Footnotes on Friday

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Ring vaccination and the eradication of smallpox

Lines snaked around New York streets when a 1947 outbreak of smallpox led to vaccination of 6 million people in less than a month.

The eradication of smallpox is the one undisputed success story in the long history of humankind’s fight against disease.

Undisputed, did I say? That smallpox is gone is beyond a doubt. No-one has seen it outside of a laboratory since 1977,  which makes the last case almost old enough to be historical, if one of us were to write a book about it. (Fifty years or more before the present day is usually suggested as the timespan for ‘Historical’, though we might want to review that in the light of how different the ’70s and ’80s are from the present.)

Yet some argue that vaccination was not the reason for the disappearance of the disease; that it was getting milder as the population grew healthier; that even at its height, the vaccination campaign only reached 10% of the populations of the countries were vigorous vaccination campaigns took place.

Some smallpox was always milder

Point 1: as I discovered when I researched smallpox for To Mend the Broken-Hearted, smallpox always came in two varieties. Variola minor had a death rate of 1%; variola major, on the other hand, killed 30% on average. It’s true that, by the mid-20th century, variola minor was the predominant strain in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, variola major continued to scythe its way through communities in the rest of the world, killing 300 million people and occasionally making a visit to the supposedly safer countries, courtesy of international travel. Here are just two examples. An overseas visitor to New York started a massive vaccination campaign in 1947, after he infected 12 people. Two, including the visitor, died.  In 1962, a traveller from Pakistan started a smallpox outbreak in Wales.

Twenty-five people contracted smallpox, and six of them died, including a nine-month-old baby. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/smallpox_01.shtml]

In the late 1950s, the World Health Organisation decided the only way to protect the world from such events was to eradicate the disease. Smallpox was ideal for the attempt. [https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/disease-eradication]

  1. It was easy to recognise. Patients develop a distinctive rash. Time from exposure to rash is short, so the disease usually can’t spread very far before someone notices it.
  2. Only humans can transmit and catch smallpox. Many illnesses have an animal species they can also infect, so the disease can hide there and jump back to humans under the right conditions.
  3. After surviving smallpox or being immunised, people are protected for a lifetime.

Ring vaccination

Which brings us to point 2. Carefully managed, 10% was enough.

The WHO strategy was to track down every contact of every smallpox case they found, and vaccinate them, thus putting a ring of immune people around the live disease. It’s as simple as that. With a disease that meets the three criteria above, you don’t need herd immunity across the entire population. You simply need to get rid of any case you find by ring-fencing it with people who can’t get smallpox, and therefore can’t pass it on.

Quarantine is essentially the same strategy: you take away any chance smallpox has to jump to a new human host, and the disease dies (at least in that vicinity) when those being treated either recover or die. Except that quarantine tends to  be expensive, time consuming, and leaky. Vaccines work better.

In 1977, the last patient in the world to catch smallpox outside of the lab was diagnosed in Somalia.

Ali Maow Maalin, a 23-year-old hospital cook in Merca, had never been successfully vaccinated. After his diagnosis, an intensive tracing and vaccination campaign led to 54,777 people being vaccinated in the next two weeks. The disease was cornered, with no vulnerable hosts nearby to spread to.

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The sex workers of Regency England

In Georgian England, according to Dan Cruickshank’s The Secret History of Georgian London, one in five women in London earned income from the sale of sex. He called London:

‘a vast, hostile, soulless, wicked all-devouring but also fatally attractive place that makes and breaks, that tempts, inflames, satisfies, yet corrupts and ultimately kills’.

A ban on keeping a brothel was passed into law as early as 1751, but prostitution was not made an imprisoning offence until the 1820s. (Not that the new law stopped the trade, of course, but it did largely drive it off the streets, at least in the more gentile parts of town.)

With no regulation, there are no reliable statistics. Estimates made at the time defined unmarried women living with their partners as prostitutes, and also assumptions about a woman might be based on as little as how high she held her skirts to avoid the fetid rubbish in the streets. While 50,000 (one late 18th century estimate by a judge) is probably well over the top, 20,000 might well be true. Guides to the whores and brothels of London, newssheet accounts and cartoons of the fashionable courtesans at the peak of the trade, their own narratives, and other contemporary records assure us that the sex trade was a thriving part of the economy at the time, and continued to be so in the first decades of the 19th century.

