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Category: Gail Eastwood

I am very excited to announce that the fourth book in my Tales of Little Macclow series, His Lady to Love, releases this coming Sunday, September 15th! After the year+ long detour I took to co-author Writing Regency England, I’m so happy to be back to my little Derbyshire village and the fiction stories of my heart.

Here’s the link (it’s also going to be in KU): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DDRKCFH3

Book cover for Gail's new release His Lady to LoveThe heroine of His Lady to Love, Ailis Murray (known to her intimate friends as “Lissie”), is a young Scottish widow. Many of the widowed heroines we meet in romance fiction have not enjoyed a happy first marriage. I think the reason is simply that the heroine’s lack of previous emotional engagement makes the new romance easier to have the “first love” depth and intensity readers enjoy. But I always like a challenge and frequently prefer to swim against the current. What if our heroine doesn’t fit that mold?

Lissie loved her first husband deeply and after a year is still grappling to some extent with her grief. She is very resistant to falling in love again. She believes that she has “had her one great love” and isn’t willing to settle for a less satisfying relationship. She doesn’t want to wed again. (Naturally I hope the reader will be rooting for her to be proven wrong!) But the emotional risk is not her only reason for not wanting another marriage.

To understand the potential benefits of widowhood in the Regency, we need to take a quick look at what it meant for women to be married.

Black & white woodcut engraving of a Regency couple. She is seated, wiht one hand on her breast, looking excoted, while he kneels in front of her and is kissing her hand. Very romantic!

Regency lovers, woodcut 1815

Marriage in Georgian and Regency society was considered the ultimate point of womanhood. Procreation was necessary for the continuation of society. In the upper classes, children meant maintaining the structure of the ruling strata of society, while in the lower classes, they meant maintaining the supply of workers in the laboring strata. But also, in these periods, the alternatives for women were few. Being married meant survival and sustenance—being protected and provided for by a man.

I think it is very hard for us in this modern age to fully grasp how different things were for women back then in an entirely male-dominated world! The trade-off for the life-long sustenance and (assumed) safety of marriage was that wives had no rights of their own. Legally, marriage was seen as unifying the couple into a single entity. Once married, everything a woman owned, earned, or was given belonged to her husband (unless protected in some way, such as a trust). A wife was legally dependent on her husband for everything, seen as essentially a sub-unit of the man she is attached to.

Obviously, there were women who defied the system, but they were the rare cases. And if widows hadn’t adequate means of support from some source after their husbands died, marrying again was the necessary alternative to suffering in severe poverty. But widows who had an income source, having fulfilled society’s expectations by marrying, could enjoy a freedom that no wives, spinsters, or younger unwed misses were granted. For widows, marrying again meant giving up their freedom and submitting themselves back into the legal invisibility of being a wife.

Lissie is a wealthy widow. Her late husband, who owned multiple properties including estates, undeveloped land, shipping interests, and even a woolen mill, left everything to her. And immediately, despite her mourning, suitors flocked to her. The wealth attracted them but also society assumed a woman had not the skill or intelligence needed to manage such assets. Except Lissie has already been managing all of it, for her husband was ill the last two years of their marriage and trained her in the job.

If she marries, all of her husband’s legacy goes to her new husband. Lissie has dreams and ambitions of her own, ones she expects a husband would not support. So she has practical as well as emotional reasons for resisting our lovely story hero.

I hope you’ll want to see how this romance works out! Our hero has dreams of his own and marriage is not a good fit in his immediate future, although this is a romance where he falls first. How does Scottish Lissie come to be in the English village of Little Macclow, anyway? And how does our hero entice her away from the solitary existence she seeks to get her involved with the affairs of the village?

The books in my series follow a continuing chronology and characters from the earlier books pop up again in later ones, but each book is written to stand alone, so you don’t need to have read the earlier ones to enjoy His Lady to Love even though it is Book #4. I am releasing it in Kindle Unlimited (temporarily). This release is the first time I’ve done that for any of my books, so if you’ve never read one and want to give my work a try, this is a good opportunity! I hope you will.

