The Regency Speech & Conversation Study Guide

This is the companion guide to Proper Speech & Conversation, the flashcard lesson in which a governess trades your modern slang for the phrasing a Regency drawing room would have accepted. The lesson is quick. This page covers the whole subject: what actually made speech sound vulgar to the period ear, the proper words for the ideas we now put badly, the rules that governed who spoke and about what, and the era's firm belief that loose language meant a loose mind.

A young woman's conversation was assessed as closely as her playing. It was where breeding either showed or failed to, in real time, in front of people whose opinion decided her season. The good news is that the rules were consistent and mostly negative: a long list of things not to do, around a small core of things that were always safe.

What Made Speech Sound Vulgar

"Vulgar" in the period did not mean coarse in the sense of obscene. It meant common, of the crowd, and it was applied to a whole set of speech habits that marked a person as not gently bred, whatever their actual money.

The recognised faults were loud talking and loud laughing, fashionable cant and exclamations such as "la," "monstrous fine," and a drawn-out "so," constant exaggeration, oaths and near-oaths, over-familiarity with people barely known, personal remarks about anyone present or their close connections, and dominating the conversation so that others could not get in. Austen builds Lydia Bennet, Mrs. Bennet, and John Thorpe very largely out of this list, and expects the reader to place them by their sentences before anything else tells us who they are.

The Modern Word and What a Lady Said Instead

Most modern casual speech has a Regency-genteel equivalent that says the same thing with more precision and less heat. These are the substitutions the lesson drills.

The pattern is that the genteel version is more specific. "Without a competence" tells you a person lacks a settled independent income, which is a more useful fact than "broke." "Gave the cut" names an actual social act. The modern words flatten distinctions the period wanted kept.

Words That Have Since Changed Sides

A few words meant close to the opposite of what they mean now, and getting the period sense wrong will make Austen read strangely.

Condescension

In the Regency this was a compliment. It meant a person of high rank graciously lowering themselves to be kind to an inferior, and it was exactly what an inferior hoped for. Mr. Collins praises Lady Catherine de Bourgh's "affability and condescension" and is being entirely sincere and admiring. The modern sneering sense came later.

To make love

It meant to court, to pay romantic attentions, to woo, with no physical implication whatever. "He made love to her all evening" means he flirted and paid compliments.

Nice

Still carried its older sense of precise, exact, finely discriminating, alongside the newer vague sense of "pleasant." A "nice distinction" was a fine one. Using "nice" to mean merely agreeable was current but looked down on, which is the whole basis of Henry Tilney's teasing of Catherine Morland.

The Rules of Drawing-Room Conversation

Turn-taking

Conversation was a shared activity, and a lady's job was to keep it moving and general, drawing quieter people in rather than holding the floor. Talking at length about yourself, or steering every subject back to your own concerns, was a recognised discourtesy.

Safe ground

The weather, journeys and roads, books and music, the entertainment in front of you, mutual acquaintance discussed in general and kindly terms, and the neighbourhood. These carried no risk and could be handed to anyone.

Forbidden ground

• Money: anyone's income, debts, or expectations, including your own.
• Politics and religion, in mixed or barely known company.
• Anything scandalous about a person present, or their near relations.
• Your own health in any detail. "I have been a little indisposed" was the entire permitted account.
• Direct personal remarks, even flattering ones, about someone's face, dress, or situation.

The cut

The sharpest tool in the room was the "cut direct": meeting a person's eye and then pointedly declining to acknowledge them. It was a real weapon, reserved for a genuine breach, and using it without clear cause reflected worse on the cutter than on the cut. A "cut indirect," pretending not to have seen someone, was the milder cousin.

Giving and Taking a Compliment

A compliment was best when it was specific, plausible, and about something a person had done rather than something they simply were. "Your account of the concert quite makes me wish I had gone" is a better compliment than "how clever you are," because it names the thing and does not require the receiver to either agree or dispute a claim about their own character.

Receiving one, a lady deflected lightly rather than either accepting it outright or denying it hard. A small "you are very kind" and a return of the conversation to safe ground was the whole of it. Arguing with a compliment, or fishing for more, were both worse than the compliment itself.

Precision of Language, and the Sound Mind

The period genuinely believed that how exactly a person used words told you how exactly they thought. Loose, inflated, or fashionable language was read as a symptom of a loose, unformed, or merely imitative mind.

Austen dramatises this directly. In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney catches Catherine Morland using "nice" to mean vaguely pleasant, and needles her about it until she protests. He is teasing, but the point stands: he is testing whether she can be brought to think about her own words, and she can, which is part of why she is worth his time.

"…and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything."
Henry Tilney, Northanger Abbey, chapter 14

Where These Rules Come From

As with the rest of Regency manners, there was no single authority, but a stack of conduct books and a body of fiction that watched the same behaviour more closely. The sources this guide leans on are all in the public domain.

• Dr. John Gregory, A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774), still in wide circulation, and firm that a woman should keep her wit and her opinions under a very tight rein in company.
• Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), the standard source on conversation as a shared duty and on the governing of enthusiasm.
• Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, and Trusler's Regency abridgement, on the difference between conversation that includes a room and conversation that performs at it.
• Samuel Johnson's Dictionary and the general 18th-century project of fixing English usage, which is the intellectual background to the period's contempt for "cant" and vogue words.
• Jane Austen's novels, above all Northanger Abbey for the "nice" lecture, Pride and Prejudice for Lydia and Mrs. Bennet, and Emma for Miss Bates, whose kindly, unstoppable talk is a gentler study in the same fault.