Who worked in the sex trade?

Sex workers—defined as those who made some or part of their living by selling sex—ranged from those offering a quick bang up against a wall in a slum alley to those  accepting gifts from hopeful admirers while mixing on the fringes of Society. And everything in between.

Most prostitutes seem to have been working class girls who, having surrendered their virtue to a man of their own class, sought some profit from their lapse. One woman said:

‘she had got tired of service, wanted to see life and be independent; & so she had become a prostitute… She… enjoyed it very much, thought it might raise her & perhaps be profitable’

Which it was, giving her enough savings to purchase a coffee house and set up in business. For others, prostitution was seasonal, or a temporary reaction to a financial crisis. Many worked for a year or two, then took their savings home, and married or set up in business. Prostitution might also be a way to supplement income from another job; seamstresses and milliners, in particular, were so poorly paid that many of them sold their bodies as well. So much so, that many took it for granted that all seamstresses and milliners offered sexual services on request, which must have made walking home after work a fraught exercise for those who didn’t.

Where could you find them?

Prostitutes were scattered throughout London. Those who worked in wealthier areas, such as the West End, were more likely to find wealthy clients, and those with bit parts in the theatre, who then—as now—might be turned off in a moment if the performance did not please the audience, were well positioned to find a wealthy admirer to keep them in the style to which they would like to become accustomed.

They tended to gather in areas with looser police control; when the police became stricter in the City of London in the eighteenth century, the prostitutes gravitated toward the west and east ends of the city; when police control loosened in the early nineteenth century, they returned to the City. Prostitutes also tended to congregate in areas with cheap lodging houses and lots of men. St. Giles and St. James, home to many cheap boardinghouses, were popular with prostitutes in Westminster; the Docks, where many sailors disembarked, was popular on the east side of the city. – Prostitutes in 18th-Century London

Sir John Fielding, the magistrate, called Covent Garden ‘the great square of Venus’. He said, ‘One would imagine that all the prostitutes in the kingdom had picked upon the rendezvous’. – Prostitution in Maritime London

Rewards—and risks

A clever, pretty, talented girl could hope to attract a generous protector, perhaps even an admirer so besotted he would marry her. It happened, though rarely. More commonly, a man would set his mistress up in a house or apartment, and visit her when he was at leisure until he tired of her or she of him.

Many sex workers, if not most, were in less fortunate circumstances. Those running the brothels sought constantly for fresh girls to please the appetites of their customers. A girl who accepted a job, or even a bed for the night, might find herself put to work whether she wished or not, her virginity auctioned to the highest bidder, and her share of the income withheld to pay for her food, board, clothing, and whatever else the brothel-keeper could imagine.

(I say ‘her’, but of course the same applies to male sex workers, though—homosexuality being illegal—we have little information about their lives, and that little from court records.)

The risks were great. Contraception was very hit and miss, if used at all. Pregnancy must have been a constant worry. ‘Pulling out’ was the most common method for avoiding unwanted children, and was as effective then as it is now (which is to say, not very). Protective ‘Machines’—condoms made from oiled cloth or the intestines of various animals—were available, though men were more likely to use them to avoid disease than to prevent pregnancy. And they were probably better at the second, since water could go right through them and they tended to tear.

Various methods were used to abort unwanted pregnancies, many of them just as likely to kill the mother. A baby could be born alive but then killed, or put out to a baby farmer so that the mother could return to work. A mistress of a single protector might be in a slightly stronger position if the child’s father was willing to keep the mother on. Some men—and not just royal princes—had quite large families by their mistresses.

Disease was the other big fear, for both the sex workers and their clients. Gonorrhea and syphilis were treated with ointments containing mercury, the toxic effects of which could be as dangerous as the diseases. Side effects included kidney failure, severe mouth ulcers, nerve damage, and loss of teeth. On the other hand, untreated syphilis ends in abcesses, ulcers, severe debility, and madness or death. And gonorrhea can spread to the blood and eventually kill. So not good choices.

