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Monthly Archives: March 2013

Before I get to the smutty talk, let me apologize for last Wednesday. I was sick with the ague. Ick. Anyway, this week’s post is about another book although it might be fairer to call it a pamphlet. The Georgian Bawdy House, by Emily Brand.

Here with, my by the moment review:

Oh my god. No. Way. Ewww.
One sexual myth of the early part of the Long 18th Century: amorous embraces could revive the dead. Right. How is that not necrophilia?

Viper-Wine. OK. That’s awesome. Drink viper-wine and you get frisky, even if you’re ::coughcough:: older.
Of course I googled it. Here.

Vinum Viperinum
Viper juice
of dried Vipers two Ounces
of white Wine three Pints
Infuse with a gentle Heat for a Week and then strain the Wine off
There has been some Dispute whether living or dry’d Vipers are best Viper Wine or whether a cold or hot Infusion is preferable. The college here has preferr’d dry’d Vipers and a warm Infusion; but the medicine is not of Consequence enough to be worth disputing about. I believe the Virtues it is pos’d of are very inconsiderable. A Medicine has been advertis’d in Town the Name of Viper Wine which is said to have had very extraordinary Effects such as might be from a Tincture of Cantharides which upon Examination I find it really to be.

Okayyyy.

:::Boggle::: There is a picture of ladies examining dildos, with testicles and hair. Ohmygod.

Oh. Hey. The Duke of Wellington. Boxing. Plenty of Regency era stuff here.

Kitties!!! (It’s a print with fighting cats.)

Oh….. I get it. Very funny. Snort.

My sweet honey, I hope you are to be let with the Lodgings!
No. Sir. I am to be let alone.

Boy, I wish this was on my iPad. Because the font is TINY!

Themed amatory entertainment. Hoo boy. Really? All righty.

Mollyhouses were meeting places for homosexual intercourse.

A lot of this makes me sad. The average age of a London prostitute: 16-24. As with everything, some women were wealthy — while they were still young, but so many other women were just trying to make ends meet.

I will continue with this next week, I think.

Last week I did a “review” of The Georgian Bawdy House” by Emily Brand. I continue this week. The previous post.

For next week, by the way, I am lining up an awesome post….

Pregnancy was definitely an issue for prostitutes, since it’s an issue for all fertile women who have sex. This book lists remedies that persisted among women until the advent of the birth control pill. My father, who was a resident in San Bernardino when abortion was still illegal, including in California, once told me about what women did to themselves to attempt to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. I can tell you this: pick your era prior to the pill and legal abortions: self-administered toxins and poisons, mutilation, abandonment, and infanticide.

I’ve blogged here before about my copy of Mysteries of London (1834-1844) features an engraving of a young woman, come far down in life, who has just killed her newborn. I know we sometimes romanticize the Courtesan, but she, too, was at risk of pregnancy, and there were few foolproof methods of contraception.

With professional opportunities severely restricted for most women, while there was demand for sexual services, virtue continued to be overthrown. (31)

Two brothels that catered to the wealthy were Jane Goadby’s establishment and Charlotte Hayes. Notions of women leading men to their sexual doom abounded. Women did go to brothel’s in search of their husbands. The book also contains a really excellent photo of an early 19th century condom, that looks to have been put over a cylinder. This gives a much better view than the more usual laid out flat photos.

Men and women alike had to worry about venereal disease, with all the accompanying dangers of remedies that, as we know, could not possibly have been effective.

Mr. Harris’s infamous “Harris’s List” of prostitutes sold 250,000 copies.

This I hadn’t heard before: “Mother Douglas” had footmen give condoms to the men before they went upstairs.

There were women who went to brothels to indulge themselves. According to Brand, they peeped though windows and selected the gentleman of their choice. Brand says these women had to pay much more for their pleasure.

And I will leave you there, because the rest get depressing, when the discussion turns to all the ways women were punished, and the men? They weren’t.

This is an interesting, fact-filled book with a nice list of references.

 

Tuesday night I was unable to get to the Risky site to finalize my post (an interview with Susan Broadwater of The Regency Library.)  Unfortunately, I leave for work before 6 AM and that means I couldn’t get back to this until now.

I have Susan’s post scheduled for next Wednesday. I’m putting up an awesome giveaway, so make sure you check out the post.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of tulips.

