

James Edward Austen-Leigh's remark about table decorations is particularly interesting in its implications for the female role. Notably missing from the occupations of Jane Austen's young ladies is the flower-arranging so common among their Victorian fictional counterparts. The only hint of things to come is in the late work Persuasion, with Mary Musgrove's beautifying a nosegay—appropriate to the modernised, showy but flimsy Uppercross Cottage. This, incidentally, is a fine example of Jane Austen's social prescience: Florence Nightingale, born in 1820, was to rebel against the restriction of female occupations to little more than ‘the endless tweedling of nosegays in jugs’.

The service à la Russe of James Edward Austen-Leigh's time left the table free for such fripperies because the food would be under the direction of servants, on sideboards and trolleys, carved by them and brought round very much as waiter service today, and served in courses familiar to us, each dish and its proper accompaniments arriving in turn. The service à la française of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century was very different. (The change must have occurred between 1850 and 1870, since in David Copperfield, written at the earlier date, the old methods still obtain.) One course would comprise a huge variety of dishes and all would be present upon the table together, ‘smoking before our eyes and our noses’, as Austen-Leigh puts it. Cookery books of the period often carry diagrams suggesting how the dishes might be arranged upon the table to give a pleasing balance. Several large joints of meat and complete boiled or roasted fowl, sometimes garnished with appropriate vegetables (duck with peas, for example) would occupy the central ground. Made dishes and accompaniments (though not many vegetables) would be placed artistically at the sides and corners. There would always be a tureen of soup at one end and very often a whole fish at the other. These would be removed, when the company had finished with them, and more dishes brought in their place. The remains of a fish skeleton were deemed unattractive to be left on the table, whereas a half-carved joint was not.

One of the drawbacks of this style of service was that the meat lost its heat while the soup and fish were consumed. Another was that, despite the huge variety on display, an individual diner might not be served to the dishes he or she liked. Each gentleman carved the meat immediately before him and helped his neighbour and himself to this and other dishes within his reach. Jane Austen mentions one dinner she attended where a lady diner's plate remained empty for some while because her neighbour neglected her, although she asked him twice for some meat. Even for men it was ill-bred to stretch too far or to pass the heavy dishes about and, though there would be servants standing around whose assistance could be sought by catching their eye, it was considered greedy and discourteous to the company to do this too often. It certainly behoved diners, when taking their places, to pay as much attention to the disposition of food as to the identity of their neighbours—unless they happened to be in love.

When everybody had eaten enough of this course, there would be a large-scale disruption and bustle while the servants carried away all the dishes and brought and arranged another complete course. A memorable moment in Emma occurs at the Coles' party, when the conversation between Emma and Frank is interrupted at an interesting point. ‘They were called on to share in the awkwardness of a rather long interval between the courses … but when the table was again safely covered, when every corner dish was placed exactly right’, private conversation can be resumed. (E, 218)

This second course, which contained as many dishes as the first, just as deliberately arranged, might include some new joints of meat to titillate the jaded palate, but the emphasis this time round was on the lighter savoury concoctions like fricassees and patties, together with a selection of fruit tarts, jellies and cream puddings. Clean plates and utensils were provided by the servants as often as required; the need was signalled by placing the handles of the knife and fork on the plate. While nobody was expected or enabled to try more than a small proportion of the dishes on offer, all that cookery was not wasted. The cold remains served for another day's ‘lunch’ or supper, and eventually, if the family tired of them or they deteriorated before they were used up, for the servants' table. As a system it was efficient both in terms of labour and fuel; all the cooking for twenty-four hours could be done in one go, while providing the impression—the reality, indeed—of variety and plenty.

