October 16, 2014 by judeknight

Criminal injustice

I’ve been researching the justice system of the late 18th and early 19th century, It’s a fascinating period – a time of change in attitudes to crime and legal remedies for crime, as in so much else.

Our modern view is that one law should apply to all. It doesn’t always work. Money buys better lawyers, for a start. But the basic principle is that we have laws that lay down the crime and the range of punishments, and judges who look at the circumstances and apply penalties without fear or favour.

The pre-19th century situation in England was far, far different.

One of the major plot lines in Farewell to Kindness is the hero’s hunt for his family’s killers. In the course of the book, I reach a point where I want to get some of the minor players out of the way, and I hit on the idea of having them caught with contraband goods, arrested, and incarcerated.

I figured they’d be ripe for a little bit of pressure to make them give up some information about the real villain.

Ooops. 21st century blinkers on.

While my characters were having some money troubles (caused by my hero working behind the scenes), they were still wealthy merchants with powerful connections. And even poor peasants, as long as they had influence behind them (such as the local squire) could often slide gently out from under the attentions of the law in the system as it was then. Wealthy merchants? No problem.

So when the Excise or Customs officers (or maybe both) and the local representatives of the law (probably retainers of the local Justice of the Peace, but possibly part-time or full-time night watchmen appointed by the local City Council – no central police force yet) turned up at the door, the conversation would have gone something like this:

“What do you lot want? I’m about to have my dinner.”

“Now look here, Mr XX. Your warehouse down on the wharf is full of stolen and smuggled goods.”

“My goodness, I wonder how that happened.”

“You knew all about it. We have evidence, and a deposition from a real Earl. And we have to listen to real Earls, because they’re important.”

“Bother. You’ve got me there.”

“Yes, it’s a fair cop. So consider yourself arrested.”

“Really? How about if I just give you the goods?”

“Excellent idea. The sale of those goods should fetch a pretty penny.”

“I’ll even loan you a cart to take it all away.”

“Thank you, Mr XX. Have a nice dinner.”

Here’s a neat summary of the way the system worked. Here’s part of what the writer says about the change that was happening.

The key issue was the transition from (to use Foucault’s distinction) sovereignty to government: from a world in which crime was simply a wrong, a personal interaction between individuals or individuals and their superiors, to one in which crime was disruption, in which an offence against the criminal law was a disruption of the public peace and of the effective working of society. This meant a shift from the centrality of the court (as the place where disputants would confront one another) with no implications for the working of society, to the centrality of police and crime detection (as minimising disruption to the working of society).

To the mind of the law enforcers of the time I’m writing about, contraband goods offended those from whom the goods were stolen, and repaying those people (with smuggled goods, the offence was against the King) set the balance right. And if a little of the payment stuck to the hands of those enforcing the law, that was only fair, since they’d done the work.

So I need to go back to those scenes and rewrite them. But I have an idea!

October 14, 2014 by judeknight

Let’s roll them! – a history of chairs for invalids

Wheels on chairs for invalids go back a very long way. We have documentary evidence of them in a Chinese print reliably dated to AD525, but human ingenuity quite possibly put chairs and wheels together long before that.

It’s likely, though, that only the rich had such chairs. Certainly, once wheeled chairs for invalids begin to regularly pop up in the documentary record, the posteriors seated in them belonged to the rich and the noble.

In 1595, King Philip II of Spain was sketched sitting in a reclining chair with wheels on each leg. It was clunky and heavy, and he needed to be pushed around by a servant, but – hey – king, right?

Self-propelling chairs arrived remarkably quickly after that, unsurprisingly developed by someone who was himself in need of a chair. In 1655, Stephen Farfler, a paraplegic watchmaker, moved himself around in a chair with three wheels. He moved around by turning handles that worked on the geared front wheel.

