Adoption in the Regency

I was doing a little research into one of the Regency staples the other day.  A girl is adopted into a noble family.

Does this actually work? I asks meself.


After looking around, I've decided,
loosely speaking -- yes. 
Strictly speaking -- no.

And isn't that helpful?

We speak loosely of 'adoption', but there's an important distinction between legally taking a child to stand in the position of a biological child with all the rights that come with that and assuming care and custody of the child in a limited way.

Until the 1920s, there was no formal legal mechanism for adopting children in Great Britain.

What you had was fostering, indenture, wardship, guardianship, apprenticeship, and various less-formal-arrangement-ships . . .  but nothing that put the child on an equal footing with children born in a marriage. 

So how did they manage the whole orphaned-child problem?

Ordinary working folk, from simple decency or from a desire for another pair of working hands, would often take in a neighbor's child when the parents died.  The local vicar might find space for another scullery maid in the kitchen.  No official legal guardianship was established, but everybody in town likely sighed in relief and went on to other problems, of which they doubtless had a plenitude.

Because if no one stepped forward to care for orphans, they 'fell upon the parish', which was a hard place to land.  The local officials might solve the problem by apprenticing them.  Unfortunately, few localities had the funds to buy children desirable places.  (One common form of charity was to leave money in one's will to buy apprenticeships for poor boys.)

This apprenticeship was a mixed bag.  For parish orphans, it might be called the poor man's guardianship.  The contract gave the master rights over the child, but also bound him to feed, clothe, care for the child, and train him or her up in a trade.  In earlier centuries, apprentices were often treated as part of the household -- an extended quasi family of Master, servants and apprentices.  Even in 1820, in Rural Rides, Cobbett could still speak of traditional farms where master and servants, dairymaids and the farmer's daughters sat down at the same table, a disparate but united household.
So some orphans got lucky.  Some, like Oliver Twist, not so much.

Looking up into the upper echelons of society --

The laws and customs of primogeniture meant that men of substance, titled or untitled, would often consider themselves responsible for a widespread group of family, friends and dependents.  They'd snabbled the property and money.  The flip side of that concentration of wealth was that they were supposed to take care of the family.  
So your average Merchant Prince or belted (why belted and how was everybody else holding up their trousers?) earl might have a pack of widows, spinsters, dotty great uncles and assorted orphans, only tenuously connected to him, land on his doorstep, expecting to be provided for. 


Remember in Heyer's Frederica . . .  our heroine applies to the 'head of the family', a very distant cousin, for assistance.   He was the winner in the big primogeniture lotto.



Another sort of fosterage was not uncommon.   Couples without children of their own would often foster a child, usually related, and raise it as their own.  The child would inherit from this couple through the will.  For instance, Jane Austen's brother Edward left his family to be fostered by a much richer cousin, Thomas Knight, and eventually inherited his estates.

And we come, finally, to three of several sorts of legal guardianship

First off were guardians in socage.  This is for heirs and heiresses of landed property.

Blackstone says, " . . . who are also called guardians by the common law.  These take place only when the minor is entitled to some estate in lands, and then by the common law the guardianship devolves upon his next of kin, to whom the inheritance cannot possibly descent ; as, where the estate descended from his father, in this case his uncle by the mother's side cannot possibly inherit this estate, and therefore shall be the guardian . For the law judges it improper to trust the person of an infant in his hands, who may be possibility become heir to him.  
           Blackstone's Commentaries




What that is saying is that if the young woman has a piece of property -- say a nice house -- her guardian will not be, for instance, the father's brother.  The custody of the child goes to the closest blood relative who could not inherit. 

Second, we have guardians by nature.  That's going to be the father, first off, and the mother if the father is dead. When the father does not explicitly appoint a guardian for a female under sixteen, the guardian was the mother.  Her guardianship extends until the girl reaches 21.  She doesn't get control of the property.  Only to the custody of the child.

And you can catch up on the rest of this posting here, at Word Wenches.