Of course it was only in the grandest households, or when company was invited, that two full courses were de rigueur. Ordinary family dinners consisted of just one course, though a variety of dishes would be on the table at the same time. A typical family dinner might be this of Parson Woodforde's: ‘a couple of rabbits smothered with onions, a neck of mutton boiled and a goose roasted, with a currant pudding and a plain one’.¹⁵ Even this might have been too rich for the Austens; on arriving at Henry's house in London in 1813, Jane, her brother Edward and three of Edward's daughters were served ‘a most comfortable dinner of soup, fish, bouillée, partridges, and an apple tart, which we sat down to soon after five’. (L, 319)¹⁶

Mrs Bennet, who is proud of keeping a good table at all times (‘I hope my dinners are good enough for her’, she says of Charlotte Lucas. ‘I do not believe she often sees such as home’), (P & P, 61) regularly draws attention to the distinction between family dinners and those to which company is invited. When Bingley is first asked to dine at Longbourn, ‘Mrs Bennet planned the courses that were to do credit to her house-keeping’—somewhat prematurely, as it turns out, since Bingley is about to go to London. (P & P, 9) Almost a year later, when Bingley and Darcy reappear on the scene to revive all Mrs Bennet's hopes, ‘she did not think any thing less than two full courses, could be good enough for a man, on whom she had such anxious designs, or satisfy the appetite and pride of one who had ten thousand a-year’. (P & P, 338)

Even richer than Darcy was one of Jane Austen's forbears on her mother's side, the first Duke of Chandos, whose second wife, née Cassandra Willoughby, brought the unusual Christian name into the family and bestowed her surname on one of Jane's anti-heroes. In 1753 this couple gave a dinner which was attended by, among others, Elizabeth Montagu. ‘You may well imagine how well I dined on two and forty dishes, and a dessert of one and twenty, very well ordered and served’, she wrote to a friend, adding, rather understandably, ‘I came away before supper’.¹⁷

By contrast the dinner eaten on 4 July 1806 by another of Jane's relations, her uncle James Leigh Perrot, may be taken as typical of the spread provided on a fairly ordinary occasion by a person of comfortable means and middling status in the early nineteenth century. No women were present and the demands of business rather than of fashion probably accounted for the late hour. James Leigh Perrot was in London with his cousin James Leigh to consult his lawyer, Mr Hill. Knowing that the details of his meals while he was away from his wife would be interesting to her, he wrote, ‘We dined yesterday at Mr Hill's, not till seven o'clock; Dr Budd came in to Dinner, so that Mr Hill had no opportunity of talking with me upon Business. Our Dinner was Mackerell at Top, Soup at Bottom removed for a Neck of Venison, one Chicken on one Side, and Beans and Bacon on the other; Pease and Cherry Tart succeeded’. He added, ‘Not choosing to fast so long, I made a good Luncheon here upon some exceeding good giblet Soup’.¹⁸ He was referring to his hotel, Hatchetts: another instance of the term ‘luncheon’ being associated with an inn at this date.

In order to pace themselves it was necessary for the diners, viewing the first course spread before them, to know whether there was more to come. ‘You see your dinner’ had been the phrase used by the plain-spoken mid-Georgians to indicate that there was just one course. In The Watsons, when an extra effort is made by Elizabeth to entertain guests, her sister-in-law, Mrs Robert Watson, instead of being gracious and appreciative, protests ‘against the appearance of the roast Turkey, which formed the only exception to “You see your dinner”.’ Evidently Elizabeth has announced that, contrary to their normal custom, there is more food to come—perhaps when the soup is removed. Mrs Robert seizes the opportunity to appear self-denying while effectively drawing attention to her hostess's poverty:

‘I do beg and entreat that no Turkey may be seen today. I am really frightened out of my wits with the number of dishes we have already. Let us have no Turkey I beseech you.’ ‘My dear,’ replied Elizabeth, ‘the Turkey is roasted, & it may just as well come in, as stay in the Kitchen. Besides if it is cut, I am in hopes my Father may be tempted to eat a bit, for it is rather a favourite dish.’

‘You may have it in my dear, but I assure you I shan't touch it’, replies her sister-in-law, an example of the worst kind of guest. (MW, 354)

When enough had been eaten of the second course the dishes were taken away, the tablecloth was removed, and what was known as ‘the dessert’ was set out. The word was taken from the French desservir, to clear the table, and bore a meaning quite different from its common modern usage. Most of the table utensils having been removed with the cloth, and the waiting servants dismissed, dessert was a way of prolonging the meal with titbits which could be eaten using the fingers. Traditionally it comprised a variety of dried fruits, nuts and sweet and spicy confections, made with the most expensive imported ingredients. When Mrs Jennings seeks to cure Marianne's broken heart with offers of sweetmeats, olives and dried cherries she is describing a typical dessert.

