CHAPTER SEVEN

Historical Accuracy and Regency England

In July 2019 Netflix and Shonda Rhimes announced the cast for the upcoming adaptation of the much-loved Regency-set romance series by Julia Quinn, The Bridgertons. Eight books following eight in-alphabetical-order siblings, in which each one falls in love and gets a happy ending. The bickering but loving siblings and their mother are a beloved family in the romance community. The news that Shonda Rhimes and Netflix would be adapting the books into an eight-episode series was met with extreme excitement.

Julie Andrews was announced as the voice of Lady Whistledown, the anonymous gossip columnist who clues the reader into the behind-the-scenes drama surrounding the Bridgertons and their social circle. This casting was widely celebrated.

The issue came with the announcement of Regé-Jean Page as Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings. Page is a British-Zimbabwean actor and fans took to social media, littering author Julia Quinn’s casting announcement posts with comments decrying “politically correct casting” and bemoaning a lack of “historical accuracy.”

Page was not the only Black actor cast in the series. Golda Rosheuvel, a Black British actress, was cast as Queen Charlotte. This casting is an accurate reflection of real life, as Queen Charlotte was directly descended from Margarita de Castro e Souza, a fifteenth-century Portuguese noblewoman who was herself a descendant of Alfonso III and his mistress Madragana from the thirteenth century.

And Page as Simon Basset, a duke, was not without his own historical precedent. Dido Elizabeth Belle, born to an enslaved woman and an Englishman, was raised in England by her uncle Lord Mansfield, alongside her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. Contemporary letters indicate that Dido was very much a part of her aristocratic family, to some visitors’ consternation.

And Dido wasn’t alone as she moved among the upper classes in nineteenth-century England. By the 1780s it was common practice for African leaders to send their sons to England for education, just as they had done with their trading partners in Spain and Portugal before.

The question of diversity and historical accuracy has long roiled the romance community, and the controversy around the Bridgertons casting brought it to the forefront of a community dealing with its own history of systemic racism.

Most Regency romance novels written in the twenty-first century feature entirely white casts of characters. Most Regency-set period movies and TV shows similarly show only white faces on screen. Historical evidence tells us this is a reflection not of the truth, but rather of a modern fantasy that whitewashes history. In actuality, romance novels and plays written in the nineteenth century often featured characters of color.

The Queen of the Regency Novel Jane Austen featured a West Indian heiress, Miss Lambe, in her unfinished novel Sanditon. Miss Lambe is a largely unspeaking role, but she’s certainly there on the page, existing with the white heiresses she attends school alongside. The schoolmistress Mrs. Griffiths is not prejudiced against Miss Lambe; quite the opposite, as we are informed that Miss Lambe is sickly and under the constant care of a physician and must have the best accommodations, even compared with the white Beaufort sisters also under Mrs. Griffiths’s care.

Austen is not alone. There are many more examples of classic Regency authors who included characters of color, including Maria Edgeworth and Charlotte Dacre.

DIDO ELIZABETH BELLE

One of the most famous of Regency women of color today and in her own time is Dido Elizabeth Belle, the mixed-race woman who lived among the aristocracy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, immortalized in Amma Asante’s 2013 film Belle.

Dido Elizabeth Belle was born in 1761 to Admiral Sir John Lindsay and an enslaved woman named Maria Belle. Dido was not the only mixed-race child Lindsay fathered, but she appears to be the only one taken in and raised by his family. According to colonial laws, she was born into slavery, but it seems very likely that Dido never lived as an enslaved person. Her uncle Lord Mansfield officially granted her her freedom in his will, written in 1782 and in effect upon his death in 1793.

It appears that Dido was born in England, but she was not baptized until the age of five at St. George’s Church in Bloomsbury. Lindsay was not present, nor did he give the child his name. But he did provide for Dido and her mother’s futures in other very important ways. In 1773 Lindsay arranged for a parcel of land he owned in Pensacola, Florida, to be transferred to Maria Belle with the caveat that she build a house on the property.

Aware that his career and lifestyle made raising a child impossible, Lindsay placed Dido in the care of his uncle William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield. Lord Mansfield was already looking after another great-niece, Elizabeth Murray, who had come to stay with him after the death of her mother in 1766.