Selling vegetables in the Regency

This is sort of a pictorial posting today . . . Looking at some pictures of what a vegetable market would have looked like in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
We can start with this Scharf painting of Covent Garden in 1825.  Covent Garden was the huge central martet of London.  By the Eighteenth Century it was sort of a combination open-air market, red light district, and raffish hang-out, which must have been interesting for everybody concerned. 
Anyhow, glancing at the picture, you'll see if contains all the elements of a fine city vegetable market.
First off, there's protection from the rain, or the occasional sun. Look up at the top of the painting.  These substantial market vendors at Covent Garden have a wooden stall with a fine, permanent substantial roof. Awnings stretch out to shelter their customers. Those are wood frames with cloth stretched across them.
Here to the right, a simpler shelter covers this fruit seller. She's set up shop under a cloth awning.
Display tables are another most desirable market feature. Tables get the goods up off the ground and present them enticingly.  Apples and green beans are where they can be seen and handled.
To the right, our fruit seller has a simple but permanent-looking and useful bench.
That table in the substantial booth in Covern Garden seems to be long boards set up on a variety of blocks and barrels that probably double as storage.

Read the rest at Word Wenches:  Here.

I'll add one more painting that didn't go into the post at Word Wenchs.  This is just for the blog followers.

Markets continued to sell into the long evening.  When the sun went down, it looks like our sturdy marketfolk kept on selling into the long summer twilight.

If you want to take your folks on a stroll through Covent Garden after the theatre, it need not be deserted.  There'll be somebody there keeping an eye on the booths.  If you want to run your heroine through there in the early morning hours, before dawn, Covent Garden will be a hub of activity, noisy, thronging with people, and reasonably well lit.

A Regency Magic Lantern

Before moving pictures.  Before silent film.  Before black and white.  Before Clara Bow and Charlie Chaplin.
  

There was the Magic Lantern.



Let's say you're a Regency thrillseeker, out to squeeze all possible enjoyment from an evening.  You might go to a Magic Lantern show at a friend's house. You might put one on yourself.



People had known more or less forever that light shining through colored glass carried that color to where the light fell.  Every stained glass window in Europe, even every translucent leaf in the sunlight, every light source shining through colored glass cast an image.


The beauty of that.  A picture painted in light.



Read the rest here at Word Wenches ...

Regency Pastels

I've just had Pax do a portrait with charcoal, ink and pastels.
Him being an artist of sorts.

So I have all this spare information about pastels floating around in my head, 
and I wrote a posting over at the Wenches for anyone who wants a very brief look at art materials of the Regency.

I found it all interesting myself.

 

He's using a brass pastel holder.

Regency visual artists were about half way along the technological journey between the Neolithic Cave painters and one of those high-tech computer painting programs.  The fine work, the beautiful work, the Regency artists created was accomplished with the most simple tools and a limited array of colors.
 
Let me talk about pastels, because Pax uses pastels.  I think of pastel as a portable and democratic art form in Georgian and Regency times.   If you are a spy pretending to be an artist, or vice versa, you would carry a sketchbook and maybe pastels because they're fast to use and cheap.
And, like, portable.

Portraits in these readymade crayons offered tangible advantages over oil for the artist and the sitter: they required fewer sittings as there was no drying time; less paraphernalia; the materials were easily portable and the costs were lower.
      The Rise of Pastel in the Eighteenth Century, Margery Shelley

Just a whole bunch of pastels.  From the Met

These pastels were made by grinding natural white chalk -- something you can pick up off the ground in places like Southeast England -- into a fine powder. You mixed this with pigment and a binder like gum arabic.  You rolled the mixture into thin cylindrical sticks or long square sticks and dried them.  These were 'soft pastels'.  They were just super concentrated colors that transferred readily to the paper.

They called pastels 'crayons' in the Regency -- so confusing -- because the waxy colored sticks we think of as 'crayons' wouldn't be invented for another century.

 The most exciting recent innovation for our Regency pastel artist would have been the Conté crayon,  invented in France in 1794.  These were made from kaolin clay and graphite and fired in a kiln.  They were much harder than the chalk-based soft pastel sticks, and came in a smaller range of colors.  They could be sharpened.  They were good for tight, crisp lines and fine detail, and often used to lay down the first sketch on paper.  
 