Not usually a ticket to a better life

And if a sex worker survived these scourges, age was just around the corner. Cosmetics could be used to keep the appearance of beauty, but they had their own dangers. The white pigment used to colour face foundation was very toxic, being lead-based. Rouge might be made of tin. But slow poisoning being better than fast starvation, women painted anyway.

Even those with wildly successful careers seldom came to good ends. Many—probably most—died young. Some married. Some set up in business for themselves and retired rich. And some, like Harriet Wilson, became penniless as their appeal faded. Harriet famously responded by publishing her memoirs, having first warned all her former lovers, and taken out those who refused to pay.

Sadly, the fortune she earned was squandered by the scoundrel she subsequently married, and she died in poverty in France.

Sources

  1. Daniel Cruikshank London’s Sinful Secret: The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London
  2. Judith Flanders
  3. Vic
  4. Heather Carroll
  5. John Frith
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Go Georgian Architecture hunting in London

Just a short post this week to share a few resources on Georgian townhouses.

Here’s a site I found that explores Georgian architecture in London, with lots of examples, useful labels and fun explanations.

https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/a-spotter-s-guide-the-early-georgian-townhouse/kAIy8l4S5n_gKA

This takes us inside:

https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/characteristics-of-the-georgian-town-house/

As does this:

https://austenauthors.net/peak-inside-the-typical-regency-era-townhouse/

Enjoy! And if you want more, look for architectural pattern books from the era! They were resources for builders, and are great fun.

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A word from your King and more

Have you seen the Georgian Papers Programme website?

The GPP is a ten-year interdisciplinary project to digitise, conserve, catalogue, transcribe, interpret and disseminate 425,000 pages or 65,000 items in the Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the Georgian period, 1714-1837.

Wow. Just wow!

As you would expect, the archive, the research papers based on the archive, and the blog based on the research papers are a treasure trove for anyone interested in the era. For example, who knew that Prince Frederick, the Prince of Wales, went truffle hunting?

When I think of truffle-hunting (which is not that often), I think of pigs rooting around in Italian forests, not dogs in the English countryside. Indeed, most of the recent literature on truffle-hunting dogs implies that the use of dogs to find truffles is a relatively recent development. Frederick, Prince of Wales’, rental of two truffle hunting dogs for three months in 1750-51 tells us that using dogs to find these valuable fungi is a much older idea than most modern truffle-hunters realize.

Frederick’s account books do not mention the breed of these rental pups. The Italian Lagatto Romagnolo, a curly-haired water retriever, is renowned for its truffle-hunting abilities, but Labrador retrievers, poodles, and even Chihuahuas can be truffle-hunters. Indeed, dogs are better for hunting truffles than pigs, because dogs are far less likely to eat the truffle once they’ve found it!

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Inspiration for lovers

Back in the Regency, before printed cards became affordable and readily available, people still sent cards on Valentine’s Day–home made cards, as fancy as the person’s imagination and purse could manage, usually enhanced with a hand-written saying or poem.

And if you couldn’t write a poem to save your soul?

Then you were in luck, for a number of enterprising people put out pamphlets and even whole books with poems for your valentine.

This one is sweet:

Was there ever an urchin like Cupid so sly?
Well armed and mounted aloft in the sky;
He wounds, and we love, and then off he does fly.

That I am wounded, alas, is too true,
And that I can only be healed by you;
Is likewise a fact. Ah! What shall I do?

I’ll rely on thy pity, dear charmer of mine.
Sure you’ll not break the heart of thy poor Valentine!

You could find a poem addressed to the trade of your beloved:

So nice you dress your Lamb and Veal,
My passion I cannot conceal;
But plainly must declare to you,
I wish that you would dress me too.

When at your shop you take your stand,
Your knife and steel within each hand;
I listen to your pleasing cry,
Which sounds so shrill, d’ye buy, d’ye buy.

Now February shows his face;
And genial Spring comes on apace;
Like birds, ah! prithee let us join,
Upon the day of Valentine.

The books also provided suitable answers, also in rhyme–either a yeah or, as in the valentine to the nursery maid, below, a resounding nay.