Lord Mansfield and his wife, Elizabeth, raised the girls together. There is a famous portrait of the pair traditionally attributed to Johan Zoffany, though that attribution has recently been questioned and it has been reattributed to Scottish portraitist David Martin. [Figure 18] The portrait, generally dated around 1779, shows Dido and Elizabeth standing on the grounds of Kenwood House where they were raised. Dido is dressed in a white satin gown accompanied by a turban bedecked in diamonds and an ostrich feather, the height of fashion at the time. In her arm she cradles a bowl of fruit, grapes spilling over the edge. Her other hand is raised to her face, one delicate finger resting on her cheek as a mischievous grin tugs at her lips. A luxurious strand of pearls encircles her neck, while two large pearls hang from her ears. Evocatively, a gauzy blue scarf trails behind her, lifted up by a passing wind.

Elizabeth wears a pale-pink dress with lace details along the cuffs and stomacher, a double strand of pearls around her neck and flowers in her hair. In one hand she holds an open book; her other hand reaches out and holds on to Dido’s.

It is this affectionate gesture that has arrested historians’ attentions for years.

Even if Dido had been brought into the house as an attendant or paid companion for Elizabeth, the portrait shows that by 1779, the pair had a very different relationship. They are both richly dressed, both painted with detail and care and traditional symbols of femininity. The equal way they are treated stands in marked contrast with other nineteenth-century portraits featuring people of color, where they are often shown as exotic servants.

Dido and Elizabeth received very different inheritances from their uncle upon his death. While Dido was granted her freedom, £500, and a £100 annuity for the rest of her life, Elizabeth was left £10,000. Of course, Elizabeth was the legitimate child of Lord Mansfield’s nephew, while Dido was illegitimate, which in some ways accounts for part of the discrepancy.

Dido’s illegitimacy was delicately mentioned in her father’s obituary from 1788, where she is described as his “natural daughter.”¹ The obituary also highlights Dido’s place of importance in her adopted family, noting that her “amiable disposition and accomplishments have gained her the highest respect from all relations and visitants.”²

Elizabeth married George Finch-Hatton in 1785; they had two sons and a daughter. She died in 1825.

Dido married John Davinier, a Frenchman, in 1793. They had twin sons, Charles and John, in 1795, and another son, William Thomas, in 1802. Dido died just three years later, in 1805.

In the portrait Dido and Elizabeth are shown as equals, with none of the traditional markers that indicate a difference in their stations to the viewer—other than the color of their skin. But outside the carefully painted canvas they and their descendants had different lives.

Elizabeth’s son became the tenth Earl of Winchelsea while two of Dido’s sons were employed by the East India Company. This was a respectable establishment, but it was an employer nonetheless. Dido’s children had to work for the rest of their lives, while Elizabeth’s enjoyed a much more rarefied life.

Dido herself often worked as a secretary for Lord Mansfield as he served as lord chief justice of the King’s Bench. Widely considered one of the most powerful jurists of his time, he held in Somerset v. Stewart in 1772 that slavery was unsupported by common law in England. Mansfield ruled on several cases relating to slavery, and his judgments have been carefully parsed by historians for any hint of Dido’s influence.

Evidence tells us that Dido was a beloved family member, respected and fully integrated into the lives of her white relatives. Dido and her sons should be considered as part of the (recently fully examined) phenomenon of mixed-race families who immigrated to England during the long eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth. While the majority of white men who fathered children with women of color during this time did little or nothing to care for their children, there is a growing body of evidence of fathers who actually took an active interest in these mixed-race children, and in some cases brought them back to England to be educated and live among their white family.

In his book Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833, Daniel Livesay breaks the development of popular opinion about mixed-race families into four unique stages, each intimately tied to the slave trade. He starts with the enslaved uprising known as Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica, which led to a tightening of the power structures in the Caribbean. Next, in the 1760s, the growing abolition movement led to questions about family structures and immigration of mixed-race children to England. After this shift, a wave of bad publicity for mixed-race people came in the 1780s as concerns moved to inheritance and destabilization of the norm. Finally, Livesay points to a growing disdain after the Haitian Revolution of 1791 for rich, illegitimate mixed-race people, who were seen as imposters and therefore excluded from high society. Dido, however, does not fit into any of these four stages. She arrived in England at the very beginning of Livesay’s stage one, and her life in England spans the rest of them.

