The Cusp of a New Order

THIS IS BONEYARD CRAP FOR LATER INSPIRATION

(Notes from 2016)

It must have been very odd to be a middle-aged person in the mid-19th century.

There are all sortsof fascinating thigs toobserve in surveying social andpolitical fashion over a century or more. These fashionsareperishable, seldom lasting muchmore than ageneration; but even in the 19th century people frequently lived 80-100 years. Thus somebody born in 1800,raised and educated in the full flight of the Regency period and Napoleon’s Empire style (men in ultra-tight breeches and waistcoats, women in wispy low-cut negligee-like frocks, with an elaborate shawl worn up top for warmth and decency) would spend most of his or her adulthood in an era diametrically opposed to everything the Regency period stood for—particularly dissipation and sexual licentiousness. As one era passes away, and new expectations lay down the law, there is a lot of incongruity as the old standards fight with one another. The early novels of Charles Dickens, in the 1830s, arefull of this tension, with early-victorian earnestness and decency continuallyat odds with the social etritus left over from theage of GeorgeIII and George IV. Bad baronets and illegitimate children abound, people of the upperclassesand lowerclasses spendmost of their time swilling madeira, whiskey, and the famousgin.It is taken as an unquestionable given that society will throw up thousands of orphaned, abandoned, and illegitimate children every year, as though this has always been the course of things (though in fact itwas not). It is thought to be vry droll in Nicholas Nickleby when the tiny star in a theatrical company, a girl known as The Infant Phenomenon, is actually 12 years old, her amiable parents having stunted her growth by feeding her a glass of gin every day. An early subplot in the same noevel rvolves around the teenage girl KateNickleby, who thinks she has found abenefator in her wealthy uncle Ralph, then discovers that Ralph actually intends to “sell” Kate to his clubmate Sir Mulberry Hawk. By mid-victorian standards, in a decade or two, these depictins would be thought to be in execrable taste, apicture of wickedness that is never fit for family reading. And in fact these early plot dvices of adultery, illegitimacy, child abuse and dissipation mainlydisappear from Dickens’swork after 1840. These themse continue to appear in fiction, notably Vanity Fair, published in 8150 but et in 1815m butalwaysnow in thecontet of an historical epoch well in the past.