I have another video for you; one about the rules that you’ll meet in Pride and Prejudice and in modern novels of the late Georgian.
Footnotes on Friday
Diversity in historical England
I write historicals set in and around Regency England, which I try to ground in research. As a English-descended New Zealander, a Catholic convert from Anglicanism, and a middle-class straight married woman, I need to always remember that the society I write about was considerably more diverse than most people realise. Given my own family history, I always include people with disabilities. I don’t even have to think about that. I do have to remember the rest.
Right through recorded history, England has had people of different ethnicities, races, religions, abilities, and genders (in the modern sense). English society has always been diverse — not always tolerant, but always diverse. Lack of religious tolerance has been a strong force behind many civil disruptions and wars. Lack of tolerance for same sex attraction and other non-cis gender behaviours led to some very nasty laws (but only when the ‘offenders’ were male). But lack of tolerance for ethnic and colour differences seems to have been a Regency and Victorian invention, perhaps prompted by the desire to justify the slave trade and the exploitations of the Raj. Just look at the image above, or think of Shakespeare, who was horrid about Jews but made a hero of Othello.
Standard historical romances tend to be about white Anglican (often only nominally Anglican) protagonists, unless the author is themselves a person of colour. Disability is rare in such romances, and even then, usually limited to PTSD or a scar. Except in LGBT romances, those who are not heterosexual are usually either villains or victims, there for the main protagonists to overcome or to rescue. Of course, a deep treasure trove of historical romances are not standard at all. But this blog is not about them.
History doesn’t support this the standard view. Even in the ton, the top level of English society, the story wasn’t nearly as monochromatic — or as dull.
As regards race, England even had two queens who, today, we would call black (although contemporary accounts confirm that they were, in fact, brown-skinned). Queen Philippa, the wife of Edward III, was the first, way back in medieval times. some historians believe her son, the Black Prince, was so called because he looked like his mother. Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, was the maternal ancestress of today’s British royalty and, through her granddaughter Queen Victoria, most of the royalty of Europe. The colonial and expansionist ambitions of England contributed, too, as just one example shows.
In the more loving relationships of this period, Indian wives often retired with their husbands to England. The Mughal travel writer, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who published in Persian an account of his journey to Europe in 1810, described meeting in London several completely Anglicised Indian women who had accompanied their husbands and children to Britain. One of them in particular, Mrs Ducarroll, surprised him every bit as much as Kirkpatrick tended to surprise his English visitors: “She is very fair,” wrote Khan, “and so accomplished in all the English manners and language, that I was some time in her company before I could be convinced that she was a native of India.” He added: “The lady introduced me to two or three of her children, from 16 to 19 years of age, who had every appearance of Europeans.” A great many such mixed-blood children must have been quietly and successfully absorbed into the British establishment, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-19th-century prime minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent. [https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/dec/09/britishidentity.india]
We have clear evidence in the court records, even if you ignore all the gossip, that same sex attraction was no less common then than now.
As for religion, anyone who wanted to join the army or hold a public office had to at least pretend to be an Anglican, but at least five of the great families were Catholic anyway, and other religions flourished, though if aristocrats were not Anglican they mostly kept quiet about it.
In broader society, we know that different races were present, and that they mixed (despite efforts to the contrary). Many people who consider themselves white might be very surprised if they could see back to the multi-cultural marriage in their ancestry. The same with faith. England had large numbers of Jews from medieval times, and large numbers of Muslims from at least the 18th century.
And disability, of course, can happen to anyone.
The challenge for me is to write about a diverse culture that is true to the times and respectful of people who are not me. I constantly fear I’ll get it wrong. I fully expect to be accused of tokenism. I do my research, I talk to people who would, two hundred years ago, have been in the communities I write about. I keep trying.