Detail of picture above

You had a potential for vivid color, but in a medium likely to crumble and come apart in your hand and smear.  So the pastel sticks were fitted into a sort of metal holder that protected them and provided control and precision for the artist.

A holder for Conté pastels, about 6 inches long, brass

Because pastels were intended to be inserted into a holder, they were thinner than the ones we use today.  A square shape gave them stability in the holder. That's why the Conté pastels are square.

 

 Find the rest of this posting at Word Wenches, here.

Technical Topic -- The Regency Post Office

This is a very small historical tidbit post here.

It's the sort of thing I'd normally put into Word Wenches,
except that I find myself without the patience to ask permission for all the images I want to use.  I do not like to add links to a Wench posting because links do not last forever or sometimes even into the next month.

Anyhow, it's 1802.  (This is the Pax manuscript.)  We're in a country village near Cambridge -- the fictional Brodemere.  My character Cami looks over some correspondence that's landed on her desk. 

She picks up a letter that's come all the way across England, from London.

NOT from 1802 for oh so many reasons

The first thing you -- as a visitor from the distant future perched comfortably in her head -- would notice, is that there's no envelope.

Let me show you what the letter would not look like.
It wouldn't look like this over here to the right:

Her letter wouldn't be an envelope, with a pretty colored stamp, cancelled across the stamp by the post office. 

Envelopes on postal service delivery are still a generation in the future.   In fact, they weren't mass produced till 1845.   The post office charged by the sheet and an envelope counted as an extra sheet.  This is yet another piece of history driven by government regulation.

No stamp.  The first gummed postage stamp -- I'm talking here about a bit of paper you apply to a letter rather than stamping ink on with a big ole inked stamp -- is the 'Penny Black'.
It dates to 1840.

That's Queen Victoria on the Penny Black, btw.


"Wait," you say, for you have been paying attention.
"No envelopes?" you say.  "That's so weird," you say.


Well, yes and no.
I think letters often did often come in envelopes.
Just not letters delivered by the post office. 

Folks sending the footman crosstown or the groom cross country to hand-deliver invitations and secret love notes and blackmail requests probably made envelopes from their fancy writing paper in an origami sorta way.  Spies sending secrets in the diplomatic pouch probably used envelopes, and rich folk who didn't count the cost, and, I suspect, noblemen and MPs who franked their mail and got it free.

Mail was not universally envelope-less, IMHO.  But if it came by post, it often was.


Anyhow, there you are sitting at Cami's desk and you've remarked there's no envelope and no pretty colored postage stamps.


Next, you will note that everything is handwritten, (with a quill).  This will not surprise you since nobody's got a printing press at home and  I need hardly point out that the typewriter is an 1860s invention.
Third class junk mail is not even a bumf on the horizon.

Crossed. No relation to cross-eyed.

You may see an indecipherable mess of writing like that to the side.  Thrifty folks 'crossed' their letter so they didn't need to pay for an extra sheet.    They wrote first one way and then the other.
I would probably strangle somebody who did this to me.

What next?

Okay.

When Cami picks up her envelopeless letter from out of town, the paper -- quite possibly a single sheet -- is folded in three and sealed with red wax.
Because that's what you do when you don''t have an envelope.

Folded letter with red seal

The wax might -- probably did -- have a seal pressed into it.  This could be a complex family crest or a simple design, like an initial.

The theory was the unbroken seal proved the letter hadn't been opened.  Let us all stop to appreciate the delightful naiveté of those who bought into that particular fiction.

What you need to seal a letter

The set up for applying seals looked somewhat like this to the left here.   Camille would have most of this stuff sitting around on her desk or in one of the drawers.

Coming to the paper itself:

"Hand made papers were made in molds, hence one could readily observe the paper marks and ribbing from the parallel wires in the mold. Often these “laid” papers also bore distinctive watermarks."
 From 'Jane Austen's World'

'Laid paper' is made by catching linen pulp onto a flat, closely wired sieve and letting it dry.  The resulting paper retains a faint cross hatch pattern.

