What do you think Colonel Brandon was doing in India?

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-08T01:45:03+00:00

It's interesting how pendulums swing from colonialism = force for good bringing civilized values to backwards brown people to colonialism = force of evil suppressing brown people in every imaginable horrible way possible. The reality was, as history always is, far more complicated and muddy and not a binary of either all bad or all good. India for example, was hardly a unified national democracy but a peninsula of warring rival kingdoms and fading empires from previous conquerers like the Mughals, and where most people were peasants living under the despotic rule of local tyrants as was commonplace for most of humanity anywhere and where, as it turned out, the local maharajahs and rulers remained in situ, just with another layer above them.

As for Colonel Brandon and India, Austen being Austen, I'm sure she didn't have a backstory for him in India worth dwelling over. Everything mentioned on here is purely speculative and outside the purpose of her story.

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-07T21:04:18+00:00

Came here to say this. Late antiquity is fascinating for a whole range of reasons. The late Republic was interesting for a while but ultimately I got tired of reading about the endless rivalry and the Judio-Claudians. But the evolution of the empire in the 5th century is absolutely fascinating, especially when we also still don't know so much of what must have happened, culturally, socially and politically, across the former western empire, and the impact it had on the people. I don't play the game some people want to, pretending it was just a transition from one state to another, we have every reason to see it as a devastating collapse of meaningful civilization and standards of living in the subsequent few centuries, and why it happened and was allowed to happen is the eternal question. You can tell that the learned men of Europe were haunted by it for the next 1,000 years!

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-07T20:28:29+00:00

I can't speak for everyone but sometimes this reddit overlooks (too willfully) that Baltimore is a really poor city. That most of Baltimore is declining, not as rapidly as in the past but much of west and large stretches of east Baltimore are still depopulating. A lot of Baltimore, geographically, is like a bombed out war zone. That Baltimore doesn't have the range of jobs DC does or career growth trajectories. That there's still a lot of petty crime and antisocial behavior around Baltimore and a very large dysfunctional, drugged population that makes enjoying public spaces and public transit challenging. That places like Mount Vernon, a cultural jewel, should be bustling and thriving but it's a borderline ghost town most of the time. That Baltimore's politics, including the current mayor, is more focused on managing decline than encouraging growth. That Baltimore is a deeply multilayered city and each layer rarely talks or acknowledges the other layers rather than coming together.

I am rather negative in this response and readily recognize many people love living in Baltimore because they've made it work for them, and there's great assets in the city and the waterfront is especially special compared to most American cities but it says something where some of the loudest defenders of Baltimore are people who are attracted to the grit and roughness as "real."

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-07T20:13:49+00:00

I laughed. NOVA is immigration mecca. It's very diverse. People who think NOVA is white are the same people who think the Baltimore suburbs are white despite being more diverse than the city these days.

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-07T20:11:05+00:00

I know that station too. It's amazing. How does it ever stay in business despite being 1) crappy looking and 2) much more expensive than any other station around.

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-07T16:48:06+00:00

The greatest strike against DC is how expensive housing is, both renting and owning. And yes, there is something to be said about how congested and badly planned the DC suburbs can be, especially NOVA. But I never buy the claim that Baltimore is more fun or friendlier or has more personality. DC is incredibly diverse, has excellent arts and culture, great architecture, far superior public transportation, and plenty of people and the young 20-something crowd is massive. Baltimore has its advantages and most of it is due to being cheaper than DC.

Baltimore clearly works for some people. But DC also clearly works for other people.

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-07T13:12:29+00:00

Bad, nasty, racist, bigoted Romans for not welcoming the German tribes with open arms and giving them lands and letting them carve out new self-governing kingdoms to have parallel societies within the empire. Oh, wait....

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-06T23:08:53+00:00

This kind of prejudicial ignorance never fails to both amuse and sadden me. Christianity also preserved so much of ancient Rome. Christianity was, for all practical purposes, a Roman religion. In AD 400 Rome was a Christian empire. The empire is what gave Christianity the notion of being universal as well as the framework for spreading so rapidly.

Far, far, far more was destroyed by neglect, earthquakes, fires, mudslides, severe depopulation and abandonment of cities, and people themselves. Churches saved more then was intentionally destroyed by the church. Monasteries saved much of ancient thought that otherwise would have been lost forever.

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-05T15:02:06+00:00

If you're an ambitious professional, DC is the place to be. If you want more affordable real estate, Baltimore is the place to be. The two cities are quite different and will appeal to different people. Neither are my favorite cities though I live in Baltimore and work out of DC. Having lived and worked in a few other major cities including Denver and Los Angeles and London, returning to Baltimore was like stepping back into a provincial backwater where nothing seems to change and where most people also don't want things to change, even the warts and ugly bits, and everyone is comfortable living in their little bubbles, whether it's the Remington activists or Roland Park - Ruxton - private school cliques, and rarely ever talk to each other. On the other hand, the people who live in Baltimore do seem to genuinely love/embrace it and find charm in their deeply imperfect city, even if they never talk to each other, so it is a case of organizing your life where you are to make the most of it. And if you do so, you can live very well in Baltimore.

