Flirtysomethings

WEEKENDS were filled with drinking, dancing and parading about town in your best gear looking, ultimately, to pull a member of the opposite sex. Welcome to the York of 200 years ago - not much different from today you might think.

Well, not if you consider that a major preoccupation of young people was to find a suitable mate.

As Jane Austen famously wrote in the opening of her 1813 novel Pride And Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Quite how the well-to-do went about trying to find a matrimonial match is being played out in Regency House Party, Channel 4's reality TV show in which a group of young men and women are transported back to the early 1800s to play the mating game.

In the show, which goes out on Saturdays at 9pm, participants are encouraged to act like characters suited to a Jane Austen novel. They have to follow a code of conduct based on the strict social protocols of the day. It was the age of the matchmaker when liaisons between the opposite sex were cleverly manipulated and closely monitored.

The York of the late 17th and early 18th centuries would have been a fun place to be a rich singleton seeking a spouse, according to Peter Brown, director of Fairfax House, the Georgian townhouse museum in Castlegate.

Then, York was England's second city and a veritable playground for the well-off young, free and single.

"York set its cap very early as a magnet for tourists," says Mr Brown. "But you have to remember that tourists were much more elitist in the 18th century."

Only the very wealthy could afford their own transport. For example, in today's terms, it would cost £30,000 to keep a coach and horses for a year.

There were some very fine Georgian town houses in the city, where well-to-do families lived, entertained, and hosted visitors for events such as York races, which were the highlight of the social calendar.

Besides going to the races, people would dress in their finery and parade along the river via New Walk, which could only be accessed by paying a fee to a gatekeeper at St George's Field.

Mr Brown sums it all up rather neatly: "It was a marriage market."

A good place to gather for those on the look-out for love would be the Assembly Rooms in Blake Street, purpose-built as a dance hall in 1730.

People would turn up in all their finery, the more gold braiding, the wealthier, explains Mr Brown. The hoi polloi were admitted to an upper gallery to view to goings on until they pelted an unpopular Lord Mayor with rotten tomatoes and were barred.

The tea table was a central social institution and one unusually where women were very much in control. "It was essentially a group of women who met in a private house around a tea table," says Mr Brown.

"They would sit for hours while the hostess served tea and showed off her porcelain and silver ware. It was a place for social chat and also a place for men to come and join.

"Men realised attendance at tea table was just as much fun as sitting around the dining room drinking port."

Coffee shops were also very popular. says Mr Brown. "They were very much a place for young men to gather and talk politics, read newspapers and consume rather powerful and stimulating non- alcoholic liquors such as chocolate, coffee and green tea.

"Chocolate was much more euphoric and contained strong spices and almonds, and could really make you high. Coffee was also much stronger than it is today. Green tea was mildly narcotic, but had the added advantage of getting you quite animated without having a hangover."

Which is not to say that the Georgians didn't enjoy a tipple or two.

Mr Brown says the alcoholic consumption of Lord Fairfax and his daughter Anne was standard for the day.

"We know they ordered up three bottles of sherry and a bottle of port each day from the cellar. That was just for the two of them. They would start to drink in the morning and stay in a nice sort of stupor throughout the day."

Lots more drink would be ordered for a party. Mr Brown says documentation exists from a small brewery which made 5,000 pints of beer for one particular party at Fairfax House.

Georgian York was also a period of social mobility. There was an up and coming merchant class with strong social aspirations.

"There was always the hope that a daughter might marry the local Viscount," says Mr Brown. Indeed, such fairytales even happened. "The daughter of Peter Johnson, the recorder of York the city's most senior judge married Sir John Eden, who had a country estate in Northumberland."

There was a flourish of pamphlets on manners and etiquette at this time, fuelled by this social climbing.

Everything from how to stand, posture and even on how to hold your fan was spelt out in black and white.

Dancing was so central to the social scene that many people took lessons, hiring dancing masters of which there were four in York to put them through their paces within the privacy of their own homes. Mr Brown puts it bluntly: "You could not survive in society if you couldn't dance."

Such emphasis on proper behaviour and refinement is one of the defining characteristics of this period of history, he adds. Although the rich were surrounded by a sea of poverty, the late Georgian and Regency periods were a time of growing social prosperity.

"It was a time of huge social change and upheaval. A time when it was possible for people to change their station in society," says Mr Brown.

Fairfax House is open every day; Monday to Thursday and Saturday 11am to 5pm; Sunday 1.30-5pm and Fridays by guided tour only at 11am and 2pm. Telephone: 01904 655543 online: www.fairfaxhouse.co.uk

New exhibitions for 2004 include Dining With Lord Nelson, a display of Nelson's dessert service, which was made to commemorate his victory in the Nile of 1798.

Updated: 09:38 Friday, February 27, 2004