So I Did a Thing...

Some of you may have seen the fun I’m having with creating silly Regency memes from my collection of Ackermann's Repository and La Belle Assemblée fashion plates—a new one goes up every few days on my Facebook and Instagram pages.

But I couldn’t stop with posting them on social media. That, dear readers, would be much too simple.

So I did this:

The magnets happened for a couple of book-signings I did last summer. The calendars were a brainstorm on December 27 after someone showed me the customizable calendars that could be made at Snapfish, and I just couldn’t stop myself. I mean, doesn’t everyone need a calendar with sassy Regency memes that also tells them when Sally Jersey’s birthday is and on what day Pride and Prejudice was first published?

I’ve given several to friends, but the question is…should I make these more widely available? Would NineteenTeen readers or fans of The Ladies of Almack’s series (either books or memes) buy them? I’m afraid I would have to keep this for US purchasers only; the time (filling out customs forms) and expense of mailing them outside the US would be prohibitive. But if these appeal to you, leave me a comment and I’ll figure out what’s next.

And in the meanwhile…Sassy New Year!

Happy New Year! One More Present to Open

Is Christmas over? I wasn’t ready (I’m never ready). I spent time with friends and family, I received some lovely cards and gifts, including a set of laser-carved walnut bookends of sailing ships and a fabulous new cowl from my wonderful critique partner, Kristy J. Manhattan, in yarn died to match the cover of Mail-Order Marriage Promise.

I don’t know about you, but coming back to work after the holidays was harder than usual this year. Some of you have had it harder than I did. Hugs to those of you shivering in the snow and cold.

How about one more present? A free book.

The Husband Mission, book 1 in my Regency-set Spy Matchmaker series, will be free on all major online retailers through January 6, 2018. That gives you two days for you and all your friends and family to download a copy. This is an update of one of my personal favorite novels, Lord Borin’s Secret Love.

Katherine Collins is on a mission. The spirited spinster is financially beholden to her stepsister, who will inherit a fortune--if she marries in the next six weeks. Katherine even mounted an espionage campaign to locate the perfect husband, Alexander Wescott, Viscount Borin.

Alex cannot understand why he’s under surveillance, but it seems to have something to do with the intriguing Katherine. Rejected for service by England’s spymaster, he ought to be searching for a wife. But what wife can compare to the excitement of international espionage? Unless, of course, she’s up for a little espionage herself.

“Regina Scott pens a fast-paced riddle of a tale… Her excellent cast of characters brings great charm and humor to this romantic romp.” – RT Book Reviews

Smashwords

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Kobo

iBooks

Here’s to many more books to read and enjoy in the new year!

Happy New Year, Dear Readers!

First of all, Happy 2017 to you, our dear readers! Regina and I hope you’ll continue to read along as we squee over 200-year-old fashions, tell weird history stories, talk about our books, and generally have fun.

And speaking of reading along...believe it or not (yeah, I’m kinda struggling with believing it myself) the fact that it’s 2017 means we’ll have been writing NineteenTeen posts for ten years come September. I expect we’ll be posting our one thousandth post some time toward the end of the year, which is kind of mind-boggling...but you know, we wouldn’t do this if we didn’t want to. We hope you’re still enjoying reading as much as we enjoy posting.

Since this is a New Year’s celebration post, there are a couple of things I wanted to do...and one of them is to talk about the books we especially loved over the last twelve months. Are there any books with a historical slant, fiction or non-fiction, that you especially enjoyed last year?

My candidate for Most Awesome Historical Book That I Read in 2016 is this one:

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua is...well, I suppose that it gets categorized as a graphic novel, but it’s so, so much more than that. According to the introduction, Ms. Padua started it as a bit of a lark, but things soon got out of hand (oh, I so know that feeling...) It’s the imagined adventures of two real people, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage and amateur mathematician and celebrity offspring Ada, Countess of Lovelace (the celebrity part being that she was Lord Byron’s daughter.)  The historical part is that Babbage designed what was more or less a steam-powered calculating machine (two of them, actually)...and his friend Lovelace, writing a commentary on the designs, more or less posited what would become today’s field of computer science. In real life, Babbage’s engines were never built and Lovelace died tragically young of cancer...but in Padua’s “pocket universe” they’ve teamed up to use the engines to “to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime—for the sake of both London and science.”

