Dandy days

WHAT Mr Darcy should have been wearing, if he really wanted to impress the ladies, was a tight-fitting blue jacket with brown buttons, a waistcoat with carefully-tied cravat, and tight white buckskin trousers.

That was what Beau Brummell, the foremost dandy of the Regency age, wore - and he was the man who set the tone.

Actually, says York historian Chris Summerville, the dandies weren't the most foppish dressers of the Regency period. That honour went to the fops, who wore clothes Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen would be proud of.

The dandies reacted against that by trying to be more masculine, hence the almost military style of Brummell's clothes.

Which didn't stop them being worried about their appearance to the point of obsession. Captain Rees Howell Gronow of the Grenadier Guards was, a contemporary wrote, "one of the prettiest dandy officers of proud Albion Britain. He committed the greatest follies, without in the slightest disturbing the points of his shirt collar and would rather have blown out his brains than have gone to the opera in morning costume."

Chris loves the Regency period - those years in the early 1800s when King George III was still on the throne, the Prince Regent (later George IV) was gambling and womanising away his life, and Jane Austen was quietly writing her novels.

In many ways, he says, it was similar to our own age. Huge extremes of wealth and poverty; a dysfunctional Royal Family; and an obsession with gambling and horse racing.

His latest book, Regency Recollections, lifts the lid on the period - and provides a fascinating glimpse into Regency society that will enthral anyone who loves Austen's novels.

In the book, Regency society is seen through the eyes of above-mentioned Captain Rees Howell Gronow. Gronow was the son of a wealthy Welsh landowner. His father bought him a commission into the Guards, a passport into British High Society.

He was a member of the social elite, a regular presence in the clubs of London and the salons of Paris, who brushed shoulders with everyone from Lord Bryon and Percy Bysshe Shelly to Beau Brummell and the Prince Regent himself.

He was a dandy, duellist, raconteur and wit - although not really, despite fighting in the Battle of Waterloo, a soldier. Officers like him who bought their commissions received no military training, Chris says. Their function on the battlefield was to hold the flag and rally the troops: the real fighting was done by the enlisted men.

Being a Regency man, Capt Gronow was also a heavy gambler - so much so that he gambled away his entire fortune.

To make ends meet, he wrote a series of memoirs, four volumes in all. Chris has edited these down to give a wonderful, first-hand portrait of Regency society.

There are sections on London high society, on the Battle of Waterloo, and on life with the occupying British forces in Paris after the battle.

And there are glimpses of some of the great people of the age: the poet Lord Byron, for example, caught in bed with his long hair in curlers. "It was my conviction that your hair curled naturally!" exclaimed the friend who found him. "Yes, naturally, every night," the poet replied.

There is a hilarious account of the etiquette of taking - and offering - snuff. King George IV, Gronow writes disapprovingly, apparently took it simply to appear fashionable. "He would take the box in his left hand and opening it with his right thumb and forefinger, introduce them into this costly reservoir of snuff, and with a consequential air, convey the same to the nose, but never suffered any to enter."

Chris's favourite parts of the book are Gronow's descriptions of life in Paris after Waterloo. The officers and gentlemen of the occupying British forces set up home there, taking over the salons and most fashionable clubs. But the pesky French, Chris says, insisted on challenging them to duels. In England, only a gentleman could fight a duel. Not so in France, which still had notions of Egalite. So everyone was at it.

"The Frenchmen would try to pick a fight by standing on someone's toes, or bumping into them," Chris says. The English, being English and so naturally predisposed towards saying sorry, responded by apologising.

The French did manage to provoke their peacefully inclined occupiers into some duels. One occurred following a society dinner at Beauvillier's in the Rue Richelieu. A Frenchman laughed at an English officer for his manners when ordering wine. The Englishman picked up a French loaf and used it to beat his tormentor about the head. "On being asked the reason of such rough treatment, he said he would serve all Frenchmen in the same manner if they insulted him," Gronow writes.

The upshot was a duel fought the next day - in which the English officer shot the Frenchman.

You don't read about that kind of thing in Jane Austen.