Footnotes on Friday

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Annoying Napoleon

For my latest novella, The Beast Next Door, I researched hospitals that might have performed the surgery I needed. It had to be offshore, because the hero came home after ten years away. And not all places in Europe that might have accomplished surgeons were available — the return happens in 1814, at the end of the Napoleonic wars.

I started looking at Italy, because surgery was an important branch of medicine in Italy as early as the 16th century, unlike England, where gentleman became physicians who never touched their patients, and surgery had a recent history as a job for barbers.

Northern Italy was out. No English aristocrat would send even an unwonted child into territory controlled by Napoleon. The kingdom of Naples and Sicily, however, did not fall into Napoleon’s hands until 1806.

So my Eric was sent to one of the first and best-known of Italy’s hospitals. Santa Maria del Popolo degli Incurabli, now known as Ospedae degli Incurabili, still stands today as a modern medical facility.

It began in the late 15th century when Charles of France invaded Naples leaving a small gift behind. To this day Neapolitan’s call it the French disease. The French call it the Neapolitan disease. It has various other names but the best known as syphilis.

When it first arose the disease was deadly and many hospitals were opened for the incurable.

The Incurabili in Naples was built in 1521. A Catalonian woman, wife of the Spanish viceroy, was stricken with paralysis and miraculously cured. She founded a church and hospital comprising a group of small monastic communities where she devoted the rest of her life to caring for the sick.

Ancient camphor tree in the hospital’s medicinal garden.

Over the centuries the hospital became a medical school where the breadth of studies far surpassed the English model. Pharmacy, surgery, both medical and palliative care, all were both taught and practised.

An interesting touch for Christmas, the hospital is associated with the Naples tradition of crib scenes. According to historical records, some of the early cribs were built in an oratory at the hospital.

Locating Eric, my hero, in the Kingdom of Naples gave me further ideas for my story. When Napoleon invaded the kingdom of Naples in 1806, he was 14. Trapped behind enemy lines, he and his tutor disguised themselves as Neapolitans and took to the mountains, where they joined a band of insurgents, harassing the troops of of Napoleon’s puppet kings, first as brother and later his brother-in-law.

I love the way that works.

The Beast Next Door is a novella in Valentines from Bath, a Bluestocking Belles collection on preorder, to be published on 9 February.

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Staking the castle

You’ve all read them. The stories where the heroine is at risk because a father, uncle, brother, or husband has lost the family fortune, or where the hero cannot wed because he had inherited an impoverished estate from the gambling waistral who was the previous incumbent.

Gambling, especially the gambling of the upper classes, is a frequent plot device in our Georgian and Regency stories, as it should be since it was a frequent feature of Georgian and Regency lives.

Not just upper class lives, of course. People at every level of society, both men and women, loved nothing more than a bet, on anything from a horse race or boxing match to which cockroach would be first to run the length of the table.

For the most part, our stories look at the upper classes, though. We are compelled by what Arthur Pitt, in explaining the focus of his Masters dissertation, calls:

… the undeniably romantic allure of the richly decorated gaming clubs or the reckless gambling of dynastic fortunes [which] rather trump[s] the dingy and dull penny games played against street walls or in alehouses. (Arthur Pitt, MA dissertation, A Study Of Gamblers And Gaming Culture In London, c. 1780-1844)

Card and dice games

Card games – whether for no, low, or ruinous stakes – were everywhere. Evenings at home or out at dinner would often include card games. Hostesses holding a ball or party usually had a card room, where those fond of such games could spend the evening. Gentlemens’ clubs also set aside a room or two for their members to play cards, as did gaming ‘hells’, both low and high.

Some ladies supplemented their income by ‘holding the bank’ in private card parties held in their houses. As long as they retained the appearance of merely being a hostess, and not in business, such a venture would dent their reputation but might not ruin it.

Whist (the precursor of Bridge) was very popular. Four players, in two teams, chose a trump suit and played a strategic game to win each round (called a trick). Loo is also often mentioned. It is played in a similar way to Whist, except the dealer deals an extra hand, which a player can choose to pick up and play in preference to their own.

