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I’ve written all my books in the Regency period and since there are twelve of those books out so far, I feel as if I have a pretty good grasp of that period.  So I decided to challenge myself and set a series in the Georgian period.  The Georgian period comes before the Regency:  think Marie Antoinette, big wigs, men in tights, powdered hair, enormous side hoops.  I sailed into this new period pretty confidently.  After all, I’m a professor teaching the Renaissance every day, and the Georgian period is closer to the Renaissance.  How hard could it be?

Well, it has turned out to be harder—and more interesting—than I thought.  At the moment my desk is piled high with books about Georgian England.  And in every one of them I’ve found a surprise, if not more than one.
But the crucial one, for me, has had to do with the very texture of aristocratic society in the period.  I’m used to the Regency, as I said above:  a refined, civilized society epitomized by Jane Austen.  I’m discovering that the Georgian period is something altogether different.  For example, there was a huge market in joke books—sold to women.  Here’s a typical example:

Lord D-- told Betty Careless upon shewing her legs, that they were very handsome and so much alike that they must needs be twins:  ‘but indeed, said she, you are mistaken, for I have had more than two or three between them.’

Hmmm.

Here’s another:

A gentleman happening to make water against a house, did not see two young ladies looking out of the window close by, till hearing them giggling, when looking towards them, he asked, what made them so merry.  ‘O lord, said one of them, a very little thing will make us laugh.’

Among female wits, according to the Duchess of Leinster, “want of delicacy was very much the fashion.”

The Georgian period was an age in which a gentleman—and a lady—might well embellish their clothing with buttons painted with pornographic scenes.  It was an age in which the most famous print makers sold thousands of prints depicting their king in bed or literally in the act of making love.  Voyeurism was celebrated; many, many marriages were lived out in separation.  Once an heir was provided, women seem to have engaged in multiple relationships.  As Lord Egremont wrote to Lord Holland:  “There was hardly a young lady of fashion, who did not think it almost a stain upon her reputation if she is not known as having cuckolded her husband; and the only doubt was who was to assist her in the operation.” In the words of a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Mortagu, marriage is “as much ridiculed by our young ladies as it used to e by young fellows:  in short, both sxes have found the inconvenience of it, and the appellation of rake is as genteel in a woman as in a man of quality.”

I wrote books set in the Regency period because I loved reading Georgette Heyer and Judith McNaught and all the wonderful romances that introduced me to the period.  At the base, I really would love to have been born in the Regency--as long as I was the daughter of a duke, naturally.  But now I’m changing my mind.  I think I’d like to have been born (as the daughter of a duke) into the raunchy, laughing, sexy Georgian period.

Let’s pretend that you could choose the historical period in which you’d like to be born.  When would you choose?  And Why?