History buffs and hist-rom readers alike know that adultery has traditionally been an accepted, even expected, feature of aristocratic life—and not just in the distant past, either. It’s rumored that during one of Charles and Diana’s blazing rows about his relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles, Charles was heard to ask in disbelief, “Am I to be the first Prince of Wales without a mistress?”
Eventually, like generations of aristocratic wives before her, Diana took lovers of her own. What made the Prince and Princess of Wales different from so many royal couples was that their various and public infidelities led to divorce. In the past, most couples just chose to lead separate lives. Indeed, that’s still the case today with many royals (see: Princess Caroline of Monaco and Prince Ernst August of Hanover).
Last time, we were talking about Beethoven and his ubiquity in the Regency period. Likely, for example, Jane Austen's more musically inclined heroines would have been familiar with his work, if not played his pieces on their pianofortes. But what we think of Beethoven and his work is not the same as what Marianne Dashwood and her family would have thought in Sense and Sensibility.
I may be dense about the Regency in general, but now I think I get it. The idea is this: In Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen writes,
Another odd idea that seemed to have become accepted as fact was that television audiences didn’t read. (Radio audiences were a different matter entirely—The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, for example, began as a radio program.) Television audience went to the movies—after all, both were visual media—so they could be trusted to attend Star Trek movies or The Blues Brothers (which started out as a Saturday Night Live skit), but they weren’t likely to actually read books based on television shows.