Piquet was a game for two players, with a complicated scoring system and the potential for huge wins or losses.

Vingt-et-un is today called Twenty-One (same name, but in English). Each player draws one card at a time, in an attempt to get cards that add as close to 21 as they can get, but without going over.

In Faro (or Pharoah – or Basset, the game Pharoah was derived from), the dealer takes cards from a special wooden box and lays them face up on the table. One suit of the cards is pasted to the table in numerical order, and players place their bets by putting what they want to stake on one or more cards. Various rules decide whether a card drawn from the box wins for a player with a stake on the same number, or loses.

Hazard is a dice game, rather than a card game. Players bet on the numbers to be rolled.

Of course, gaming tables were just the start. Next week, I’ll take a look at the Betting Books, and later at horse racing.

This blog post on Jane Austen’s World has a list of further links at the end. https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/gambling-an-accepted-regency-pastime/

I also consulted:

https://harlequinblog.com/2011/02/gambling-in-regency-england/

https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-profitable-vice-gambling-in-regency.html

https://www.cherylbolen.com/gambling.htm

https://allaboutromance.com/gambling-in-historic-england/

http://www.riskyregencies.com/2012/05/21/regency-gaming-hells/

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The railway revolution

I’m continuing with a travel theme, and taking a look at my favourite mode of transport: trains. Those of us who are old enough to remember life before the internet have some idea what railways meant to how human beings live on the planet.

As they spread across one country after another in the nineteenth century, they opened unprecedented opportunities for trade, allowed investors to make huge fortunes, and gave ordinary people access to places, goods and services that had previously been exclusively for locals or the wealthy.

They also destroyed industries and the communities built around those industries.

Travelling at speed

Before trains, the fastest form of travel was a galloping horse. Set up a succession of horses spaced about ten miles apart, and you could get a message from London to Edinburgh in, perhaps, 48 hours (depending on road conditions). Travelers without such a facility would take four to eight days. In Victorian times, a train would take 16 hours to do the same journey.

Moving in bulk

Before trains, you could move goods in bulk (by barge or ship), or you could move them at speed (relatively speaking), but not both. Same with people. An army on the march could cover 30 to 50 miles a day, or boat down a river at whatever speed the current traveled. Trains reached 60 miles an hour by 1840, carrying people and goods at speeds never before possible.

Unintended consequences

Trains made the suburbs possible. They put a day trip to the seaside within the reach of ordinary city dwellers. They allowed factories to shift their goods across nations and across borders. They also furthered the depopulation of the countryside, replaced local goods — especially foods — with products brought from far away, and changed social habits, employment, and culture.

Massive engineering projects opened up inaccessible places to travelers and settlers, often at the expense of local communities.

Trains upped the head count in a disaster. An accident to a horse might take a single rider. One to a coach might result in several deaths. When a train hit another in a tunnel in 1861, 23 people died and 176 were injured.

In both positive ways and negative, trains changed the world.

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Why Georgian England partied at the full moon

I’ve been studying sunrise and sunset, moon rise and moon set, and moon phases charts for December 1814 and January and February 1815. My characters in my latest work in progress live in a quiet corner of the country within an hour’s carriage ride of Bath, and want to attend the assemblies there. Dreadful roads and poor lighting are an accident waiting to happen, which the Georgians knew even better than we do, living in a world where street lighting hadn’t spread beyond the wealthier parts of the bigger towns.

If you lived in a large country house and wanted to hold a party, you’d probably arrange it for a time when the moon would give your local guests sufficient light to see their way, perhaps with a bit of assistance from a pair of carriage lamps (fueled by oil). According to some research done by the US army, your driver would be able to pick out sufficient detail for safe driving at a distance of 400 metres on a cloudless night under a full moon that is high enough in the sky to light the road you’re using. This could drop as low as 20 metres at the quarter moon, making for a very slow trip.

In town, those out for the evening would send footmen or hired link boys to go ahead of the carriage with links (bundles of rush dipped in pitch and set alight to make a torch) or oil lamps. I guess close neighbours might have done that in the country, too. But not my characters — they have too far to go, so are stuck with partying only on a fine and moonlit night.

