Mr Darcy Is Coming! Planning A Special Dinner

Mrs Elton with her housekeeper.

When planning a dinner or card party, hostesses set aside part of the day to organise menus with their housekeeper or cook. Emma’s new bride, Mrs Elton, complained: ‘I believe I was half an hour this morning shut up with my housekeeper.’ 

Mrs Elton and her pearls.

If only one course was served, the company was told ‘You see your dinner’ when they sat down to dine. But for a special dinner party, at least two courses were provided. When Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs Bennet invited Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy to a family dinner at Longbourn, she, ‘did not think anything less than two 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.’

Perkins, 'Every Woman Her Own Housekeeper'.

All the dishes for the first course were placed on the table at the same time. Then the serving dishes were ‘removed’ for the second course, which was arranged in a similar fashion. Guests ate a little of what they fancy from the dishes closest to them, perhaps asking a servant to pass them a favourite dish, if wanted, from the far end of the table.

'The gentlemen did approach'.

Genteel hostesses dressed smartly though not over-grand, so that their guests did not feel inferior if only modestly attired; but for dinner parties, ladies and gentlemen normally wore full evening dress.

Images:

Charles Brock coloured illustrations for Emma, and black and white illustration for Pride and Prejudice, courtesy of Mollands.

A sample 3 course dinner for the month of March. John Perkins, Every Woman Her Own House-keeper, (London, 1796). Courtesy Google Books.

Dinner Time!

Dinner in the 1780s.

In Jane Austen’s day, dinner was a moveable feast, depending on whether you kept fashionable hours; country hours where normally earlier than in London. The haut ton did not dine until at least five or six o’clock, or even later. When Lady Newdigate (Hester Mundy) stayed at Stansted Park in 1795, she commented that: ‘The hours of ye family are what ye polite world w’d not conform to viz. Breakfast at 8½, dine at 3½, supper at 9 and go to bed at 10, but Everybody is at Liberty to order their own Breakfast, Dinner or Supper into their own Rooms and no questions ask’d.’

The Austen family dined at half-past three when living at Steventon Rectory in the 1790s. However, over Jane’s lifetime, their dinner hour changed. While staying with the Bridges family at Goodnestone in 1805, Jane mentions dining at four o'clock, so that they could go walking afterwards. Three years later, when the Austen ladies lived in Southampton, Jane noted in a letter, ‘We never dine now till five.’ During a visit to her brother Henry’s new residence in Henrietta St, London, Jane wrote to Cassandra (15 September 1813) that soon after five o’clock, shortly after her arrival, the family sat down to ‘a most comfortable dinner of soup, fish, bouilée, partridges, and an apple tart.’

Dessert time at the Ashmolean.

Following dinner, tea and cakes were normally served around seven, and the day ended with a light supper and wine (unless one had dined fashionably late). As the dinner hour got later and later, some people had a snack, perhaps some cold meat, in the early afternoon to fill the gap. By 1817 Sir Richard Phillips noted in his Morning’s Walk from London to Kew that the dinner hour of the polite world had ‘shifted to the unhealthy hours of eight or nine’ at night. 

Image © Sue Wilkes: A table set for dessert in the 1770s at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.