Yet it is clear that Dido and her fellow mixed-race inhabitants of the early nineteenth century were a visual reminder of the very real and moral question of slavery and abolition. Historians tiptoe around the question of Dido and her influence on Lord Mansfield and his legal decisions. And it’s certainly not black-and-white. There are shades of gray. But it is difficult to reconcile Dido’s place in her family with some of Lord Mansfield’s legal rulings and writings.

Dido seems to exist firmly in what Livesay calls the “Atlantic family”: that complex web of relationships formed by families with joint European and African ancestries. But she has been discounted by historians of the Regency as too unique to study or include in larger grapplings with the era.

But this was an era of huge change, especially for the family unit.

It is undeniable that Dido gave a face to these larger moral and existential questions for her family and friends. She lived and moved among them as life-and history-altering questions were decided by those she was closest to.

We have no written record of Dido’s thoughts or feelings. The main source of information on her life is her uncle Lord Mansfield and the brief notes he jotted down about her. The other source is the visitors to Kenwood House who filtered their views of Dido through their own (often prejudiced) lenses. American visitors were particularly surprised at the familiar way Dido was treated by the family, highlighting the difference between American and British attitudes toward people of color as debates around abolition and the morality of slavery raged. Thomas Hutchinson, captain general and governor in chief of Massachusetts Bay, visited Kenwood House and wrote:

A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies and after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other. She had a very high cap and her wool was much frizzled in her neck, but not enough to answer the large curls now in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel—pert enough. [They call] her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her—I dare say not criminal.³

We have no record of how Dido felt about such visitors and scrutiny. What we do have is the portrait—the clearest indication of her privileged place beside her cousin.

The fictionalized version of Dido’s life, the 2013 film Belle directed by Amma Asante, compresses many of the historical events that took place during Dido’s life that led to the outlawing of slavery in England. The film imagines Dido at the center of the debate as her uncle decides on the case of Gregson v. Gilbert. The case was sparked by the Zong massacre, when the crew of a British slave ship murdered 130 slaves by throwing them overboard, supposedly because they had run out of water but in reality to cash in on the insurance policies that had been taken out on the slaves as cargo. The ruling, presided over by Lord Mansfield, found that the deliberate killing of slaves was in some instances lawful. But after the trial new evidence came to light that there had been rain on the second day of the murders, leading to a retrial.

In the film Belle, the famous portrait of Dido and Elizabeth is unveiled right before Lord Mansfield is due to rule on Gregson v. Gilbert. Dido sees the painting through a window as the artist unveils it to Lord Mansfield. The music swells as Dido and her uncle share a significant glance.

“It will hang at Kenwood,” he tells her.

“It will?” she asks.

“Why should that surprise you?”

“Why should it not?”

The discussion that follows shows that Dido is very aware of her complicated place in the world. She doesn’t see herself in the stories of slaves she hears; nor does she belong in high society. But she also knows the importance she has for her uncle (whom she calls Papa in the film) and speaks a line that gets to the heart of Dido’s extraordinary life: “When it comes to the matters you believe in, society is inconsequential. You break every rule when it matters enough, Papa. I am the evidence. This painting is the evidence.”⁴

MARY SEACOLE

Many of us learned in school about Florence Nightingale, known as the founder of modern nursing due to her heroic actions during the Crimean War.

But Florence had a colleague, a Jamaican-Scottish woman named Mary Seacole, who was also famous for her nursing heroics during the war, heroics she detailed in the first autobiography published by a Black woman in England, in 1857. After her death in 1881, Mary’s fame was far surpassed by Florence Nightingale’s, and she began to fade from memory.

Luckily, in the 1980s there came a renewed interest in Mary with a new edition of her bestselling autobiography Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1984). In 2005 the two-hundredth anniversary of Mary’s birth was celebrated with the unveiling of a newly discovered portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. [Figure 19]

But the rediscovery and celebration of Mary’s lifework has not been without its detractors, who, just like those angry about the Bridgertons casting, call foul on the supposed “politically correct” insertion of people of color into the historical record. In 2013 British education secretary Michael Gove drew the ire of historians and the public when he attempted to remove Mary Seacole from the national curriculum. Gove and his supporters insisted that Mary’s contributions had been overblown, somehow at the expense of Florence Nightingale, and that removing her from the curriculum would give students more time to study Winston Churchill.