Most of the sites I looked at when researching wheelchairs jump from Farfler to John Dawson of Bath. But wheelchairs – both ordinary chairs with wheels and more advanced chairs designed specifically to have wheels – continued right through.

And, in any case, the Bath chair was invented around 1750 by James Heath. Bath was becoming popular as a spa town, but it was not designed to easily get around in a carriage, and ordinary wheelchairs really only worked well on a flat surface such as inside the house.

The Bath Chair was designed to take invalids out and about; primarily down to the Roman Baths for the treatment, and then back home again. Until then, invalids used the sedan chair, which required two attendants to carry. The Bath Chair just needed one person at the back pushing. Furthermore, the occupant of the chair had the steering stick and could therefore directly control the direction of travel. I can see that would be appealing to the average wealthy dowager!

You can see from the advertisement that Heath also sold wheelchairs. The example shown appears to have wheels at the front and stabilising legs at the rear, so no doubt the attendant lifted slightly when he pushed.

But the self-propelling chair had not gone away. John Joseph Merlin, a Belgian inventor and watchmaker (and, perhaps not incidentally the inventor of the in-line skate) created a successful chair that became the model for others. Keith Armstrong, in A very short history of the bicycle and wheelchair, says:

In the mid 1770’s he invented roller-skates and presented his new creation by arriving at a London party playing his violin whilst gliding around the room. Merlin received rapacious applause and an encore, the party-goers demanded that he repeated his act, during the second attempt, he quickly discovered that he didn’t known how to stop and he had a major accident. The next we read about him is of the invention of a new type of self-propelled wheelchair… His design was so successful that 120 years later, a London catalogue of medical equipment was able to boast nine different ‘Merlin’ wheelchairs available on their books. Merlin died in 1803.

As far as I can tell, the Merlin chair had small handles on its arms. But the name ‘Merlin chair’ was retained for later chairs where the occupant was able to turn the large rear wheels to get around, and – by the late 19th century – the smaller propelling wheel had arrived, to help people keep their hands clean.

Meanwhile, back at the end of the 18th century, let’s not forget John Dawson. The most prominent Bath chair maker of his time, his chairs outsold everyone else’s. Since, by all accounts, they were not very comfortable, we must assume that the others were worse!

There’s still a long way to go till we get to the sort of chair I’ve shown below, but the rest of the journey can wait for another post.

October 13, 2014 by judeknight

Letting the imagination free wheel

Some of my friends have said “Where do you get your ideas?” No doubt it differs from writer to writer, but if you’re interested in the way my mind works, here’s an example.

I’ve found that not writing on my novel on Sunday is having unexpected side effects. My imagination, which continues producing plot lines and snippets of dialogue, goes off at tangents while I’m paying attention to 2014. Snarls in Farewell to Kindness untangle themselves. New ideas for the next three books slip into those evolving plots. And whole new sets of characters and story ideas beg for a wee bit of brain time.

The weekend before last, two characters with cameo spots in Farewell to Kindness demanded their own story.And they’re going to get it. Look before Christmas for a free short story or novella (not sure yet) about how Viscount Avery (also known as Candle because he is tall and thin and has red hair) meets Minerva Bradshaw, who makes wheeled chairs for invalids.

The first seeds were planted when I was populating the village where Elizabeth, my heroine, lives. I had a block of land in behind the row of workers’ cottages that Elizabeth and her family live in. I decided to make it one estate; a comfortable gentleman’s detached house and garden belonging to a retired manufactory owner, called Bradshaw.

But why would the Bradshaws move to a tiny village on the edge of the Cotswolds? I decided that they wanted to be nearer to their daughter, who had married a peer. And, because he was a peer, they didn’t want to be too close, in case they embarrassed the Viscount and his new wife. The manufacturer’s daughter, Lady Avery, was now waiting in the wings, ready for her entrance.

A couple of months later, my hero and heroine went to an assembly in a nearby country town. The assembly has been organised by a group of local women, including the social climbing doctor’s wife and the local Baroness who is my villainess and a complete snob.

