Footnotes on Friday

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Virtual historic tours

If you can’t go to the wonderful historic sites that we write about, you can still visit. Here are some links to get you started.

Heritage virtual tours: 360 virtual tours of incredible heritage sites, including British Royal Palaces; the Royal Opera House; historic buildings and castles like Wrest Park and Bovey Castle, as well as renowned distilleries such as Remy Martin and The Balvenie; galleries, museums and their exhibits, such as unique historic aircraft.

Virtual tours, panorama, and models from the BBC History division

The Louvre, where you can check out virtual tours of the Egyptian antiquities collection, remains of the Louvre’s moat and the Galerie d’Apollon

The Sistine chapel, with its incredible art.

Some of the most walkable sections of the Great Wall of China

The British Museum, the world’s oldest national public museum.

And more:

  • https://www.countryliving.com/uk/wildlife/countryside/g32000722/virtual-uk-landmark-tours/
  • https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/attractions/london-virtual-tours-attractions-landmarks-coronavirus-lockdown-a4401481.html
  • https://www.history.com/news/10-best-virtual-museums-tours-history-from-home
  • https://www.travelandleisure.com/culture-design/architecture-design/google-arts-culture-app-europe-castles
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Will you be my Valentine?

The St Valentine we remember on this day was probably a Roman martyred for being a Christian sometime in the 3rd century. (There are at least two other candidates: one a bishop in Terni, and one who lived in Africa.) Legend has it that St Valentine performed secret marriage ceremonies for soldiers during a time they were not permitted to marry, and that he sent a letter to his jailer’s daughter signed ‘From your Valentine’.

February 14th has been associated with St Valentine since at least the 5th century. February 14th was also considered the start of Spring in Europe, and one tradition holds that it is the day the birds choose a mate. This tradition may go back to a Roman Spring Festival, celebrated from February 13th to 15th. Whichever came first, by the Middle Ages, when the French and English became devoted to the concept of courtly love, St Valentines became a day for people to declare their love.

In parts of Sussex Valentines Day was called ‘the Birds’ Wedding Day’ until quite recently. In Hamlet, Shakespeare mentions the tradition that the first man an unmarried woman sees on Valentine’s day will be her husband, when Ophelia sings:

Good morrow! ‘Tis St. Valentine’s Day
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your valentine!

Other traditions and superstitions associated with  Valentine’s day include:

  • if the names of all a girl’s suitors were written on paper and wrapped in clay and the clay put into water, the piece that rose to the surface first would contain the name of her husband-to-be
  • if unmarried women pinned four bay leaves to the corners of their pillow and ate eggs with salt replacing the removed yokes on Valentine’s day eve, they would dream of their future husband
  • if a woman saw a robin flying overhead on Valentine’s Day, it meant she would marry a sailor. If she saw a sparrow, she would marry a poor man and be very happy. If she saw a goldfinch, she would marry a rich person.
  • in Wales wooden love spoons were carved and given as gifts on February 14th. Hearts, keys and keyholes were favourite decorations on the spoons. The decoration meant, “You unlock my heart!”

Valentine cards have been made since at least the 17th century, though the explosion in the number waited till the invention of a steam powered printing press and the penny post in the mid 19th century.

Happy Valentine’s day.

Do enjoy it with five tales of a love to warm your heart in the Bluestocking Belles’ latest collection, Fire & Frost.

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Waltzing the night away

When we Regency writers include a waltz in our stories, I believe our readers see something like this — the Victorian variety, which is fairly close to how we dance it now.

 

In fact, it was a lot closer to this (by the 1820s):

Or even this (when couple dancing really got going after about 1810 — 30 years earlier on the continent):

Before that, the term waltz referred to a long dance to a piece of music with three beats in the bar, or to the music itself.

Then, of course, there is a modern waltz.

https://youtu.be/Rpd9LqD2BHs

 

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Charity events in Georgian England or the poor shall be with us always

Our view of Georgian life is often coloured by fictional accounts of high society, where ladies spent vast amounts on bonnets and gentlemen gambled away entire estates on an evening’s card game. Which is a fair reflection of a small part of society, come to that. But one in ten families lived below the ‘breadline’, and at times as many as two in five. Many people were precariously balanced on a knife edge where illness, accidents or old age could tumble them into starvation.

The Poor Law and parish-based support

The Poor Law was meant to make sure such unfortunates had the help they needed. Wealthy households paid a levy to the parish, and local overseers apportioned financial hand-outs, clothing and fuel, and bread to those who could prove they belonged to the parish and therefore had a right to its support.