This decision was rightly and roundly denounced, and thirty-five thousand people signed a petition demanding that Mary remain in the teaching materials on Victorian Britain, resulting in a defensive statement from the Department of Education: “Previous media reports that Mary Seacole was not included in the new National Curriculum were speculation. We have never said that Mary Seacole would not be a part of the Curriculum.”⁵

Mary Jane Grant was born in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. Her father, James Grant, was a Scottish soldier and her mother was a Jamaican woman who ran a boardinghouse and was well known as a “doctress.” Mary was taken with her mother’s work from a young age.

I was so spoiled by my kind patroness that, but for being frequently with my mother, I might very likely have grown up idle and useless. But I saw so much of her, and of her patients, that the ambition to become a doctress early took firm root in my mind; and I was very young when I began to make use of the little knowledge I had acquired from watching my mother, upon a great sufferer—my doll… So I also made good use of my dumb companion and confidante; and whatever disease was most prevalent in Kingston, be sure my poor doll soon contracted it. I have had many medical triumphs in later days, and saved some valuable lives; but I really think that few have given me more real gratification than the rewarding glow of health which my fancy used to picture stealing over my patient’s waxen face after long and precarious illness.⁶

One of the many ways Mary’s detractors have tried to undermine her right to appear in the historical record is by questioning her medical expertise, especially compared with the more traditionally trained Florence Nightingale.

What is clear from Mary’s memoir is that she was carefully trained and always eager to learn new nursing techniques. She took her profession seriously.

She was also very aware of the prejudices she would and did face due to her skin color. On a visit to England in 1821 she experienced racial prejudice, which stayed with her for the rest of her life. “Strangely enough, some of the most vivid of my recollections are the efforts of the London street-boys to poke fun at my and my companion’s complexion.”⁷

On November 10, 1836, Mary married Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole in Kingston, Jamaica. Seacole was a godson (and rumored illegitimate son) of Admiral Horatio Nelson. Unfortunately, Seacole was often ill, and Mary spent much of their marriage nursing him. He died in 1844, leaving Mary a widow. Soon after, Mary’s mother also died.

After her mother’s death, Mary took over her boardinghouse, Blundell Hall. During the cholera outbreak of 1850, which killed over thirty-two thousand Jamaicans, Mary nursed many back to health and received public acclaim for her efforts.

Mary believed that cholera had come to the island by a steamer ship from New Orleans. She was right about contagion theory and would use what she had learned in Jamaica during future outbreaks.

In 1851 Mary traveled to Cruces, Panama, to join her half brother, who had opened the Independent Hotel. Almost immediately upon her arrival she was faced with a new cholera outbreak. Mary went right to work taking care of patients and establishing her reputation as an effective nurse. “There was no doctor in Cruces; the nearest approach to one was a little timid dentist, who was there by accident, and who refused to prescribe for the sufferer, and I was obliged to do my best. Selecting from my medicine chest—I never travel anywhere without it—what I deemed necessary, I went hastily to the patient, and at once adopted the remedies I considered fit. It was a very obstinate case, but by dint of mustard emetics, warm fomentations, mustard plasters on the stomach and the back, and calomel, at first in large then in gradually smaller doses, I succeeded in saving my first cholera patient in Cruces.”⁸

Mary herself even fell sick with cholera due to her nursing patients through the disease, but she recovered quickly. In 1852 she opened her own hotel, the British Hotel, but she soon packed up and moved to Gorgona, Panama, where she opened a women-only boardinghouse.

In 1854 Mary turned her attention to the worsening situation with the Crimean War. Hundreds of soldiers were dying, not due to fighting, but due to diseases like cholera. Florence Nightingale was approached to form a unit of nurses to be sent to Turkey to help with the war effort.

Mary was determined to join this contingent, but she was turned away when she applied at the War Office.

