What year is this supposedly set in?
1850s?
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MovieChat Forums > Wives and Daughters (2002) Discussion > What year is this supposedly set in?
Much earlier than that. It begins in the late 1820s and continues into the 1830s.
Ladies fashions were different in the 1850s
Somewhere in the mid 1820's and 1830's. The Squire referred to the French being the arch enemy 'in my day', and they had been defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. It took a long time for the French not to be hated and distrusted. The fashions shown when Molly has grown up show the large puffed sleeves which came in around the late 1830's.
shareThe novel makes repeated references to Cynthia's uncle Mr. Kirkpatrick as a QC, or Queen's Counsel -- a senior position for a barrister (lawyer) in the British legal system.
The phrasing gives us a clue that the story is set after June 1937, when the young Victoria succeeded her uncle William IV on the throne. Before that date the term would have been King's Counsel (KC).
Given that "Boney", as the old Squire called him, caused trouble for the English from roughly 1803 to 1815 and that the Squire is probably in his fifties during the story, that too supports a date of the very late 1830s, after the accession of Victoria but before the railroads began to change English rural life in the 1840s.
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But the beginning of the story is set prior to that. The story begins with Molly a small child.
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