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Carriages, horses, boats, and Shank’s pony

I’ve read a few novels recently where the protagonists make amazingly fast journeys, leaving London in the morning and arriving in York for afternoon tea, or zipping across the Mediterranean in what must be a jet powered sailing ship. It always throws me out of the story. So, in the interests of the pleasure I get from well-researched books, here’s my rule of thumb for early 19th century travel. Times don’t allow for rest, changing horses, storms or other adverse conditions, or particularly fast journeys over a short distance.

Walking: ten miles in 3.5 hours

Carriage or horse: ten miles in 1 hour

Ship: four knots (four nautical miles in 1 hour)

Try these resources as a starting place for further research:

Sarah Waldock on speed of travel in Jane Austen’s England

Teach us history on Travelling in the early 19th century

Royal Museums Greenwich on sailing times in the 18th century

And posts of my own:

All at sea — travelling the Mediterranean

Three roading heroes

 

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Deformity and disability in Georgian England

Georgian England was a dangerous place for children; even children of the wealthy. In 1800, one in three children died before they turned five. The risk was similar for infants of all social classes, except for the very poor, though class differences favouring the wealthy showed up at later ages.

But what of those born with a congenital impairment, or who survived illness or accident with a permanent disability? Some felt that such afflictions were the ‘will of God’, and ‘it was a religious virtue to accept patiently what God had willed’. [Turner & Withey] On the other hand, people were uneasy with deformity, and those who could afford to do so tried to avoid sights that offended their sense of aesthetic perfection. Improvements in prosthetics, surgery, and assistive technologies allowed parents to improve their children’s chances of future social success.

Suppliers appealed to their customers in terms of their ‘gentility’, promoting the idea that visible deformity or disability could be socially limiting as well as hindering economic productivity. [Turner & Withey]

A huge number of tortuous devices came onto the market to straighten backs and legs, and improve posture.

Devices to improve posture and keep an individual ‘straight’ were as varied as the manufacturers who made them. Large pieces of metal called backirons were hidden at the back of clothing and prevented slouching. Steel collars forced wearers to obey mothers’ and governesses’ injunctions to keep heads up, sometimes assisted by shoulder braces which pulled shoulders back. Neck swings stretched the spine by suspending the ‘patient’ in a block and tackle type device so that only their toes touched the ground. [Grace]

Not everything could be fixed, and even if a child’s impairment was minimised by one of the treatments on offer, the very idea that their body was defective and to be shuffled out of sight could not have made the children’s lives easier. The practice of casting blame can’t have helped.

Congenital deformities in infants were often blamed on something the mother did or experienced during pregnancy. A cleft palate might be the consequence of seeing a hare. A strawberry birthmark (infantile hemangioma) is so called because of the myth it results from eating strawberries in pregnancy.

Or perhaps the mother was deep dyed in sin. If God has afflicted this child, the reasoning went, it cannot be a punishment for the child’s sins, so it must be someone else’s fault, and who else but the mother? Or perhaps the devil had afflicted the child, and therefore the family. Where the belief in evil magic still prevailed, the family might conclude they had been cursed, and that was the cause of the deformity.

Shakespeare’s Richard III has quite a few passages exploring the reasons for the protagonist’s deformity, touching on all of these possible causes.

Such beliefs must have made for interesting family dynamics.

In the story I’m writing at the moment, I gave my hero an infantile hemangioma, which has shaped his life. Sent away to be hidden in the country as a small baby, he spent his early childhood years isolated by the growing tumour on his face. Then his family sent him for surgery in Naples two years before it was conquered by Napoleon, ironically at about the time the hemangioma was shrinking naturally. Now that the imprisonment of Napoleon has made travel easy, he has come back to England, his face scarred where the hemangioma was removed.