By the early nineteenth century cheese, the reputation of which had formerly suffered from being thought labourers' food, was establishing the place at that stage in the meal which it has retained ever since. Only with the improved transport of the period could a variety of cheeses from different parts of the country be brought in their prime to the rich man's table, and begin to acquire their individual names after their places of origin. Thus when Emma unwillingly catches up with Mr Elton and Harriet in Vicarage Lane, she is disappointed to find that ‘he was only giving his fair companion an account of the yesterday's party at his friend Cole's, and that she was herself come in for the Stilton cheese, the north Wiltshire, the butter, the cellery, the beet-root and all the dessert’. (E, 89) A fine cream cheese is served after dinner at Sotherton in high summer when the milk is at its richest.

Wine seems not to have appeared until the dessert—it was certainly very much associated with it. At Barton Cottage, when this stage of the meal is reached, ‘Thomas [the servant] and the table-cloth, now alike needless, were soon afterwards dismissed … the dessert and the wine were arranged’, though this is only Mrs Dashwood dining with her eldest daughter. (S & S, 355)

‘Who can now record the degrees by which the custom prevalent in my youth of asking each other to take wine together at dinner became obsolete?’ James Edward Austen-Leigh enquires.¹⁹ The custom he refers to is that whereby a gentleman diner would fill the glasses of his female neighbour and himself and they would drink with each other to a toast of his proposal. Dr Chapman thinks this is what is meant by Edmund Bertram's being glad to put an end to Mr Rushworth's speech ‘by a proposal of wine’, presumably to his neighbour Mary Crawford;²⁰ though as host on the occasion he might equally, if manners were already changing, be concerned to see everybody's glasses filled. (MP, 55) The old custom, however, certainly still prevailed at the time Sense and Sensibility was written, accounting for this little vignette between Sir John and Elinor: ‘Since Edward's visit, they had never dined together, without his drinking to her best affections with so much significancy and so many nods and winks, as to excite general attention.’ (S & S, 125)

After taking one or at most two glasses of wine, the ladies would gracefully withdraw from the dining-room. The hostess had to ascertain by a glance that her female guests were ready for the move; her rising to her feet was the signal for all the ladies present to do likewise. A dozy woman like Lady Bertram might not be very alert to this duty; she never willingly rises to her feet in her life. When Fanny Price is longing to escape Henry Crawford's presence at Mansfield Park, ‘she thought Lady Bertram sat longer than ever, and began to be in despair of ever getting away’. (MP, 304) A gentleman would politely step forward to open and close the door for the departing ladies. After another dinner at Mansfield, that preceding the ball, Edmund, holding open the door as Fanny follows her aunts out of the room, asks her to keep a dance for him.

Strict precedence was observed in the order in which the ladies processed out. At the opening of Persuasion, Elizabeth Elliot has for thirteen years been ‘walking immediately after Lady Russell out of all the drawing-rooms and dining-rooms in the country’. (P, 7) It could be awkward when seniority of age clashed with seniority of rank. The Miss Musgroves complain that their sister-in-law, the daughter of a baronet, makes too great a point of taking her due precedence over their mother. Women in their own home gave way to guests. ‘Remember,’ Mrs Norris tells Fanny, when she has been invited to the Parsonage to dine, ‘wherever you are, you are the lowest and the last; and though Miss Crawford is in a manner at home, at the Parsonage, you are not to be taking place of her.’ (MP, 221) The daughters of the house filed in and out according to age, until one of them married, when she went to the top of the queue. On the day of Lydia's return to Longbourn as Mrs Wickham, Elizabeth, sickened by her sister's folly, withdraws from the family

till she heard them passing through the hall to the dining-parlour. She then joined them soon enough to see Lydia, with anxious parade, walk up to her mother's right hand, and hear her say to her eldest sister, ‘Ah! Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a married woman.’

