Tea — Blog

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?