Twenty-Four Characters for Twelfth Night

I was doing research (lovely, lovely research!) and came across a picture I just have to share with you.

We’ve talked about Twelfth Night several times, and a masquerade to celebrate it is included in The Aeronaut’s Heart in My Fair Regency. January 6 marks the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas and the end of the Christmas season in general. In England, it might be commemorated with parties and a special cake. I am a bit late for this year’s celebration, but I offer you the following to get you thinking for next year. (Fingers crossed that if you click on the picture, you can see a larger version.)

These cards were designed and published by Thomas Rowlandson in 1811 and depict the various “characters” you might play during a Twelfth Night party. Your hostess might hand you a role to play when you arrived, or she might have sent you the card in advance so you could come in character and in costume.

And oh, the plot possibilities!

• A shy young lady aghast at being asked to play Lady Racket.
• A mismatched couple; say the gentleman is asked to play Captain Dash but the lady is stuck with Lady Careless.
• Your rival insisting that you play Miss Gadabout.
• A studly fellow being assigned Lord Flutter while a bookworm is assigned Major Matchless.
• The grumpiest chaperone being given Mrs. Friendly!

What do you think? See one you’d like to play? Or one you wouldn’t?

Wishing you a very happy new year, with many wonderful characters to discover in books you love!

Blast from the Past: A Bandalore by Any Other Name

I'm off wandering the wilds of Iceland with my DH and will be back next week to report on our travels. In the meanwhile, here's a Blast from the Past about a different type of pastime. See you soon!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that historical research is probably the most fun you can have with your corset on.

I was doing research on Eton in the early nineteenth century a week or so ago, and was on the website Open Library reading a book called “A History of Eton College 1440-1910” by Sir H. C. Maxwell Lyte, and happened to skim over this passage:

Among the minor games popular at Eton at this period and for some time afterwards was that of bandalores. A bandalore was a disc of box-wood, with a deep groove in its outer edge, round which a string was coiled, and the art was to send it flying through the air, unwinding the string as it went, and by giving a jerk at a particular moment to bring the disc back again to the hand, recoiling the string on its return journey. Michael Hicks Beach writing to his mother in his sixteenth year says:— “I have three excellent bandylores and did throw one of them out (which has a string about four feet and a half long), one hundred and fifty-nine times without missing.”

I thought about that for a moment, trying to picture just what this bandalore “game” was...and then it hit me.

It was a yo-yo. They were playing with yo-yos in the late 18th century!

So I did a little more digging...and found this image, from a French fashion plate from 1791, along with the following information: The most common French word for Yo-yo at the time was "Emigrette", but it is called the "Joujou de Normandie" in a caption to a version of this image which was included in Albert Charles Auguste Racinet's Le Costume Historique (1888), a monumental six-volume work on costume (alas, the cheapest set I could find on-line was in the $3000 range!) "Joujou", by the way, means "toy", and has nothing to do with the etymology of the word "yo-yo", which is from a Philippine language...but it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it?

So there you go. Who knew that one of the hot toys for both boys and girls in 1790s Europe was the yo-yo?

Historical research rocks!

All the News That Was, and Wasn't

I’m doing research. Lovely, lovely research. When I’m starting to plot a new Frontier Bachelors book, I read newspapers from the months in which I’m thinking about setting the tale. I like to see what was happening in Seattle, from a citizen’s point of view (or at least an editor on the other side of the Sound). I discovered the germ of the idea for A Convenient Christmas Wedding that way. I was fairly sure Beth Wallin’s story would be set in the spring of 1875, and I’d seen a mention online that there’d been a diphtheria epidemic in March. I never did find mention of the epidemic, but what I did find amazed me.

Much of the news wasn’t exactly news. 

Take this gem from the March 25, 1875, issue of the Puget Sound Dispatch:

“A Philadelphia youth was recently married to a girl who had refused him eighteen times. He wishes now he hadn’t asked her but seventeen.”

Or this

“We call the attention to Mr. Bergh [authority in the school system at the time] to the fact that the wolves are in a starving condition in Wisconsin. Any children sent there will be forwarded from Milwaukee.”