Where the parish authorities were genuinely charitable, poor relief might tide a family through a bad patch so they could get back on their feet. But the idea that poverty was a character fault is not a 21st Century invention. Strident voices wanted the poor to suffer for their charity handout.

Workhouse to discourage the poor from seeking help

IN 1722, the first legislation passed allowing parishes to provide poor relief in specially built workhouses. By the end of the century, more than 100,000 people lived under their stringent and often dire regime.

The sexes were segregated, and the able-bodied set to work, with strict rules and routines. Some workhouses were pleasant enough. Others were no better than prisons, and many of the poor preferred to starve rather than be put in the workhouse.

They were overcrowded, and the people in them often overworked and underfed. Epidemics tore through them, and the deathrate for people of every age, and particularly for newborns, was brutal. Nearly 2,400 children were received into London workhouses in 1750. Fewer than 170 of those children were still alive in 1755.

Private charities

The parish levy wasn’t the only funding for the poor, though. Many landowners (and particularly their wives) kept to the age-old tradition of providing food and other items to those who lived on or near their estates, and some continued this one-on-one help in town. They also joined groups to provide help for those who needed it.

Private charities collected money for initiatives such as the Foundling Hospital in London, which cared for children whose mothers could not support them, the Marine Society, which trained poor boys for a life at sea, the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitues, various hospitals to provide free medical care, and educational initiatives. I particularly like the name of the Female Friendly Society for the Relief of Poor, Infirm, Aged Widows and Single Women of Good Character Who Have Seen Better Days. The days of 140 character tweets were well in the future.

Benefits with friends

To raise money, these charitable groups used the time-honoured idea of offering tickets to an entertainment: balls, musical concerts, art exhibitions. Some charged a weekly subscription to support their work. Some solicited donations through pamphlets and direct approaches to possible donors. (Some people have suggested balls were a Victorian contrivance, but British newspapers contain advertisements for charity balls and assemblies, or reports on them, going back to the middle of the previous century.)

Groups would also get together to raise money for a friend in need; perhaps someone who had been injured or widowed. In the British Newspapers Online archive, I found a number of advertisements for events ‘for the benefit of Mr. Xxx’, which is, of course, where we get our term Benefit, to mean a charity event.

Women and charity

While men ran many of the great philanthropic institutions, charity was “the proper public expression of a gentlewoman’s religious energy”. [Vickery, 254] Many women joined benevolent societies (where members agreed to provide support for any of their number who fell on hard times) and a huge number of women founded or joined charitable groups that supported what they themselves would have called ‘good works’.

References

Porter, Roy: English Society in the 18th Century. Penguin, 1982

Uglow, Jenny: In These Times, Faber & Faber 2014

Vickers, Amanda: The Gentleman’s Daughter, Yale, 1998

White, Matthew: Poverty in Britain. https://www.bl.uk/georgian-britain/articles/poverty-in-georgian-britain

Fire & Frost

Fire & Frost is coming out Tuesday of next week, and since the five tales of find love in the depths of winter revolve around a charity event, I thought it was a good time to look at Georgian charities.

In a winter so cold the Thames freezes over, five couples venture onto the ice in pursuit of love to warm their hearts.

Love unexpected, rekindled, or brand new—even one that’s a whack on the side of the head—heats up the frigid winter. After weeks of fog and cold, all five stories converge on the ice at the 1814 Frost Fair when the ladies’ campaign to help the wounded and unemployed veterans of the Napoleonic wars culminates in a charity auction that shocks the high sticklers of the ton.

In their 2020 collection, join the Bluestocking Belles and their heroes and heroines as The Ladies’ Society For The Care of the Widows and Orphans of Fallen Heroes and the Children of Wounded Veterans pursues justice, charity, and soul-searing romance.

Celebrate Valentine’s Day 2020 with five interconnected Regency romances.

Melting Matilda by Jude Knight – Fire smolders under the frost between them.My One True Love by Rue Allyn – She vanished into the fog. Will he find his one true love or remain lost, cold and alone forever?

Lord Ethan’s Courage by Caroline Warfield – War may freeze a man’s heart; it takes a woman to melt it.

A Second Chance at Love by Sherry Ewing – Can the bittersweet frost of lost love be rekindled into a burning flame?

The Umbrella Chronicles: Chester and Artemis’s Story by Amy Quinton – Beastly duke seeks confident woman who doesn’t faint at the sight of his scars. Prefers not to leave the house to find her.

(This post was originally written when we were promoting Holly and Hopeful Hearts, a collection about an earlier Charity event organised by the Duchess of Haverford and the ladies of London Society. It was published by the wonderful Madame Gilflurt on her Madame Gilflurt’s Guide to Life.)

