Footnotes on Friday

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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!

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Slavery in the Cape Colony

The slave lodge in which the Dutch East India Company (VOC) kept its slaves. The lodge was built in 1679, and was used to house slaves until 1811, when the new British government converted it into government offices.

The first slaves arrived in the Cape Colony in 1658. Slavery was abolished in 1834 — in what was to become South Africa as well as in the rest of the British Empire. In between, thousands — as many as 71,000  — of people from India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Indonesia and the East African coast were brought here to work as slaves.

Their diverse origins and therefore languages, the fact that they were mostly scattered and isolated on farms in the hinterland, and the skewed gender balance (four men for every woman) meant that, unlike in other slave-owning cultures, they didn’t develop their own slave society until the nineteenth century, and then mainly in Cape Town.

Life on the isolated farms was brutal, encouraging  many to attempt escape despite the punishment that would follow if they were caught.

Slaves in the countryside ate food grown on the farms. Sometimes they also ate fish and rice. Some slave owners took advantage of the lack of legislation and gave their slaves food of a very poor quality. One visitor wrote in 1804 that: “black bread, half sand, and the offal of sheep and oxen are their general fare”. On the other hand, on some farms, slaves had small pieces of land where they grew vegetables for their own use. Domestic or house slaves usually received better food than the slaves who worked in the fields.
(https://slavery.iziko.org.za/slaveexperience)

Some did better in private ownership in Cape Town itself, as a Dutch sea captain suggests in a possibly exaggerated account written towards the end of the 18th century.

“I would reckon that a white servant in Europe does twice, or even three times more work than these ‘slaves’; but I would also be certain that, in a house where everything is well ordered, four or at most six slaves can easily do work. However, I believe that, except for the least substantial burghers, there are many houses, large and small, where ten or twelve are to be found. As they divide tasks, they are necessary. One or two have to go out each day to fetch wood, which takes all day. If the mistress leaves the house, there must be two for the sedan chair. The slave who is cook has an assistant in the kitchen. One does the dirtiest work every day . . . and two are house slaves. Many Cape women do not gladly sleep without a maid in the room, and thus one is kept for this and, better clothed than the others, also has the job of lady’s maid and carries the Psalm Book behind on visits to church. If there are children, each has a maid, although sometimes two daughters share. Small children need one to themselves. This is without one who washes and makes the beds, a seamstress and a knitter, as three or four are always kept busy that way, and I still have none for the stable.”
(C. de Jong, ‘Reizen naar de Kaap de Goede Hoop . . . 1791-1797’, 3 vols (Haarlem, 1802-3), pg. 143-4.)

On the other hand, how hard slaves worked even in the town, and how they were treated, depended entirely on the disposition of their owner. Those retained in the slave lodge either worked for the company or were hired out for labour.  They lived in terrible conditions.

The Slave Lodge was dark, wet and dirty. A subterranean stream flows under the Slave Lodge and this stream flooded the cellar of the Lodge during winter. The roof also leaked which led to hardship in the wet winter months. The slaves only received blankets after 1685. Before then, they had nothing to cover themselves against the cold. However, Höhne, the Slave Overseer, reported in 1793 that the bedding stayed wet in winter and that the slaves never had time to properly wash and clean their belongings. Statistics show that the death rate was higher during winter than in summer. The building was very dark and without adequate air circulation. There were no windows in the building, only slits in the walls with bars. Only a few of these slits faced the outside of the building. Louis Michel Thibault, the building inspector, reported in 1803 that the building was so dark inside that one needed a lantern even in the day.

Furthermore, the Lodge was very dirty. Mentzel wrote in 1785 that the stench was unbearable in the Lodge. The stench was especially bad in the vicinity of the eight toilets next to the quarters of the mentally ill. Pigs were kept in the courtyard and fattened on garden refuge to be sold to the free citizens to earn an income for the slaves.
(https://slavery.iziko.org.za/slavelodgelivingconditions)

Women faced sexual exploitation, of course. The shortage of female slaves was echoed by the shortage of women overall. From late in the seventeenth century, the VOC issued regulations forbidding relations between Europeans and female slaves. They didn’t stop European men visiting the slave lodge, however, which was known to operate as a brothel. Mulatto children and cases of men who purchased a slave’s freedom and married her suggest  no-one took the regulations very seriously.