Or this

“Julia Ward Howe is organizing a literary club in Washington [D.C.]. In conjunction with it will be a free night school for carpet-bag representatives who cannot spell words of more than two syllables.”

Ouch!

The Weekly Argus of around the same time included a short story called Eurella, about a girl who put on airs because of her fancy first name and lived to regret it.

Then there was this, supposedly taken from a paper in Vineland, New Jersey:

“Mr. Carruth, editor of a paper published here, was fatally shot this morning by Chas. K. Landis, known as the father of Vineland. The affair rose out of an article in the paper, which Landis tho’t referred to him, but in which no names were mentioned.”

Maybe there’s a reason the Dispatch editor chose to use more stories without local people in them!

That issue does go on to describe massive parades celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York.

So, Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

So What Did You Think?: Victoria

I think it’s probably safe to assume that a number of NineteenTeen readers watched the new offering on PBS’s Masterpiece, Victoria, this past Sunday evening (or, as I did, streamed on-line at pbs.org). And c’mon, you knew I’d be watching it.

The seven-part series is a dramatization of the first three-ish years (1837-1840) of Queen Victoria’s reign. It opens with her reception of the news that her uncle, King William IV, had died and that she, at just over eighteen years of age, is queen.

I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that I should probably not watch television or movie dramatizations of historical events, because, inevitably, the “dramatization” part wins out over the “history.”  History simply doesn’t make very good television: it’s too slow, too messy, too often lacking in the cohesion that makes for good storytelling.

And that was decidedly the case with Victoria. While there was oodles of conflict in the events around Victoria’s coming to the throne—the years between 1835 and 1837 were drama-filled indeed—Victoria chooses to make stuff up (I’m sorry—dramatize) and moves it to the years after 1837. So we basically ended up with a first episode here in which there wasn’t a lot of history.

• Unlike what is shown in Victoria, Sir John Conroy was more or less out of Victoria’s life the minute she became queen: she barely saw him again, and after a matter of months Lord Melbourne managed to negotiate him out of Victoria’s mother’s household and into retirement (it took a little longer to repair the relationship between Victoria and her mother, but it did mend.) And while Conroy spent considerable time and effort before her ascension to try to force a regency on her, there was no question of it once she became queen.

• The Duke of Cumberland became King of Hanover the minute Victoria became queen, and was in Hanover by the end of the month, taking up his royal duties...not conniving against her back in London.

•  Lord Melbourne had certainly been popular with the ladies in his earlier years...but by the time Victoria came to the throne, he was fifty-eight years old and looked it every bit of it. Though he undoubtedly adored his little queen and treated her gallantly, it was very much a paternal sort of affection...and hers for him was that of a girl who’d never had a father figure in her life (don’t forget, her father died while she was still an infant), not to mention a male friend.

•  Sir Robert Peel wasn’t “common,” as he’s played here—he was the son of a wealthy mill owner and politician and attended Harrow and Oxford. Victoria didn’t much care for him at first, but eventually came to both admire and respect him.

However, they did at least a semi- creditable job with the Lady Flora Hastings scandal and with the Bedchamber Crisis, when Victoria’s stubbornness about losing her ladies because they were married to Whig ministers brought down Peel’s fledgling government. Within a decade, court appointments became more disassociated from party politics.

Overall verdict? I was...underwhelmed. The settings weren’t bad but the costumes were disappointing (The Young Victoria movie was much yummier in that regard). I found a lot of the acting stiff, and while Jenna Coleman as Victoria was very striking, there was simply far too much time spent with the camera lingering on her face while she emoted...stiffly.

But that’s just me...did you watch it? What did you think? Tell us!

A Brief Visit to the Seventeenth Century

I love “living history” museums—those amazing places where an attempt is made to re-create how life was lived in a specific time or place. In the US, Colonial Williamsburg is the grand-daddy of them all...but I’m lucky enough to live close to several others, and was even luckier last week to visit one of them with my dear friend and partner in blogging crime, Regina!

