In Romans 13, Paul warns his flock to obey the rulers over them, saying, “But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain . . .”

These days, “the sword” of the government is usually jail time or fines or community service, and only occasionally the death penalty. But in the Regency, it was different.

Criminals were still sent to prisons then. But in the Regency, prisons weren’t nearly as regulated as they are now. Some prisons didn’t provide enough of food or other necessities for the prisoners. Some were workhouses. Worst of all, some were “hulks”: old ships moored in the Thames, where hundreds of men were locked below deck, in the dark, doomed to fight and starve and probably die long before they were granted the dubious opportunity of transportation to the colonies.

And it wasn’t just men in the prisons or hulks: children convicted of crimes were sent there, too. While men and women were generally separated in prison, adults and children were not. You can just imagine the fate of those children.

If you weren’t sent to prison, you might be sent off to the colonies, on the theory that if you couldn’t commit any more crimes in England if . . . well, if you weren’t in England anymore.

But perhaps the biggest difference between the way our government punishes crime and the way crime was punished by the government of Regency England was the death penalty. We still have it, yes, but it’s rarely used, and generally only for very serious and violent crimes. Moreover, these days, attempts are made to administer it humanely. But in the Regency, not only were hundreds of crimes were punishable by death,  if you were sentenced to death, you were going to die publicly and probably not painlessly, by hanging.

However, reform of the penal code was beginning – and ongoing – in the Regency. According to Donald Low in his book The Regency Underworld, in 1816 Sir Samuel Romilly succeeded in getting pickpocketing to be no longer punishable by the death penalty. In a time when over two hundred crimes could be punished by death, this was a notable success. Other reformers began trying to implement corrective programs in the prisons or, at the very least, to separate serious criminals from the less serious, instead of having them all mill about together, the worse corrupting the better (see Peel’s Prison Act of 1823).

This post isn’t anywhere near exhaustive – the people of the Regency were inventive, and the nuances of the penal code numerous and arcane. It’s a rich field for research, but one that requires a strong stomach.

But even with all these differences between then and now, prison still isn’t a good place to be, and not even always a safe place. The spirit of the reform work and the concern for prisoners that began in the Regency are still carried out today by ministries like Prison Fellowship. And then as now, children still feel the pain imposed by the penal system. With Christmas coming, Angel Tree is a great place to start if you feel a call to ministering to the children of those in prison in this day and age. And just about every city has a prison with people in it who can use visitors and books and Bibles. Things might be better now, but they’re far from perfect. The light of Christ still needs to be taken to the darkest of places.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica

We return to the library of our typical Regency gentleman in order to take one of the most scandalous volumes off of its shelf: the poetry of Lord Byron.

Byron is the archetype of an eponymous sort of Regency hero – the sort that is, in the words of his contemporary and sometimes-lover Lady Caroline Lamb: “Mad – bad – and dangerous to know”.  You want brooding? You want scandalous? You want the dark and handsome hero who just might be too depraved to be redeemed? Meet George Gordon, Lord Byron.

As a  boy, Byron suffered what would now be called child abuse and grew up, sadly, to repeat the pattern. He’s such a legendary figure that it’s hard, even now, to be sure exactly which stories about him are true and which aren’t, but he treated his wife badly, conducted numerous affairs – possibly with both men and women – and fathered several illegitimate children, including (persistent rumor had it) one by his own half-sister.

Yet for all this, he wrote exquisite poetry, treasured both in his own time and still treasured today.

Byron’s poetry took Regency society by storm in 1812, when he published the beginning of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, a poem inspired by his own recent European travels. He went on to write “Don Juan”, and many other verses, though the most famous today is the song that begins:

“She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes” .

Byron died young, at age 36, one of the most celebrated and controversial artists of the Regency – or any – period.

-Jessica Snell 

Previous Poets of the Regency posts:

-William Wordsworth

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

Woman Reading

Though she died just before the Regency began, Mary Wollenstonecraft (mother of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley) had an enormous impact on Regency ideas about the education of women.

The Original Feminist

In her ground-breaking book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollenstonecraft made the first strong and popular argument for women’s education. Though she’s considered one of the mothers of feminism, Wollenstonecraft’s feminism was very different from the feminism that makes headlines today. Instead of arguing for the right of woman to be just as raunchy as the guys, Wollenstonecraft was concerned  with women’s virtue: she argued that it was impossible for women to make wise  decisions if they’d never been taught how to think.

You couldn’t, Wollenstonecraft argued, raise a girl to only think about her looks, to only be concerned about snaring a husband, and then expect her to be smart enough to run a household or good enough to raise well-behaved children. If you wanted her to be fit to do her duties, you had to educate her.

Also, Wollenstonecraft argued, women were created as suitable mates for men, which meant they were of the same species – as Dorothy Sayers would later put it, women are human – and so what was good for men was good for women. God didn’t expect wisdom and virtue from men and silliness from women. If education gave men the tools they needed to be virtuous, education could give women those same advantages.