I have saved the best for last.

When a letter travelled through the postal service, it acquired postmarks.  A letter heading from London to Cambridge and then to the fictional Brodemere would collect several.

There'd be a colored circular postmark from London, giving the date it was mailed.  The letter, in 1802, would go by mail-coach to Cambridge (I'm fairly sure) and there's be another postmark from Cambridge as the destination post office.  There might be a square stamp showing fees or postage added during the trip.  Mileage might be stamped -- but more usually handwritten -- in pencil.  The final cost might be written in pencil likewise.  Toll fees might be noted, again in pencil. 


At the excellent Bath Postal Museum we find Here, here, and here Bath to London 'straight line' letters from 1801, 1807  and 1805.  A letter to Andover in 1808 is here.

For further perusal, if you are just fascinated by postal stampage:


Here is a franked 1822 letter from Kilmarnock Scotland to Isleworth Middlesex that shows several interesting features.
.

A complex seal for some letter

This one has a crowned 'Free' handstamp of December 2, indicating the recipient in Middlesex was entitled to receive mail without paying postage.  That's the 'franked letter' we read about.  Seems to work for both sender and recipient, which I didn't know.
On this, we see a 'Kilmarnock - 427' stamp, showing the mileage.  That would have been struck upon sending.  And there's a Glasgow transit stamp with the date November 29, 1822.  


Another very relevant set of postmarks is about halfway down the page here.   Scroll down till you reach the post titled, 'Entire written 22 September 1803 from Fakenham Norfolk to Andover'.  This has a date stamp, and mileage and price written in pencil.

(I've seen some indication that mileage marks record the distances to London.  The recipient post office didn't try to calculate the byways and pathways from all points in the kingdom.  Charges were simply based on (a) how far from sender to London and then (b) how far from London to the recipient.
This doesn't sound very fair, frankly)

n.b The next letter in that discussion is sealed with black wax, because it's a condolence letter.

Moving on ...

about halfway down the page here, in the post beginning "Heck I'll pay you $3 Brummie", is an 1829 letter with two colored handstamps and two penciled notes.  A post or two further down is the same letter laid flat to show the sender's address.
I can't tell for sure, but it looks like the sender's name might be folded inside when the letter is sent ...? 

That whole six-page thread is interesting if you're dealing with Regency-era or Victorian correspondence. 

London postman 1830

Here is an 1839 cross-London letter.


Finally ...  How much did delivery of Cami's London letter cost?

Letter Rates for 1801 for a single sheet, within Great Britain

Not exceeding 15 miles				3d.
15	to	30	miles	4d.
30	to	50	"	5d.
50	to	80	"	6d.
80	to	120	"	7d.
120	to	170	"	8d.
170	to	230	"	9d.
230	to	300	"	10d.

This is from The Development of Rates of Postage, by A. D. Smith

Anyhow, that's about 8d for the London letters.  Less for the ones from Cambridge.

Those Lively Regency Streets

Regency streets would have been fairly active and interesting places, what with knife grinders, pot  menders and chimney sweeps, milkmaids and streets sellers hawking everything from cherries to hot codlins -- not to mention the miscellany of enterprising pickpockets and cut purses and those generally operating on the windy side of the law.



Exciting, those Regency streets.

'Hot Codlins' are roasted apples, in case you didn't know and were wondering.


There was a little woman, as I've been told,

Who was not very young, nor yet very old;

Now this little woman her living got

By selling codlins, hot, hot, hot!



But I digress.


Along with all those buyers and sellers, intent upon the mystery of commerce, there were artists out there hustling a living.


You had your street musicians.  Most often, they'd be playing something portable, like a violin or a hurdy gurdy.  I do not feel impelled to discuss what a violin is, but hurdy gurdy's are kinda interesting.   



Drop over to read the rest at Word Wenches.  Here.
Still to come ... Hurdy gurdys, Raree shows and Punch and Judy.

Technical topic -- The Regency East End

Someone asks --

In re the Regency East End ... Would you happen to have any book recommendations?




Indeed I do:

Berm, Chaim, London's East End, (mostly late Victorian Information.)

Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, Black London: Life before Emancipation.

Holmes, Thomas, London's Underworld.  here. 

Low, Donald, The Regency Underworld.

Victorian East London Dore

Mayhew, Henry, Mayhew's Characters.   (See also Quennell, Peter ed, London's Underworld.  This is a selection from Mayhew and available used and cheap.  Mayhew is written mid-century but info is earlier.  A lot of Mayhew's work is on the net. For instance --  here. )

Rose, Millicent, The East End of London. (I don't have this one myself, so I can't vouch for it, but I keep meaning to look it up in a library.)

Two Citizens, How to Live in London.  here.

Have a look at the maps here and here.


Here's a Victorian account:

We dismiss our cab: it would be useless in the strange, dark byeways, to which we are bound: natives of which will look upon us as the Japanese looked upon us the first European travellers in the streets of Jeddo. The missionary, the parish doctor, the rent collector (who must be a bold man indeed), the policeman, the detective, and the humble undertaker, are the human beings from without who enter this weird and horrible Bluegate Fields. 

We arrived at Whitechapel Police Station, to pick up the superintendent of savage London. He had some poor specimens - maundering drunk - in his cells already - and it was hardly nine o'clock. 

We plunge into a maze of courts and narrow streets of low houses - nearly all the doors of which are open, showing kitchen fires blazing far in the interior, and strange figures moving about. 

At dark corners, lurking men keep close to the wall; and the police smile when we wonder what would become of a lonely wanderer who should find himself in these regions unprotected. "He would be stripped to his shirt" was the candid answer - made while we threaded an extraordinary tangle of dark alleys where two men could just walk abreast, under the flickering lamps jutting from the ebon walls, to mark the corners.       Jerrold Blanchard, London: A Pilgrimage 1872

I feel like I gotta get up on one of my hobbyhorses here.

London workmen Victorian

The most important thing about the rookeries of London in 1802 -- and the Roman tenements in 79 AD and the slums of SE Washington DC in 1960 -- is that the denizens of the place were 'at home'.  They weren't dwelling in some landscape of horror. 

And they were ordinary folk.  The men and women in these stacked-up, decrepit buildings and dirty streets were ordinary, well-meaning, hard-working people, not monsters.  The violent gangs hanging out on street corners were a dangerous minority who preyed on and were hated by everyone else.  
 

Clothes sellers, late C19

When the heroine makes a wrong turn and ends up in a bad neighborhood, she hasn't fallen into a pit of vipers.  Those people passing her on the street, the ones living three flights up in every building, are no better nor worse than the well-dressed crowd she'd meet in Mayfair.  Her maidservant grew up a block to the left.  Her cook has a brother living down at the end of the alley and visits him every Sunday.  Your heroine's problem is not that the streets are populated with slavering hyenas.  It's that she's conspicuous. 

In My Lord and Spymaster I try to show the heroine as someone who comes from the mean streets, who understands them, who recognizes the dangers but doesn't see the place as some filthy hell filled with demons.

St Giles, in the Regency. See the streetlamp

The alley to the right was Dark Passage--and wasn't that a fine descriptive name?  To the left was Dead Man's Way.  Another piece of poetry.  When she was a kid she'd run this warren barefoot.  She knew these streets, knew every thin trickle of an alley that ran into Katherine Lane.  She'd been born in a grim little attic a dozen streets to the north.  Time was, she chatted friendly and easy with every beggar and pimp on the Lane.  She could have ducked into any of these taverns and been welcome to dry out by the fire.  Now she was a stranger.  Not Jess, any more.  Now she was 'Miss Whitby' and she didn't belong.  

and

From the outside, all rookeries look the same, but some are more dangerous than others. 
Ludmill Street was peaceable in its rough way.  Safe enough, if you knew what you were doing.  When a pair of Irishman approached, making monetary offers, she snapped back, sharp, in Italian.  They left her alone, thinking she belonged to the Italians.  There were lots of hot-tempered Italians in this section who didn't like even their whores approached by Irishmen.  A few hundred yards further on, she sent an Italian boy on his way with a Gaelic curse.  Lots of hot-tempered Irishmen in this quarter, too.  

