Kristi here. It’s no secret that part of the Regency era’s appeal is the clothes. Fancy and glamorous, yet relatable with it’s lack of hoop skirts and horse hair bustles. I’m going to the ACFW (American Christian Fiction Writers) Conference in September and one of the events is a dinner where everyone is invited to dress up as one of their characters.
I don’t have a Regency era dress. I’m seriously considering making one (with the help of my considerably more sewing skilled mother). If I do it will probably be a fairly simple cotton one, not a fancy ballgown. But if I were to dream, what kind of Regency dress would I want?
First off, it would definitely be an evening dress. The ruffles around the neck and face that often accompany morning dresses would drive me insane.
Second, I’d want some color. I have no desire to look like a ghost walking around in an all white gown. I’d stay away from the lavenders and purples, since those indicated a state of half-mourning. Red would be a bit garish, though the Hubs always likes me in it. I think I’d lean to the blues or greens. I see more blue in Ackerman’s prints than green, so we’ll go with blue.
I think my favorite would be something like this, but with a blue underskirt instead of the pink.
And guess what? I could actually order a reproduction dress very similar to it… though of course it’s rather expensive. It’s gorgeous though, isn’t it?
Of course, this was all dreamed up before I came across this beauty. One day I’m going to have to write a heroine with the gumption to walk into a ball wearing a plaid evening gown. That is just amazing.
What about you? Do you have a dream Regency outfit?
As an American, reading books set in England – particularly historical England – could sometimes be confusing. Once I started researching the time period, I realized that certain words had different meanings “across the pond”. So for everyone like me, I’ve put together a list of a few things that used to confuse me. Hope they help!
Hall
Hall is one of those words that seems simple, but has vastly different meanings on each side of the Atlantic. I always wondered why people spent so much time standing around in the hall. Wasn’t it cramped?
Because in America a “hall” is a passageway – usually on the narrow side – that rooms open off of. In Regency England the hall was the area the front door opened into. Similar to an American foyer or vestibule. In large English homes, the hall is a room in an of itself, often a fairly large one since visitors were sometimes required to wait there a while before being admitted further into the house.
Living “in” the street
In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Jane Bennet mentions that her aunt and uncle live in Grace Church Street. In American English, that implies Grace Church Street is neighborhood or even an apartment building or some other such collection of living spaces.
What is actually means is that her aunt and uncle have a house with a Grace Church Street address. In America we would say they live on Grace Church Street. It’s a distinction that some modern day Regency authors use and others don’t, but now you won’t be confused if you ever come across it.
Townhome
It’s just that: your home in town. When Americans normally think of as being townhomes are actually called terrace houses in England. These are houses that share a wall with another house on one or both sides. Many homes in Mayfair are terrace houses, but not all. So when the heroine heads to her townhome for the season, she’d probably sharing a wall with her neighbor, but not necessarily so.
First Floor
Have you ever seen characters going up to the first floor? Or looking down from a first floor window? For an American that can be quite confusing – to the point that I try to avoid saying which floor they’re on at all.
The “first floor” in America is actually the “ground floor” in England. So people had to actually go up stairs to reach the first floor.
What other terms do you find yourself stumbling over? Any other words you’ve found have a double meaning?
How do you picture your Regency characters flitting about London by night? Until 1807, London went about by the feeble flicker of oil lamps.
Special interest groups fought against gaslight, fearing the loss of the whale-oil trade. The inflammatory Bill of 1816 (supportive of gas lighting) would also ruin the navy, the ropemakers, sailmakers, etc. etc. according to its opponents.
Yet gaslight did more for prevention of crime “than the days of Alfred the Great”. Lighting at night brought safety, but also enhanced the reputation of London as the City of Sin. “London Lights” was a slang term referring to the regency age’s gilded immorality.
Nightlife entertainments in London were hideously vulgar, and respectable citizens did not take their families out after dark to public venues. My source says the “flaring gaslight” was appropriate to the rough and tumble array of available diversions.
Information is from: Life in Regency England, by R. J. White, publ. 1963
What do you picture for lighting when you are reading or writing regency fiction? Please leave a comment.
I discovered the most delightful regency romance the other day on Amazon. Friendship and Folly by Meredith Allady, Book 1 of the Merriweather Chronicles.
Something that intrigued me from the first was the introduction, where the author explains how she found this manuscript in an old trunk of her grandmother’s, a trunk filled with old journals and manuscripts. She edited the most complete manuscript and has published it as “Friendship and Folly by Meredith Allady.” Whether Meredith Allady is her real name, her grandmother’s, or a pseudonym–or pun (Meredith, A Lady?) matters not.