Now, I am not for a single instant going to blame the authorities who would not listen to the offer of a motherly yellow woman to go to the Crimea and nurse her “sons” there, suffering from cholera, diarrhea, and a host of lesser ills. In my country, where people know our use, it would have been different; but here it was natural enough—although I had references, and other voices spoke for me—that they should laugh, good-naturedly enough, at my offer.⁹

Mary was not deterred by the racism she faced. She next applied directly to Florence Nightingale’s elite force of nurses, but was once again turned away. Mary was much more affected by this setback, writing, “Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks, as I stood in the fast thinning streets; tears of grief that any should doubt my motives—that Heaven should deny me the opportunity that I sought.”¹⁰

Despite this heartbreak and setback, Mary was not dissuaded. She decided to travel to Turkey with her new business partner Thomas Day to reopen the British Hotel. When Mary arrived in Constantinople she did finally meet with Florence Nightingale. While Nightingale provided Mary with a bed for the night, she did not join Nightingale’s nurses.

Instead Mary continued to travel and settled on the road between Balaclava and the British camp near Sevastopol. The new British Hotel was opened in 1855. There Mary served meals and nursed wounded soldiers. She often went out into battlefields, selling goods and ministering to wounds in the field.

After the war ended, Mary had to shut down her business at a loss. She traveled back to England completely destitute. She was feted by soldiers but had to declare bankruptcy in 1856.

Mary’s difficulties were widely reported and fund-raising efforts were undertaken by grateful soldiers. In 1857 the Seacole Fund Grand Military Festival was held at the Royal Surrey Gardens to raise funds for Mary. It was attended by a crowd of forty thousand, but the Royal Surrey Gardens company was having financial difficulties of their own, so Mary only received £57.

In 1860 Mary returned to Jamaica, where she converted to Catholicism. Her money problems persisted and another fund was raised. Ten years later she returned to London, where she once again was received with accolades. She was appointed official masseuse to Alexandra, the Princess of Wales, who suffered from rheumatism.

Mary died at her home in London in 1888. Despite her difficulties with money for most of her life, she left behind an estate of over £2,500.

Mary took careful pains to ensure that her extraordinary life and work would be remembered by future generations when she dictated her memoir to an anonymous editor in 1857. She left behind a record of what it was like to live as a Black woman during the nineteenth century, giving us insight into such disparate worlds as Jamaica, Panama, England, and Turkey.

Mary faced prejudice head-on. Her memoirs are littered with moments where she was discriminated against or treated poorly due to the color of her skin, but Mary never let it stop her from her life’s mission, learned at her mother’s knee, of helping the sick.

PRINCESS CARABOO

Given everything we have learned about prejudices against people of color in Regency England, it’s particularly interesting to consider the case of Mary Baker, otherwise known as Princess Caraboo. Mary Baker was a poor English woman who invented the persona of a foreign-born princess. She was successful in her deception for a few months.

How and why did a poor English girl choose to disguise herself as a foreign-born princess if, as we are told, there were no people of color in Regency England?

Almost everything we know about Mary Baker comes from her contemporaneous biographer John Mathew Gutch, who wrote a narrative account of the hoax and published it in 1817, shortly after Mary Baker’s true identity was revealed.

The story starts with the supposed Princess Caraboo appearing in the Gloucestershire village of Almondsbury on April 3, 1817. She was dressed in black, and appeared not to speak English, instead using hand gestures and an unknown language to communicate. She was also in possession of two counterfeit coins, a serious offense.

Princess Caraboo was taken to the county magistrate Samuel Worrall and his American-born wife, Elizabeth, for examination. Aside from speaking another language, Princess Caraboo had displayed other indications that she might be foreign-born. She excitedly recognized a painting of a pineapple and identified it using the word ananas, which means “pineapple” in several indigenous languages. She also bowed her head and prayed in her unknown language before and after eating, and before sleeping on the floor despite the presence of a good bed in her room.

No one knew what to do with Princess Caraboo so she was sent to the mayor of Bristol, who sent her to St. Peter’s Hospital for examination as required by law. While there, a Portuguese sailor named Manuel Eynesso contacted the authorities, claiming to speak Princess Caraboo’s language. After meeting with her, he told “her” story of how she was from a small island nation of Javasu and had been captured by pirates, whom she had escaped from by jumping overboard and swimming to safety in England.

