George IV Phaeton

Your co-coordinator, Lisa and a few Janeiacs from Rochester recently attended the Walnut Hill Farm Driving Competition in Pittsford. One highlights of this year's event was seeing a beautiful, stylish and sleek  George IV Phaeton.

 

The design of this wicker phaeton was copied from a carriage made for George IV in 1824. The king liked to drive his own carriage but by 1824 he was in his 60s and quite portly. He asked for a carriage to built without sides and low to the ground so he could easily get in and out. 

Later in the 19th century this design became popular with ladies, who because of the hoops, bustles and corsets, needed a carriage that provided easy access. 

At Walnut Hill, this carriage took part in the Ladies Wicker Phaeton - Picnic Turnout competition. In addition to driving skills, the human competitors must make and carry with them in the carriage, a fancy picnic lunch. As soon as the driving part of the competition is over, the ladies must unharness their horses and set up their lunch on provided tables. Judges come around to each picnic and taste the food.

 Here are the judges sampling the picnics.

  The lady driving the George IV phaeton provided this lunch. 

There were even wicker glass-holders!

JASNA Syracuse Fall Schedule and Membership Reminder

Here are JASNA Syracuse’s scheduled meetings for fall 2013; please mark your calendars! All meetings will take place at 2:00 pm.

• On Saturday, September 14, at the Liverpool Public Library (310 Tulip St., Liverpool), our Michaelmas meeting topic will be “Jane Austen and the 10-Pound Note.” The Bank of England has recently announced its plan to feature JA on its 10-pound note as of the year 2017--so, using this as our inspiration, let’s talk about money in the novels and in JA’s own life. 
• On Saturday, November 2, at RiverRead Books (5 Court St., Binghamton), we’ll begin our observance of Mansfield Park's bicentennial in 2014 by discussing “Slavery and Servitude in Mansfield Park” at our All Hallows meeting. 
• And on Saturday, December 7, we’ll gather for a joint Christmas/JA’s birthday meeting with the Jane Austen Book Club-CNY of Hamilton (which otherwise, alas, is on hiatus this fall) over dessert at the Colgate Inn, 1 Payne Street, Hamilton. We’ll hear Deborah Knuth Klenck, JASNA Syracuse member and Professor of English at Colgate University, present a talk titled “Performing to Strangers: Being, Seeming, and Courting in Pride and Prejudice.” 

Finally, we encourage those of you who are already JASNA members to renew your memberships (the renewal letters just went out from JASNA national by U.S. mail). And we urge those of you who are not presently members to join or rejoin JASNA (go to this link). There’s still time to take advantage of the special offer: Join before August 31, and you’ll get the summer issue of JASNA News, the Society’s newsletter. (And if this is any particular inducement, your Regional Coordinator's book review of the recent republication of Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women appears in this issue. Never fear; several readers have asserted that the review is more fun than it sounds!)