1810--What a Year It Was

I promised you a new series, didn’t I? Well, today it begins...but first, a little background.

I’ve had an idea for an adult Regency story for years...but some ideas take a long time to marinate. I jokingly say that the girls in the back room had to think about it for a while...and in 2015, they let me know they were ready to get started. The story has turned into a serial, told in novella-length episodes that are complete stories in themselves but include an overarching plot (and developing romance, of course!) that interweaves with the events of the individual stories.

The story takes place over the course of 1810 and will end in 1811, which means I’ve been doing a lot of research about that one year...and it was a pretty interesting one. So I thought it might be fun to examine some of those events that inspired my serial, because we’re all about weird history stories here at NineteenTeen, right?

So what was going on around the world in 1810?  Although my serial of course will focus on England and its concerns, there was a lot of interesting stuff happening elsewhere...

• Napoleon divorces his Josephine in order to marry Marie Louise of Austria, and adds Holland and the German kingdom of Westphalia to the empire, but French forces under Marshal Masséna are expelled from Portugal
• Beethoven composes Für Elise
• Lord Byron, sojourning in Greece, swims the Hellespont 
•  General Bernadotte, one of Napoleon’s marshals, is elected Crown Prince and heir to the throne of Sweden.
• Frédéric Chopin, composer and pianist, is born, as were Robert Schumann, English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (who wrote the wonderful Cranford, among others), and P.T. Barnum.
• Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Chile take varying steps toward independence from Spain.
• The first steamboat on the Ohio River begins operation . 
• King George III is declared insane (again.)
• And for you Regency boxing fans, the great 40-round match between Cribb and Molineaux takes place.

Stay tuned for the first post soon!