Five and twenty ponies,

Trotting through the dark -

Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.

Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,

Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!

(Rudyard Kipling, A Smuggler's Song, 1906)

Kipling's poem was written in 1906, but it refers to the Georgian era, when taxes on imports were high and smuggling was rife. Many people turned a blind eye to the trade, often profiting from smuggled goods themselves. Susannah Fullerton tells us that at least half of the tea imported into England was obtained illegally. Normally, tea cost at least seven shillings a pound, but contraband tea could be bought by smugglers at seven pence a pound and sold for two shillings. That’s 24 pence – over three times the legal price. Tea merchants could not compete with these prices, so much of the tea they sold was of dubious origin. A case from the Old Bailey law court records of 1799 reports that William Strick was arrested in Cornwall for smuggling. His case was not tried in Cornwall, however, but in London. It was thought that no jury would dare to convict him in Cornwall, since the smuggling trade had such a hold.

When Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice learns that Mr. Wickham has debts of over a thousand pounds in Brighton, she is aghast. ‘“A gamester!” she cried. “This is wholly unexpected; I had not an idea of it.”’ Those less innocent than Jane, however, would not have been surprised at Wickham's debts. Gambling was a staple pastime of Regency society, and vast fortunes were lost at the gaming tables. The politician Charles Fox owed £140,000. That's around £31 million today. And Mr. Darcy paid Wickham's thousand pounds, amounting to roughly £87,000 now. Only love for Elizabeth could have induced him to do that.

Women gambled too. Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, Charles Fox's friend and supporter, could lose in one evening an amount equivalent to twenty years of income for a gentleman such as Mr. Bennet.

Although gaming was largely illegal, this didn't prevent the gamers. Their punishment was generally in losing enormous sums of money, rather than being arrested, and the Old Bailey records between 1800 and 1830 do not show any prosecutions for gambling. Fraud, however, was a crime, and a gambler might be arrested for cheating.

One example from the Old Bailey in 1812 describes how Samuel Bathcot was cheated out of £10 by  the Wheeler brothers.

'I did not intend to start a riot,' says Elizabeth Darcy, at the start of my book Crime and Prejudice. Of course she didn't; she was agitating for women's education. Why shouldn't women like Elizabeth Darcy, Mary Anning the geologist, and Charles Darwin's cousin Caroline Wedgewood, be allowed to go to Cambridge University?

Undergraduate students at Cambridge each belong to a college, where they sleep, have meals and sometimes discuss their work with a specialist in their subject. There were no women's colleges at Cambridge in Jane Austen's time. The first, Girton, was founded in 1869; the second, Newnham, was founded in 1871. The third, New Hall, was not founded till 1954. Women were allowed to attend some lectures at Cambridge in the 1870s, and to sit for exams from 1881. In 1880, women presented a petition demanding the right to receive a degree, but it took another 17 years for a vote to be held, and the result was disastrous.

"Are you looking at me?" 

It didn't take much for a gentleman's honour to be challenged in Regency England, and once offended, the parties often resorted to a duel. Duelling in the UK was outlawed in 1819, but duels continued to be fought until 1852. The favoured weapons were pistols or swords. In theory, killing someone in a duel was counted as murder, and the winner was liable to the death penalty. In practice, a lot of leniency was upheld in sentencing.