There’s so much to love here—the illustrations are glorious and historically correct (omg, the clothes are right, and so is the Duke of Wellington’s nose!) The story-telling is witty and erudite but never stuffy (I totally want this illustration of Isambard Kingdom Brunel on a t-shirt for my engineer husband and son), but it’s also real and human—Lovelace and Babbage aren’t cardboard figures, but brilliant and funny and in many ways, tragic. If you have the least interest in technological history or science fiction or the Victorian era or or or...read this book!

And in the “Other Things that Require Celebration” department, may I present this: a new cover for By Jove, being re-released next month from Book View Café. Gotta say, I'm in love with it.  Look for more news about By Jove in February. 

Now, dear readers, what's your news? Please tell us about your favorite 2016 book, or what you're bookishly looking forward to

this year...and keep reading!

 

 

(Fireworks image courtesy of noppasinw at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

Happy New Year!...but not in 1811, 1818, or 1819 (and 1820 was pretty lousy too)

Happy New Year to all our readers! Regina and I hope that 2015 will be an historic year for all of you (pun fully intended)!

For the House of Hanover, though, which held the British throne for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, several new years in the early 1800s were not very happy: Novembers and Januarys in particular saw the deaths of several prominent members of the royal family.

And of course, the death of a member of the royal family meant that polite society went into mourning as well. While early nineteenth mourning had not become the extreme pastime it would under Victoria, the expectation was that black would be worn by those who could afford it for a few months, followed by a period of half-mourning. Rules for immediate family members were of course different—mourning was prescribed for a year and a day for spouses, a year for parents or children, six moths for siblings, and lesser amounts of time for aunts, uncles, and cousins. This meant some scrambling as the “little black dress” had not yet been invented: you didn't necessarily have much in the way of black clothing, for black was very specifically the color of mourning. While mourning dress was not much of a hardship for men, who already possessed black clothing, for women it meant hurried trips to the dressmaker for new dresses and accessories (imagine how busy the high society modistes and milliners must have been when royals died!) or making over and/or dyeing an older garment for women of more modest means (there are several references to this activity among the letter of Jane Austen.)

Additionally, the rise of fashion periodicals helped popularize the wearing of a special mourning wardrobe. Let’s have a look at what was en vogue in mourning wear in Ackermann’s Repository.

Princess Amelia, youngest daughter of George III, died in early November 1810 in her late twenties after a long bout with tuberculosis. It’s thought her death exacerbated her father’s descent into his final illness which led to the Regency. As a daughter of the monarch, she seems to have merited only a month of public mourning as January's prints are back to normal.  Note the decorative urn, often a symbol of mourning, with a coronet and picture of a young woman on it. Interesting to note that our model is wearing white gloves; perhaps full mourning was not prescribed? (Ackermann's, December 1810):

Princess Charlotte of Wales, Prinny’s only daughter, died after a terrible two-day labor in November 1817, probably of childbed fever. National mourning for her was deep and sincere, and public mourning seems to have been decreed for two months, as per the prints from December 1817 and January 1818, all from Ackermann's Repository:

 

In the prints from January 181 below, note the addition of white and gray to the color palette. This denotes half-mourning, when these plus quiet shades of purple and lavender could be properly worn.

Queen Charlotte followed her beloved grand-daughter almost exactly a year later in November 1818. Her death was not unexpected as she had been ill for some time. It's especially interesting to note here that the styles themselves were in the highest fashion--the enormous bonnets and decorative hems that were such a feature of the year--but just rendered in black.

And into half-mourning, for January 1819:

January 1820 was a bad month indeed, as the Duke of Kent, father of the future Queen Victoria, succumbed to pneumonia only to be followed less than a week later by his father, King George III...and the Prince Regent became King George IV.