(P & P, 317)

This passage is interesting because it shows the formality observed even within a family party. It also shows the women trooping in together; Lydia does not claim her husband's or her father's arm.

The withdrawal of the women from the dining-room left the men free to enjoy an hour or so of uninhibited conversation and drink, though there is nothing of this in Jane Austen, who famously never gives a scene at which no woman is present. Excessive after-dinner drinking is hinted at only in Emma's suspicion, during Mr Elton's unwelcome proposal, that he has over-indulged himself with Mr Weston's good wine; and even this suspicion is unfounded, for Mr Elton has drunk just enough ‘to elevate his spirits, not at all to confuse his intellects’. (E, 130) We need not suspect Mr Collins and Sir William Lucas of over-indulging in order to appreciate how much they must have enjoyed having the freedom of Lady Catherine's dining-room when she leaves them to its possession—for the separation of the sexes still takes place, albeit with some awkwardness, when there is no host to preside over this part of the evening.

If this was the hour most looked forward to by many of the men, it could be the most tedious hour for the women, thrown on their own resources in the drawing-room, with neither alcohol nor male company to inspirit the scene. At the Dashwoods' dinner-party in town, there is poverty of conversation enough at table, but ‘when the ladies withdrew to the drawing-room after dinner, this poverty was particularly evident, for the gentlemen had supplied the discourse with some variety—the variety of politics, inclosing land, and breaking horses—but then it was all over; and one subject only engaged the ladies’, which is the comparative heights of two of their little boys. (S & S, 233) Even Elizabeth Bennet can sometimes flag at this hour. ‘Anxious and uneasy, the period which passed in the drawing-room, before the gentlemen came, was wearisome and dull to a degree, that almost made her uncivil.’ (P & P, 341) On the other hand, with no gentlemen to draw their attention off, some ladies improved in pleasantness, Bingley's sisters for example: ‘Elizabeth had never seen them so agreeable as they were during the hour which passed before the gentlemen appeared’. (P & P, 54)

In the early novels, the gentlemen return to the ladies en masse. At Mrs Philips's, ‘The interval of waiting appeared very long. It was over at last however. The gentlemen did approach. … Mr Wickham was as far beyond them all in person, countenance, air and walk, as they were superior to the broad-faced stuffy uncle Philips, breathing port wine, who followed them into the room’. (P & P, 76) In the case of the ladies, it was the hostess who led the way, but with men the host brought up the rear. John Dashwood also follows the body of gentlemen guests into the drawing-room of his London home.

Later the habit established itself of each gentleman leaving the dining-room when he wished. At the Randalls dinner-party there are five men and three women. Mr Woodhouse soon follows the latter into the drawing-room. ‘To be sitting long after dinner, was a confinement that he could not endure. Neither wine nor conversation was anything to him; and gladly did he move to those with whom he was always comfortable.’ (E, 122) Later in the novel, Mrs Elton takes his habit as a compliment to herself: ‘Here comes this dear old beau of mine, I protest!—Only think of his gallantry in coming away before the other men!’ (E, 302) Not only feeble old men but smart young men in love might wish to get back to the ladies. At the Coles' dinner-party, ‘They were soon joined by some of the gentlemen; and the very first of the early was Frank Churchill. In he walked, the first and the handsomest. …’ (E, 220)

If there was no company in the house, the family were free to spend this interval between dinner and drinking tea in a more informal way than in sexually-segregated conversation. This was the period denominated ‘afternoon’, and in the summer (when there were fewer social engagements anyway) it could be pleasantly spent out of doors. Lydia Bennet proposes a walk to Meryton in the afternoon of a very busy day in May; Elizabeth and Jane have already travelled from London, had lunch at the George with Lydia and Kitty, and dinner at Longbourn with the entire Lucas family as guests. The people of Highbury frequently take walks at this time of the early evening (to use, for a moment, our own terms). When Emma has no companion, she walks only in the grounds of Hartfield, as in the July ‘afternoon’ when Mr Knightley proposes marriage to her. The weather has just cleared, and ‘on Mr Perry's coming in soon after dinner, with a disengaged hour to give her father, she lost no time in hurrying into the shrubbery’. (E, 424)