I needed a target for the Baroness’s snobbery, and fortunately Lady Avery was right there. So I put her on the committee of patronesses.

I also realised that I needed my secondary lead, Alex, who had been sent home to recuperate after breaking one leg and being shot in the other, to be mobile for a later scene, so I took the opportunity while he was having dinner at the doctor’s house to let him borrow a Bath Chair. In a prescient move, I explained that the chair had belonged to Lord Avery’s mother, and Lady Avery had donated it to the doctor when her mother-in-law died.

Which brings us to the Sunday in question. On Saturday evening, I’d been writing about what happened at the assembly, and the villain, feeling insulted by Alex, had sabotaged the chair.

It occurred to me that Bradshaw could be a retired carriage maker, and so he could diagnose that the collapse was foul play, and not fair wear and tear. Then I thought how much more fun it would be if his daughter provided the diagnosis, which would make her, as a tradesperson herself, even more of a target for the Baroness’s scorn.

By the end of the day, she was fully formed in my mind – an only daughter, born to older parents and their dear delight. With a bluestocking mother and a highly successful father, she is given the education of a lady, but loves best to follow her father around the manufactory. He does mainly design, but he teaches her to handle tools, and she turns her skills to designing and producing chairs for invalids.

In the real world, John Dawson invented the Bath Chair in 1783. [Or did he? See my post on the history of wheelchairs.] In my putative short story, Bradshaw Coaches is giving him a run for his money by 1805, when young Randall Avery comes looking for something a bit special in the way of chairs for his invalid mother.

And is directed to a workshop to consult with ‘Min Bradshaw’. Benjamin or Dominic, he wonders? Minerva is working on the undercarriage of a nearly completed chair.

The overalls were filled by a delightfully female rear. His stunned brain, impaired by the sudden loss of blood to other regions, could only think “definitely not a Benjamin or a Dominic.”

“Hand me that wrench.” The voice was undeniably female, too, with husky overtones that made him think… all sorts of things he shouldn’t think about an innocent, even if she was a tradesman’s daughter.

I’ve been researching the history of wheelchairs, which is meat for another blog post.

October 12, 2014 by judeknight

Why do I blog? And how?

On the Facebook group English Historical Fiction Writers, one of the members said that she’d been told she needed a blog, and asked for recommendations for a good blogging tool. The discussion segued, in the wonderful way that conversations do, into questions about whether ‘need’ was the right word.

Should writers blog? And if so, why?

As you will quickly realise if you look through my posts so far, I’ve been blogging for less than four weeks. At least as Jude Knight. But I’ve been blogging for a lot longer under my commercial writing identity, and I didn’t even think about whether or not to blog until Lynn’s respondents raised the question.

Key point number one: write a great book

Another discussion on Facebook a few days ago asked whether we write because we enjoy it, or whether we write to make money. Now, not being a fool, I don’t expect to make a fortune as a novelist. Would I like to? Too right! I’d love to write fiction full-time, and for that to happen, it needs to generate enough income to pay the bills.

To sell, though, I need a few things.

First, I need to write a book that is worth reading. Nothing else I need to do even comes close to this in importance.
Second, I need to let people know that the book exists. The kinds of people who read my kind of book. Lots and lots of people. They can’t buy it if they don’t know about it.
And then there are a heap of other practical things that I’m not going to talk about in this post.

My to-do list

Continue reading →

October 10, 2014 by judeknight

A proposal mixed up in a proposition

Here’s the scene I’ve been working on; the one where my hero and heroine confront their differences and realise that they do not have a future. I was trying for an irresistible force and immovable object thing. Disclaimer: this is first draft, unedited, and not proofread.

Just to set the scene, it starts as Rede and Elizabeth leave church on Sunday morning. Rain has stopped the birthday picnic, and so Rede has been commissioned to keep Elizabeth away from the house while the other members of the house party prepare a party for her.

