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The gloves are off. Or are they?

Having a Ball


Just in time for your holiday viewing. This very enjoyable BBC production resurfaced on Youtube a couple of years ago, and I stumbled across it again this fall – a sort of experimental reenactment of the Netherfield ball, at least in terms of dress, customs, candlelight, food, music, and of course dance. They made an effort to recreate details wherever they had information to make them historically accurate. For some areas - like the precise method of serving such a dinner - they had to wing it, so the re-enactment is in that way experimental.

If you’ve never seen the program, or even if you have, it's worth a viewing. I’d be interested to know what folks think. (I think I remember discussing it on Janeites awhile back?) I was sorry when it was withdrawn from BBC offerings and happy to learn it’s still around.

So here is my question about wearing gloves at supper. When the vid. was making the rounds among some of my friends this fall, one had a question about gloves at supper. She wrote

That was wonderful! I loved all the food details and the clothing.

I think they got one thing wrong though. Women would remove their gloves at dinner and put them in their laps under their napkins. I learned that from Downton Abbey which was pretty well researched, I think.<<


Of course, Downton Abbey was a different era, but taking the gloves off for eating makes sense, and appears as a custom in etiquette manuals later in the 19th century. Does anyone know what the Regency custom was?

And just for fun, I found a couple of references Austen made to specific foods (below), which were used in the program when designing the menu for supper.

Dorothy



Saturday [November 17, 1798].
My mother desires me to tell you that I am a very good housekeeper, which I have no reluctance in doing, because I really think it my peculiar excellence, and for this reason—I always take care to provide such things as please my own appetite, which I consider as the chief merit in housekeeping. I have had some ragout veal, and I mean to have some haricot mutton to-morrow. We are to kill a pig soon.
There is to be a ball at Basingstoke next Thursday. Our assemblies have very kindly declined ever since we laid down the carriage, so that dis-convenience and dis-inclination to go have kept pace together.
–– from Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters

Miss Bingley was engrossed by Mr. Darcy, her sister scarcely less so; and as for Mr.
Hurst, by whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who lived only to
eat, drink, and play at cards; who, when he found her to prefer a plain
dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her.
–– Pride and Prejudice

Thank you for sharing this, Dorothy - I had never encountered this BBC production before, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I loved that it was shot at Chawton House, as I have been in all those rooms and could picture everything so well. It was at once meticulously researched and rather experimental, a sense of sort of knowledgeable winging it, that was great fun.
?Diana