Afternoon walks of relaxation were more often undertaken by men, or by men and women together, than the predominantly female morning walks and visits—doubtless because the men had, with the advent of dinner, given up their pursuits of the day, be they sport or business. Mr Woodhouse expresses the wish that Mr and Mrs Cole, instead of giving dinners, ‘would come in one afternoon next summer, and take their tea with us—take us in their afternoon walk’. (E, 209) On another occasion Emma and Harriet are just setting off for a stroll when Mr Knightley, walking up from the Abbey after dinner, agrees to join them; on returning they fall in with ‘Mr and Mrs Weston and their son, Miss Bates and her niece, who had accidentally met. They all united; and on reaching Hartfield gates, Emma, who knew it was exactly the sort of visiting that would be welcome to her father, pressed them all to go in and drink tea with him.’ (E, 344)

Even in the winter, and in situations of some ceremony, however, the period between dinner and tea was known as the afternoon. On arriving for dinner at Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford gives Fanny a note from his sister (why has she not been invited?) urging her to ‘smile upon him with your sweetest smiles this afternoon’. (MP, 303) In The Watsons, Emma dines with Mr and Mrs Edwardes and their daughter Mary prior to going to a ball for which they are to set out at eight o'clock. She is a stranger to their house and, ‘with nothing to do but to expect the hour of setting off, the afternoon was long to the two young ladies … The entrance of the Tea things at 7 o'clock was some relief.’ (MW, 326)

Both beginning and ending later than present-day afternoons, those of Jane Austen's time, whether spent formally or informally, always closed with this drinking of tea. The time for tea seems to have been set at about three hours after the commencement of dinner (when the Austens dined at half past three, they drank tea at half past six), which would give on formal occasions two hours to eat, and one for the after-dinner separation of the sexes; and on simple family days, perhaps an hour to eat and two hours for walking or any other activity.

At Hartfield tea is taken on ‘the large modern circular table which Emma had introduced at Hartfield and which none but Emma could have had power to place there and persuade her father to use, instead of the small-sized Pembroke, on which two of his daily meals had, for forty years, been crowded’. (E, 347) In other establishments the tea things would be brought in by the servants to the family or assembled company in the drawing-room, as in the Edwardes' house in the passage quoted above. When Henry Crawford is trying to force Fanny to engage in conversation with him, while Lady Bertram dozes and Edmund hides behind a newspaper, Fanny is relieved to hear ‘the very sound which she had been long watching for, and long thinking strangely delayed. The solemn procession, headed by Baddeley [the butler], of tea-board, urn, and cake-bearers, made its appearance and delivered her from a grievous imprisonment of body and mind.’ (MP, 344)

Part of her deliverance is that she now has something to do: ‘she was busy’. It is not surprising that, of Lady Bertram and Fanny, it should be Fanny who makes the tea. In fact Lady Bertram feels herself incapable of it: on the occasion when Fanny has been invited to dine at the Parsonage, Lady Bertram tells her husband plaintively, ‘She always makes tea, you know, when my sister is not here.’ (MP, 219) But there are other examples which show that this was often the duty of the young ladies of the house. No doubt it set off their charms. At Longbourn, Jane makes the tea and Elizabeth pours the coffee. Elinor Dashwood ‘presides’ at the tea-table in Mrs Jenning's London drawing-room. However, at Mansfield Parsonage, it is Mrs Grant, not Mary, who is ‘occupied at the tea-table’ after dinner. (MP, 224)

Although the ceremony was invariably known as ‘tea’, coffee was often also available. Coffee is drunk very frequently in Pride and Prejudice: at the Philips's, Netherfield and Rosings as well as Longbourn. It is also mentioned at Sotherton, Mansfield Park, Woodston Parsonage and the Dashwoods' London lodgings. Arthur Parker, a molly-coddled invalid, is unique in taking cocoa at this hour; his sisters are equally unique in each having a different kind of herb tea—an early instance, this, of health foods for fanatics. Jane Austen also mentions dandelion tea in a letter—but this was an economy measure, perhaps. Following so shortly on a large dinner, little sustenance was required or provided with the beverages, but there is cake at Mansfield Park, toast at Sanditon and muffin both at Hartfield and at the Philips's. This may have been particularly welcome to those guests who had not been invited to dinner with the family, but just ‘to drink tea’ and spend the rest of the evening.