What I discovered when I began reading it is a wonderful story told in what I found is an extremely authentic Regency-style, which I why I think it truly is a discovery from someone’s old trunk and not a well-researched historical. There are allusions to historical events and things only someone who lived in the era (and those of us who have done a lot of regency-era research ourselves) are privy to.
The Christian-spiritual thread through the novel is also in keeping with someone writing from that era, very much like Jane Austen. People pray and quote Scripture in a very natural way. It shows how Bible-illiterate our generation has become. The most moving scene happens during the crisis/climax and is very much a Christian lesson.
The story also has the wit of Jane Austen.
If you go on Amazon, though, the author warns those who don’t enjoy Jane Austen or an old-fashioned writing style to please stay away. On Goodreads.com, she tells readers: “For all those readers who loathe the ‘epistolary’ style of narrative, Meredith tenders her heartfelt apologies; but there it is.”
I for one was caught up from page one of this regency story and am glad to see that there is a Book 2 in the Merriweather Chronicles.
Vegans, Vegetarians, and PETA look away from this post.
As we get ready to celebrate the 4th of July, our nation’s Independence Day, we should take the time to thank a service man or veteran for their duty, for choosing to protect America so we might enjoy freedom and wonderfully barbequed hamburgers and hot dogs.
Source: Wiki Commons
The English during our period of the Regency were not particularly joyous of America’s Independence. They still brooded over their loss in our Revolutionary War and impressed our men into service to fight their other wars, but I digress.
Yet, we can still trace our love of fire roasted meats to them.
Fire roasting was (and is) common around the world and a forerunner to our barbecue cooking method. From cooking meat in a hot pit in the ground to using wooden frames to hold the meat, people of all cultures and all nations figured out fire-cooked meat was yummy. The English were quite serious and well regarded for their meat cooking.
Pehr Kalm, a traveler to England on his way to America (1748) noted:
“Roast meat, Stek, is the Englishman’s delice and principal dish. It is not however always roasted, Stekt, to the same hardness as with us in Sweden. The English roasts, stekarne, are particularly remarkable for two things.
All English meat, whether it is of Ox, Calf, Sheep, or Swine, has a fatness and a delicious taste,either because of the excellent pasture, betet, which consist of such nourishing and sweet-scented kinds of hay as there are in this country, where the cultivation of meadows has been brought to such high perfection, or some way of fattening the cattle known to the butchers alone, or, for some other reason.
The Englishmen understand almost better than any other people the art of properly roasting a joint, konsten, at val steka en stek, which also is not to be wondered at ; because the art of cooking as practised by most Englishmen does not extend much beyond roast beef and plum pudding, stek.”
We can thank John Walker, an English chemist who in 1826 invented the friction match. He took a stick of wood and dipped it in a paste formed from potassium chlorate and sulfur to make a match that lit when struck on an abrasive surface. As you light up the coals tomorrow, think John Walker, unless you own one of those fancy auto-lighting-gas grills or a lighter.
Source: Wiki Commons
One thing I am glad did not become the norm is the Turnspit Dog. Look at the picture below and see the dog on the circular track pinned to the wall. No, your eyes are working properly. The doggie is hung up like kitchen pots or a ladle, just another kitchen utensil aiding the cooking of foods in an English kitchen.
Source: Wiki Commons
Can you imagine? “Cook, is the meat done?”
“No milord, Lassie has another mile to go.”
Turnspit dogs were short animals trained to run on a treadmill like cage so that spit meat cooked evenly. These kitchen helpers were small, low-bodied creatures with short front legs. They often had grey and white fur or reddish brown.
Source: Wiki Commons
The dogs, commonly called Kitchen dogs, Turnspit dogs or Vernepator Cur were very sturdy and capable of turning the spit wheel for hours. Now that is some serious cooking if you have to train pets to help. Lucky for us and the greater good, this practice died off by the late 1850’s.
So light up those grills tomorrow, be thankful of our independence, and give a special patty to your pet pouch. Happy Fourth of July.
Source: Kalm’s Account of His Visit to England, 1758 http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924028059693/cu31924028059693_djvu.txt
So glad to be back at Regency Reflections. Is that the bang of fireworks I hear in celebration? Sometimes it seems as if our neighborhood has returned to the Revolutionary War right before the Fourth of July there are so many sizzles, pops, and whistles!
Regency lords and ladies were no strangers to fireworks. The fire masters (the equivalent of today’s pyrotechnical engineers) performed their duties for public events like coronations and military victories as well as private events like balls and routs.