Photo by Yours Truly

Photo by Yours Truly

 

This week I have Susan Broadwater visiting here. After some time off-line, she’s back on line with The Regency Library. It’s a research service for anyone who needs information about the Regency. She also runs the email list Regency Library. I was a longtime subscriber and now that she’d back, well, I’m back, too. I asked her if she’d be interested in doing an interview here because she’s been researching the period for so long, I thought Risky Readers would enjoy hearing from her.

I’m offering one commenter a year’s subscription to The Regency Library email list.

About Susan

Susan Broadwater lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1996 she opened Moonstone Research and Publications and began providing private research services and Regency and Research Libraries, e-mail based subscription services. Susan is a graduate of Asbury University and holds a masters degree in Theology from Emory University. Currently she is focusing most of her time on Regency and Research Libraries.

The Questions

1. Why the Regency? What got you interested in the period?
I always loved Regency romance novels. I devoured everything I could find by Mary Jo Putney, Jo Beverley, Stella Cameron and others. Then I got involved in the online services. This was in the mid-90s when online was basically three or four services and there was no widespread access to the actual internet. By the late 90s this changed and I became involved with Carmel Thomaston’s Painted Rock Writers Colony to provide research materials. At that time there was very little to be found online regarding the Regency period so I began to accumulate materials in order to provide them to writers who needed them. After Carmel’s death I basically took the regency part of the materials I had collected and began Regency Library. For other time periods and materials Research Library was created.

2. Where do you find your materials? Did you just have a big pile of stuff at your house?

I live in Charlottesville, Virginia and worked for the University of Virginia for 16 years. They have one of the best libraries in the country and what they don’t have they can get it for you. I used a lot of their materials at first. Then I discovered right across the street from the library in a little alley an antiquarian book store, which had a good selection of 18th and early 19th century materials. I began buying as I could afford the books. Later there was E-bay and I even met (through a now defunct list) a university professor who was giving his collection away. He knew what I did and sent me about 400 books which included Gentleman’s Magazines, European Magazines and half a year (1814) London Times among other goodies. I’m still going through this stuff. Eventually I had to distribute the collection over three rooms of the house and turned one bedroom into an office and another into a library.

Sometimes you come across things in very unusual places.  When I was dropping off my taxes to be done the receptionist was still at lunch so instead of waiting in my car I went to a pawn shop that is located next to the tax preparer’s to look for CD’s and DVDs. Instead of that I found an 1812 Ackermann’s Repository—with all its plates—price $50.00. I asked the pawnbroker  how he had come to have this in his shop and he said that he paid 15.00 for it and usually didn’t take such things but felt sorry for the person pawning it. I bought it and asked him why he hadn’t researched it online to see what it was worth. He said he had tried but could not find a full volume on E-bay. I distributed some of the plates from this last week to the Regency Library. Of all places to obtain Ackermann’s this was the one I never would have thought of in a million years.

I got another year of Ackermann’s in the meantime. I left a number for the pawn broker and he called me up and told me he had another set — cost more this time but wasn’t too bad and well worth it.

3. What’s the most surprising/unusual thing you’ve come across? Anything that made you laugh?
I am currently getting an exhibit together for the regency library website that involves Ladies Court Costume and court etiquette. I came across a description of one worn to the Queen’s birthday that was decorated with fossils! Had to read it twice because I couldn’t believe it. There is also a picture of the Princess of Wales in a court dress that was published in La Belle Assemblee in 1807. Just looking at that dress and her in it makes me laugh every time.

4. One thing I’ve noticed is when you spend a significant amount of time research a certain subject, one day you realize that your knowledge has become a resource in itself — you know that x and y happened, but you’re able to make connections between all the various sources. I imagine you as this treasure trove of knowledge retained from your work. Can you talk a bit about your view of the Regency period and how it’s changed (or not) over time?

I recently helped with Noel Ivor Hume’s biography of Belzoni as a literary researcher. This is when I realized that there was a connection between the actual facts of the history of that time and that literature could provide extra facts and clues to help illuminate the history and in this case it actually brought a clearer picture of Belzoni’s wife Sarah through Lady Morgan’s writings (both fiction and non-fiction) and even through the fashions of the day. There was actually a fashion plate in a Lady’s Monthly Museum showing the Belzoni fabric that was fashionable. Sometimes you go on one quest and end up somewhere you really didn’t expect to go and learning about someone that had basically been pretty much overshadowed by her husband.

I’ve learned a lot since I started with Regency Library not only about the facts of the history of that time but also a lot about the human side of the people who lived at that time. My view of it is that it’s not too different than our own when it comes to the human nature and foibles.

