] One thing I've always found remarkable is how comparatively plain, so many aspects of Regency life were, at least compared to previous and later periods. Perhaps "simple elegance" would be a better descriptive term.

This was kind of my "Why I'm interested particularly in the Regency (other than Jane Austen)" mini-manifesto:

Why I'm attracted to the Regency... Written by The Mysterious H.C. (1/14/2001 11:23 a.m.) in consequence of the missive, If we had a time machine...., penned by Malene

The main reason why I'm attracted to the Regency (using the term broadly to denote the ca. 1790-1820 period), other than the Jane Austen connection, is that I consider it to be the high point of traditional (non-throughly-industrialized) Western culture in a number of ways (though certainly not from the point of view of European power struggles and wars!). A fair amount of applied technological progress had already occurred, making many people's lives easier in certain ways, and literacy was taken for granted among all individuals of the broad "genteel" stratum, and was even somewhat widespread among shopgirls and people like that -- but the negative consequences of population increase and unrestrained laissez-faire industrialism hadn't really set in (the population of England increased almost four-fold over the course of the nineteenth century, replacing the rural squalor that Regency England had inherited from the middle ages with concentrated urban slum misery, and medicine didn't really become scientific enough to reliably point the way towards the systematic alleviation of the new problems until at least the 1870's...). In America, slavery was not as entrenched and important as it later became (a lot of people were still thinking that slavery would eventually fade away, and the south had not yet become hardened and intolerant towards any discussion about slavery). In matters of aesthetics, the Regency generally had at least as good taste as what had preceded, and better taste than what followed -- in architecture and furniture, for example, the Regency enjoyed playing with a tension between the opposite poles of the classical vs. the gothic (while in many ways still keeping with the good old-fashioned solid Georgian), but in the Victorian, a kind of conformitarian neo-pseudo-ersatzo-Gothic became the predominating style, and it was fashionable to load everything down with heavy cluttered ornamentation (this was a kind of revival of the Elizabethan tendency that the more jewels etc. you wore the better, with no upper limit except what you could afford, while the Regency was more subtle and restrained in some ways). In a number of different respects, the Victorian period took various Regency social customs and rules of etiquette and/or morality, and rigidified and fossilized them, so that Victorian society was quick to condemn any departures from inflexible one-size-fits-all absolute standards and conventions that everyone was expected to conform to (something which wasn't true to quite the same degree in the Regency). Regency clothes, especially for women, were more aethetic overall and less encumbering and restrictive than those of basically any other period between the 1520's and WW1 (not showing the tendencies toward tight corseting, heavy ornamentation, and ever-changing extreme exaggerations and distortions -- hoopskirts, bustles, big sleeves, etc. etc. ad nauseam -- that was pretty much the norm in fashionable women's clothing during most of the 18th and nineteenth centuries...). There were some negatives too, such as this period being that of the fairly extreme predominance of the country gentleman over other rural classes in England (so that the largest segment of the rural population was landless agricultural labourers, and the Regency was the highpoint of severe penalties for trivial property crimes, and extreme legal penalties for very minor poaching infractions -- where "poaching" was defined as someone not of the upper classes hunting any animal which the upper classes wished to monopolize the hunting of) -- but there was plenty of open political debate in both England and America (despite sporadic episodes of repression in both countries), and the English political system probably would have been reformed sooner had it not been for continental European political/military events (despotism was very much on the defensive in intellectual circles). So if I were given the choice between living in any era between the Victorian and the present, I would quickly choose the present, but if I were forced to choose an era between the middle ages and the 1870's to live in, I would probably choose the Regency...