A fire-master was originally a commissioned officer in the artillery who ordered the instructions and directions for making fireworks, whether for military purposes such as rockets or for celebration. Each firework consisted of one or more tubes of paper of various diameters filled with different types of flammable powder and connected to a quick match or a slower burning fuse. Rockets might have a stick at the end to help steady the flight. How hot the fire burned, the direction in which it burned, and the diameter of the opening through which it shot all affected the size, shape, duration, and color of the firework.
People didn’t seem to tire of fireworks, no matter how many times they saw the bright lights. Talented fire masters were in great demand. Of course, the displays had their down sides as well. In large crowds, there was the apparent danger of pieces of the rockets in particular falling back to the ground and striking people on the head or shoulder. Sparks could also burn as they fell. Perhaps to help prevent such calamities, some events were held near a body of water like a river or ornamental pond. The Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens had some amazing displays along the Thames.
Emboldened by their acclaim, however, the fire masters became more and more creative over the years. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the fireworks were orange or white. In the 1830s, fire masters discovered that burning metallic salts with potassium chlorate would give them many more colors to play with. Fireworks were affixed to wooden frames to spell out words or illuminate scenes. Others burst in the sky like stars, hissed and wove about like serpents in the air, or showered sparks down on amazed onlookers like hot rain. Musicians composed odes that could accompany the displays. Architects and engineers built revolving machines that could light up or shoot out fireworks at various angles. Even one of the Prince Regent’s favorite architects, John Nash, built a machine to house such displays.
Today, fireworks light up the night sky at sporting events, fairs and concerts, and civic events. But we owe much of our delight to the creativity and ingenuity those early fire masters.
Regina
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Though she hasn’t found a way to make her hero a fire master yet, Regina Scott has penned 27 stories set in Regency England. Her most recent novel, The Husband Campaign, was released in April 2014 from Love Inspired Historical. You can learn more about her at her website at www.reginascott.com or catch up with her online at www.facebook.com/authorreginascott.
Camy here: Thanks so much, Regina, for our guest post today!
Since I discovered traditional Regencies, I have counted Carola Dunn as one of my favorite authors in this genre. So imagine my thrill when I ended up on a Regency fan list with Ms. Dunn. When I decided to review another traditional Regency as a Throw-back Thursday post, I contacted Ms. Dunn and asked her which one of her wonderful books she would like me to review. She suggested The Babe and The Baron which, to my delight, had slipped below my radar.
I say to my delight because finding a Carola Dunn book I hadn’t read is like finding a forgotten box of chocolates in the cupboard. In addition, she told me an amusing story about this book.
Soon after she began to write it, her publisher, Walker Publishing, canceled their traditional Regency line. Two years passed before this book finally saw the light of day under the Kensington Zebra imprint. Poor Laura remained pregnant for two years. “She did not,” MS. Dunn assured me, “give birth to an elephant.”
Laura’s scapegrace husband dies while celebrating the fact that she is expecting their first child, leaving her penniless. Gareth, Lord Wyckham, a distant cousin of Laura’s husband, learns that she is now penniless and offers her a home along with a host of other relatives living under his roof. Gareth is a wonderful hero—kind, responsible, enjoying a bit of fun, so not stodgy. He is also a wee bit overprotective of Laura and her condition.
Laura, however, has been used to being independent since her scandalous marriage to her late spouse, and chafes at the hovering, all the while she is falling in love with her relative by marriage. With tact and dignity, she slips into the household routine, taking children and elderly relations in hand and wanting to discover why Gareth is so overly protective of her, a near stranger.
As typical of one of Ms. Dunn’s books, this traditional Regency is written with detail to character and interplay with the hero and heroine, as well as the cast of others important in their lives. Each individual has a unique role to play in the development of the characters, the romance, and the story itself.
If you haven’t read this delightful tale yet, it is available in electronic formats, along with other Regency romances by Carola Dunn. She now writes wonderful mysteries also worth reading.
How many times have you read of the hero or heroine of a Regency novel ringing the bell for the servant? Did they really do that? Were bell pulls as common as we think they were?
The answer is a somewhat complicated yes and no.
Bells have long been used to summon servants, though during the Regency the idea of summoning them from anywhere in the house was still fairly new.
Staff Call Bells via Wikimedia Commons
From the time the small handbell was invented, people have used them to summon servants waiting in the hall or across the room. Simple systems that connected a room to a nearby antechamber were documented during the first decade of the eighteenth century. The idea of a house-wide network of bells wasn’t introduced for another 35 years.