Do you have any favorite stories with widowed heroines? Did they have good first marriages? Or after bad ones, are they either hoping for a better second chance or soured on the idea of marriage entirely? Have you had experience with any of these outcomes yourself?

 

If you follow this blog at all, you know I fall down all kinds of rabbit holes and this was a very interesting one. Technically, I was researching how letters were addressed before there were postal codes or even house numbers, but when I went to the website of the British Postal Museum, first there was a sidebar about postmen’s uniforms (exhibit “Dressed to Deliver” runs to Sept 24). I love anything about historical clothing, so could not resist that! Included was an example of one worn by a Thames River Postman. A what? I could not pass up investigating, and stumbled into what I think is a really fascinating Regency-related story!

The River Thames in London was a huge center of shipping activity during the Regency. The Pool of London was the area below London Bridge where thousands of huge ships moored and thousands more small vessels tended to them, while intermixed with them were houseboats and many other smaller crafts. Regina Walker has a great blogpost about that: https://reganromancereview.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-port-of-london-in-18th-century.html

The Pool of London by John Wilson Carmichael

In 1800, an enterprising Thames Waterman (guild member of the Waterman and Lightman Company) named William Simpson petitioned the Post Office to create the position of River Postman to service the ships. Another man had proposed such a service in the 1790’s but had been turned down. The need was significant and Simpson obtained signatures from merchants, captains, and ship owners to support his request. The duties were to “deliver and collect letters from the various vessels on the river, deliver goods and occasionally ferry people.”

The work was hazardous. As explained on the Postal Museum blog, “All year round they had to manage the tide, winds, cold and fog – not to mention the ships and barges….” All of which meant the job required a high level of skill. Simpson’s assistant drowned while on the job in 1803. Simpson himself died in 1806 from injuries he sustained on a ship while making a delivery.

A later River Postman wrote in 1821: “I must inform you of the accident that happened to the Post Boat on Monday through the violence of the wind. I was delivering a letter on board the Ship Albion near the Tower, when a barge came down and sunk the boat and with great difficulty, I saved my life.”

“Pool of London” by Thomas Luny (1801-1810)

When Simpson died, his widow petitioned the Post Office to put their sixteen-year-old son in his father’s position. He was too young, but as he had already been helping his father with the job, the Post Office decided to allow it.

William (Junior) worked at it for four years without incident. But when the young man was 20 years old for some reason he succumbed to the temptation that access to all this mail provided and stole some mail and a £20 note and fled, taking “a Hackney Coach about 10 o’Clock last night from Brick Fields, Dock Head.” Scandal!!

“Pool of London, Below London Bridge” by Samuel Atkins (1790) at the Courtauld Gallery, London

A reward of £100 was issued, payable on conviction, to anyone who apprehended him. William Junior was caught eventually at the Swan public house, Forest Row, East Grinstead, East Sussex, and sat in London’s Newgate Prison until the time of his trial. In October of 1810 he was convicted and sentenced to hang, although due to his age his sentence was reduced to transportation to Australia to labor there for life.

The scandal did not end of the Thames River Postal Delivery Service, however. Young William’s assistant, Samuel Evans, took over the position and served faithfully until 1832 (making him the one whose report I quoted above). When he retired, his son took it on. That was the start of a family dynasty that lasted until the River Postal Service ended in 1952, served by six successive members of the Evans family.

Did you know about this specialized postal service that began during the extended Regency?

“Dropping the ball” in the modern sports-inspired idiom means failing to carry through on some task or responsibility, which seems appropriate given my failure to post this article sooner. I fully intended to post it at the beginning of the month, but life got in the way (my husband got a pacemaker implant and needless to say my attention was mostly on him!). But if your January has sped by as fast as mine, it should not seem long since New Year’s Day, LOL!