So fond of children you are grown,
I wish you had some of your own,
I think my dear, if you’ll consent,
That I in that could give content;

How charming it would be to see,
A little baby, just like thee;
Say if you like this plan of mine,
As you’re today my Valentine.”

The Nursery Maid’s Answer:

“Pray Mr. Smack drive on, gee-ho,
With me our courtship will not do,
Your face is ugly, but your mind
Is ten times uglier, I find;

I am a girl that’s very nice,
And won’t be bought at your price;
Your Valentine I will not be,
So prithee think no more of me.

Buy Valentines From Bath for 99c, until Valentine’s Day only

To help you celebrate this lover’s day, we’re keeping the Bluestocking Belles’ 2019 collection of Regency novellas, https://bluestockingbelles.net/belles-joint-projects/valentines-from-bath/, at 99c until after Valentine’s Day. Follow the link for more details and buy links.

 

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Maps of Regency London

I set out to read about the slums of London in 1814, and found myself with two wonderful maps. The one above was produced in 1812, and shows the city a couple of years before my work-in-progress. Look at the parks and wide streets to the west of the ancient heart of the city. To the east we see industry and docks. That was the way the wind blew. Even when Shakespeare was alive, the city’s stink reached noses fifty miles away. It wasn’t any sweeter in Regency times, what with coal fires and the smell of a million people, all their associated animals, and the sewage they collectively produced. Of course the rich preferred to live to the West.

The second map was the last to show every single building in London, and was drawn in 1799. You’ll find a digitised, fully scaleable, version of it here. As the characters in my 3rd and 4th Mountain King books venture into the slum kingdom of my villain, this is going to be extremely useful. Now to decide precisely where to put my imaginary Devil’s Kitchen.

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An odd snippet of history

I’ve started thinking about my newsletter story for February. My inspiration this time is the Seekers song, The Carnival is Over.

When I looked up the lyrics to see if I’d remembered them correctly, I found out that Tom Springfield, who wrote the lyrics, had adapted a tune to a Russian song, written in the late nineteenth century, about a Cossack revolutionary and robber. In the original, the Cossack Stenka Razin is wedding a Persian princess, captured during a raid down through the Caspian Sea. After one night, his followers accuse him of allowing his woman to make him soft. So he picks her up and throws her into the Volga River in order to keep peace within his band.

What a chilling little tale as background to a lovely song!

See a video clip of the Seekers singing The Carnival is Over. For the original lyrics to the Stenka Razin song and a translation, scroll through the Wikipedia article, here.

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Fact, Historical fiction, Fantasy

As the eighteenth century ended in revolution and war, fashions changed. Woman began wearing the simpler style of women’s clothing, known now as empire line, after the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte whose wife Josephine popularised the fashion.

But in the court of Queen Charlotte, queen of Great Britain, the hoops of her youth still prevailed. Which led to the bizarre fashion pictured above — an empire silhouette for the bodice, with a hoop, petticoat, and overskirt below. As if hoops weren’t enough to handle, the poor debutante of the time also had to handle a train, plus between three and eight ostrich plumes in her hair. Probably not pinned in place by a tiara, since tiaras were only for adults, and the girls being presented to the queen for the first time were generally too young to be regarded as adults. (Old enough to marry, though, since the purpose of their debut was to signal their availability as brides.)

All of which is by way of saying that, in the first episode of Brigerton, I picked up six historical errors before the first titles. The non-court style dress, the lack of ostrich feathers, the presence of the younger children in the audience at court… it goes on and on. By the time Anthony Brigerton dropped his pants, quite unnecessarily, since unbuttoning his fall would have been sufficient, I had quite sensibly given up.

The story Julia Quinn wrote was Fiction. The Shondaland version was Fantasy — a delightful froth with a mashup of fashions, practices, and historical miscellany. I loved it. I recommend it. It’s a delightful romp. And I hope it will lead to a greater interest in the genre I love. But if you’re going to watch it, leave your historical research knowledge at the door.