Dressing a gentleman
In many ways, men’s evening dress in the Regency was a throw-back to day and evening wear a generation earlier, with 18th century evening clothes more ornate than those worn during the day, but similar in terms of the actual items of apparel. So as you watch the following video, think of your favourite Regency hero or villain getting ready for a formal ball or an evening at Almacks.
The following is about dressing a regency cavalry officer. Thank you, priorattire. You’ll need to click through to YouTube to view it.
https://youtu.be/pSksa0RZdio
How to use the wheel on a sailing ship
I’ve been bringing my heroine and her entourage from South Africa to England in the latest draft of Unkept Promises, which has meant a lot of research about the type of ship, its size and configuration, what type of accommodation Mia might have found herself in, where she and children might be out of the way but also out in the air during the day, and all sorts of other things that I never mention in the book (but that I need to know so I don’t make any egregious errors).
At one point, she goes off to talk to the ship’s captain, and I set out to find out where the wheel was on a brig-rigged schooner. Which led me to wondering how the wheel worked, which led me to this YouTube clip. You’re welcome.
(The maker of the video notes that he didn’t include the use of the sails, a major factor in steering a sailing ship, as any yachtsman knows.)
The disease that made you in fashion
One of the biggest killers of humankind in history (apart from other humans) has been a tiny organism we now call Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
In ancient Greece, it was considered the most prevalent disease of the age. Throughout history, it has been feared and the symptoms treated with despair. And in the nineteenth century, it was a fashionable way to die.
The most common form of tuberculosis attacks the lungs. Sufferers experience chest pain, fatigue, night sweats, loss of appetite leading to a general wasting away, and a persistent coughing up of phlegm and later blood (and bits of lung tissue). Eventually the patient’s lungs are so invaded by the disease that they suffocate and die. Sounds sexy, right?
No. Not that bit. What our Regency and Victorian poets and artists admired was those features of the disease that fit their ideas about the causes of illness and their concept of beauty.
First, not knowing about germs, they thought that the causes of the illness varied by social class. When the poor died in their filthy overcrowded rooms, they had the Graveyard Cough, the White Plague, the King’s Evil (so called, because the touch of a king was thought to be a cure for the version of the disease we now call scrofula, a tuberculous swelling of the lymph glands). These were diseases of poverty, immorality, and criminality, which were all clearly linked, since poverty was obviously the fault of the poor. (Come to think of it, some modern commentators haven’t moved on from that belief.)
When the wealthy died, it was clearly a different disease, since they were rich, moral, and altogether less smelly. It was consumption, so called because the person grew thinner and thinner. It was, so medical theory had it, an excess of emotion and genius typical of the artistic mind that slowly consumed the patient. They were killed by fiery passion.
And look how lovely they were while they died! Was it fashionable to be slender (rather than hearty and robust like the working classes)? Not being able to eat made you thin. Was it fashionable to be pale (rather than tanned like those horrid workers who must toil in the sun)? Loss of blood will make you positively pasty.
Since one in four deaths in the nineteenth century was caused by the disease, many fashionable poets, musicians, painters and authors died of consumption, which confirmed, in the minds of the fashionable, that their creativity had killed them. Add to that the predilection of said creative types to glorify death by consumption in their poems, operas, and novels, and hey presto. A horrible slow wasting death becomes desirable.
Kirana, Jules’s mistress, is slowly dying of consumption in my current work-in-progress, Unkept Promises. Her death will be written some time in the next few days, poor soul.
The man who could have saved millions
Look up maternal mortality figures for Britain and the United States in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries and through to the 1930s, and you’ll see why childbirth was so feared. Every year, between four and eight women would die for every 1000 total births, during the birth or within the following 42 days. Factor in that few couples practiced ways of limiting conception, and women faced this risk time after time. Breastfeeding was a time-honoured way of spacing babies, since conception is suppressed in many women while fully breastfeeding, but by the nineteenth century, wet nurses were fashionable for the upper classes, so men commonly had nine or ten children, often with two or more wives in succession.