After tea something more than conversation was usually required to vary the scene. Mr Bennet habitually retires to his library after tea but he is the exception, for most people took it for granted that they must amuse one another during these last hours of the day. In Jane Austen's own family there was often reading aloud. Emma is doomed to evening after evening playing backgammon with her father. Her only respite is when she can assemble the old dames of the village to ‘win or lose a few sixpences by his fireside’, but even then she must sit and listen to their ‘prosings’. (E, 22) Whenever much company was assembled, it was usually cards or music, or a combination of both, which whiled away the hours. The young ladies present would be begged to play and sing; or card tables would be organised by the hostess for the pleasure (usually) of the gentlemen. ‘A whist table was formed after tea—formed really for the amusement of Dr Grant, by his attentive wife, though it was not to be supposed so.’ (MP, 227) During Elizabeth's visit to Netherfield, Mr Hurst, who lives only to eat, drink and play cards, is indulged the first two evenings, with loo and piquet respectively, but on the third evening he is not so lucky: ‘When tea was over, Mr Hurst reminded his sister-in-law of the card table—but in vain. She had obtained private intelligence that Mr Darcy did not wish for cards’. (P & P, 54) On one of the Netherfield evenings Miss Bingley and her sister sing; the game of whist at Mansfield Parsonage is accompanied by Mary Crawford playing the harp. Marianne plays the piano at Barton Park; Mary Bennet at Netherfield; Elizabeth at Rosings. Emma plays at the Coles' and later Jane and Frank sing together. At Mansfield Park, all the young people except Fanny gather round the pianoforte for a glee.

Impromptu dancing often closed the evening. In her youth Jane Austen herself danced this way at Goodnestone Park, with Lady Bridges accompanying on the piano. Anne Elliot plays country dances for the hour together that the young people at Uppercross may have the pleasure of dancing; Mrs Weston performs the like service at the Coles's. But Fanny's first experience of dancing at Mansfield Park is consequent upon ‘the late acquisition of a violin player in the servants' hall’. (MP, 117)

The last meal of the day was supper. When dinner had been eaten early in the day, supper had necessarily been a substantial repast; but as dinner itself became an evening meal, all that was normally required last thing at night was a tray of elegant light refreshments. Consequently it is the more old-fashioned characters who are attached to the idea of supper. This is made most explicit in the notions of Mr Woodhouse, who ‘loved to have the cloth laid, because it had been the fashion of his youth’. (E, 24) This is not because he is greedy, for indeed he takes nothing but gruel himself and recommends his guests to take the same. It is simply habit.

The schoolmistress Mrs Goddard is another such elderly, homely body who has not moved with the times. When she receives, from the mother of a former pupil, the gift of a fine goose, she consumes it not at dinner but at supper. ‘Mrs Goddard had dressed it on a Sunday, and asked all the three teachers, Miss Nash, and Miss Prince, and Miss Richardson, to sup with her.’ (E, 29) Dinner for these hard-working women is probably still the middle of the day, when the pupils eat theirs. By her early supper-time, however, Mrs Goddard can relax and enjoy her food. She—or rather Harriet, but surely in echo of her words—is the only person in any of the novels to use the verb ‘to sup’, though Jane Austen frequently used it herself in her letters.

When Mrs Philips promises her nieces, if they will come in the evening, ‘a nice comfortable noisy game of lottery tickets, and a little bit of hot supper afterwards’, we know she is betraying vulgarity as much in the second component of her invitation as the first. (P & P, 74) Mrs Bennet, her sister, also offers supper, and is disappointed when the party from Netherfield will not stay for it. Between the writing of Pride and Prejudice and its publication, mealtimes and manners changed and Jane Austen herself realised that she had slipped up a little. ‘There might as well have been no suppers at Longbourn,’ she wrote to Cassandra when the book came out and she read it for the first time in print, ‘but I suppose it was the remains of Mrs Bennet's old Meryton habits.’ (L, 300)

