Live Like a Regency Heroine

While I adore the Regency, I must say that the hygiene issues back then would have really gotten me down. I'm not exactly OCD (although people I've lived with may disagree...), but I must have clean hands at all times. And my mother can attest that this trend started early - as a toddler I was apparently pretty calm and well-behaved, but I screamed like I was dying if I got mud into my sandals. Today's "I Covet" feature, Nancy Boy Hand Soap, isn't specifically Regency, but it does involve Castile soap...close enough, right? Nancy Boy is based in San Francisco, with a tiny boutique on Hayes Street (a trendy, up and coming gentrified neighborhood with cute bars/shops/restaurants, for those of you who want to picture it). Their product lines are relatively small, but everything they make is to die for.

I was walking down Hayes Street one day and could smell them from several stores away - one whiff of their elusive, wonderful Signature scent hooked me forever. From their website: "Signature is our most popular scent. French lavender makes it calming and restorative, but the Washington peppermint and Tunisian rosemary give it clean, fresh, bracing notes to which both men and women are drawn." Doesn't that sound divine?

If you want a bit of this scent to brighten your darkest days, try the hand soap (perfect for my unacknowledged OCD-ness, since it doesn't dry out my hands). Or, get a candle in Signature scent so your whole room can smell alluring. Best of all if you get the soap, though - for a few moments, you can live like a Regency heroine! This is a Castile soap, which means it's oil based and quite runny (fair warning; it took me awhile to get used to runny hand soap) - but Castile soap was quite popular in Europe, and the fancy set would have used Castile soap instead of lye or other, harder soaps.

Let me know if you try them! Or, if you have other great scent recommendations, please share them in the comments...I'm always looking for new candles, scents, and other ways to brighten up my life (without spending a fortune on diamonds ;)

Apologies for the lack of posting last week, dear readers. I took a much-needed jaunt to Monterey, where I avoided all sites of interest and locked myself in my hotel to edit my latest project. I almost felt like a Regency heroine, even though I was wearing pajamas most of the time -- as an unmarried lady with no male relative or servant to escort me, I instead confined myself to my rooms and wrote. It would get old v. fast, but for a few days, it was wonderful. But the point of this post is not Monterey -- instead, it's about servants during the Regency. In every Regency romance I've ever read, at least one of the protagonists had servants to attend to their every need (it is a fantasy, after all -- and how many of us fantasize about working twelve hours a day in a factory or toiling as a milkmaid?). Even the smallest middle-class households had at least a stout maid or footman to do the heaviest work; without any mechanized help for laundry, cleaning, cooking, or other chores, keeping up a household was endlessly grueling. But how could a family afford to hire so many servants?

The answer: human labor was incredibly cheap by today's standards. A maid could be hired for £6-8 per year, in addition to room, board, and a few articles of clothing -- roughly equivalent to only £450 ($730) per year today. As an example of what the purchasing power of those pounds was, a lady could buy roughly 12 pairs of silk stockings, or three pairs of walking boots; she could not even think of buying a cashmere shawl, which could approach a price of £60 (nearly £3370/$5480 today -- this was back when all the cashmere actually came from Kashmir and had to make its perilous way to England by sea).

Obviously, to live like a Regency heroine today, I would need to pay someone much more than $730/year to wait on me (I would also have to start wearing silk stockings instead of Uggs, but that is another matter). However, the advantage (or disadvantage, if you are a Luddite) of the Industrial Revolution is that we now have appliances to replace many of the tasks that servants used to do.

The appliance I'm currently salivating over is the Breville One-Touch Teamaker (and no, I'm not a shill for Breville - I found this on my own). It has all the bells and whistles one could ever want in a teamaker: an automatic start timer, a keep-warm function, and settings to control the exact time and temperature of steeping, since different teas require different brewing times and water temperatures. At $249.99, it seems absurdly expensive for a teamaker; after all, my teakettle, which cost approximately 15% of that, has held up for years. But, to look at it another way, the teamaker costs 1/3 of what it would have cost to hire a maid for a year, and she would have brought me hot tea whenever I wanted. With that (questionable) logic, I've almost convinced myself that it's worth the purchase. And the teamaker won't listen in on my conversations and spread my affairs to the entire ton, so that's a definite point in its favor.

Have you splurged on something lately that helps you to live like a Regency heroine? Should I buy the teamaker, or keep up the drudgery of boiling water on the stove?