At the beginning of January 1830, Brighton was filling rapidly, as the migratory British social elite came to roost for the winter Season. The townhouses were freshly painted and refurbished, primped for entertain- ment; the ‘Queen’ of Brighton, Mrs Fitzherbert, was in residence accom- panied by her pretty, unmarried nieces, Loo and Coo Smythe; 1 Brighton’s current musical darling, Madame Sala, was beginning her winter con- certs; 2 and competition for tickets to the exclusive Brighton balls—the ‘Almacks’ of Brighton, held in the Assembly rooms in the Old Ship Inn— was quickening. Despite the winter weather, the streets were gay with carriages, and the stylish promenades and shops thronged with chatter- ing members of fashionable society making and renewing acquaintances. Uniformed ofcers, Continental diplomats and a smattering of young European aristocrats on tour added an extra dash of colour and cosmo- politanism to the scene. For Elizabeth (Betsey) Lady Fremantle, it was a comfortably familiar scene. 3 This was the fifth winter that she and her two unmarried daugh- ters, 29-year-old Emma and 19-year-old Cecilia (Cicey), were spending in Brighton. As a worldly-wise widow of 51 with a lifetime’s experience of fashionable society in Britain and on the Continent, Lady Fremantle found that Brighton suited her. It provided her with tasteful lodgings, desirable amenities and easy access to elite society—all within a conveni- ently walkable distance and for substantially less expense than in Lon- don. Her journals for c.1825–35 feature winters in Brighton and Nice, two important coastal resort towns which, although at diferent stages of urban development, attracted a similarly stylish clientèle. A study of her experiences during this period reveals that the construction of a cohesive social group in an urban framework was a transactional process that depended not so much upon place as space (that is, upon places used for purpose). 4 Her journals suggest that the creation of fashionable society required the cooperative efort of individuals with shared social skills, behaviours and beliefs—people from diferent regions, or even coun- tries, but with a shared social vocabulary based on similar class-based socialization—who used the physical provision of the town to establish 5 Spaces of Sociability in Fashionable Society Brighton and Nice, c.1825–35 Elaine Chalus 15032-2343e-2Pass-R02.indd 75 3/3/2019 1:26:22 AM