So, have you ever been reading a Jane Austen novel, and it's
just going swimmingly, until you come to a word that you're either
like A, "What on earth is that?"
Or B, "Did she just say that?
I thought this was supposed to be a very clean Regency romance.
What is happening here?"
Well, that's what we're talking about today: Words that either
don't really exist anymore or ones that have definitely changed their
meanings since Jane Austen's times.
Today, our vocabulary lesson will be on the topic love and marriage terms.
And this video was actually requested by one of you, my awesome viewers.
So if you have any other video ideas or requests, you'd like to make, please
leave it down in the comments below.
And I will add them to my list of a great video ideas.
My name is Ellie Dashwood and this is my channel where I talk about classic
literature, history and writing.
If you like any of those topics, please subscribe.
The first one is the term "out."
This being the term lady, Catherine de Bourgh uses when questioning
Elizabeth about her family.
Your younger sisters, are they out in society?
Yes ma'am.
All.
What?
All five at once.
That's very odd.
Lady, Catherine just can't believe that all of Elizabeth sisters are out.
So what did it mean to be out in Regency and Victorian times?
Basically for young ladies that meant they were out in society.
AKA, they can go to balls, they can go to parties and guys can hit on them.
Yeah, that's right.
There was an official moment, when a girl stopped being a girl and became a
woman who could go dance with people, date people, be Lydia Bennet, apparently.
For different classes of people, this meant different things.
Of course, if you were of the nobility or you were super rich, you would come
out by being presented to the Monarch.
We see this even happen in Downton Abbey, when Rose is presented to
the King and Queen of the time.
After that moment, they would officially be out in society.
Before they were presented, they were still considered a little girl.
Guys couldn't hit on them.
They pretty much stayed home when everyone else went out to party.
After they were out, they participated in something called the season.
I'm going to make a whole other video on the season.
But imagine the season being in the spring and summer, a hundred
days of nothing but partying.
Literally all day parties, every day.
You had breakfast parties, you had dinners.
Then you had balls after the dinners.
And then you would have a later balls after the earlier balls.
That's right.
You needed multiple balls in one day.
And why?
It's because of the season was the upper classes form of a marriage market.
They were trying to get everyone married off.
If you were a girl and you came out, but you weren't married
off within three seasons.
Then you were an old maid and you were just sad.
But of course, for people who weren't in these super upper echelons of society,
being out pretty much meant that you could go to the Netherfield ball.
I think the most in-depth description of being out versus not being out can be
found in chapter five of Mansfield Park.
So if you want to see Jane Austen's take on some of what
being out versus not out meant.
Go read Mansfield Park.
Of course you should read Mansfield Park anyway.
Cause that's great.
Okay.
The next term up is the one my great viewer, thanks viewer, requested.
Which is lover.
So this is not lover.
AKA Taylor Swift's version of Lover.
The basic definition of the word lover is.
Someone who loves something.
I just did a video on the ultimate gift list for book lovers.
You should check that out if you haven't, but again, book lovers.
So being a lover of a person meant a romantic suitor or someone
trying to woo someone over.
And if they were both in love with each other, like say Elizabeth and
Darcy, by the end of the book, then they would both be each other's lover.
There was no sleeping together involved until after marriage.
So very similar to that term is making love.
Now.
It's very interesting that the usage of the term making love
to mean sleeping together did not come about until about 1950.
So all of those generations before 1950 had this other definition of making
love, which was when a lover was trying to woo over the person they loved.
For example, when Darcy's like:
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.
He was making love to Elizabeth by trying to woo her over with romantic advances.
But again, not what we think of it as today.
So I think it's super interesting to look at the history of words
and where they came from and also how they evolved through the years.
And I feel like the next word on this list is obviously, super famous
for Jane Austen misunderstandings, because of how it has evolved in our
time, which is the word intercourse.
Okay.
We all know what this means today, but do you know what it
meant in Jane Austen's time?
I'm going to read you the definition straight from this dictionary.
It says: "Intercourse meant frequent and habitual meeting in contact,
social communication between persons.
Mental or spiritual exchange or intercommunication."
AKA, they were good friends and like to write each other letters or have
deep chats about the meaning of life.
That is what intercourse meant during the Regency era.
No, it's actually really interesting because it had meant that for hundreds
of years in society, but it was during Jane Austen's lifetime when
it started to be applied to sex.