5. Do you read fiction? What kind?
I read historical romance—just about any time period but love Regencies and Westerns. I also read classics like the Bronte’s. I like mysteries also. My favorites are Ann Perry’s Monk series. If a book is good or sounds good from the back cover I’ll try it out. We do have a used book store here and that’s the only place I can find the old gothics so I buy some Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney when they have them—which is rarer and rarer now.

6. If you won a bazillion dollars, I know you’d buy me a fancy house, but what’s the second thing you’d buy?

A full, complete set of Ackermann’s Repository. Saw one at ABE for a mere 27,000! Was in great condition though.

7. Favorite Regency outfit?

Susan's Favorite Outfit

Susan’s Favorite Outfit

I like that hat.

8. You have an email-based group called Regency Library. Can you tell us a little bit about about what it is?

The Regency Library distributes both primary and secondary research documents weekly to subscribers. The documents range from late 18th century to 1830 and come from a wide variety of resources. I try to select documents that shed light on the manners and customs, basically the everyday life of the people who lived during this time period. I try to include fashion plates from one of the periodicals La Belle Assemblee, Ackermann’s, Ladies Monthly Museum and Lady’s Magazine. When I go looking for something to include in the week’s distribution I try to find something that is interesting, informative and sometimes funny. I lately came upon a book (found it through a review in one of the above mentioned periodicals) that was published in 1821 and was used for evening entertainments at home. It got a particularly bad review because the forfeit for losing some (actually more than one) of the games included too much kissing! I had to have a copy of this book and found one through ABE Books and bought it. It will be serialized this year on the list. Subscribers receive approximately 30 or 40 documents a month and we do serialize entire books/periodicals so it’s a good way for people to have searchable copies of materials without having to pay the price for owning the entire book.

9. What do you have planned for the Regency Library over the next few months?

I’m going to serialize that game book. We’ll also continue with one of my favorite research projects which are travel accounts of foreigners to England during the time period. I’m also delving into accounts of English travelers to the US during the time period because they tend to compare manners and customs in England with American manners. I want to begin making a list of what I intend to distribute during the month and send it to all subscribers with some alternative documents listed, and if they want to opt out of some of the regular things, they can substitute from the alternatives or put in an individual request. I want to tailor the list as much as humanly possible to the subscriber’s needs. I announced this to the list and the only exception would be if a request is really off the wall and I couldn’t fill the request. I’ll try to look for what is requested but if I can’t find it then it would not be done. In all the years of doing this there have been only two instances where I could not find an answer for a question either because the records had been destroyed or were in private hands in England.  I’m also going to distribute tips for doing research—like reading the reviews in some periodicals to find some real gems. Last but not least, I want to begin distributing a puzzle game weekly—crosswords, riddles, etc. that center around the Regency time period.

The Contest – Rules and Such

Void where prohibited. Must be 18 to enter. No purchase necessary. Winner will be chosen at random. Multiple comments do not increase your odds of winning. Odds of winning depend on the number of entrants and your ability to follow the rules.

To enter, leave a comment to this post by midnight Pacific March 29, 2013.

Happy Tuesday, everyone!  What are you doing this week??  I got my latest Harlequin Regency romance turned in (yay!!) and am getting caught up on a few things before diving into the next Elizabethan mystery.  Things like grocery shopping and running the vacuum cleaner, which always fall by the wayside when a deadline looms.  Among my projects–a fun round-robin story my local RWA chapter is doing with a St. Patrick’s Day theme!  Stay tuned for more info on that….

I am also announcing a winner!  The winner of a copy of A Stranger at Castonbury is…Emily!  Congrats!  Email me your info at amccabe7551 AT yahoo.com….

LadyAndMonstersCoverIn between taking a few naps and watching some DVDs that have piled up while I was working on the book (including all of season one of Girls, I have also been dreaming of spring.  Like many places, winter has been dismal here, with more gray skies and snow and freezing rain than usual.  (I also just read The Lady and Her Monsters, about Mary Shelley and the writing of Frankenstein, which included some depressing details of 1816’s Year Without a Summer.  It hasn’t been that bad here, but still…).  So I’ve been perusing garden catalogs and spring fashion websites (already bought some shorts at J Crew!).

 

 

If I was in the Regency this is the outfit I would be wanting to wear now (from my Regency Pinterest page!):

RegencyYellowDress RegencyParasol RegencyBonnet

And we could go out for a nice drive on a sunny afternoon:

RegencyPhaeton

What are you looking forward to this spring???

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