Controversy

Wollenstonecraft’s ideas weren’t completely accepted in her own day – they aren’t even now – but by stating her case so clearly and so well, she started a conversation that lasted all the way through the Regency and beyond. The “bluestockings” of the Regency – the bookish women – were Wollenstonecraft’s intellectual heiresses.

If you’re reading this today and you’re a woman who loves books, if you’re a woman who enjoyed a high-school and even a college education, Mary Wollenstonecraft is one of the brave pioneers you have to thank.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

I was lucky enough to get my part of my college education at a great books program – that is, a program based on the sort of education that’s been going over in England for centuries – back to the Regency time and beyond.

The big differences between what I did and what your average Regency gentleman did are:

1. I got to study the great works of Western literature in translation. Back in the day, you would have read Aristotle, Plato, Virgil and the rest in the original Greek and Latin.

2. I got to do it even though I’m a woman.

Self-Education

I’m almost a decade out of college now, and I still feel the effects of my great books education, in the best of ways. My world grew when I read those books, and, as I reread them, it’s still growing.

And if you’re in America, you’re literate, and you have a public library card, you too can read the books an educated Regency gentleman – an educated medieval gentleman, an educated Roman gentleman! – would have had (or longed to have) on his book shelves.

That’s the beautiful thing about education: it doesn’t have to stop. If there’s something you want to know about, if there’s wisdom you want to gain, you can do it. No, just reading books won’t give you all the benefit of reading them under brilliant professors and it won’t give you all the joy of discussing them with other eager-eyed students. But here are some hacks for the adult, self-starting student:

1. Try online courses, many of them free, in the subject area you’re interested in. iTunes U has a lot, and there are even Christian universities offering free, good content.

2. Use a book to help you find and understand good books. The Well-Educated Mind is one that will give you a guided course of good reading.

3. Pick translations of the great works that also have great introductions. Most copies of classic works in translation will contain introductions that explain the context of the work and why it’s important. I hardly ever skip these, because they’re like a mini-tour, giving me a heads-up about what I ought to be looking for when I read the book itself.

What Good Is It?

So, why should you try reading the great works? Well, I can’t answer it for you, but here are some benefits I’ve noticed for myself:

1. I have context. When I read new political ideas or religious ideas, they don’t seem bigger than they should. I can see where they fit on a continuum centuries long. When I read a new story, I can see the echoes of the old story it’s riffing on.

2.  The Bible makes more sense. When you read other works written around the same time as the Bible, it helps you understand the Bible better – and also to admire it more! When you see what kinds of things were written at the same time, the truth and beauty of scripture stand out.

3.  Some of it’s just plain enjoyable. So much of good literature is valued not just because it’s true or influential, but because it’s beautiful. Indulge yourself – read some Boethius!

4. You can recognize new lies as old ones. There isn’t much new under the sun. And if you’ve read about politics in Rome, you’ll learn something about politics in America. If you’ve read about temptation in Dante, you’ll recognize temptation in your day-to-day life.

5. You can recognize that truth is always truth. There’s something reassuring about reading across the centuries, because you can see that some things don’t change. The goodness of the Lord is everlasting, and it shows up in the written record of human history.

Question for you:

What’s your favorite old book? Or which do you think you’d enjoy reading the most?

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell 

A modern haul of local produce.

These days there’s a lot of talk about food localism: the practice of eating food that was grown close to where you eat. Enthusiasts of the movement often try to make their meals only out of food grown within 200 miles of where they live.

If I did that, I’d be without my two (okay, three!) cups of coffee every morning, but I admit that I see the appeal. I’m lucky enough to live in a region with community-supported agriculture (or “CSA”) groups, which means that our family largely eats produce that was grown only miles from where we live.

But families in the Regency took local eating to a whole new level, especially in the large country estates. These estates, formed hundreds of years before there were safe and reliable roads and trade routes, grew almost all of their own food out of necessity, and even in the Regency, when importing food was more feasible, many of these large estates still produced most of what they ate right there on the property.

What kinds of foods were produced on a country estate?

The food produced on an English country estate ran the gamut from meat to vegetables, wheat to fruit, dairy to game.

Estates supported large farms, which could grow grains and vegetables in their fields, while the more well-off landowners could also support greenhouses dedicated to expensive and rare tropical fruit like pineapples (a princely gift in those times!). Wheat was made into bread and also used for brewing beer.

Estates also were hugely concerned with animal husbandry. Cows provided the milk for on-the-grounds dairies, and they also provided meat, along with pigs and sheep. There were even estates with dovecotes that raised pigeons for the table – the nestlings, or “squabs”, were prized for their delicate meat. Large estates could also contain fishponds.

The extraordinary thing to modern eyes was not necessarily how much food was produced in the lands surrounding the great English houses, but how much of the processing of that food was done on the property. Nowadays, farms grow food and factories process them. But in the 1800s, the growing and processing was often done on the same property, with the cows being milked, the dairymaid making cheese, and the cook arranging the cheese dish all being owned or employed by the same family.

Further Reading

For a much more thorough overview of the food production and processing on an English estate, I recommend Christina Hardyment’s “Behind the Scenes: Domestic Arrangements in Historic Houses”.