I bring up ball-dropping because on New Year’s Eve it has become a “time-honored” custom (since 1907) to drop a giant electronic time-ball from a tower in Times Square, NYC, to welcome in the new year. But did you know that the “ball drop” tradition ties back to maritime England in 1818? Yes, solidly within the Regency period.

Wikipedia says the ancient Greeks used a ball drop to help track time, but the first “modern” time ball was created and installed in Portsmouth, England. Here’s a quote from the article:

“The first modern time ball was erected at Portsmouth, England, in 1829 by its inventor Robert Wauchope, a captain in the Royal Navy.”
The BBC News website has an article referencing Wauchope with interesting details (would you expect me not to follow this rabbit hole?). According to that article, Wauchope’s first idea was a system of flags that would be visible at sea to help mariners calculate their position by knowing the accurate time.  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-humber-58559814

He first began soliciting interest in his “modernized” idea in 1818. His proposal, Plan for ascertaining the rates of chronometers by signal, described the time-ball, a large hollow metal sphere rigged on a pole and attached to a mechanism so that it might be dropped at an exact time each day.  The ball installed in Portsmouth was the first test of his idea.

Wikipedia says: “Others followed in the major ports of the United Kingdom (including Liverpool), and around the maritime world.” The one on the Nelson Tower in Edinburgh is shown below.

A round stone tower of five stories with a cross-shaped support pole on the roof with a gold time ball resting at its base. The Nelson Tower in Edinbourgh

“One was installed in 1833 at the [Greenwich Observatory] in London by the Astronomer Royal, John Pond, originally to enable tall ships in the Thames to set their marine chronometers, and the time ball has dropped at 1 p.m. every day since then.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Observatory,_Greenwich)

Semi-octagonal brick tower at the Greenwich Observatory with a small white wooden clock tower above at the right side, surmounted by a cross-shaped pole with a large gold ball at the base, resting at the roofline.

Except in windy weather, according to a source in the BBC article. The pole in Greenwich is relatively weak and strong wind is a hazard. In 1853, the Greenwich pole broke and the huge ball crashed to the ground! (In this photo it looks to me as though the pole may have since been reinforced!)

When American and French ambassadors visited England, Wauchope also submitted his idea to them. The United States Naval Observatory was established in Washington, D.C., and the first American time ball went into service there in 1845.

Wikipedia describes the process: “Time balls were usually dropped at 1 p.m. (although in the United States they were dropped at noon). They were raised half way about 5 minutes earlier to alert the ships, then with 2–3 minutes to go they were raised the whole way. The time was recorded when the ball began descending, not when it reached the bottom. With the commencement of radio time signals (in Britain from 1924), time balls gradually became obsolete and many were demolished in the 1920s.”

New York City’s contemporary version of the time-ball has been used since 31 December 1907 at Times Square as part of its New Year’s Eve celebrations. Quoting Wikipedia again, “At 11:59 p.m., a lit ball is lowered down a pole on the roof of One Times Square over the course of the sixty seconds ending at midnight. The spectacle was inspired by an organizer having seen the time ball on the Western Union Building in operation.”

The article also says only 60 of these time balls still remain in locations around the world –I found it interesting that eight are in the United Kingdom, seven are in Australia, including one at the Sydney Observatory (shown below), three are in the United Sates and three in New Zealand.

Belated wishes for a Happy New Year, everyone!

The Sydney Observatory is a large granite stone building with a central tower of four stories. Affixed to the roof of the tower is the typical cross-shaped support pole with a large golden ball resting at its base.

P.S. A shorter version of this article was posted on Facebook, in the readers’ group “Regency Kisses: Lady Catherine’s Salon.” I’ve mentioned the group here before –it is focused on “sweet/low heat” Regency romances and authors, so if you are on FB and read all types of Regencies, you might like to take a look. It is a great place to discover new authors to try, while waiting for the next books to release from your “Risky Regency” writers here!