Living as we do on opposite sides of the country, any time spent together is precious— but getting to geek out at history together is even more awesome. And geek out we did, at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where reenactors strive to show how life was lived in the colony founded by the Pilgrims in 1620. (Check out their very informative website at www.plimoth.org)

When I say reenactors, I mean reenactors—the people dressed in early seventeenth century garb that you see in the houses cooking or repairing roofs or tending their gardens are in the personae of actual Plimoth inhabitants. They learn their person’s actual history down to the accent they probably spoke with, and then “become” that person...and don’t ever break character. It’s pretty cool to chat with them (though of course some people try to bait them out of their roles--but what fun is that?)

I’ve been to Plimoth Plantation several times before, and the neat thing is that every time I go, I learn something new. So what did I learn this time? 

• That the bundles of reeds that make up the thatching on thatched roofs are actually sewn to the rafters with big stitches—how cool is that? You just see how the thatch is sewn on in courses at my photo above.

• That not only jugs and bowls and plates were made from earthenware, but things like braziers to hold a small quantity of coals to cook over were as well—and worked quite well.

• That bayberry candles—candles made from the small, waxy berries of the bayberry shrub that grows copiously in coastal New England—were a later invention; the inhabitants of Plymouth made their candles from tallow and beeswax (bees were brought over not long after the first settlement.)

But the best thing I was reminded of? That true friendship cannot be dimmed by distance and absence.

What to Give your Favorite History Geek for Christmas

A few weeks ago, Regina gave us her Literary holiday shopping list (I lurve the red dress!) Now, 2015 was quite a year for us history geeks, seeing as it did the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, and 2014-2015 saw the publication of several excellent history books on life ca. 1815. If you’re looking for the perfect gift for yourself or for the history geek in your life, have a look at a few of these:

In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815 by Jenny Uglow; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015 An amazingly detailed snapshot (though at over 800 pages, that may not be the right word) of life in England over twenty plus years after the end of the Peace of Amiens. The book covers everything from politics and economics to art and literature to how ordinary people, both city and country, lived their daily lives. Extensively illustrated (especially with a lot of Gilray and Rowlandson cartoons of the time) and very readable.

Jane Austen's England: Daily Life in the Georgian and Regency Periods by Roy and Lesley Adkins; published by Penguin Books, 2014 Here on NineteenTeen we will confess to something of a bias toward writing about life in aristocratic circles, because (let’s face it) it’s just so darned much escapist fun to twitter on about ball gowns and court presentations and that sort of thing. Of course, historically speaking, the “upper ten thousand” made up a very small percentage of the population. So if you’d like a clearer view of how the middle and lower classes lived--the people, in fact, who appear in Jane Austen’s novels--then this book is for you. Again, exemplary research, with useful illustrations, maps, and timelines.

Of course, in this 200th anniversary year of the Battle of Waterloo, a definitive biography of Napoleon Bonaparte would seem to be just the thing, and Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts (Penguin Books, 2014) precisely fits the bill. It’s a doorstop of a book at 800 pages, but they’re very readable pages (yes, I read them) and paint a balanced picture of one of history’s more controversial figures.

For a definitive look at Waterloo itself, popular historical novelist Bernard Cornwell has brought us his first work of non-fiction in Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles (Harper, 2015), I’ve not had a chance to read it, but its reviews are outstanding and I intend to get my mitts on it as soon as possible.

And for you historical foodies out there (I'm raising my hand), Dining with the Georgians by Emma Kay; Amberley Publishing, 2014 is a delight. Covering the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it covers an important time in gastronomic history when many of our own eating habits were being established and foods we love today were establishing themselves as part of regular diets (hello, chocolate!) There appears to be a soon-to-be-released follow-up as well, Dining with the Victorians, which I think I’ll have to go see about...

Feel free to print this entry out and leave it lying about somewhere conspicuous. ☺ Are there any history books published in the last few years that you’d recommend to NineteenTeen readers?

All for Research Purposes, Of Course!

Ah, the glam life of a writer. (I do hope you realize I’m writing with tongue firmly in cheek.) Why lurk at home writing in your jammies when you can go to an awesome retreat for historical fiction writers, try on gorgeous (and authentically made) 19th and 20th century gowns, eat amazing food made from period recipes, and generally have a wonderful time?

