Dr Sally Holloway
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr Sally Holloway’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.
So Georgian Britain, it's the period from about 1714 to 1830. It's when it's ruled by the Hanoverian kings, George I, II, III, IV. And we commonly refer to the era generally as the long 18th century. So it's a time of massive social and cultural change. And we're going to be talking about the typical journey that a so-called ordinary person might go on as they search for a spouse.
I think actually it's a lot more about romantic love than you think. So like, yes, it is important to make a strategic match, but a strategic match with someone who you were in love with. This whole ideology of love became much, much more important during the 18th century. particularly for middling and genteel people like Mr Barnaby Sykes.
People like that would have found that love was being celebrated right across culture. You know, in the novels they read, in the poetry they read, in the art they saw, in philosophy. And it wasn't this sort of frothy idea, but actually something that was really important in revealing your morality and your refinement as a civilised person. Oh, that's interesting.
That's a pretty good guess. Yeah, I mean, women were typically, you know, 23, 24. Men were mid-20s, maybe 26, 27, 28.
Middling and genteel people, family and friends were really important. And you might meet someone at one of their houses, you know, in a group of friends that you were all going to the theatre together. Card party?
card parties yeah gaming or visits for tea or cake or dinner or you might meet people walking to church and back or if you were much poorer you might meet someone at a fair it wasn't completely calculated but it also doesn't mean that you could do anything you wanted for love you were just sort of gently shepherded into the right direction
So much walking, walking out in public squares, walking through town, walking around in front of other people.
And everybody saw me out walking with Barnaby Sykes. There's no point walking with Barnaby Sykes if no one can see you doing it. Oh, my God.
He might sort of open it by offering her some gifts to see how interested she is and how well they're received.
I want to know what's been turned out my door. Well, I've studied one guy who he offers this woman sweets and she accepts them. But then the next day she puts her head down and walks past him on the other side of the street. Oh, it wasn't a successful offering.
Only once you're much further in. So you'd open with something quite cheap, like a ribbon. Oh. And then escalate towards the end, offering things like rings and jewellery.
Yes, that sort of thing. But building up to hopefully like emeralds, basically. The things that you selected varied massively according to social class. So if you were poorer, you might gift things that you could collect for free, like posies of flowers that you collect from a meadow, coins that you'd engraved by hand.
You'd smooth it to a blank face and then engrave, you know, someone's initials on it.
That's really creepy, the coin. And then stay busks. You'd insert a stay busk down the front of your corset. They'd be engraved with things like hearts and flowers and initials.
And sometimes some of them have little secret compartments in the back that you could unscrew and put a lock of your hair, bringing the two bodies together, the body of the woman who wears it and the body of the man whose hair is in it.
People hold hands and, you know, women in their diaries talk about sneaking off to a back room for kisses with men.
Why is it crying diamonds? It's a woman's eye and it's about the purity of her love.
Yeah, people kiss their love letters. They kiss their gifts. They kissed, you know, lips in pictures like this. It's all about creating that feeling of being together and creating an emotional bond at a distance, at a time when you couldn't just send someone a text.
Yeah. Once a couple embarked on a romantic correspondence, that was a sure sign that they were on the road to an engagement. You didn't just correspond with anybody in that vein. And some dads wouldn't let men correspond with their daughters until they had proven to them that they had the means to marry.
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