Of course, before that, it was not connected to that topic at all.
So it's interesting that we have this word that pretty much means talking to
each other and it evolves into a term that most people now associated with sex.
When the next word on our list is the exact opposite.
And that is the word conversation.
Yes.
We're talking about the same word you would say, "I had a great
conversation the other day about why Jane Austin is awesome."
Yeah.
So the word we use to describe talking to someone and having a discussion, was
originally a word that meant to have sex.
Even in Shakespeare's work, he used the word "conversation"
as a euphemism for sex.
And it didn't take on the meaning of talking back and
forth with someone until later.
Now, by the time Jane Austen was alive, it did have that
talking back and forth meaning.
And I think that was probably the common meeting by the time Jane Austin was alive.
Now this is a form of conversation, that meant to have sex, this is relevant
to Jane Austen and the Victorian era, and even today, because that led to
the phrase "criminal conversation."
Which meant having an affair.
Yeah, so if a married person had an extra marital affair that would
be called a criminal conversation.
So that is a random factoid.
It can actually still be used in some legal systems as an actual
term, describing an affair.
Criminal conversation.
Right.
Up next is a word that a lot of you might know, and a lot of you might not know.
And that's why I included it because I feel like it's still
pretty common, but it's falling out of usage, which is chaperone.
Now a chaperone is a person, who pretty much follows a single girl
who's now out in society around so that no guys hit on her or have any
sort of conversations with her that could lead to ruining her reputation.
For example, in Victorian London, if there was a young unmarried
woman, she would not be seen simply running around the town by herself.
So basically all of this, was done to prevent her from being alone with a man.
Because either one, something could happen such as, them sleeping together, that
results in the ruining of her reputation.
Or two, just being alone with him and everyone knowing that, could hurt her
reputation and cause people to gossip and be like, "Hey, maybe something did happen.
There was no chaperone there."
We see this in Sense and Sensibility when Marianne went off to explore
Willoughby's house and they were alone and that raised some eyebrows and
some speculation as Elinor points out.
Then we also see this in Emma when Jane Fairfax chaperones her
Otherwise something could happen.
Next step.
We're moving straight to these people are engaged.
Now, if you want to learn more about the word engagement itself, and the
many ways it was used, then check out this video I made about five Pride
and Prejudice words you should know.
Because I include that in there.
But now let's assume they are engaged and they want to get married.
The next thing they would need to do is either buy a marriage license or have
banns read, or if nobody's approving of this marriage, runaway to Scotland.
I am going to Gretna green.
And if you cannot guess with whom I should think you were a simpleton, for
there is one man in the world I love.
All of those topics, I cover it in this other video about why does
Lydia Bennett want to runaway.
Scotland.
Actually, I cover so much about marriage in that video.
I cover all the licenses and some interesting acts of the law that
affected marriage during that time.
So definitely go check that out.
So say we have Elizabeth and Darcy and they've agreed to marry each
other, but now what comes next?
Very important step before they can get married is for their parents, or in Mr.
Darcy's case, since his father is dead, Mr.
Darcy and Elizabeth father to work out something called a marriage settlement.
AKA the Regency version of a prenup.
Only it functioned differently because it was very much concerned
with a woman's money and how that would be managed during her marriage.
Because of course, when a woman got married in Regency England or
Victorian England, or before women's rights started to make a serious dent
on this state of affairs, basically a woman was owned by her husband.
Everything she had was owned by a husband.
Legally, she melted into him in the eyes of the law and
didn't really have any rights.
So, of course for families marrying off their daughters,
they were very worried about this.
For example, Elizabeth was going to be getting at thousand
pounds upon her mother's death.
Well, what if Darcy just totally spent all that?
Course we all know Darcy wouldn't and he's super rich, but that was a fear.
So basically these marriage contracts would outline how the
woman's money could be legally used.
What would happen to it upon her death.
It would talk about provisions for any children she had.
And it would also talk about something called pin money, which was an
allowance a husband would grant his wife so she could buy clothing
or other personal necessities.
Which I think is just so weird.
Basically it was trying to set up a legal contract before this new husband got
ahold of all of his wife's resources.
So that she would be protected.
So they have marriage settlements.
They're getting married.
And guess what they're going to do.
They're going to get married on a weekday in the morning.
In fact, it was by law it had to be before noon for some reason, I guess they just
get their marrying done before noon.