Puerperal fever, the killer in many cases, was no respecter of persons. Indeed, physicians were more likely to carry the disease than midwives, since they went from attending to autopsies and infectious diseases straight to assisting at a birth. Mary Wollstonecroft died in 1797, after a doctor was called to help remove the placenta when she gave birth to the baby named for her, who would later become well known as Mary Shelley.
The father of hand-washing
Use the internet to look up who first discovered that hand-washing saved lives, and the name Ignaz Semmelweiz will populate your search screen. He was a Hungarian doctor who, in the 1840s, began collecting mortality statistics in two maternity wards. In one, staffed by doctors and their students, mortality rates were five times as high as the other, staffed by midwives. He made several changes to align the routine between one ward and the other, but to no effect. Then one of the pathologists died. He’d pricked his finger during the autopsy of a woman who died of puerperal fever, got very sick, and died. Apparently, such deaths among pathologists were not uncommon, but Semmelweiz noticed that the man had shown all the symptoms of puerperal fever.
Semmelweiz realised that puerperal fever wasn’t uniquely a post-natal disease of mothers. He then theorized that doctors were getting little pieces of corpse on their hands when they dissected bodies, and those caused the fever. He made his doctors and students wash their hands and instruments in a chlorine solution, and maternal deaths in the doctors’ ward dropped dramatically.
Problem solved.
Hold on. Not so fast.
While all the facts about Semmelweiz are true, the appellation ‘father of hand-washing’ is wrong for two reasons.
First, he wasn’t the first
He wasn’t the first to notice the correlation. In the 1790s, Alexander Graham, a naval doctor who had retired from the sea to work in a hospital in Aberdeen faced an epidemic of puerperal fever, and recorded his conclusions about the 77 cases in his care.
‘… it is a disagreeable fact that I, myself, was the means of carrying the infection to a great number of women.’
He recommended burning the women’s bedclothes and told doctors to carefully wash themselves and to change their clothes between patients.
In the United States, a few years before Semmelweis, physician and poet Oliver Wendell-Holmes drew the same inferences.
‘… the disease known as puerperal fever is so far contagious as to be frequently carried from patient to patient, by physicians and nurses.’
They weren’t the only ones.
In France, there was Antoinne Germain Labarraque. In Ireland, Robert Collins, In Britain, Thomas Watson. All of them advocated hand-washing to save lives.
Second, no one wanted to know
Medical science laughed at the notion that doctors might be inadvertently killing patients.
Gordon was hounded out of Aberdeen, and had to return to the navy, where his knowledge of handwashing informed his surgical practice and undoubtedly saved many sailors. But not medical practice. Labarraque, Collins, and Watson fared better, being honoured for their medical achievements, but scoffed at for their theories of hygiene, their recommendations disregarded.
Semmelweiz, perhaps because of his aggressive attitude, was the worst treated of all. He publicly berated those who didn’t agree with him, in increasingly abusive terms. In one letter, he said:
I declare before God that you are a murderer and [history] would not be too unfair if it remembers you as a medical Nero.
In 1865, aged only 47, he was committed to an asylum, probably beaten, and died of sepsis — ironically, the same infection of the blood stream that was still killing all those women he tried to save.
There’s good news, and there’s bad news
Even after Lister proved the connection between germs and disease, hand-washing took a long time to catch on. In the Scandinavian countries, midwives adopted hand-washing early, and had the earliest drop in maternal deaths. Other countries reluctantly followed, the United States as late as 1930. All the evidence in the world is not enough to change minds that are set on what they want to believe.
Even today, close to one third of maternal deaths in Africa and other developing parts of the world are from puerperal fever. They could be prevented by washing hands in an antiseptic solution and wearing clean clothes (if such supplies plus the knowledge we take for granted were available to birth attendants).
Will You Be My Valentine?
When the Bluestocking Belles first began working on a box set based around a Valentine’s Day Ball in Regency Bath, I had a few question. Was Valentine’s Day celebrated back then? How?