When she got to the Limehouse, to Asker Street, it would be considerably more dangerous.  She'd be unwise to visit alone.   

Every illustration we have of the East End of London from the Regency period is someone from outside, making a point with his picture or his description.  Saying as much about himself as he does about what he's reporting.  Hogarth's Gin Lane is propaganda.  Propaganda from the good guys, but still, a selection of detail to make a point. Bob Dylan's 'Propaganda all is phony' sums it up.


How this relates to writing --  I'm good with 'she wandered into a bad section of town' trope as a reasonable way to put the heroine in peril.  But I regret when these scenes imply that the poor of London were a seething cauldron of evil into which she had incautiously been tipped.  I dislike the: 'they look like me and are well-dressed = good; They look different and are poor = rabid animals' equation because it strikes too close to attitudes from our own era. 

This is Bond Street.  Not as fancy as we imagine it.

If I wanted to research a scene in the East End in 1800 . . .   Yes, I'd go to books and learn the geography of the place and the physical conditions and the particular 1800-ish habits of the local criminals.   But I''d want to think about the bad sections of a modern city and the people who live there and how I'd represent the adventures of someone who walking into those streets.  When I exaggerate for high drama -- what am I saying about my character and myself?  When we're writing about the past, we're also writing about the present.

. . . much later ETA: 
I got a review on a short story of mine that said -- paraphrasing here -- "Your heroine falls on hard times and works in Whitechapel scrubbing floors.  I can't believe that.  Is 'scrubbing floors' supposed to be a euphemism?"
The implication is, all the thousands of young women in Whitechapel were whores.
The implication is, there were no respectable poor living in Whitechapel.
The implication is, poverty = depravity.

When we look at the past, we see our opinions and expectations reflected back at us.  
    

An Interview at USA Today

Not your average general

An Interview with Pamela Clare of the USA Today, Happy Ever After Blog in which I talk about writing Black Hawk, winning the RITA, and why Napoleon beat the pants off all the armies of Europe for a decade and knocked the moral, ethical, and philosophical foundation of the aristocracy into a cocked hat.

Pamela: What was it like, winning the RITA for best historical? 

Joanna: Awesome. Frightening. Surreal.

And surprising. I didn't expect to win, competing against that finalist list. Wonderful books. It's like the freestyle swim in the Olympics. What separates the winner from the second place? Two seconds maybe.

I'll admit that when I got the RITA statue home I took it out and put it on the table and just touched it a few times. I kept thinking, "They like the book. They like the book." And it made me so happy.

Here's the URL.

A New Slant on Writing

In the Matthew Macfadyen / Keira Knightley 2005 production of Pride and Prejudice, there's a scene where Mr. Darcy is writing a letter, despite Miss Bingley's determination he shall pay attention to her instead.

 It reads, in part:

Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion. The perpetual commendations of the lady either on his hand-writing, or on the evenness of his lines, or on the length of his letter, with the perfect unconcern with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was exactly in unison with her opinion of each.
"How delighted Miss Darcy will be to receive such a letter!"
He made no answer.
"You write uncommonly fast."
"You are mistaken. I write rather slowly."
"How many letters you must have occasion to write in the course of the year! Letters of business too! How odious I should think them!"
"It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of to yours."




In that scene, we see Mr. Darcy writing his letter using a "writing slope''.  Go ahead.  Rent the film and see.


This 'writing slope' is a wood box with an angled surface, elevated a couple inches above the desk or table, slanted and padded with felt or leather.  See the folks at the left using these.  The man in the wig is Samuel Johnson.

This writing slope might be a heavy object, made for use in the comfort of the library or study.  It might stay at home, perfectly content, and never go adventuring.  Or the writing slant might lead a very exciting life indeed ...







Toward the end of the Eighteenth Century, the writing slope shrank in size, sprouted handles, and transformed itself into a sort of traveling desk. 


It was now both a a writing surface and a sturdy wood box for transporting and storing the impedimenta.  Like the stay-at-home writing slopes, these traveling desks or 'lap desks' were angled to provide that optimal slanted writing experience.