Though the actual creation of the full house servant bell system is debated, the first known advertisement for such a system was in 1744. It worked via a series of copper wires, springs, and pulleys to pass the vibration caused by pulling the cord to the bell in the servants’ area.
With more than 60 years from the introduction of the bell pull to the onset of the Regency, modern thinking would assume the system would be nearly ubiquitous. In places such as Mayfair, where most houses were built after 1750, the bell systems probably were very prevalent.
Jane Austen mentions ringing for servants in Pride and Prejudice when she tells Kitty to ring for Hill. Though we don’t know if this referred to the simpler “pulley bell” of the early 1700s or the household bells of the mid-1700s, it does show that bell systems were not confined to only the fashionable and trendy areas of England.
Bigger houses required more bells. Click the picture for an article on indicator boxes and bells after the introduction of electric systems.
But what about the old country houses? Some of the sprawling estates our aristocratic heroes and heroines call home were built centuries before the introduction of a bell system. Since many of these families also maintained residences in town, it’s hard to imagine them forgoing the luxury and privacy of the bells when they adjourned to the country.
The answer was pipes and tubes.
Older homes could be fitted with a network of pipes and tubes that acted as conduits for all the bell mechanisms. Plumbers (who were also busy retrofitting homes with the newfangled indoor plumbing) and chimney sweeps often began second careers and bell-hangers.
This wasn’t done everywhere, however, because some houses that installed and external bell (the first doorbells) sometimes places a sign above the pull telling visitors what to do.
Another issue with these spring-based bell systems was maintenance. Getting to a disconnected wire or pulley within the network of refitted tubes could be extremely difficult.
As the bell systems became more and more prevalent in the country homes, the indicator boards advanced. Some would utilize different sizes and tones of bells to allow servants to better hear which room was summoning them. Others created elaborate sets of flaps and labels to let servants see which person had rung.
In the 1840s, electric bell systems began to appear. This limited the amount of cumbersome maintenance and allowed for much more elaborate indicator boards. People of the Regency, however, wouldn’t have seen these as electricity was still little more than a novelty.
The bells were likely a bittersweet invention for servants. While the installation of a bell system meant that a footman didn’t have to stand in the hall for hours awaiting instruction, it also meant that whenever a bell was rung, the servant had to run up the stairs to get the instruction and then back down to see to the request. Over time the addition of speaking tubes and in-house telephones provided more direct communication, but those weren’t to grace English homes until well after the Regency period.
Grecian influence held sway over the men’s hairstyles (as it did for women as well). Short hair prevailed for men during the Regency. Many wore their hair natural, parts were not popular. But the fashionable set wore one of the following hairstyles.
Windswept:
Brutus: As popularized by Beau Brummel
Titus:
Coup au Vent: This modern hairdresser is doing a style that is very close to what my research describes!
Cherubin:
Which one’s your favorite? Are they what you’d imagined?
It’s summer. Maybe not officially for another couple of weeks, but you wouldn’t know that from where I’m sitting – sweltering in the deep south of the US.
So I asked the Regency Reflections authors what they did to beat the heat.
Ruth Axtell: Heat? What heat? I live in downeast Maine. We’re lucky if it ever hits 80 in the summer.
Before you grumble, just think about how much snow she has to dig through in the winter…
via Wikimedia Commons
Camy Tang: Iced tea! I make Muscat or Momo tea (extra strong) from Lupiciausa.com and then chill in the fridge or pour over ice, and I make a sugar syrup rather than just using dry sugar, because it seems to make it taste better. Then a squirt of a lime wedge and I’m set!
Laurie Alice Eakes: I stay inside as much as possible and drink lots of lemon water. Standard water with lots of ice and a wedge of lemon or lime.
Susan Karsten: I enjoy jumping off our boat (clad in swimsuit) — we usually boat on the deepest, coldest lake in our state, and the water is super-refreshing.
Kristi Ann Hunter:
Air conditioning. If the kids want to play outside, they’d better do it before 11AM because I’m not stepping outside without a darn good reason after that. Ironically my desk sits against an AC vent so I’m usually working with a blanket over my legs, but I’m not about to turn it off.
What about you? Is it hot where you are? What do you do to stay comfy and cool in the summer?
First off, it would definitely be an evening dress. The ruffles around the neck and face that often accompany morning dresses would drive me insane.
I think my favorite would be something like this, but with a blue underskirt instead of the pink. 
Of course, this was all dreamed up before I came across this beauty. One day I’m going to have to write a heroine with the gumption to walk into a ball wearing a plaid evening gown. That is just amazing.
.jpg)