 

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A picnic by any other name…

Sometimes, you dodge a bullet by sheer happenstance. This week, Ella Quinn, in her wonderful resource on FaceBook, Regency Romance Fans, posted about the meaning of the term ‘picnic’ in Regency England, and I went back and did some more research.

I’d looked into it for the Bluestocking Belles new collection, Fire & Frost. The heroines of our five stories make baskets of food to be auctioned for the charity that is underpinning theme for the collection. The food is to be eaten at a Venetian Breakfast on the ice of the frozen Thames (a last minute change to take advantage of the unusually cold weather).

I knew, of course, that a Venetian Breakfast was an afternoon entertainment at which food was served. The ladies, in morning dress (anything worn before the change into dinner gowns in the early evening), and gentlemen of Society would have been familiar with the term ‘picnic’.

The term started in France as pique-nique, and referred to what we today would call a collaborative meal. Everyone either brought food or drink, or they paid something towards the costs. Pique-niques became very popular in Europe during the 18th century, and when people fled the French Revolution, some of them anglicised the term and started a Pic-Nic Club. The plan was to get together to eat, drink, gamble, and put on theatricals. Around 200 people joined, and the dramatist Sheridan saw it as competition for his own professional theatre. In 1802, the resulting spat spread across the newspapers, with cartoons and the lot.

Blowing-up the Pic-Nic’s or Harlequin Quixote Attacking the Puppets, vide Tottenham Street Pantomime, James Gillray, April 2

The kerfuffle popularised the term, probably because it sounded kind of catchy. I’m guessing people began to apply it to the outdoor entertainments that were already happening, where people all brought their own food and sat and ate together. Jane Austen used it in the outdoor sense in Emma, and Dorothy Wordsworth used it in letters to a friend, both close to the period of Fire & Frost (Wordsworth in 1808 and Austen in 1816). So I think we could stretch a point to say that our Regency heroes and heroines of the winter of 1813 to 1814 might be a little ahead of their times in planning an outdoor event and calling it a picnic.

However, we were saved by the collaborative original meaning of the word. Our ladies are preparing baskets to share with the successful bidder at the auction. Hurrah! Picnic baskets.

In time, the outdoor sense outlived the joint meal sense. Meanwhile, I’ve sent a couple of line edits to make sure the picnic pedants (myself among them) don’t trip over an anachronistic name for a social practice. Phew!

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Reference: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/historians-cookbook/history-picnic

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Write what you know (and if you don’t know, find out)

 

Beginning writers soon hear the advice ‘write what you know’. Often, teachers of writing classes interpret this to mean ‘write about the places and activities, and base your characters on the people, in your own life’.

Which sucks for writers of historical fiction, fantasy, or sf.

Even leaving aside questions of time and space, a literal interpretation limits people to writing within their own race, class, age, gender, religion, and physical or mental condition. I totally agree with those who want fiction to be more representative of the glorious and diverse range of human kind. Tribalism is the scourge of civilisation, and those who tell stories have an obligation to show that the differences between people make them interesting, not scary; that difference does not mean wrong.

Know what you write

On the other hand, there’s a non-literal interpretation. Every writer I know mines their own life and their own feelings for the emotional energy that goes into a story. They study the people around them to give dimension to their own characters. They research so that the facts they portray are accurate.

I write historical romance, mostly set in places I’ve never been to and involving societies I’ve never lived in. I read historical research and primary sources. I watch documentaries and other videos set in the places my characters travel. (A bike tour gives almost a horse rider’s view of the countryside.) I talk to other people who are studying the same topics. I take classes. I read some more. I stop mid-sentence to check facts, such as the time from the onset of fever to the first appearance of the rash in smallpox.

And I check things out with experts. A battlefield medic and an emergency room nurse read my operation scene in A Raging Madness. I sent the draft of Paradise Regained to the Iranian wife of my cousin’s son. A kura (woman elder) of the people descended from the tribe at Te Wharoa agreed to look at Forged in Fire for me.  I’m not going to stop writing about diverse characters, but I’m also going to be careful that my unthinking assumptions don’t trap me into being offensive.

Life is rich, but we human beings have a habit of simplifying it to our own detriment. For example, there are thousands of edibles plant species in the world, and each of them comes in multiple types. We cultivate around 120 today. Three of those crops account for half of all food eaten on the planet.

We storytellers can (and some do) create a Regency society devoid of people of colour, LGBTQ characters, people with disabilities, poor people, people of different faiths. It sure isn’t true to history, and it’s also boring. Those who do write characters that represent such diversity often come from a community that has been marginalised, and they protest at being further marginalised by being blocked from publication and being shoved off into a corner if they are published. The assumption is that people want to read what they know.