That writing desk on the far right, by the way, is said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. 

The post continues at Word Wenches.  Here

A Flask of Regency Liquor

No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men: but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.
Samuel Johnson

Today I'm over at Word Wenches, talking about Regency tipples.  The hard-drinking Regency or Georgian gentleman is such a stock figure in Romance, it's worth stopping a minute to wonder what sort of liquor he was likely to be imbibing. 

There was ale and beer, of course, and their cousin, porter.  Ale and beer weren't precisely a gentleman's drink, but it's likely your hero lifted a mug of ale before the hunt and he may well have drunk beer with his breakfast, especially if he lived in the deep country.
Beer and ale were drinks native to England, universal, and cheap.  The drink of the people, as it were.  Even small children drank a low-alcohol sort of beer called 'small beer' made from the second or third re-fermentation of the mash during brewing and containing just enough alcohol to preserve the drink.

By the Regency, the distinction between ale and beer lay not so much in the ingredients that made them up, as in the proportions.

Ale differs from beer in having fewer hops, which, giving less bitterness, leaves more of the soft smooth sweetness of the malt. It is usual, too, to brew it with pale malt, so that it is not so brown as beer. 
Scenes of British Wealth, Isaac Taylor, 1825.

Porter―later this was also called 'stout'―was a style of strong, dark, well-aged beer dating back to the Eighteenth Century, much favored by the working class of London.  Thus 'porter', because porters drank it.  Not a stylish beverage.  If you're wondering what it was like; Guinness is stout.

Why so much beer drinking?

See the rest of the article at Word Wenches.  Here  There's also a chance to win Black Hawk (or Forbidden Rose if you'd prefer that.)

Regency Pyrotechnica

What do Vauxhall, the court of Queen Elizabeth, Cuper's Gardens, (which is described intriguingly as "the scene of low dissipation . . . and the great resort of the profligate of both sexes" — rather like our local mall,) the celebration of the wedding of George III, and Kensington Gardens have in common?

Fireworks.  Big, bright rockets and Catherine wheels and crackers.  Fireworks were the sound and light show of the Eighteenth Century.  The extravaganza that marked all great and festive events.

Sometimes there was music.  You can listen to Handel's Fireworks Music, for instance, here.  I'll admit I was expecting something with more booms in it.


“.... fireworks had for her a direct and magical appeal. Their attraction was more complex than that of any other form of art. They had pattern and sequence, colour and sound, brilliance and mobility; they had suspense, surprise, and a faint hint of danger; above all, they had the supreme quality of transience, which puts the keenest edge on beauty.”
Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver

Fireworks came out of China, like printing, dim sum and Bruce Lee.  The original fireworks date back to the Ninth Century or so.  They, were firecrackers made of gunpowder, stuffed into thin bamboo shoots.  Oddly enough, the original use of pyrotechnics was not warfare.  All this gunpowder was set off at the new year to scare away evil spirits.  It probably worked.

Knowledge of gunpowder arrived in the Middle East and Europe in the 1200s.  Marco Polo sometimes gets the credit, and why shouldn't he? 

Come by and see the rest here at Word Wenches.

Walking Through Regency London

I've been trying to imagine what the streets of Paris and London looked like and felt like underfoot in the Georgian and Regency eras.

The fashionable streets of Mayfair are fairly easy to picture.  We have lovely paintings of these, for one thing.
The wide, clean, quiet streets with expensive houses. The squares, with maybe a garden in the middle.  Yes.  I can see these.

I have some feeling of what the rookeries might have looked like too.  The grainy, mid-Victorian photos of the London slums give us an idea.  Hogarth illustrates the underbelly of London on one side of the era. Gustaf Dore on the other.

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself.  H.P Lovecraft
But, what about the middling streets?  Not the privileged haunts of the nobility.  Not the stews.  The everyday streets and passageways of London and Paris.  My characters spend most of their time in this ordinary sort of place.  What did it look like?

We have pictures. 





























And we can guess a lot about what the city looked and felt like from elements common to cities now.

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