Do errors or modern phrases bump you out of a historical story you were enjoying? Or as an author, do you find that despite your best efforts those kinds of errors creep in when you’re not paying attention? Well, if so, here’s good news: Writing Regency England has released! It is the culmination of two years of meticulous hard effort honing and focusing, choosing what to include (the topic could be an encyclopedia unto itself, of course!), writing, re-writing, fact-checking, digging for illustrations–all the work.

Picture of the book, Writing Regency England, shown at an angle so the front cover and the spine are both visible. Co-author Jayne Davis and I both love our genre, and we hope this book may serve everyone with any interest in the Regency time and world. We both believe if you’re going to go to the trouble to set a story in a historical time period, creating an authentic sense of that time and world strengthens the story and the experience the reader will gain from reading it. Mistakes can lead to bad reviews, disappointed readers, and an overall bad rep for the genre! WRE is our effort to help fellow authors avoid that fate!

Available in print only, the book offers sixteen chapters of wisdom and information about the Regency time period focused on the “most commonly seen” errors that authors make. Designed as a guide, not a list of complaints, the book covers a wide range, from developing an ear for period appropriate language, avoiding modernisms and Americanisms, to simple facts about the landscapes, flora and fauna of England (no chipmunks! no skunks!), the correct use of titles for characters in the nobility (and who is or isn’t a peer), wisdom about naming your characters plus much more. If you write Regency-set fiction or even just enjoy reading about the period, this is a new resource with a unique slant that you might find invaluable.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/191379010X

Reviewers are giving it 5 stars and saying:

“The authors of Writing Regency England: A Resource for Authors have nailed all the things I grit my teeth over when reading Regency fiction: language that is inappropriate to the period, foods that were not eaten, incorrect use of titles, ignorance of mores and early 19th century life in general. This book covers everything: setting, flora and fauna, building styles, transportation, Great Britain’s old, confusing monetary units (shillings, pence, etc.), professions, the army and navy, and much, much more. I’ve done research for my own books since 2016 and am amazed at the scope of Writing Regency England. I wish I’d had a copy then.”

“If you’ve ever wondered whether what you were reading was accurate or not, then this is the book to tell you. …whether you’re an author or a reader, this book is highly recommended.”

“Thank you to Jayne Davis and Gail Eastwood for putting their heads together to write ‘Writing Regency England’. I do not know how much time I spend going down rabbit holes when I research the period, especially when I am looking for something specific. This book is a great resource for both writers and readers of the period who care about historical accuracy.”

“I’m impressed with the quality of the information and how easy it is to read the book. I’d recommend it highly to historical literature fans, readers and authors alike.”

Every author’s approach to authenticity is as unique as their writing style and voice, but there seemed to be a need for Writing Regency England. Others who write in the same period could certainly have done this book, but Jayne and I were the ones who were crazy enough to tackle it!

Do you think accuracy matters in historical fiction? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Did you know the first “photograph” was made during the late “extended” Regency period? Its inventor, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, is the second of my “real Regency heroes” to hail from France rather than England. My justification is that scientists who studied and experimented with technological advances at this time worked and shared on both sides of the channel.

 

Niépce developed other innovations as well, but according to correspondence with his brother, he captured the first permanent live camera image in 1824. This first effort was lost in further experimentation. But in 1826, Niépce created the same image again—a view out of the window from his studio—and this image still survives today, the world’s first (if rather indistinct) photograph. 

 

Buckle in for a story that shows how luck and timing and good PR, or the lack of them, make a huge difference in scientific success.

Born in 1765, Niépce was the second son of a wealthy lawyer. He and his older brother Claude excelled in studying science and after graduating Niépce became a professor at the Catholic Oratory college where he studied in Angers. The order’s colleges were shut down in 1792 by the Legislative Assembly of France’s New Republic, and some teachers became active supporters of the revolution. Niépce briefly joined the army under Napoleon and served as a staff officer in Italy and Sardinia until ill-health forced him to resign and accept a position as the Administrator of the district of Nice. He also married at this time.