Black, J, Boulton, JP & Davenport, RJ., Infant mortality by social status in Georgian London

Grace, M., The Shape of Georgian Beauty

Roser, M. Child Mortality

Turner, D. & Withey, A., Technologies of the Body: Polite Consumption and the Correction of Deformity in Eighteenth-Century England, History, The Journal of the Historical Association

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Plot bunnies and research rabbit holes

 

Have I mentioned recently that I love research, and have never seen a plot bunny hop into a rabbit hole without wanting to follow it into wonderland?

My browsing history is eclectic, to say the least. At the moment, I have six stories at various stages. Take a look at some of the interesting facts I’ve gone rabbiting after, and tell me what you’d like me to write about here.

I’m close to finishing Abbie’s Wish, my contemporary for the Authors of Main Street Christmas set. In just the last few days, I’ve looked up:

  • classic motorcycles, and what model my hero, my villain, and my second lead might have a bonding moment over
  • electronic listening devices that wouldn’t be easy for someone to detect
  • exercises used in Riding for the Disabled classes
  • what dirt bike riding feels like, and how the bikes differ from street bikes
  • ideas for costumes for a parade float with the theme ‘summer solstice around the world’.

Paradise Regained is on its final proofread before publication in November as part of the Bluestocking Belles box set. My research days for that are well over, but included Silk Road caravanserais, trading routes north of (or over) the Caspian Sea, the best place in Europe to buy edged weapons, words in Turkmen and Persian, Paradise gardens, Sufi saints and their relics, and  the civil war in Iran during the change of dynasties in the late eighteenth century.

Also on the final run to publication is the novel House of Thorns, which Scarsdale Publishing is bringing out as part of a Marriage of Inconvenience collection. I’ve got the edits back from the publisher and am working my way through them. Research included:

  • Wirral Peninsula and the steam ferry services that connected it to Liverpool
  • 1816, the year without a summer
  • Regency property developers, including failed property developments
  • exploring officers in the Napoleonic Wars.

As soon as I clear the work for these three off my desk, I need to get back to The Beast Next Door, a rewrite of the Bluestocking and the Beast, which was originally a short story. The Beast Next Door is going in a Valentine box set for the Bluestocking Belles, and has had me looking up Regency treatments for severe strawberry birthmarks (and what happens without treatment), assemblies at Bath, and distances from Bath that would keep my heroine stranded in the country by bad weather for a crucial length of time at the start of the book.

And my mind still keeps going back to Unkept Promises. I’m over 25% of the way through Mia’s and Jules’s story, the fourth in the Golden Redepenning series. I’m continuing to research the Regency navy, particularly that arm of it that policed the seas off the Cape of Storms. Other rabbits I’ve chased to their lairs include:

  • tuberculosis — what it looked like and how it progressed before antibiotics, and tuberculosis treatments in Regency times
  • the British presence in Cape Town in 1812
  • Cape Town streets and houses in 1812
  • the history of the Cape Colony, and specifically the history of slavery in the Cape Colony
  • Ceylon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
  • the Far East fleet of the British navy in the wars with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France.

The ongoing saga of Never Kiss a Toad keeps on throwing up challenges, being outside my normal research period. I’m cowriting it with Mariana Gabrielle, and we’re publishing it on Wattpad one episode a week. Our heroine is off in the Pacific, on an island group where her father has been appointed governor. Diplomatic, Polynesian, settler, whaler, and other history needed. She has a new suitor, who is a scientist and a balloonist. Two more rabbits. She has been to Alexandria, Cairo, and Madras — all of which required description.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the intrepid hero of Never Kiss a Toad is running a shipping enterprise. New countries and also travel times, which are always fraught. This week’s episode has him preparing for his sister’s debutante ball, events that had changed a little by the time Victoria was on the throne.

It’s a good thing I love research.

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The French Disease

(This is a rerun of a blog post I wrote for Jessica Cale’s Dirty Sexy History.)

In 1494, France was at war with Naples when the French camp was struck by a terrible disease.

It began with genital sores, spread to a general rash, then caused abscesses and scabs all over the body. Boils as big as acorns, they said, that burst leaving rotting flesh and a disgusting odour. Sufferers also had fever, headaches, sore throats, and painful joints and bones. The disease was disabling, ugly, and terrifying. And people noticed almost from the first that it (usually) started on the genitals, and appeared to be spread by sexual congress.