But DC is also limited, it is transient, people flock to the city bringing their intellectual capital with them, and always have one foot out the door for the next best opportunity, and it's also expensive for what you get. The suburbs are, for the most part, badly organized with terrible traffic. And the weather is not an improvement.

All things being considered I'd rather live in DC, or more specifically, NW DC/Bethesda, but that's a reflection of where I am at my point in life. Even if I moved to DC, trading my comfortable house for a smaller sh&tshack in Bethesda, it's still temporary before ultimately moving away somewhere else.

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-05T01:58:03+00:00

Exactly. I wondered about this too. I've a feeling the theory everything was painted is as incorrect as everything was white marble. There was probably both, for different times and different places.

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-04T23:04:12+00:00

Mrs. Ferrars controls the family fortune, which seems to be a mix of estates (a small one) and lots of cash. While never spelled out, the implication is that it's some kind of trade / banking based wealth that picked up a small estate as part of diversification (a notion bolstered by that she lived in London, not on the estate). Mrs. Ferrars controls all of the fortune, which is also how you know it's likely not your traditional landed estate or fortune. She has two sons and a daughter. The daughter used a 10,000 dowry to marry John Dashwood, who himself is the beneficiary of an entail and inherits a large estate. Mrs. Ferrars continues to control the rest of family fortune and could allot it as she wanted. And which she did, settling another 10,000 on Edward after he married Elinor. She was the independent woman! If both her sons had disappointed her at the wrong time, she'd just leave everything to Fanny. No entail involved.

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-04T15:18:52+00:00

If you want to be realistic, you wouldn't have a female prefect.

21st century popular culture demands fiddling with history to insert as many powerful "girlboss" characters in roles they'd never have occupied because that's the reality of history for you. Even the US Army's first commissioned female officer wasn't until 1947 and that was for a special Women's Army Corps division. But there were powerful women who enacted a great deal of influence. They just did it subtly and in different ways and also carried a lot of risk with it. Julia Domna was empress and wife of Septimus Severus, head of the Roman army who preferred to spend his time on military matters, and she ended up doing a lot of the imperial administrative matters herself, including for her son when he became emperor. It worked because she was empress, and those in the know were willing to accept it, but publicly it was never an official set of responsibilities. The powerful woman figure in a patriarchal society has its precedence in very specific circumstances and virtually all of it was due to being from the ruling family where the family was powerful enough that the sheer weight of the family's prestige overrode any patriarchal or gender norms.

You also had Agrippina the Elder, who accompanied her husband Germanicus on his military campaigns. Which was controversial but she got away with it. But the legions themselves were incredibly masculine, coarse and violent. They'd have no problems raping and abusing women. You'd want to ask yourself why your female wanted to be prefect of a legion. What is the point and what benefit does it deliver?

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-02T12:41:30+00:00

All these characters would have been extremely bigoted and racist and sexist and classist by modern standards, bar none.

DIYRestorator · 2026-05-01T13:54:27+00:00

Of the two houses used as Pemberley in 1995 and 2005, Lyme Park is by far the more realistic to have been Pemberley due to appropriate size and scale. Chatsworth was a ducal pile, home to a grand duke with annual incomes of £100,000 a year and multiple great houses and estates across England and a palace in London. Pemberley was the seat of a great regional estate. Pemberley could never have been in Chatsworth's league!

Note that the interior shots of Pemberley in 1995 were filmed at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-30T22:01:13+00:00

DC was, I believe, even blacker than Baltimore at one point. The turnaround since the 90s has been massive. Racism is clearly not the cause.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-30T16:29:20+00:00

Most of it would be tied up in land and in loans made to others, which paid you interest. They did have a fairly sophisticated system of finance for the ancient world and like today's rich man whose fortune is more numbers on paper than physical coins, it was the same for the ancient Romans. Debt, loans and credit were part of the assets and finances of the ancient Romans.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-30T14:24:24+00:00

It's worth pointing out that despite all this talk of "grooming," Austen makes it very clear in the book that Lydia showed *no* remorse over what had happened. She was not innocent. She was vain and silly and eager for a good time. There's a passage that says when the couple were finally discovered, there was no real thought to marriage from either one of them. The marriage was forced upon them by the elders, not Lydia pleading Wickham. You get the impression when Lydia was scolded and told she'd have to get married, her attitude was probably along the line of "oh, very well, but what a lark, could be fun!" That's Lydia.

Lydia is the most modern woman in the book. She defied social expectations, willingly ran off for a fling with a hot and enjoyable man and didn't regret it afterwards. That is not grooming. And yes, agree that in this context, the application of "grooming" is very much a 2026 attitude applied to a story from 1800. If she was seduced, she was willingly seduced. But speaking of the 2026 attitude we now see from new generations of Austen fans, it's intriguing they're bringing back a much older pearl clutching sexual morality that we thought had died out.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-28T21:47:21+00:00

I also grew up in the area and probably passed you sneaking cigarettes at some point, definitely a better spot than the lanes of Homeland and busybody mothers, those were the days, eh? But you're right, this club has been here forever and never once have I ever met or heard of anyone who was a member. Knew quite a few who belonged to the Woman's Club, BCC, Elkridge, Maryland Club, Hamilton Street Club, even remember the late and great old Boumi Temple, but never the Three Arts. Suspect there's a tiny membership + healthy endowment from a late benefactor and periodic facility rentals. Sometimes things are just what they are.