 In 1795 at the age of 30, Niépce left that position in order to pursue his scientific interests, partnered with his brother Claude. They researched ideas for an internal combustion engine, living in Nice until they returned to their family estate in Chalon in 1801. Reunited with other family members, they lived there as gentlemen farmers while exploring a variety of scientific interests. In 1806 they presented a paper to the Institute National de Science, the French National Commission of the Academy of Science, which explained the workings of their engine, which they called a Pyréolophore.

A color cut-away diagram showing the internal combustion engine invented by Niepce and his brother.

Diagram of the first internal combustion engine, the Pyreolophore, of 1806. (public domain)

In 1807 they built a working version of their engine and demonstrated its success by powering a boat up the River Saone. They received a ten-year patent from Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

Unfortunately, in the same year Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz also built an internal combustion engine. The de Rivaz engine was hydrogen-powered, whereas the Niépce engine ran on various experimental fuels such as mixtures of Lycopodium powder (the spores of clubmoss) and coal dust, or resin, all of which proved expensive.

France under Napoleon was at war for nearly all of the years of the Niépce patent. During those years, the brothers also developed a hydraulic pumping machine (but too late to obtain the government contract they aimed for) and the first fuel injection engine. But they were not able to attract sufficient investments or subsidies for their Pyreolophore, so their engine patent expired in 1817.

Unwilling to release the project, brother Claude traveled to England and settled at Kew. He obtained a patent consent from the British Crown in December of 1817, but for the next ten years he pursued many ill-advised and unsound schemes to promote the engine. He was said to have “developed delirium” (probably some form of dementia) and squandered most of the family fortune.

Meanwhile, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce had already turned to new interests, among them building a velocipede (early bicycle) that he rode around Chalon. Starting around 1816, another interest was combining the process of lithography, invented in 1798, with the idea of capturing photographic images using a camera obscura. Today the process he invented is known as photo-lithography.

The problem with camera obscura images, long used as an aid to artists, was that no one had found a way to capture them in a permanent form other than drawing them. Dissatisfied with the results obtained with silver oxide-coated paper, Niépce turned to bitumen, used on the copper plates for making engravings. He developed a process he called heliography, which allowed him to copy existing engravings by laying them in the sun on a lithographic stone or a sheet of metal or glass that had been thinly coated with bitumen dissolved in lavender oil, leaving a reproducible impression on the plate.

Attempting to capture a camera image on such a plate was not a huge leap. Niépce set up a camera obscura in the window of his studio and in his first try, projected the image onto bitumen-coated stone. His second version was projected onto bitumen-coated pewter, and that is the image that survives to this day. At one time the exposure time was thought to have been eight hours but further recent research has shown in fact the exposure took several days, which is why the sunlight in the image does not come from only one direction!

Enhanced image of the buildings, light and shadows captured in Niepce’s original photograph.

Niépce traveled to England to see his seriously-ill brother late in 1826. While he was at Kew, he met botanical illustrator Francis Bauer and showed him the heliography prints and the photograph. Bauer encouraged him to share his discoveries with the Royal Society. However, the paper Niépce presented to the Society was rejected because he was too reluctant to divulge the details of his work.

Niépce left his samples and his paper with Bauer and returned to France, where he partnered in 1829 with Louis Daugerre, who was also investigating ways to capture camera images. But Niépce died suddenly of a stroke in 1833, so impoverished that the French government paid for his burial. When Daugerre presented his own process, the “daugerreotype” to the world in 1839, he claimed the recognition as the inventor of photography, over the protests of Niépce’s son. Bauer managed to have Niépce’s work exhibited at the Royal Society, but nonetheless Niépce was mostly forgotten until the modern age.

In 1952, a pair of photography historians, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, managed to track down what had become of Niépce’s photograph and acquired it. Their collection was purchased in 1963 by the University of Texas. Niépce’s reputation has finally been restored, and his original first photograph can be seen today on display at the university’s Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. Did you have any idea that photography had such an early beginning?

(all images used with this post are public domain)

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