Yep, I was back at the Historical Writers Retreat at Senexet House in Woodstock, Connecticut this past weekend, doing all of the above. It might say something that almost all of this year's attendees had come last year, and it was lovely to see old friends again, including the adorable Bear.

Friday night opened with a tour of the house's lower floor, where the servants' quarters and kitchens had originally been located...and then we had a "downstairs" dinner in the original kitchen, eating hearty "servants'" food (the bacon and leek pie was to die for) before returning upstairs to chat about writing (and eat decidedly non-19th century red velvet cupcakes!)

Retreat organizer Nicole Carlson, in addition to being a writer, has an extensive background in costuming and brought dozens of garments from her amazing collection, from corsets to bustles and gowns to evening cloaks...and hats...and...well, it was pretty amazing. I wish I'd been better about taking pictures, because I learned a lot that would have been fun to show you, such as the 18th century panniers (which give that extra-wide hip effect in gowns of the period--and which also served as quite enormous pockets (who knew?) And the early twentieth century corsets which actually fit below the breasts (yes, there were early twentieth century brassieres to wear with them!). And the gowns...! Nicole generously laced us into corsets in order to try on dresses from her collection, and we got to play dress-up got an in-depth view of period clothing to enrich our writing.

Saturday afternoon brought another sumptuous tea, followed by the ever-patient Katy Bishop coaching us through a Lancers quadrille, and then an elegant candle-lit dinner followed by a gathering to talk about the popularity of spiritualism in the Victorian and Edwardian eras (and share a few spooky experiences of our own.)

But most of all, sharing a weekend with other writers who are as obsessed by the fascinating details of history and eager to enhance their stories with them--well, that's just priceless. It was a wonderful weekend, and I hope to be there again in 2016.

A Bandalore by Any Other Name

It is a truth universally acknowledged that historical research is probably the most fun you can have with your corset on.

I was doing research on Eton in the early nineteenth century a week or so ago, and was on the website Open Library reading a book called “A History of Eton College 1440-1910” by Sir H. C. Maxwell Lyte, and happened to skim over this passage:

Among the minor games popular at Eton at this period and for some time afterwards was that of bandalores. A bandalore was a disc of box-wood, with a deep groove in its outer edge, round which a string was coiled, and the art was to send it flying through the air, unwinding the string as it went, and by giving a jerk at a particular moment to bring the disc back again to the hand, recoiling the string on its return journey. Michael Hicks Beach writing to his mother in his sixteenth year says:— “I have three excellent bandylores and did throw one of them out (which has a string about four feet and a half long), one hundred and fifty-nine times without missing.”

I thought about that for a moment, trying to picture just what this bandalore “game” was...and then it hit me.

It was a yo-yo. They were playing with yo-yos in the late 18th century!

So I did a little more digging...and found this image, from a French fashion plate from 1791, along with the following information: The most common French word for Yo-yo at the time was "Emigrette", but it is called the "Joujou de Normandie" in a caption to a version of this image which was included in Albert Charles Auguste Racinet's Le Costume Historique (1888), a monumental six-volume work on costume (alas, the cheapest set I could find on-line was in the $3000 range!) "Joujou", by the way, means "toy", and has nothing to do with the etymology of the word "yo-yo", which is from a Philippine language...but it's an interesting coincidence, isn't it?

So there you go. Who knew that one of the hot toys for both boys and girls in 1790s Europe was the yo-yo?

Historical research rocks!

Okay, What is the Shocking Truth about Women’s Blouses?

I knew you were all dying of curiosity about what shocking pronouncement I might have on the subject, so I couldn’t leave you in suspense, could I?