The Worralls, believing Princess Caraboo was a highborn foreign woman who had had a terrible ordeal at the hands of pirates, took her into their home. There she received visiting dignitaries who were fascinated by her story. Princess Caraboo demonstrated her abilities for her visitors, showing them her skill with a bow and arrow and, perhaps more scandalously, swimming naked in the lake.

The press was so intrigued by Princess Caraboo’s story that it was shared widely, along with accompanying portraits of the princess in her exotic garb. It was upon seeing Princess Caraboo’s painting in the Bristol Journal that a boardinghouse keeper named Mrs. Neale instantly recognized the supposed princess as local girl Mary Baker, the daughter of a cobbler.

Princess Caraboo was exposed. The result was widespread mockery of the Worralls for being taken in by Mary Baker’s deceit. Still, Mrs. Worrall kindly arranged for Mary Baker to travel to America on June 28, 1817, just a few short months after the entire saga started. Mary was received with excitement in America, where the Princess Caraboo story was well known. She went on a tour of theaters, giving performances as the princess.

In 1824 Mary returned to England, continuing to perform as Princess Caraboo. However, her life took a sad turn; the next time we find her in the historical record she is selling leeches to the Bristol Hospital. Catching the leeches sometimes involved using your own body as bait. Mary died in 1864 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Gutch’s narrative of Mary Baker’s time with the Worralls is fascinating. It explains exactly how Mary took cues from the people around her, adapting her behaviors to fulfill their expectations of her as a foreign-born woman. Mary Baker was a poor woman with little to no education. It is telling that despite this, she was still able to successfully mimic a foreigner, and even create a compelling character for her hosts to engage with.

As Gutch points out, Mary Baker was a popular guest of the Worralls who entertained visitors with a wide range of education. Whenever something was pointed out to her as something she would be doing, if she was truly foreign, she simply adapted. Mary Baker’s genius was in taking advantage of everyone underestimating her. It was accepted that she didn’t speak English, but as Gutch tells us, she listened while people talked around her and used their information against them.

Mary Baker knew there was more value in her invented Princess Caraboo persona than her real-life status as a poor white English woman. She subverted the contemporary views of women in perhaps the most subversive way possible. A poor, uneducated woman shows us that everything we and her contemporaries think and thought about nineteenth-century women barely scratches the surface of the truth.

CONCLUSION

As Tudor historian Miranda Kaufmann has noted, “History isn’t a solid set of facts… it’s very much about what questions you ask of the past. If you ask different questions, you get different answers. People weren’t asking questions about diversity. Now they are.”¹¹

We’re asking different questions and looking for different stories than we have in the past. This is an exciting time for history as stories that have long languished in the shadows are brought into the light.

The concept of “the Regency” itself is such a loaded one. Technically, it refers to only the ten-year period in England between 1810 and 1820 when George IV ruled as Regent. But how do we divest one historical moment and place from the enormously important context surrounding it?

While the long eighteenth century, ending with the distinctive Georgian era in England, dragged into the start of the new era, it collided with the so-called Regency in the early aughts of the 1800s.

Meanwhile in France, we were squarely in the Napoleonic era, heading fast toward the Napoleonic Wars.

The former colonies were settling into the United States after gaining their independence, with their attention shifting toward expansion and the continuing genocide of the indigenous population to make way for European and Christian settlers.

In China the population had doubled (similar to the population growth that occurred in the nineteenth century in Europe). The ports were opened to Western trade and missionaries after a series of military losses to European forces.

If we separate England’s Regency from its global context we miss out on so much of the story. We also do a disservice to the people of the early nineteenth century who certainly considered themselves as global citizens, communicating with each other despite distance.

The many remarkable women of the larger nineteenth century world were certainly known of and discussed in the ballrooms and sitting rooms of Regency England. Some of them even inhabited those very ballrooms, forcing us to reexamine our ideas about who and what was accepted, and why.

This book is from a Western perspective, engaging with how England and concepts of Englishness changed contemporaneously and historically. There is no denying the overwhelming whiteness of the Regency in popular imagination. This seems unquestionably tied to the tokenization of the few people of color living in England who left behind records of their existence. Should we further erase them due to their scarcity?