A grinning Willie Bush had the chaise ready for them in the lane, and Rede handed her up into it. He slid in beside her, took up the reins, and told Willie, “Stand away, Bush, and thank you.”

Anne was silent while he guided the horses through the home-going crowd. They passed the gates to the Squire’s house, and turned right into River Road.

Rede had planned this. She should have realised earlier that morning, when she saw his two prize bays hitched to the chaise for the under groom to drive. She was torn between annoyance and a certain pleasure at his persistence.

He broke the silence. “You have been avoiding me, Anne.”

“I have,” she acknowledged, deciding that confrontation was safer than conciliation. “You do not seem to have taken the meaning I intended, however.”

He let out an impatient huff of air. “Should I take silence as an answer? No. I need you to say the words.”

They were silent as he coaxed the horses onto the bridge, then turned to pass the mill.

“I have been told to keep you from the house for one hour,” he said, “so I thought we would drive past the Roman fort, and then back across the bridge at the far end of the estate.”

An hour! How could she bear it, with his long warm thigh pressing against hers under the waterproof cover. She shifted, moving slightly to the left.

“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” Rede told her. “I will never do anything you did not want.”

“And yet, here I am,” she replied, tartly.

He shifted too, withdrawing slightly so that they no longer touched. Perversely, she missed the comfort, and had to fight the urge to follow.

“I won’t deny that I want you,” he said. “I think about you constantly. I dream of you at night. I imagine caressing every inch of you, kissing you, tasting you, completing what we began the other night. If you are honest, Anne, you will acknowledge that you want me, too.”

“What I want or do not want does not matter.” Anne sat up straighter. “All that matters is what my family needs.”

“Can you not have both?” he coaxed. “Can you not meet your family’s needs and your own?”

Continue reading →

October 9, 2014 by judeknight

Image quilts

Someone on Twitter introduced me to Image Quilts, an app for Chrome invented by Edward Tufte, a statistician, to help people visualise data. It captures any images produced by an image search, and then lets you move them around, delete them, introduce others, turn them into black and white, and change their size.

And what beautiful results it makes. Here’s one I produced showing landscape paintings from the Georgian era:

And here’s one of book covers. My search term was “Historical romance cover best seller”.

October 7, 2014 by judeknight

Too many dukes?

Image used in Czechoslovakia for Sabrina Jeffries’ book Only a Duke will Do. And he would, wouldn’t he?

Because I’m trying to write historicals that are historically plausible, I do a lot of research. And one thing I found early on is that the trios (and more) of sexy young or youngish dukes that pop up in some books are just not historically plausible. In 1814, Great Britain had 28 ducal titles, held by 25 people. (Not counting the royal dukedoms given to the sons of the reigning monarch.)

These dukes all tended to marry within the upper peerage. The chances of a ~~herd~~ pack of them descending on an unsuspecting village and carrying off the local dressmaker, the cook, and the retired courtesan were pretty slender.

This doesn’t prevent me from enjoying a good series with more than one gorgeous eligible duke in it. Let’s face it. Dukes are sexy. As this article in the Huffington Post points out:

…duke is shorthand for the type of hero they can expect to read about and the kind of hero readers love: the powerful, alpha male who bows down to no one (except the heroine).

What’s not to love?

But I’m trying to keep my own duke heroes down to an acceptable level. I have none in the current book, but three, all of different ages, over the 50 or so books I have planned.

The picture shows a map of society in 1814, and here’s a summary of my research on the nobility at the time.

Nobility = 2,880 people with 576 heads of family (includes royalty and bishops as well as nobility)

The numbers below do not include secondary titles. The dates mark states of union. Until 1707, England, Ireland and Scotland were separate countries. In 1707, Great Britain was formed through the union of England and Scotland. Between 1707 and 1801, Great Britain and Ireland were separate countries under one ruler. From 1801, the state became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – one country. In 1922, the Irish Free State seceded, but that’s outside of our period.