I knew the Victorians had hand written cards, and the Americans in the late 19th century brought in printed cards. And I knew Valentine was a Roman, killed for his faith and remembered for kindness to lovers. I didn’t know much else, but a bit of research soon put that right.
Wild Lupercalia
Long before the fifth century, when the three possible claimants for the story of St Valentine were around, the Romans had a feast in the middle of February that celebrated fertility. It included a ritual in which men killed animals and then used their hides to whip the women who lined up for the opportunity. The proceedings also including a jar full of names to pair men and women up for the duration of the festival – or longer, if they found they liked one another.
Valentine – but which Valentine?
When Christianity became the preferred religion, or so the theory goes, the bishops looked around for a replacement festival; one that wouldn’t involve quite so much blood and sex, but still let people have a good time.
They had a handy day already: 14 February was the feast day of three martyrs, both called Valentine. One was a fellow who refused to convert to paganism and was executed. According to legend, before he died he performed a miracle to heal the daughter of his jailor, and sent her a letter signed ‘from your Valentine’. Not much is known about the third, except that he died in Africa.
The other was a Roman priest who performed weddings for soldiers forbidden to marry, which in time led to the connection between St Valentine and lovers.
Beloved friends
At first, St Valentine’s Day was for celebrating any kind of love by showing affection. However, by the late fourteenth century, the idea of courtly love was in full swing, and the medieval author wrote a poem in which he firmly associated St Valentine and his day with romance.
As the years passed, the tradition developed. Lovers exchanged gifts, poems, letters, and handmade cards to celebrate the feast. Lovelorn suitors might give a Valentine’s Day token to impress the beloved. By the eighteenth century, the association of the saint between the saint and a wider definition of love had disappeared from England. But the association of the day and lovers was going strong, and it was only going to increase in the nineteenth century. In 1815, the year of our Valentine’s Day ball, such an event was entirely possible, and we can certainly expect our characters to keep up the tradition of giving hand-made tokens of affection to the object of their love.
It would be another thirty-five years before a entrepreneurial American woman would create the first print run of Valentine’s Day cards, but our story was feasible, and we were off.
~*~
Valentine’s from Bath releases on Saturday. Only 99 cents for more than 450 pages of stories. See the Belles’ project page for details. The blurb below is from my novella, one of five in the collection.
Getting dressed in Regency England
This week, I thought you might like to see what goes into getting our heroines and heroes dressed.
First, the heroines:
And now for the heroes. This is from the movie about Beau Brummel. If you’re shy, don’t watch the beginning. (The shirt would have been put on over the head, with buttons only at the neck. But hey.)
Join the library! (Regency-style)
My heroine Charis didn’t like much about the social rounds in Bath. Had her mother been prepared to pay the subscription she would have enjoyed the circulating library.
By 1814, many towns and most cities had at least one circulating library, perhaps run by a bookstore or printer, but often a stand-alone business. Books were expensive. A 3-volume novel cost the equivalent of 100 dollars in today’s money. Paying a yearly subscription to a library meant you could borrow books that would otherwise be out of your reach.
Rules for a Subscription Library
Circulating libraries became social places, where ladies could meet and be seen. The reading rooms often offered games, and the libraries might also sell other merchandise.
As a member, you could purchase a copy of the library’s catalogue (for about sixpence). You could choose your book from the catalogue, and take a couple home, then another couple when you’d finished those ones. (The number you could borrow at a time varied from library to library.)
What would they think of my library, which I ‘visit’ over the Internet, and which allows me to download 15 ebooks at a time? Or, for that matter, my personal ebook collection, which numbers in the 1000s, many of which have cost me less than five dollars?
(Charis appears in The Beast Next Door, a novella in Valentines from Bath.)
Also see:
The Circulating Library in Regency Times: https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/the-circulating-library-in-regency-times/
The Circulating Library:
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.
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.