And for a fascinating look at current localism, I recommend Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell 

It’s no secret that America has a problem with disordered eating. In a land of abundance, food isn’t just fuel; it’s comfort, it’s reward, it’s entertainment.

I’m no exception to this trend, so this devotional is written from a place of weakness, not strength. But as I’ve been thinking about this month’s theme of “Food and Frolic”, I find myself meditating on St. Paul’s dictum that he who does not work shall not eat.

This verse comforts me because it reminds me what food is for. Food is a thing with a purpose. Food lets us work, and work is such a great good that it existed even before the Fall.

Working for some very sweet food indeed.

So in some ways food is a reward. It’s the proper end to a day full of employment. It’s the proper preparation for a day full of good work. It’s both a reward and a necessity. We need food to do the good things God has given us to do, and we are blessed with food after we do those good things. (Because, after all, if you plant the garden, you get to enjoy its fruits. If you put in the hours, you get the paycheck.)

I think this is why saying grace before our meals is one of the best correctives to the disordered American appetite. So many traditional table prayers contain within themselves a proper theology of food. My favorite is the very simple, “Bless, O Father, thy gifts to our use and us to thy service; for Christ’s sake.”  This to us, Lord, and us to You. Or, as I prayed regularly once upon a time, “Lord, please bless this food, and may I use the energy I get from it to serve You.”

Indeed. Amen!

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

“Business or pleasure?” It’s a familiar question in an airport or at a train station. And it’s a question that would have been applicable back in the 1800’s too. Though the people of Regency England traveled for their holidays, they traveled for business reasons too.

Travel Time

One of the distinctives of the Regency is that it was a time of enormous industrial development. Not only were civil engineers learning how to make already common methods of transport (horses, wind-powered ships, etc.) more efficient, they were also developing new ways to get people and materials across vast distances in less time. According to the Oxford Illustrated History of Britain:

“It took nearly a fortnight to travel from London to Edinburgh in 1745, two and a half days in 1796, and around 36 hours by coach or steamer in 1830.”

That’s a lot of change in well under a century. And, of course, rapid technological development led to changes in society as well.

The manufacturers

England was a country that made a lot of its money on its exports, many of which were produced in its northern regions. Items like coal and wool were manufactured in the north of the country and carried down to the south (and thence to distribution points across Europe) by ships on the sea, and, more and more by the time of the Regency, by canal.

So, while the aristocracy might find themselves traveling to the seashore for a holiday, the lower-class man was much more likely to find himself traveling the way most of us have always found ourselves traveling: when our jobs say that we must.

The armed forces

And who, in the Regency, had jobs that were most likely to force them to travel? Besides the merchants, it was the men in the army and navy. As in every era, wars and rumors of war abounded in the Regency. Take your forty shillings from King George and you were likely to find yourself far, far away from your native England. America? France? Even India? All these destinations and more were possible for the man in uniform.  No promises of holiday feasts or vacation amusements, but if you wanted to see the world in the early 1800s, joining up would almost guarantee it.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell 

I’m an amateur word nerd.*  So when I see the world “holiday” I can’t help but remember that it came into our language from the phrase “holy day”.

Because, of course, it used to be on the holy days observed by the church that the people were released from their work duties. You can still see this in our own calendars: Sunday is the day we weekly remember the resurrection, and many of us still have it off. Christmas vacation is rooted in the remembrance of Jesus’ birth, and spring break in the celebration of the events of Easter.

Thinking “holy day” when I see “holiday” is a pedantic bit of geekery, I admit it. At least, it is on the surface. But when I look deeper, it gives me a hint about what really makes for a restful holiday or a good vacation.

“I need to get away” – from what? 

We talk about “needing to get away”, and I, for one, certainly do feel like I am escaping when I’m lucky enough to leave the city for the mountains, or my everyday life for a week of kicking back.

But what is it that we really need to get away from? It’s not like everyday life is a horror, for most of us. Our days are busy, sure, but for many of us, they’re filled with good things, with everyday duties like working and housekeeping, caring for kids and feeding ourselves and our families.

It makes me think that maybe I’m asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, “what do I need to get away from?”, I ought to be asking, “what do I need to run towards?”

Sabbath Rest

Work is good, but no one should be always working. It is rest that we are running towards. Resting after labor is so important that it was God himself who set us the example of how to do it.

And rest is not an emptiness, rest is a fullness. It is rest in the presence of God. It is being with, not being without. Even in seemingly run-of-the-mill vacation activities – things like swimming in the ocean or games of catch or long walks on a mountain trail – you can hear echoes of the Edenic rest our first parents enjoyed. In Eden, Adam and Eve walked with God in the cool of the evening. In our vacations today, we still take great joy in being somewhere beautiful in the company of those we love.

And even for introverts like me, when I am alone, I am not alone. The urge for silence and solitude is, really, an urge to be alone with God. To be still in His presence.

This is rest.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell 

* Amateur because the professionals are the ones who have etymological dictionaries. I make due with my precious hardbound edition of the shorter OED.