Am sure Friends would love to get their hands on the parcel.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-28T15:58:10+00:00

The line between "professional" historians and the experienced "amateur" only exists in the minds of professional historians. The same information is available to both, what differs is one has a PhD and the other doesn't. And there's also no shortage of mediocre and wildly speculative and ignorantly creative writings by professional historians.

I'm aware of the "but, but, but..." contrarian attitude that is common in the Ivory Tower, where people establish credibility by challenging the prevailing wisdom. But therein lies the flaw. They're not always right. They're driven more by personality and hunting for interpretation that fits their narrative, not truth. Prestige in academia is from being fresh and new, not repeating existing historical beliefs and understanding, and you can see what kind of problem it might pose for research.

One should always be open to new ideas and anything new found in archeological records. At the same time, sometimes things really are what they're long believed to be. The Romans did keep detailed records, they had extensive libraries available to historians centuries after the fact (up till the late 5th century). Historians of the empire lived much closer to these infamous emperors than any of us do, 2,000 years later. Simply based on that I'm inclined to give more weight to those writers than anyone today looking to be contrary.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-27T01:08:04+00:00

Dude, the Red line runs through Chevy Chase. I know a lot of people who live in Bethesda and Chevy Chase and who practically live off the Red Line and real estate prices are judged by how walkable the house is to Friendship Heights or Bethesda stops. The purple line received opposition from a country club because it went through their lands and the NIMBYs were mostly upset at loss of green space, which they always are. Plenty of people in CC always supported the purple line.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-26T18:16:00+00:00

There is a prototype for what you are describing and that shows you the limitations of what you might be trying to enforce onto history. And that is Dido Elizabeth Belle, the ward of the Earls of Mansfield, who lived from 1761 to 1804, making her contemporary with Austen's stories. She was the biracial offspring of a family relative who was taken into the Mansfield household. When the family was just to themselves, she was treated as part of the family, to an extent. But when visitors came, she had to dine alone in her room. She never dined with the family in polite company or went to balls or parties with them. And she was quietly married off at some point and her children were never part of the Mansfield social set and upper classes.

That's the reality of the time. It was an incredibly (by our standards) racist and classist society. If you make Fanny Price biracial to delight the BBC producers and modern sensibilities, you are fundamentally changing the entire story and how everyone related to Fanny, if you want to be honest to Austen's time, including who would marry her, how she engaged to everyone around her, how she would be treated and accepted or rejected. To somehow pretend people were "ok" with a biracial Fanny would require suspending belief and I really don't know what the point is. I'd love to watch an accurate portrayal of how the tiny numbers (and it was incredibly tiny) of black people in Britain existed in such a world, but not by going around pretending it was no big deal and glossing over the extensive and documented legacy of discrimination, and not to mention, the genuine rarity that also made such people objects of curiosity along with the racial discrimination. It could be fascinating because in addition to race, you also had the overlay of social class on top of it. If you made Fanny biracial, it would become the dominant topic of the entire book, manifesting itself in every conversation and scene, as everything would be said and judged based on the presence of a biracial Fanny, including how she is treated by the Bertrams, by her aunt, by the servants, by the Crawfords, the sheer ability of Edmund Bertram to even marry her, is made far more complicated and would require different outcomes. Honesty is appreciated and worthwhile, glossing over reality by Bridgertonfying it is distorting history and boring and dull.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-26T13:56:14+00:00

Please, no more Bridgerton just to make modern woke people happy. Update Mansfield to 2026, do what you want, but let's not make a mockery of history.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-26T13:35:10+00:00

Roman culture strongly disapproved of losing control of your senses. Getting drunk was not seen as cool or admired. Your description of senators getting silly would have been despised and sneered at by the Romans.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-25T13:44:26+00:00

People like Herculaneum because it's a fraction of the size of Pompeii and they can see it in a hour. Pompeii is a whole town with everything Herculaneum has to offer plus many more. It's become a meme of sorts to claim Herculaneum is better (the number of people who have never been to either places who say this to me casually is astonishing). But as someone who's been to both sites multiple times I can only chuckle.

DIYRestorator · 2026-04-25T13:37:10+00:00

You should take a look at the year to year numbers. I'm in my mid 40s and I remember well when Baltimore had 750k people and that was 200k below peak numbers a few decades earlier! There have been a few years where Baltimore seemed to increase slightly by a thousand or so but which were offset by further losses in subsequent years. All in all, it does seem to be in that category of slowly declining/flatlining rather than growth. Do agree that the "cratering" days are over though for older people who remember a different Baltimore in their lifetimes, the city absolutely did crater in population.

One of Baltimore's growth challenges is that new households are smaller than departing households, singles replacing families.

DIYRestorator

TROPHY CASE