I’m currently reading Roy and Lesley Adkins’ book Eavesdropping on Jane Austen’s England, which I recommend. But this post is not a book review. Instead, I want to talk about something the Adkins discuss in Chapter Six, “Sermons and Superstitions.”
“During the eighteenth century the medieval bench pews were often replaced by closed box pews, which provided some privacy and protection against drafts. Inside the church, differences in social quality were reflected by the size and quality of the family’s pew and its position in the nave” (158).
I’ve Tweeted about this issue in the past, because I think it’s really important for Regency fiction writers to be aware of the prevalence of box pews in “our” historical period of interest. Twenty-first century writers who grew up as churchgoers, or whose only expossure to religion is to contemporary Christianity, may automatically think of wooden benches when they read the word “pew.” After all, that’s the kind of pew many churches have now, assuming they use pews rather than individual chairs! The image below displays bench pews of the sort often used today:
As a Catholic born in the late twentieth-century, I picture something like the image above when I hear the word “pew.” But that’s not how most Anglican churches handled seating during the Regency. The illustration of the fashionable St. George’s in Hanover Square below shows you what seating was like in the early nineteenth century. This picture depicts an 1841 wedding. You can see that contrary to what some romance novels imply, wedding guets at ton weddings would NOT have sat in rows of benches as they do today. They would sit in closed box pews.
While I’m talking about fashionable weddings in St. George’s (which show up frequently in Regency romance novels) it’s also important to note that Georgian weddings were not the huge social events that they are now. Some weddings were celebrated quietly, with only immediately family present, if that. (Dorothy Wordsworth did not attend her beloved brother William’s wedding in 1802, despite the fact that she lived with him in Dove Cottage.) The church would not be gussied up for a wedding with white bows and huge bouquets of flowers. The wedding breakfast might be lavish, but not all guests invited to the breakfast attended the wedding. On the other hand, since a parish church is a public place, anyone could walk into the church and watch a wedding purely for entertainment.
Today, even very old church buildings do not usually have box pews. Changes in Anglican church seating began only a few decades after the Regency ended. In the Victorian period, some Tractarian writers and church architects pushed back against private box pews for both aesthetic and theological reasons. Many Tractarians believed it was wrong to show distinction to the rich in church. They expressed a preference for allowing rich and poor Christians to mingle together in the church. There was at least one Tractarian novel about the evils of pews, in fact! But that’s a story for another day.
That said, there are a few examples of the eighteenth-century style of pew extant today. This page about “Georgian Churches” has some great examples. Though I’ve not personally seen such pews, I’ve been told that some older American churches still display box pews, too.
If you want a good example of what nineteenth-century pews looked like and how they signified social standing, take a look at this illustration of “The Little Church in the Park” by Hablot Brown (“Phiz”) in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. This is one of my favorite images of a Victorian church service, because it conveys a good deal about the social aspects of corporate worship.
In the illustration above, you can see Sir Leicester Dedlock and his wife, Lady Dedlock, standing together in the pew with the heighest walls (left side, center of the church). As a baronet and the local landowner, Sir Leicester outranks everyone else in the church, so he has the best place. Across from them on the right side, in a much lower pew, you can see Mr. Jarndyce’s party. This group of ladies and gentlemen includes Esther Summerson— the girl in the bonnet looking at the Dedlocks. If you know the story, you’ll know why Esther keeps looking at the Dedlocks, and if you don’t know the plot, I refuse to spoil it. Let’s just say that this is a pivotal scene and leave it at that, shall we?
Anyway, back to the Regency! If you write fiction set during the Georgian era, make sure that any church scenes reflect the way social rank and wealth influenced people’s seating. If your characters are nobility or well-ranking gentry, they may very well occupy the best pews, especially in a country church. “Poor” or working class characters may sit in the gallery or in church-provided pews in the back (Adkins and Adkins 158).
annerollins.com 