The Italian kingdoms joined forces and threw out the French, who took the disease home with them, and from there it spread to plague the world until this day.

Where did it come from?

Syphilis. The French Disease. The Pox. The Great Imitator (because it looks like many other illnesses and is hard to diagnose). The French call it the Neopolitan Disease. It is caused by a bacterium that is closely related to the tropical diseases yaws and bejel.

Scientist theorise that somewhere in the late 15th Century, perhaps right there in the French camp outside of Naples, a few slightly daring yaws bacteria found the conditions just right to change their method of transmission. No longer merely skin-to-skin contact, but a very specific type of contact: from sores to mucus membranes in the genitals, anus, or mouth.

They’ve found a couple of possible sources.

One was the pre-Columban New World, where yaws was widespread. Did one of Columbus’s sailors carry it back? It would have had to have been the first or second voyage to be outside of Naples in 1494.

The other is zoonotic. Six out of every ten human infectious diseases started in animals. Was syphilis one of them. Monkeys in Africa suffer from closely related diseases, at least one of which is sexually transmitted.

Mild is a relative term

At first, syphilis killed sufferers within a few months. But killing the host immediately is a bad strategy when you’re a bacterium. Especially when you’re a frail little bacterium that can’t live outside of warm moist mucus membranes.

So syphilis adapted. Soon, few people died immediately. The first sore (or chancre) appeared between 10 days to three months after contact. About ten weeks after it healed, the rash appears, and the other symptoms mentioned above. These symptoms last for several weeks and tend to disappear without treatment, but reoccur several times over the next two years.

For more than half of sufferers, that’s it. The disease has run its course. But it is a sneaky little thing. It is still lurking, and a third or more of those who contract the disease will develop late complications up to 30 years after the original chancre. These are the ones to fear. During the latent phase, the disease is cheerfully eating away at the heart, eyes, brain, nervous system, bones, joints, or almost any other part of the body.

And the sufferer can look forward years, even decades, of mental illness, blindness, other neurological problems, or heart disease. And eventually the blessed relief of death.

How was it treated?

Until the invention of antibiotics, the treatment was as bad the cure. Physicians and apothecaries prescribed mercury in ointments, steam baths, pills, and other forms. Mercury is a poison, and can cause hair loss, ulcers, nerve damage, madness, and death.

Syphilis was the impetus for the adoption of condoms, their birth control effect noticed later and little regarded (since conception was a woman’s problem). The first clear description is of linen sheaths soaked in a chemical solution and allowed to dry before use. Animal intestines and bladder, and fine leather condoms also appear in the literature.

They were sold in pubs, apothecaries, open-air markets, and at the theatre, and undoubtedly every wise prostitute kept a stock.

Not having sex—or at least not having sex with multiple partners—would have been a more effective solution, but it appears few of society’s finest took notice of that!

Syphilis in romantic fiction

Those of us who write rakes would do well to remember how easy it was to catch the pox. Indeed, in some circles it was a rite of passage!

“I’ve got the pox!” crowed the novelist de Maupassant in his 20s. “At last! The real thing!” He did his part as a carrier by having sex with six prostitutes in quick succession while friends watched on.

The mind boggles.

We can, I am sure, have fun with the symptoms and the treatment, though we’d do well to remember that it was not an immediate death sentence, and suicide might be considered an overreaction to the first active stage, when most people got better and were never troubled again.

Scattered across a few of the books I’m writing, I have my own syphilitic character in the final stage, suffering from slow deterioration of his mental facilities and occasional bouts of madness, though his condition is a secret from all but his wife, his doctor, and his heir.

Watch this space!

