Today, I’m sharing a resource on London. It is 18th century focused, but much of it still applies in the following two or three decades. Check out London Lives, a collection of documents, images, archives, and articles about the City of London, the City of Westminster, Southwark and Middlesex.
When we first set up the Bluestocking Belles website, we had the idea to turn our blog into a gossip sheet, where we and other authors could spread gossip about characters from historical romances. The Teatime Tattler has now been going for six years, and this year it (or rather an unknown correspondent) plays a starring roll in our box set, Storm & Shelter.
In truth, as far as researchers can tell, newspapers totally devoted to scandal and gossip were a feature of 18th Century publishing, and reappeared in the 1820s. But in the Regency era, the antics of the upper classes were far more likely to be outed in cartoons posted in the windows of print shops, or in pamphlets devoted to a single story. Society news, and even scandal, does appear in the newspapers we have from those times, but in a column in amongst the war news, shipping news, reports on politics, weather reports, advertisements for everything under the sun, and all the rest.
That said, hundreds of papers came and went during the late Georgian period, from the end of the 18th Century to the ascension of Queen Victoria, so who knows?
Interested to know more?
Guess the identity of the reporter snooping on the people trapped in the Queen’s Barque and the good people of Fenwick on Sea. You’ll find clues in the eight charming novellas in the collection Storm & Shelter.
All correct answers will be entered for the prizes listed below. The winners will be selected at random. Open internationally.
The contest closes on 23rd April at midnight New York time, and prizes will be drawn on 24th April.
Land travel in Regency England required negotiating rough roads and weather on foot, or on an animal or a vehicle pulled by an animal. Anyone with the money could purchase a seat on a stage coach, or even the mail coach if speed was more important than comfort.
More money would get you a post chaise – a hired carriage that took you from the inn where you hired it as far as the owning company agreed to go. With your post chaise, you also got one or more post riders who worked for the owning company, who rode the horses or maybe alongside the horses, and took the post chaise back when you’d finished it.
Wealthy travelers preferred the convenience of their own carriage. Not only were private carriages likely to be better sprung and better fitted out with every convenience, but on a long trip the travelers wouldn’t have to change carriages when reaching the boundaries of a hire company’s territory.
With all three types of traveler on the road, a staggering number of horses were needed to keep them moving. Each team could manage perhaps 10 or 15 miles before tiring, depending on terrain and conditions, and then the carriage would need to stop and have the team replaced with a fresh one.
At the height of the period, an inn on a popular route might have up to 2,000 horses available for hire, or being boarded on behalf of wealthy travell\ers who preferred their own horses and could afford to send them on ahead for a planned journey.
In Storm & Shelter, floods and slips force many travelers to interrupt their travel at the coaching inn in Fenwick on Sea. Storm & Shelter is the latest anthology of novellas from the Bluestocking Belles, this time with novellas from friends Grace Burrowes, Mary Lancaster, Alina K. Field. It is 99c until publication on 13 April.
Just a short post this week to share a few resources on Georgian townhouses.
Here’s a site I found that explores Georgian architecture in London, with lots of examples, useful labels and fun explanations.
This takes us inside:
https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/characteristics-of-the-georgian-town-house/
As does this:
https://austenauthors.net/peak-inside-the-typical-regency-era-townhouse/
Enjoy! And if you want more, look for architectural pattern books from the era! They were resources for builders, and are great fun.
Have you seen the Georgian Papers Programme website?
The GPP is a ten-year interdisciplinary project to digitise, conserve, catalogue, transcribe, interpret and disseminate 425,000 pages or 65,000 items in the Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the Georgian period, 1714-1837.
Wow. Just wow!
As you would expect, the archive, the research papers based on the archive, and the blog based on the research papers are a treasure trove for anyone interested in the era. For example, who knew that Prince Frederick, the Prince of Wales, went truffle hunting?
When I think of truffle-hunting (which is not that often), I think of pigs rooting around in Italian forests, not dogs in the English countryside. Indeed, most of the recent literature on truffle-hunting dogs implies that the use of dogs to find truffles is a relatively recent development. Frederick, Prince of Wales’, rental of two truffle hunting dogs for three months in 1750-51 tells us that using dogs to find these valuable fungi is a much older idea than most modern truffle-hunters realize.
Frederick’s account books do not mention the breed of these rental pups. The Italian Lagatto Romagnolo, a curly-haired water retriever, is renowned for its truffle-hunting abilities, but Labrador retrievers, poodles, and even Chihuahuas can be truffle-hunters. Indeed, dogs are better for hunting truffles than pigs, because dogs are far less likely to eat the truffle once they’ve found it!
Once upon a time there was a prince who liked to go to the seaside. One of his favourite uncles lived in Brighton, and George found the seaside resort very much to his taste. He rented a rather pleasant farmhouse, Brighton House, from a member of his staff, and later entered into a lease that let him make the changes he wanted.
The architect he chose, Henry Holland, built a rotunda over the grand dining room, and added a new wing. Brighton House became Marine Pavilion.
But it didn’t stop there. Next came extensive stables, with room for 60 horses. The stables were even bigger than the house.
But soon, that wasn’t enough. I guess the prince was having fun. The interiors were originally neoclassical, but the prince was soon having them all converted to the new oriental style, and then he had some even grander ideas. The original architect built on again, adding more rooms, but that still wasn’t enough. By 1815, a new architect, John Nash, was working on the building we have today–little is left of the first two incarnations of the building, apart from the room under one of the new domes, once the dining room, then the grand saloon.
The building was finally finished in 1823, and by then our prince was king, and too busy for more than two more visits to the farmhouse that grew.
***
I was looking into this because I had my heroine in my latest book visit the Royal Pavilion, and I suddenly thought to check whether it had been built yet. It hadn’t. It was still the Marine Pavilion.
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.
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.
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.)
I’m loving the CrowsEye videos. CrowsEye Productions is a group of three women with a passion for history, art, and film-making. This one is from the Photoshoot series.
Quadrille anyone? You’d really have to know what you were doing, or you’d throw everyone off! A muttered ‘Follow my lead’ just isn’t going to do it.
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: