Of all the activities at the annual Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England — the walking tours, the lectures, the teas, the balls, the dramatic performances and games of croquet — the showiest and merriest is the Grand Regency Costumed Promenade, a public display of sartorial ingenuity and Austen ardor that winds through the heart of town.
Last Saturday’s parade, in the year that Janeites are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the writer’s birth, was particularly exciting. The clothes: A-line dresses, Spencer jackets, bonnets and small drawstring handbags known as reticules for ladies; breeches, waistcoats, jackets, cravats and top hats for gentlemen. Gathering genteelly along the grand Royal Crescent, some 2,000 costumed personages processed in a stately manner through the city until they reached the Parade Gardens, which provided a felicitous backdrop for further admiration of the outfits.
Women greatly outnumbered men, and anyone hoping to engineer a meet-cute with their own Mr. Darcy was most likely disappointed. But there was a large contingent of lively military re-enactors from His Majesty’s 33rd Regiment of Foot for those who, like Lydia Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice,” love a man in a uniform.
Austen herself lived in Bath for a scant five years, and didn’t much care for the place. (One of her characters, Henry Tilney, famously declares in “Northanger Abbey” that: “For six weeks, I allow Bath is pleasant enough; but beyond that, it is the most tiresome place in the world.”) But long stretches of that book and “Persuasion” are set in the city, whose grand Georgian architecture makes it look (except for inconvenient anachronisms like cars, cellphones and the odd Burger King) just as it did in the 19th century — especially when it’s full of visitors who have dressed the part.
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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