 

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A Tale of Two Princes

The handsome young pair above are Prince George, the Prince of Wales, and his next youngest brother, Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. They were fifteen and fourteen respectively when this was painted. Prince George was two years off his much-publicised affair with the actress Mary Robinson that marked the transition of his strained relationship with his father from sullen obedience to open rebellion, and that gave him the moniker ‘Florizel’.

Poor George was stuck with the role of Prince of Wales–fundamentally king in waiting and by all that’s holy boy, you’d better wait patiently. Frederick, on the other hand, was gazetted as an officer in the army the following year. So the age of seventeen was momentous for both of them: one set out publicly on a life of hedonism, display, emotional excesses and rebellion, and the other began a career in the army, and is credited with accomplishments that include carrying out the major reforms that fitted the army for the Peninsular campaign of the Napoleonic wars, founding Sandhurst, a military school which promoted merit-based training for future officers.

Yes, he had an expensive gambling habit, but he was also a hardworking military officer and later served in the House of Lords.

The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, had to invent his own role. Patron of the arts, pain in his father’s rear end, lover, entertainer, home renovator extraordinaire… poor George.

 

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Cravats, Kerchiefs, and Neck Ties

One of the great benefits of leaving his last office job, according to my personal romantic hero, was that he could get rid of most of his neckties. Ghastly things, he reckons, with no practical purpose. He kept a couple for formal occasions, and the rest went to the charity shop, to torture some other poor fellow.

I was thinking about that the other day, as a friend and I looked at a period inappropriate book cover. According to the artist, the male model was Victorian, but that’s a period of more than six decades. Men’s neckwear changed in that time, so I went looking to find out how and when.

First, let me take you back to the beginning. Neck scarves of some kind were worn in ancient times. We can see them in the Terracotta Warriors, in Roman soldiers on Trajan’s Column,  and in pictures of medieval knights and Mongol warriors. A likely purpose was as a practical garment to tuck round the edge of armour to stop chafing, or to perhaps to stop sweat from rolling down the neck and setting up an itch, or to keep the neck warm, or even for multiple purposes, not the least of which might be battlefield medicine.

Their evolution from a practical garment to sartorial elegance dates back to the Thirty Years War. This was a conflict fought in Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century, as part of the struggle for dominance between the Austro-Spanish Hapsburgs and the French Bourbons. The French hired mercenaries from Croatia, and they wore a neck scarf to tie the top of their tunics shut. The look caught on among the French and spread from there. Of course, the aristocrats who adopted the fashion wore lace cravats (La Cravatte was the name given to the neckwear by Louis XIII; a nod to the Croatians).

The lace got steadily more extravagant through the early part of the eighteenth century, and matched with lace cuffs made a spectacular show.

Then came the French Revolution, which affected fashion as well as politics. The revolutionaries affected a less ostentatious style of dress, and — in fashion — where the French led, the rest of Europe followed. The cravat we know from Regency movies and books was born. The cravat covered all but the collar of the shirt, and often that, as well — a shirt being regarded as underclothes at the time. A long rectangle of fabric was folded and intricately knotted to the specifications of the wearer (or his valet, but a gentleman with pretensions to elegance would not trust such an important detail to his valet).

At the turn of the century, Beau Brummell dictated that the cravat should be a crisp white as should the stockings, the breeches and coat black, and only the waistcoat in colour. Of course, not everyone agreed, and cravats of all colours can be seen in paintings of the time.

The simplest and most casual way of tying a cravat was to wrap it around the neck several times and tie a bow, and this became highly fashionable as the nineteenth century wore on. By the 1850s, gentlemen were wearing a black cravat or bow tie, simply folded and pinned so that the shirt showed between the bottom of the tie and the top of the waistcoat. A thinner piece of material became the Ascot tie, so called because it was casual wear for events such as race meetings–recognisably a necktie like those still worn today, but much wider, and pinned to the shirt.

The next evolution was the club tie, purportedly created in the 1880s, when the rowing team of Exeter College, Oxford, took the striped bands off their hats and tied them around their necks.

The modern necktie was invented by an American in the 1920s — three pieces of material cut on the bias, thus eliminating wrinkles. My husband’s least favourite item of men’s clothing had arrived.