Dukes: 28 titles held by 25 people: Title comes from shire

11 titles in peerage of England to 1707

9 in peerage of Scotland to 1707 (including two doubles with England and one double within Scotland)

7 in peerage of Great Britain and Ireland 1707 to 1801 (6 GB and 1 Irish)

1 in peerage of UK and Ireland 1801 onwards (the Duke of Wellington)

So 17 English, 7 Scots only, 1 Irish duke.

All Dukes are also Marquesses as secondary titles.

Marquesses/Marquises: 32 titles: Titles come from place names, originally border marshes (chiefly with Wales)

1 in peerage of England to 1707

3 in peerage of Scotland to 1707

19 in peerage of Great Britain and Ireland 1707 to 1801 (10 GB and 9 Irish)

9 in peerage of UK and Ireland 1801 onwards (6 UK and 3 Irish)

So 16 English, 3 Scots, and 12 Irish marquesses.

Earls: 210 titles, including 11 doubles – 6 held by women: 70% of titles come from place names and use ‘of’; remaining 30% come from surnames

25 in peerage of England to 1707

41 in peerage of Scotland to 1707 (4 held by women)

12 in peerage of Ireland

97 in peerage of Great Britain and Ireland 1707 to 1801 (38 GB and 59 Irish – 1 of the Irish titles held by a woman)
35 in peerage of UK and Ireland 1801 onwards (24 UK – 1 of which was held by a woman – and 11 Irish)

So 87 English, 41 Scots, and 82 Irish earls.

Viscounts: 66 titles, includes 2 held by women, includes 1 double; ancient title for sherrif – usually the title name is the same as the surname

1 in peerage of England to 1707

2 in peerage of Scotland to 1707 (uses ‘of’)

11 in peerage of Ireland (1 held by a woman)

36 in peerage of Great Britain and Ireland 1707 to 1801 (9 GB and 27 Irish – 1 of the Irish titles held by a woman)

16 in peerage of UK and Ireland 1801 onwards (8 UK and 8 Irish)

So 18 English, 2 Scots, and 46 Irish viscounts.

Barons: 172 titles; title name is usually the same as surname

17 in peerage of England to 1707 (4 held by women) plus 16 vacant
16 in peerage of Scotland to 1707 (1 held by women)
5 in peerage of Ireland

81 in peerage of Great Britain and Ireland 1707 to 1801 (50 GB and 31 Irish)

28 in peerage of UK and Ireland 1801 onwards (23 UK and 5 Irish)

October 6, 2014 by judeknight

Mob football

On Facebook, I’ve just reposted an article by EE Carter about medieval football. Great article, and I love the video clip (an ad starring David Beckham and friends) that she’s used to illustrate her piece.

I came across a description of mob football when I was researching village Whitsunweek activities for Farewell to Kindness, and I loved the idea. So a football match duly made its way into the novel, giving the villain an opportunity to attempt to kill my hero. (Yes, I know that would be a breach of mob football’s one rule, but he’s a villain, okay?)

Mob football is still played today in several parts of Britain, as shown in the following clip.

October 5, 2014 by judeknight

A profound curtsey

When I first started blogging (in my other life), I came across the acronym H/T. This, I found out, meant hat tip, or a tip of the hat, or thank you very much.

I’d like to H/T Jane Austen’s World, which I’ve already quoted several times in the couple of weeks I’ve been blogging. Under the circumstances, a curtsey seems more appropriate, and I’ll make it a very deep one.

Thank you, Jane Austen. I’ve visited you many times over the past year, and my little OneNote database is full of links to interesting articles about all sorts of things.

For almost anything you want to know about late Georgian and Regency Britain, this list on Jane Austen’s World is a great place to start.

And also try her list of original sources.

Jude Knight Storyteller

Creating determined heroines and the men who appreciate them

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