‘Duets after supper’ are mentioned at Netherfield but not similarly commented upon in Jane's letter. (P & P, 40) It could be that while families continued to take some light refreshment at the end of the day, this would be done in what Jane elsewhere calls ‘unpretending privacy’, and that to offer supper to dinner guests (who had probably, anyway, eaten a more substantial dinner than usual) was the faux pas of Mrs Bennet. Certainly no supper closes the evening at Rosings or Randalls—or at Mansfield Parsonage, despite the famous appetite of the master of that house. However, returning to Mansfield Park between ten and eleven o'clock from taking dinner at the Parsonage, and finding the family assembled in the drawing-room and Fanny with a headache, Edmund goes to a table ‘on which the supper-tray yet remained’ and pours a glass of madeira for his cousin. (MP, 74)

The diminution of supper to a few oddments which could be served on a tray led to the manufacture of an elegant new possession for the home. Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys, a friend and contemporary of Mrs Austen, but rather richer, wrote in her diary for 31 August 1798:

In the morning we went to London a-shopping, and at Wedgwood's, as usual, were highly entertain'd, as I think no shop affords so great a variety. I there, among other things, purchas'd one of the new invented petit soupée trays, which I think equally clever, elegant and convenient when alone or a small party, as so much less trouble to ourselves and servants.²¹

Even at Hartfield the cloth is not laid on the dining-table, but on some smaller table which, at the appointed time, is set out and moved towards the fire in the drawing-room, where the guests are playing piquet or quadrille. At Northanger Abbey, however, where there seems to be a separate room for every purpose, many of them dedicated to the production or consumption of food, one room is nominated the supper-room, which is where Eleanor and Catherine are sitting at eleven o'clock on the last evening of Catherine's visit. To heat a room especially for this purpose seems the height of pretension and of conspicuous consumption of resources, and thus highly consistent with the General's domestic law.

When Jane Austen stayed in 1808 with the family's benefactress Mrs Knight, an elderly woman of refined manners, supper for the two of them was taken in the dressing-room, and consisted of tart and jelly. In the same year the Austens themselves provided a tray of widgeon, preserved ginger and black butter to some elderly ladies who had come for the evening. If this does not sound particularly digestible for old ladies late at night, neither does the toasted cheese which Jane Austen elsewhere mentions as being her own favourite supper dish. With greater discretion, Emma orders the Hartfield suppers so that they are warm and comforting for her father's guests, who dine early, yet delicate enough to do credit to her housekeeping: on different occasions we hear of minced chicken, scalloped oysters, fricassee of sweetbread, asparagus, boiled eggs, biscuits, baked apples, apple tart and custard. Probably many of these were uncommon fare in the Goddard and Bates establishments, thus all the more a treat.

Wine, or wine and water, is drunk with supper at Hartfield and Mansfield. Such drinks, with the addition of hot soup, were often provided late at night to people who have been out at the theatre or a public assembly of any kind. Jane Austen and a party of brothers and nieces, returning to Henry's house from a visit to the Lyceum in 1813 (on the same day as the dinner already mentioned), took soup and wine and water before retiring to bed. In The Watsons, after the monthly public ball, it is the Edwards' habit to come home to some ‘welcome soup’: taken on this occasion, rather unusually for a meal which is not dinner, at their dining-table. (MW, 336) Catherine Morland takes ‘warm wine and water’ after one evening out in Bath, and on another appeases her hunger (we are not told with what) as soon as she gets back to the Allens' Pulteney Street lodgings. (NA, 29, 60)

It is at a private ball, however, that suppers really come into their own, regaining for one dazzling evening the glory that has otherwise long departed. The late hours of a ball and the energy expended in dancing made suppers essential. In 1800 Jane Austen attended one such private ball of fifty people. ‘We began at 10, supped at 1, & were at Deane [where she was staying] before 5’. (L, 91) In a mocking passage in Sense and Sensibility, when Robert Ferrars is spouting drivel about the comforts of cottages, he assures Elinor that even balls can be held in them: ‘The library may be open for tea and other refreshments, and let the supper be set out in the saloon.’ (S & S, 252)