When?
High noon?
No, I do my killing before breakfast.
Seven o'clock.
So if your wedding is in the morning, then that sort of rules
out having a wedding dinner.
So most of wedding dinners were actually wedding breakfasts.
So we even see this happen in Downton Abbey, when the housekeeper
and the Butler get married, they have a wedding breakfast.
Which in the Regency and Victorian times, was the common way it was done.
So next up is honeymoon.
Now this was a word that was in use, but believe it or not, when someone
said honeymoon, it did not involve flying to Barbados for two weeks.
I know totally unforeseeable.
Actually the origin of the word honeymoon, I feel like is very much debated.
Everybody has their own theory.
I've heard both that, it was because the bride's family was supposed
to supply them with a month of honeymead before they got married.
So that they could drink honeymead for the first month of their marriage.
And of course "month" is based on the word moon, because it's about a moon cycle.
So honey plus moon, honeymoon.
But of course other people are like,"No, honeymoon is actually
kind of a depressing idea."
That, all the sweetness you get out of marriage.
Right?
Like you get married.
You're so excited.
You have a month of just being like, "Oh, it's so sweet.
It's just like, honey."
And then after that, you're like, "Actually, no.
Marriage is horrible.
Why did I do this?
I don't even like this guy."
So no matter which story behind honeymoon you prefer, basically it did
refer to the month after the wedding.
And while richer couples would go on something called a
wedding tour or a wedding trip.
Which during Regency times was usually around England or after all the Wars
in France ended, they would go and they would tour Europe in the Victorian times.
Most couples just got back to everyday life after the wedding.
Next up is the term lady.
Now, I included this one because as we talked about before a
woman, when she got married, she pretty much became her husband's.
And we even see this in the terms of how she's talked about by others
.In the very first chapter of Pride and Prejudice,we get this line.
Going to dramatically, read it to you now,
"My dear, Mr.
Bennett," said his lady to him one day, "Have you heard that
Netherfield Park is last?"
So, of course, this is talking about Mrs.
Bennett and Mr.
Bennett, but did you notice how it said his lady.
Basically this wasn't just Jane Austen looking for synonyms, so
she didn't have to repeat words.
This was a common way wives were referred to.
So woman got married and then she had a baby, the newspaper
announcement would read "Lady of Mr.
Fitzwilliam Darcy was delivered of a healthy girl on Monday morning."
Yeah, that's right.
She would be lady of her husband.
So this was just a way women were talked about during the Regency times.
So actually, if you notice in this dramatic reading
where she says, "My dear Mr.
Bennet!"
You ever wondered, why is she goes around calling her husband Mr.
Bennett?
Actually, I have a whole video on that, on the forms of address in Regency England.
So you should definitely check that out.
It's a very interesting why she continues to call her husband, Mr.
Bennett.
The last one I want to cover in this video is actually a law and
it is the Bastardy Act of 1733.
And this is just a really interesting concept, I thought
I'd include in this video.
Which is that it was illegal for a man to father an illegitimate poor child.
That's right.
That was illegal, basically, because now this poor child would be a drain
on the resources of the parish.
That would probably have to step in to help this poor, unwed mother raise
this child and keep it from starvation.
So, what would happen is if a woman who was poor shows up pregnant and
she's not married, what they would do is they'd bring her before the local
magistrates and make her swear to tell them the truth of who the father is.
Then they would drag the father in and give him three options.
Now, the first, if he wasn't already married to someone else,
of course, was to marry her.
Right?
Because then he would be the husband and father of this child.
And he would thereby be responsible for providing for them financially.
Now, if he doesn't want to marry her, or if he's already
married, he has two other options.
One being, he has to reimburse the parish for helping raise this kid financially.
Now, if you didn't want to do that, his third and final option
was to be in jail for awhile.
That's right.
He'd have to serve a jail sentence.
Because he fathered a legitimate child.
Now I just thought this was an interesting historical fact that
I would share with all of you.
And that's it for today's video on Regency love and marriage,
Jane Austen vocabulary lists.
And again, this video was requested by one of my totally epic viewers.
Hi viewers.
You're awesome.
If you have any questions about classic literature or history, you would like
me to answer in one of these videos, please leave it in the comments below.
And subscribe if you like history, classic literature or writing.
Yes.
Thank you.
Okay.