I think — I hope — the assumption is wrong.

So let’s be brave

If you’re a reader, choose to read a novel that challenges your assumptions about your favourite historical era. And please, put your suggestions for novels to read into the comments so we all have a chance to try something new.

If you’re a writer, include diverse characters. Go out and learn so you know what you write. Present humankind in all its wonderful variety. Here’s a resource list, courtesy of Louisa Cornell, who says she got some of the list from Vanessa Riley (who writes great novels with black heroes and heroines).

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Equiano; or Gustavu Vassa, the African written by Himself

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 by David Livesay

Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Gerzina

Britain’s Black Past by Gretchen Gerzina  (3/31/20)

A South Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Subcontinent, Michael Fisher, Shompa Lahiri and Shinder Thandi. London: Greenwood Press, May 2007.

The Chinese in Britain – A History of Visitors and Settlers by Barclay Price (2019).

The Chinese in Britain, 1800 – present, Economy, Transnationalism by Benton Gomez and Gregor Edmund

Chinese Liverpudlians: A history of the Chinese Community in Liverpool, by Maria Lin Wong. Liver Press, 1989.

Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. by Christopher J. Hawes

The Infidel Within: The History of Muslims in Britain, 1800 to the Present. by  Humayun Ansari

(And here’s what 31 authors said about Write What You Know.)

 

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The Greatest Killer

In some parts of England, people with communicable diseases such as smallpox were isolated in so called Pest Houses like this one in Findon.

“The smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the bighearted maiden objects of horror to the lover.”
T.B. Macaulay

For at least 3,000 and perhaps as much as 6,000 years, smallpox was one of the world’s deadliest diseases. In countries where it was endemic, it was a disease of childhood, killing up to 80% of children infected. A person fortunate to escape infection in childhood who then caught the virus as an adult, had a 30% chance of dying. Either way, those who survived the disease were left with lifelong scars but also with lifelong immunity, so they could neither catch the disease nor transmit it to others.

Transmission was from person to person, including from droplets in the air from sneezing, coughing, or even breathing. Worse, body fluids on things like clothing or bedding could carry live viruses.

In countries where the disease was new, with no such protective pool of survivors, the infection rate was horrific and the death rate catastrophic. For example, in the Americas, it’s estimated that smallpox, measles and influenza killed 90% of the native population. Children and adults were affected alike.

Even in Europe, though, smallpox changed the fate of nations. In Britain, it played a part in the downfall of the royal house of the Stuarts. Smallpox put Charles II out of action for several weeks during a crucial time in the Civil War, and killed his brother Henry. Had this Protestant prince been alive when James II’s Catholicism caused the rift with the people, history might have been quite different. All of the new king’s sons died young, one of smallpox. He was succeeded by his daughter Mary and his son-in-law and nephew William of Orange.

Mary died of smallpox towards the end of 1694. Thomas Macaulay described her death as follows:

That disease, over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious and beneficient victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death. The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid; but the plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory; and the small pox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover. Towards the end of the year 1694, this pestilence was more than usually severe. At length the infection spread to the palace, and reached the young and blooming Queen. She received the intimation of her danger with true greatness of soul. She gave orders that every lady of her bedchamber, every maid of honour, nay, every menial servant, who had not had the small pox, should instantly leave Kensington House. She locked herself up during a short time in her closet, burned some papers, arranged others, and then calmly awaited her fate.

During two or three days there were many alternations of hope and fear. The physicians contradicted each other and themselves in a way which sufficiently indicates the state of medical science in that age. The disease was measles; it was scarlet fever; it was spotted fever; it was erysipelas. At one moment some symptoms, which in truth showed that the case was almost hopeless, were hailed as indications of returning health. At length all doubt was over. Radcliffe’s opinion proved to be right. It was plain that the Queen was sinking under small pox of the most malignant type.

