] OK, so the gentility ate breakfast around 10:00 am...Then when was dinner? ....If you invited guests for dinner, what time did they arrive, and what time did they generally leave?

I've posted on this before, but since then I've found out more information on this interesting subject. It seems there were really only two formal meals during much of the Regency - breakfast in the morning and dinner which would normally begin at six or seven in the evening. (Although the supper tray might be brought in just before bedtime, if one had dined earlier - as in Emma.) A formal dinner could drag on for hours apparently. That 'lovable old rascal La Rouchefoucauld' was horrified at English habits. Writing in 1784, he complained:"Dinner is one of the most wearisome of English experiences, lasting as it does four or five hours!"

Ladies of fashion were apparently prone to rise late and their habit of eating only twice a day was very dangerous to their constitutions - according to 'The Mirror of the Graces' (1811) anyway. The author of this informative work warns young women about the dire consequences of fashionable eating habits:

My objection is not more against the quanitity than the quality of the dishes which constitute the usual repasts of women of fashion. Their breakfasts not only set forth tea and coffee, but chocolate and hot bread and butter. Both of these latter articles, when taken constantly, are hostile to health and female delicacy. The heated grease, which is their principal ingredient, deranges the stomach; and, by creating or increasing bilious disorders, gradually overspreads the before fair skin with a wan or yellow hue.

After this meal, a long and exhausting fast not unfrequently succeeds, from ten in the morning till six or seven in the evening, when dinner is served up; and the half-famished beauty sits down to sate a keen appetite with Cayenne soups, fish, French patees steaming with garlic, roast and boiled meat, game, tarts, sweetmeats, ices, fruit, &c. How must the constitution suffer under the digestion of this melange! How does the heated complexion bear witness to the combustion within!

And, when we consider that the beverage she takes to dilute this mass of food, and to assuage the consequent fever in her stomach, is not merely water from the spring, but Champagne, Madeira, and other wines, foreign and domestic, you cannot wonder that I should warn the inexperienced creature against intemperance.

The superabundance of aliment which she takes in at this time is not only destructive of beauty, but the period of such repletion is full of other dangers. Long fasting wastes the powers of digestion, and weakens the springs of life. In this enfeebled state, at the hour when nature intends we shoud prepare for general repose, we put our stomach and animal spirits to extradordinary exertion.

(snip - until....)

Indeed, I am fully persuaded that long fasting, late dining, and the excessive repletion then taken into the exhausted stomach, with the tight pressure of steel and whalebone on the most susceptible parts of the frame then called into action; and the midnight, nay morning hours, of lingering pleasure, - are the positive causes of colds taken, bilous fevers, consumptions, and atrophies.