References

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27983483-history-sex-and-syphilis

http://www.infoplease.com/cig/dangerous-diseases-epidemics/syphilis-sexual-scourge-long-history.html

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/syphilis.html

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38985/title/Syphilis–Then-and-Now/

When Syphilis Was Trés Chic

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The fault of the poor

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Some of the rhetoric of economists who support the current financial system sounds suspiciously familiar to my history-geek’s ear, and one prime example is the British government’s reaction to the crisis in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Great Hunger, as it was known in Ireland, seemed to the British government of the day a fairly minor affair; something the poor had undoubtedly brought on themselves by their improvident dependence on a single crop.

Never mind that it was about all they had time to grow as they laboured for the wealthy, who owned all the land and decided what should be grown there. Wheat crops were harvested and exported, using Irish labour. Those labourers couldn’t afford to buy what they’d grown for their masters, but instead planted potatoes in the small patch of land around their cottages. In 1845, half the potato crop failed in Ireland, but nobody died as a result, partly as a result of government relief efforts. The views of Sir Randolph Routh, the man running the relief programme, make chilly reading when we consider what followed.

The little industry called for to rear the potato, and its prolific growth, lead the people to indolence and all kinds of vice, which habitual labour and a higher order of food would prevent. I think it very probable that we may derive much advantage from this present calamity.

Blame the victim, much?

In 1846, almost the entire crop failed followed by one of the coldest winters on record. The new minority government reduced its relief efforts, and made relief largely dependent on participating in useless public works: roads that went nowhere, walls that surrounded nothing.

From the beginning of 1847, the Tory government came under attack from Disraeli’s Whigs. In response, they introduced soup kitchens, the only really effective response of the entire miserable affair, watery soup being better than nothing. But summer brought the third successive year of crop failures,. The government brought in a Poor Law Act mandating workhouses, but failed to stop the export of corn.

The debates of parliament make chilling reading, as one person after another reflected on the ill effects of helping the undeserving poor, and the need for the Irish to simply make more effort. I get a strong sense of deja vu when I read these remarks in the light of more modern public debates about food, refugee, and other crises where the rich are being asked to share their resources.

That year, Oscar Wilde’s mother had this poem published:

Weary men, what reap ye?
Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?
Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?
Would to God that we were dead
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread … We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure
bask ye in the world’s caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

Despite urgent pleas from English officials and others, the government did nothing, many politicians continuing to blame the Irish poor for their own demise. In 1849, as the harvests began to recover in some parts of Ireland, in others the deaths continued. One official enquiry concluded:

Whether as regards the plain principles of humanity, or the literal text and admitted principle of the Poor Law of 1847, a neglect of public duty has occurred and has occasioned a state of things disgraceful to a civilized age and country, for which some authority ought to be held responsible, and would long since have been held responsible had these things occurred in any union in England.

The population of Ireland dropped by half in the fifty years following the start of the famine. Ireland took over a century to recover, and the descendants of those who failed to help when help was needed suffered the retribution of those scarred by the sufferings of their own ancestors. It would be nice to think that today’s politicians could learn from this and other similar tragedies, but I’m not holding my breath.

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Hydrotherapy and fashion

Buxton Crescent — built for the spa trade

I’ve been doing some research for the novella I’m writing, The Beast Next Door. It is set in the spa town of Bath, and in a nearby village, so I’ve been looking at spa towns.

Bath is possibly the best known in Regency romance writing, but it is by no means the only one.

Cheltenham was very popular in the day, especially after George III took the waters there in 1788. Royal Leamington in Warwickshire was also popular with the Georgian wealthy. In Derbyshire, Buxton was popular, its Crescent offering accommodation, shops, restaurants and assembly rooms for dancing and gossip. Tunbridge Wells in Kent was another place for the Regency belle and beau to see or be seen. (It was, purportedly, discovered in 1606 when a young nobleman with a raging hangover tasted the water and felt miraculously recovered.)

Harrowgate in North Yorkshire was famous throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and visitors often included European royalty.

Some spas didn’t really take off until the Victorian era. Charles Darwin was a fan of Great Malvern in Worcestershire. In Powys, Wales, more than 30 springs made Llandrindod Wells a popular resort, especially after the coming of the railway. In the Highlands, Strathpeffer came into its own in the 1870s.

And those are just a drop in the bucket!