All this time William remained night and day near her bedside. The little couch on which he slept when he was in camp was spread for him in the antechamber; but he scarcely lay down on it. The sight of his misery, the Dutch Envoy wrote, was enough to melt the hardest heart. Nothing seemed to be left of the man whose serene fortitude had been the wonder of old soldiers on the disastrous day of Landen, and of old sailors on that fearful night among the sheets of ice and banks of sand on the coast of Goree. The very domestics saw the tears running unchecked down that face, of which the stern composure had seldom been disturbed by any triumph or by any defeat. Several of the prelates were in attendance. The King drew Burnet aside, and gave way to an agony of grief. “There is no hope,” he cried. “I was the happiest man on earth; and I am the most miserable. She had no fault; none; you knew her well; but you could not know, nobody but myself could know, her goodness.” Tenison undertook to tell her that she was dying. He was afraid that such a communication, abruptly made, might agitate her violently, and began with much management. But she soon caught his meaning, and, with that gentle womanly courage which so often puts our bravery to shame, submitted herself to the will of God. She called for a small cabinet in which her most important papers were locked up, gave orders that, as soon as she was no more, it should be delivered to the King, and then dismissed worldly cares from her mind. She received the Eucharist, and repeated her part of the office with unimpaired memory and intelligence, though in a feeble voice. She observed that Tenison had been long standing at her bedside, and, with that sweet courtesy which was habitual to her, faltered out her commands that he would sit down, and repeated them till he obeyed. After she had received the sacrament she sank rapidly, and uttered only a few broken words. Twice she tried to take a last farewell of him whom she had loved so truly and entirely; but she was unable to speak. He had a succession of fits so alarming that his Privy Councillors, who were assembled in a neighbouring room, were apprehensive for his reason and his life. The Duke of Leeds, at the request of his colleagues, ventured to assume the friendly guardianship of which minds deranged by sorrow stand in need. A few minutes before the Queen expired, William was removed, almost insensible, from the sick room.

(In my book To Mend a Proper Lady, a girls school is caught up in a smallpox epidemic, causing my heroine Ruth Winderfield to flee with three girls for whom she is responsible plus two more she promises to deliver home on her way back to London. Of course, she becomes trapped at the home of the girls’ guardian, nursing them and others who fall ill.)

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Making glass for windows

Until the early 20th century, all glass was hand-blown. This video shows how they made large sheets back in the day. Invented in the 17th century, it was expensive and didn’t become the common method until the early 19th century. Something to keep in mind when writing a scene in which someone is seen in a window is that such glass had ripples and faults. The view would have been distorted to some extent.

Even more so before that, for all those centuries when window glass was crown bullions, or bullseye glass, as shown below. This video also shows the cylinder method.

 

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Religions and revival in Georgian England

Shakers worshipped in dance

I’ve been reading up about dissenters, pantheists, cults, and other non-traditional religionists in the 18th and early 19th century. In religion, as in society as a whole, it was a time of ferment. New ideas and new ways of doing things led to (and came out of) the industrial revolution, the French and American revolutions, revolutions in the approaches to scientific inquiry, artistic expression, fashion, farming, architecture, and all kinds of other aspects of human society. How people worshipped was part of, and in part fuelled, that change.

Some writers make the direct link. It was those driven from France into the Lowlands after the Edict of Nantes (Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, and members of other persecuted sects) that, thrown together in exile, began to question conventional social mores.

Their heretical opinions about orthodox Christianity led some of them into the extremes of Puritanism, and others to deny all labels. ” I am not Lutheran, Calvinist, Arminian, Socinian, Anabaptist, or Quaker,” says book factor, Prosper Marchand, one of the voices in that place and time. He avowed a Christianity with no organised church and no official doctrine, and this in 1712. From such radical thinking, itself fuelled by Renaissance humanism, came the Enlightenment, as well as Hellfire clubs, messianic cults, poetic pantheism, and the Great Awakening, with its new forms of established religion such as Methodism. These, in time, led to the reform of those institutions that had triggered the change.

Millenialism was a strong strain in the American Revolution. Victory over the British showed that God favoured America, and those with millenialist leanings became convinced that it was in the United States that Christ would reign for 1000 years. Even the French revolution had religious roots, with the diaspora mentioned above strongly shaping the politics of the revolutionaries. Some argue that the industrial revolution, likewise, was a consequence of religious thinking.

Religions influenced by dualistic philosophies view the material world with suspicion and hostility. The material world is considered evil, while the spiritual world is considered good and noble. Renouncing this world became the mark of holiness. Equally detrimental to the development of science were world views that did not have a concept of a supreme personal Creator God. Some of the ancient civilizations, for example, which did develop some mathematics and technologies, did not develop general scientific theories, because of the absence of a creationist perspective that gives confidence in the existence of rational laws in nature. This clearly explains the lack of interest on the part of these cultures in scientific research and technology. It also shows how the Reformation, with its return to Biblical Christianity, spurred a phenomenal interest in fundamental research and technology. The great scientific advances and the industrial revolution that followed bear this out. (Institute for Christian Research)

The abolition of slavery, wide-spread education, broadening of the suffrage, workers rights — all of these 19th century innovations were championed by those who inherited the Great Awakening; that is, by the intellectual and spiritual children of those religious exiles.

In my book The Darkness Within, my hero’s investigation into a disappearance leads him into a pantheist cult.