Last time, I pontificated about how carriage accidents are not the same as car accidents, and if you need a character dead in a regency novel, having them catch a ‘trifling cold’ is one of the most realistic ways to get rid of them. A lot of you had good comments, but I was traveling and didn’t have regular internet access.

So I’m going to revisit some of those remarks, and add a few more of my own.

One of you pointed out that traffic laws were not a thing, and it was often more dangerous to be traveling crossways to a carriage than inside of it. This is true; right of way was mostly determined by the status of the carriage, not by its size or how difficult it would be to stop it once it was in motion. It was less of a problem in the countryside, but larger towns, and especially London, were very scary places if you needed to get from one street to the next on foot. They still are, to be fair; the roads haven’t gotten any straighter, and one of the underrated benefits of driving or riding with horses is that they won’t usually choose to stand on a person if they can avoid it. Ever stepped on a mouse by accident?- it’s a great way to make oneself levitate; horses feel the same way about humans under their feet. Cars don’t care, and the driver of a car is relatively shut in, which makes it harder to hear someone yelling, “Look out!” right before the crash.

It didn’t help matters that people of the past tended to live more of their lives outdoors. In rural areas, that meant spending a lot of time in the fields. In towns, people often took their work and sat outside their home, on the edge of the street. The light was better, for one thing, and as crowded as it was, it was still less crowded than sitting indoors for most people. Door to door salesmen were more common in regency (and Victorian) cities, and a whole host of people went from house to house as part of their work- the rag and bone man came to collect kitchen waste, gongfermers and nightsoil men cleaned out the cesspits, the knocker-upper tapped on his clients’ bedroom windows every morning.

All that time outside, in all weathers, leads us back to the spread and severity of diseases before modern medicine. People also died of the cold; regency England was beset by harsh winters, and 1816 was known all over the West, including the fledgling United States, as the year without a summer, because of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia the year before.

Death by drowning also got a mention; well spotted. Sailors at sea are at highest risk, of course, and given the severity and magnitude of storms at sea, it’s a miracle anyone survived long enough to get back to land. Captain Wentworth accurately assesses the risks in Persuasion when he remarks that, had his ship returned to port twenty-four hours later, it would’ve been caught in a gale that blew up, leaving him to a watery grave and a small paragraph in the newspaper noting his death.

People also drowned at home, especially in rural areas. Men and boys were more likely to bathe by swimming in a convenient river- probably not the Thames, but it was relatively safe if you lived in a small village- and women and girls had to fetch all of the household’s water by hand; it was easy to slip and fall into a stream or well. There doesn’t seem to be a concerted effort to teach children to swim, and historical clothing was fairly heavy, and became incredibly heavy when saturated; the weight would be enough to drag the person under.

On the other end of the spectrum, fire was also a major danger. There were very few closed stoves in 1800, and no central heating. Any heat came from an open fireplace, and in most households, all the cooking and water heating was done over that fire, so you couldn’t have a screen even if there’d been the money to buy one. As people switched over from wool clothing- warm and fire resistant- to cotton- cooler, washable, but flammable- the danger, particularly to girls and women, grew worse. There are a lot of unfortunate accounts of people’s clothes or hair catching from a stray spark, and no way to put them out. Houses also burned down more frequently than we’re used to; many rural houses were thatched with straw, and with no running water, the fire brigades were basically useless at putting fires out; their main utility came from pulling down the houses next to the one on fire, so it didn’t spread.

Obviously, people found ways to mitigate the danger of death whenever they could- the London statistics in 1810 indicate that about 2 percent of deaths were caused by ‘accidents’- else the human race wouldn’t have survived long enough to produce you, me, and everyone else alive today. Life expectancy at birth was low by our standards, but if you take out the incredible numbers of children who died from ordinary diseases, the numbers begin to look a little better. A little. Staying alive was a hard slog for most of human history, and our ancestors were a lot tougher than we give them credit for.