More seriously, when Mrs Weston is planning the ball at the Crown—which is to be a private ball, despite its being held in an inn—she at first, because of the awkward access to the only room large enough to accommodate a sit-down supper, ‘proposed having no regular supper; merely sandwiches, etc, set out in the little room; but that was scouted as a wretched suggestion. A private dance, without sitting down to supper, was pronounced an infamous fraud upon the rights of men and women.’ (E, 254)

The odd thing about the arrangements at the Crown is that ‘at the time of the ball-room's being built, suppers had not been in question’. This is a mystery. The ball-room had been added to the Crown ‘many years ago … while the neighbourhood had been in a particularly populous, dancing state’. (E, 197) Had the young Henry Woodhouse, and Hetty and Jane Bates, once danced there? Or even Mrs Bates before she was married; and Mr Knightley's parents? Surely these good people would have wanted supper? It was, after all, the fashion of their youth, and there was no previous period when supper was not eaten.

In the event the supper provided at the Crown is a plentiful one. ‘Dear Jane,’ cries Miss Bates as she sees the spread, ‘how shall we ever recollect half the dishes for grandmama?’ We do not learn what the dishes were, with the exception of ‘Soup too!’ (again in Miss Bates's words). (E, 330) Soup was certainly the essential component of supper at a ball. There is soup at the private ball at Mansfield Park; and one of Mr Bingley's two conditions for fixing the date of the ball at Netherfield is that his housekeeper should have time to make ‘white soup enough’ for the assembled party. (P & P, 55)

Notes

1. Memoir [A Memoir of Jane Austen, by J. E. Austen Leigh], p. 39.

2. Austen Papers, [R. A. Austen-Leigh (London, 1994)], p. 245.

3. Quoted in Jean Latham, The Pleasure of Your Company: A History of Manners and Meals (London, 1972), p. 31.

4. André Parraux, Daily Life in England in the Reign of George III (London, 1969), p. 37; Carl Philipp Moritz in England in 1782 (London, 1924), p. 33.

5. Dorothy Marshall, ‘Manners, Meals and Domestic Pastimes’, Johnson's England, ed. A. S. Turverville (Oxford, 1933), p. 348.

6. Austen Papers, p. 245.

7. Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (8th edn, London 1782).

8. Caroline Austen's Reminiscences, p. 40.

9. There is an excellent discussion of these terms in Myra Stokes, The Language of Jane Austen (London, 1991), pp. 1-9.

10. Sara Paston-Williams, The Art of Dining: A History of Cooking and Eating (London, 1993), p. 244.

11. James Boswell, The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, p. 79.

12. Walpole, Letters, xiv, February 25 1789.

13. Byron, Don Juan xv, stanza 61.

14. Memoir, p. 30.

15. James Woodforde, The Diary of a Country Parson, 1759-1802, ed. John Beresford (Oxford, 1949).

16. Jane Austen mentions that the visitors were welcomed in the hallway by all Henry's servants except for the cook, Madame Bigeon, who was ‘below’ ‘dressing’ this dinner. Two mornings later, writing to Cassandra before breakfast, Jane informed her, ‘At eight I have an appointment with Madame B., who wants to show me something downstairs’—further proof, surely, of the sisters' familiarity with and interest in kitchen affairs. (L, 322)

17. Iris Brooke, Pleasures of the Past (London, 1955), p. 32.

18. Austen Papers, p. 243.

19. Memoir, p. 30.

20. Appendix to Emma, p. 500.

21. Emily Climenson (editor), Passages from the Diaries of Mrs Lybbe Powys (London, 1899), p. 320.

Abbreviations

Page references to Jane Austen's novels and letters are given in the text. The editions and abbreviations used are:

The Novels of Jane Austen ed. R. W. Chapman (3rd edn, 5 vols, Oxford, 1923):

E: Emma

MP: Mansfield Park

NA: Northanger Abbey

P: Persuasion

P & P: Pride and Prejudice

S & S: Sense and Sensibility

MW: The Works of Jane Austen, vi, Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford 1954)

L: Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman (2nd edition, reprinted with corrections, Oxford, 1979)