In the book I’m writing at the moment, the British have taken over the Cape Colony for the second time (after returning it to the Dutch a few years earlier). The slave lodge has been closed, but slavery is still legal, and slaves still outnumber free people in the colony by around three to one.

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Would you like to fly in my beautiful balloon?

Balloons rise over my valley at the start of the annual Wairarapa Balloon Festival

One of my characters is currently flying over 1840s Madras in a balloon, so I’ve been reading Richard Holmes’ book Falling Upwards. Balloons, he points out, gave our ancestors their “first physical glimpse of a planetary overview”. From up above balloonists could contribute to forecasting weather, researching geology and other earth sciences, and — if only because winds are fickle — improve (or make worse) international communication.

The first successful hot air balloonist were the Montgolfier brothers. They were the children of a French paper manufacturer, and one of them was a dreamer. Joseph-Michel Montgolfier watched laundry drying over a fire, and was much taken by the way it caught the hot air and floated upwards. In 1782, he made some experiments with a small box made from wood and cloth. Success led him to approach his brother, and he and Jacques-Étienne built a larger model together.  In 1783, several experiments brought them to the attention of the King, as well as scientists and other flight enthusiasts. The first human passengers were carried October (tethered) and November (when they traveled 8 km in 25 minutes).

From the dawn of time, people had dreamed of flying. Now a lucky few could finally do so.

Frenchmen were the first hot-air balloonists, but others quickly took up the challenge. The French scored another first, though, with the first military balloon regiment, founded in 1794. The opposing armies hated them. They couldn’t do a thing without being observed from on high, so whenever the balloons came close enough, every weapon that could be mustered was fired at the basket. This, says Holmes, “made the military aeronaut’s position both peculiarly perilous and peculiarly glamorous.”

That was the beginning. Throughout the nineteenth century, aeronauts explored the limits of what was possible with a balloon, and sometimes — with dire consequence — beyond those limits. Holmes says that they came from many different walks of life, had many different approaches and interests, but all had in common a single compelling desire: they wanted to fly.

Nicolas Camille Flaummarion, one of those nineteenth century aeronauts, wrote of those early days when suggesting that the balloon was not the final answer to the desire for flight, and that some other method remained to be invented:

…already it has done for us that which no other power ever accomplished ; it has gratified the desire natural to us all to view the earth in a new aspect, and to sustain ourselves in an element hitherto the exclusive domain of birds and insects. We have been enabled to ascend among the phenomena of the heavens, and to exchange conjecture for instrumental facts, recorded at elevations exceeding the highest mountains of the earth.

Doubtless among the earliest aeronauts a disposition arose to estimate unduly the departure gained from our natural endowments, and to forget that the new faculty we had assumed, while opening the boundless regions of the atmosphere as fresh territory to explore, was subject to limitations a century of progress might do little to extend. In the time of Lunardi, a lady writing to a friend about a balloon voyage she had recently made, expresses the common feeling of that day when she says that ” the idea that I was daring enough
to push myself, as I may say, before my time, into the presence of the Deity, inclines me to a species of terror ” — an exaggerated sentiment, prompted by the admitted hazard of the enterprise (for Pilatre de Kozier had lately perished in France, precipitated to the earth by the bursting of his balloon), or dictated by an exultant and almost presumptuous sense of exaltation : for the first voyagers in the air, reminded by no visible boundary that for a few miles only above the earth can we respire, appear to have forgotten that the height to which we can ascend and live has so definite a limitation.

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Hey, shortie!

Army and Navy records give us a good idea of height (and nutrition) during the mid years of the 19th century.

Sandhurst students aged 16 to 19 were exceptionally tall compared to international standards and their own poorer compatriots. The high-nobility of Germany, sons of hereditary princes and barons, were as tall as the sons of the British gentry, but no one else was.

Even low-fee-paying Sandhurst students had a 10cm advantage over youth in the various US military establishments. Which is all the more startling, given that Americans males were, on average, the tallest men in the world — 5c to 6cm taller than the average British man. However, while the rich of Britain took the average up, the poor brought it down. And there were more poor.

The boys who joined the Marine Society and Sea Cadets, a charitable venture designed to supply men for the navy, were the shortest group in Europe and America. At 16, they averaged less than 1.5 m. The average difference between them and the Sandhurst boys of the same age was 22cm.

As a measure of the gap between rich and poor, that’s telling.

