O to be in England now that the 19th century is there

Via AustenBlog we have found out about an amazing dinner. Now, if only it could possibly take place. Who wouldn't want to be there?

Next up on my reading list (I feel like Oprah): Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

They are related by era, of course.

Interestingly, if we were alive in 1840, we would be able to invite Gaskell, Bronte and all these other British authors to dinner: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), Edward "It was a dark and stormy night" Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), Gaskell (1810-1865), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1868), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Charles Reade (1814-1884), Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Emily Bronte (1818-1848), George Eliot (1819-1880) and Anne Bronte (1820-1849).

What's more we could add a seat at the table for Queen Victoria (1819-1901), and we could put these poets at the card table: William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) and Robert Browning (1812-1889).

And by rights these four should have been living in 1840, all dying young: Jane Austen (1775-1817), Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), John Keats (1795-1821).

Now every dinner we attend will look ordinary and boring.

Categories: Weirdo