As I’ve been reading ladies’ magazines from the summer of 1917 and paying especial attention to the advertisements, I noticed a surprising thing: the many ads for, of all things, underarm hair removal. Yes, you heard me correctly. Like this one, from McCall's July 1917 issue:

And this one from The Delineator, also July 1917:

And that doesn’t include the ads for antiperspirants and deodorants and talcum powder (some of which, by the way, are quite lovely (sorry that the image is a trifle crooked--I didn't want to damage the magazine while scanning it. This one's from McCall's, by the way):

This surprised me at first—underarm hair removal? Really? But as it says in the ad, ladies’ blouses made of sheer batistes, cottons, and linens were all the fashion. Here’s a couple from the same issue of The Delineator. Look closely and you can see that the sleeve fabric was indeed very sheer:

And that doesn’t include bathing suits, some of which were sleeveless by now (also from July's The Delineator):

Underarm hair would be clearly visible in both cases...and definitely not “dainty” (a favorite adjective from this era, it seems)...hence, hair removal products. Maybe I’m clueless, but I’d just never thought of this as an early twentieth century problem...but evidently it was.

And this is part of why I take such joy in research: because you don’t know what you don’t know, and filling in all those gaps in knowledge is such a wonderful thing. Even when it involves underarm hair. I don't think I'll be writing any scenes in which my characters fret about this problem--at least, I don't think I will--but it certainly was interesting to learn about. This is not the kind of history that ever makes it into the history books...but it's history just the same--how the people before us lived. It's my favorite kind of history, and I hope you've enjoyed all the shreds of it that Regina and I try to bring to you.

Not the Nineteenth Century...and Not Ackermann's Repository

This January finds me doing something I don’t usually do—namely, working on a couple of projects at once. One of those projects is a story set in the United States in 1917, just as the country has entered World War I on the Allies’ side.

Now, the cool thing about working on a story set in the 20th century is that there’s even more of a wealth of research material than there is for the 19th, my beloved Ackermann’s notwithstanding. My favorite research medium for details of everyday life in other times is magazines. As with any historical source, one has to be careful. Magazines often portray life in an idealized manner—how their readers want to see themselves and their lives rather than how they really are. But even so, they’re a rich source of the kind of details of everyday life that it’s hard to find elsewhere.

So I’ve accumulated a tidy stack of back-issues of several magazines from the summer of 1917. Mostly they’re magazines that would have appealed to a female audience: I’ve got issues of McCall’s Magazine, Today’s Housewife, The Modern Priscilla (lots of needlework patterns), Women’s World, The Delineator, Ladies’ World, Needlecraft, Collier’s, The Literary Digest, and The Independent. The Delineator is an especial delight with very high production values and many pages of fashions for each month, many in color (hmmm, I sense a Fashion Forecast for 1917 coming up....) Most of them have short stories or serialized stories, and I’ve enjoyed reading some of these. But most of all, I think I love the ads. Especially this one, from the July 1917 issue of McCall's Magazine:

The text reads:

They bow to you--discriminatingly well-dressed American woman! It is a new name--one which we will make it worth your while to remember. In your mind we would have you associate the name with all that is fine in workmanship and all that is graceful in shoes.

Keds for you will cover all daytime occasions--home wear; golf; tennis and all other outside games; for ordinary walking or "hikes"; for yachting and riding wear; and plenty of other styles just as prettily suitable for wear with morning frocks and daintiest house gowns, at home or on the country-club porch.

She travels many miles a day--the woman going about her household duties; but she is perfectly content to walk on the journey of loving service when she wears a shoe as pretty as it is comfortable. These trim Keds sum up excellence in their flexibility, durability, and delightful comfort--qualities very desirable to active feet.

The tops of Keds are of the firmest and finest of cool canvas, giving these shoes full elastic support. Then they have rubber soles which make them delightfully flexible and durable. No shoes are more comfortable or prettier for warm-weather wear.

Ask at your shoe shop to be shown Keds. They mean style, service and economy for all the family--styles for husband and kiddies included.

Yes, Keds were introduced to the world in the summer of 1917. I totally had to have my heroine wearing a pair of her new, deliciously lightweight shoes in their honor...and who would have guessed that the Keds brand has been around for nearly a hundred years? By the way, check out the fashions in the illustration: oh, those risque bathing suits!

I’ll be featuring more ads in future posts...including the shocking truth about ladies’ blouses. Stay tuned!