Free Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes by Michael Paterson Page A

new arrivals effectively attached themselves to the way of life already in existence, and followed – often with slavish devotion – the behaviour and habits of those already at the top.
    With polite society travelling between London, Bath, Brighton and other centres of entertainment, country houses were seen as useful places in which to break a journey, and at the appropriate times of year large numbers of people did so. If you were well dressed enough to look like a member of ‘polite’ circles, you might expect to arrive at any house and be shown around it.
    Calling at, and being shown around houses, whether they were occupied at the time by their owners or not, became an established pleasure of the polite tourist. The visit by Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet to the home of Mr Darcy, with the customary tour conducted by the housekeeper (for whom the tips given by such callers would be an important source of income), is a well-known literary instance of this. From the 1790s, when war against the French closed the European continent to English travellers and ruled out the Grand Tour, houses that echoed the architectural glories of Greece and Rome, and contained archaeological and artistic relics of them, became an important source of education for those who could no longer see the originals. The country house, which in previous ages had been largely a place from which to run the estate or sit out the winter (it was the town house in which collections were displayed and much polite entertaining done), now became a place to visit on its own account. At the same time, the Agricultural Revolution had made farming more profitable and efficient. Not only were up-to-date, well-run estates instructive and pleasurable to visit, they were also places that absorbed the energies and roused the passionate enthusiasm of their owners.
    With fast coaches and good roads, the age of country-house visiting had properly arrived, and these houses adapted to accommodate house parties. From the 1760s onward the bell-pull – a system that linked every room upstairs to the servants’ wing or hall – meant that maids and footmen could be summoned from distant quarters and need no longer hang about the corridors (in many houses the small wooden chairs they used, decorated with the family coat of arms, can still be seen), waiting to be called upon. The servants’ bell board made it possible to see at a glance in which room of the house they were required, but the bells went on ringing for up to ten minutes to encourage the slow or unwilling! By the latter decades of the eighteenth century a system of bells connected by a rope was commonplace in country houses, and the system became more sophisticated over the following century.
    The house party was a largely informal affair. Groups of people, both old friends and new acquaintances, stayed together in a house for a matter of days or weeks or even months. Activities were unstructured, apart from meeting for meals and during sporting expeditions, so that guests were left much of the time to do as they liked. It was not considered necessary for everyone to participate in the same things. They could seek diversion alone or with any number of others. Above all they were free to be idle. The communal rooms of English country houses became places for relaxation, in which lounging was perfectly acceptable. A major aspect of them – and a prime preoccupation for many participants – was the chance they offered for courting: meeting and impressing members of the opposite sex, with a view to marriage. In these informal gatherings, in which people might be in each other’s proximity for a matter of weeks, it was easily possible to find oneself conducting a romance. This lifestyle was, once again, captured by Miss Austen, who described not only the pleasures of this life of endless leisure but the boredom and backbiting that so often accompanied it. Nevertheless the house party, a product of the