 

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Please, please, Mr Postmaster

I’ve written before about the Penny Post in the context of Christmas Cards, but I find the whole development of mail and postage in the United Kingdom interesting. For various reasons, I’ve been researching foreign mail – letters sent from the United Kingdom to overseas countries or vice versa.

In the beginning, such mail was very haphazard and unpredictable, sent by whatever ship happened to be available. We’re talking sailing ships, so too much wind and your letter could end up at the bottom of the sea; too little and it isn’t going anywhere. Other hazards included pirates and enemy ships.

Even under the best of conditions, transport was slow, relying on navigation techniques that only slowly improved over the years before the invention of the chronometer, as well as prevailing winds and ocean currents.

Sending letters overseas

A letter from England to Australia in the early years of British settlement might take eight months or a year to reach its destination, and if it required an answer, the original request is going to be at least 18 months in the past before the response arrived.

By the nineteenth century, when most of my stories are set, you had several options for sending letters from England to places overseas.

  1. You could deliver it to a post office, pay their fee, and leave it to them.
  2. You could ask a private business with overseas links to send your letter through their system.
  3. If you lived in a seaport, and if a ship in that port was heading in the right direction, you could ask the captain to take your letter for you.
  4. If you lived in London, you could go to coffee houses where ship captains met with merchants to bargain for cargoes, and — for a small fee — add your letter to a mail sack going to the right place. The coffee house would bargain with the appropriate captain.

Sending a letter from overseas

In many parts of England’s far flung empire, there was no postal system, but any ship’s captain would accept mail for ports along his route. With no regular service, the length of time before a letter arrived could not be known.

Say you were travelling to Cape Town, like the heroine of my next Redepenning novel. Mia might write a letter to her English relatives from the Canary Islands, and leave it to be sent back to England. But the next ship might be going to England via the Caribbean and then Canada, and her letter would therefore take the long way home.

From early in the 18th century, the Royal Mail had its own ships, called Packet Boats, to cover the route between England and Ireland, and England and Europe. The Royal Mail could also send mail on private ships, under the Ship Letter Act of 1799. The captains of such ships had a legal obligation to hand letters to the Postmaster at their first port of arrival in England, and were paid a small sum for doing so.

It’s a far cry from the instant gratification of email and direct messaging, but be patient, and it worked. Mostly. Eventually.

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The Georgian population boom

Throughout early modern history, Britain’s population changed at about the same speed as the rest of Europe. A really bad epidemic of the plague would drop the total numbers for a while, but on the whole there was a gradual increase, averaging less than one percent a year up until 1625, then remaining stable for 125 years, then increasing at a slow rate again to take 150 years to double.

Britain followed the pattern until the 1700s. In 1714, George 1, the first of the Hanoverians, came to rule over a country of 5.25 million. In 1760, the population had grown to 6.15 million, a healthy 17 percent at a time population growth in most of Europe was static. But the next 50 years would see a massive change. In 1815, the population was 10.25; almost double the 1714 figure. France in the same period saw a 35 percent increase, and the Dutch figures remained much the same.

Why did the population grow so fast?

Scholars give two reasons why Britain’s growth was faster than that of other nearby countries.

The first was a drop in mortality. Britain had more people because fewer of them died. From early in the eighteenth century, Britain began imposing quarantines on imports and ships sailing from places known to have the plague or other highly feared diseases. Innoculation against smallpox helped, too. People still died of typhus, cholera, and other diseases, but the number of deaths in each epidemic dropped dramatically.

The second was the age at marriage. Before the eighteenth century, the mainly agriculture-based workforce would put off getting married until they could afford a cottage and a small piece of land. Average age at marriage for women was 26 in the 17th century, and for men it was 28.  Fertility drops (on average) after 30, so not marrying until after 26 means fewer children overall.

The enclosure acts changed all that. The biggest landowners scooped up all the land, and people who would have been small-holders had to work for wages or migrate to the new jobs in city manufactories. Our working couples no longer had a reason to wait, so they married earlier and faced the challenges of finding work together. By the 19th century, the average age of marriage was 23 for women and 25 for men. (Not in the aristocracy. They married for different reasons, sometimes as young as 13 or 14.)

Since women now had a longer fertile period in marriage, and less chance of dying of disease, the number of children per couple increased.

In the next 150 years, decreasing infant and maternal mortality meant the British population doubled every 40 years, providing factory workers for industrial revolution and upsetting theorists like Malthus, who thought the upwards curve was the way things had always been, and that it would continue.