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Category: Gail Eastwood

Wow, here it is the beginning of December –is anyone else wondering where November went? Sometimes, as the days fly by, I wonder if time seemed to go by this fast to people who lived during the Regency –or pick any given historical time period. With all our modern time-saving conveniences, how is it that we seem to live at a frenetic pace? (I know this isn’t only me!!) Is it because we try to cram more activity into our days, simply because we can? Has time actually sped up (a theory I read somewhere…)?? What do you think?

The reason I am ruminating on all of this today is because, even though I knew today was my day to blog here, I never did have time this week to choose a topic or prepare a post. So that’s the apology –I’m sorry I don’t have an actual post for today!! I did consider asking among my sister Riskies if anyone wanted to swap dates, but I never even got a chance to send out that appeal. This is the first time I’ve ever just completely missed posting here.

The promise is that in January I should have some real news to share! I’m looking forward to that. In the meantime, I want to wish all of you the most wonderful holidays –whatever you celebrate. It’s the season of light and love, that we should try to hold in our hearts and share with each other all year long. I think our world needs it more than ever!!!

In place of my post, here are two pictures of what has eaten up my extra time this week –things I’ve made for my church bazaar which is tomorrow. I am the coordinator for vendors and have been fielding phone calls and emails from them all week, while measuring and re-measuring the church hall and tweaking the floor lay-out to make sure there’s room for everyone besides all the tables full of church-made items.  We set up today, so we’ll see! In the meantime, sending you love and best wishes. And an early “Happy New Year”!!

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house-maid-by-william-pyneDo you ever catch yourself wishing you had a cook and a housekeeper? How about a lady’s maid to do your hair, or a footman you could send to the store? My schedule imploded this week thanks to a big surprise project at work, and once again I caught myself wishing for that kind of extra help.

My family has already pointed out to me that clones wouldn’t do. They would be just like me, and therefore likely to enthusiastically embrace new projects, rather than merely help complete the existing ones, so they would multiply the problem rather than solve it. (sigh)

If you could have whatever servants you wanted, which ones would you choose? Our modern conveniences have made some servant jobs obsolete –scullery maid, for instance. In a large Regency household, the scullery maid washed all the dishes, pots, and pans, not only for the family, but also those used by the other servants, all of whom outranked her. Today the dishwashing machine handles most of that.

I don’t think I need a butler, either, even though in the Regency the butler might reign supreme over all the other servants in a household where there wasn’t a steward over him. The butler managed the wine cellar, looked after the good silver cutlery and plate, and supervised all the male servants in the household under him, especially the footmen who served the family and guests at dinner. He sorted the mail (well, on second thought, that still might be useful to me), and welcomed or turned away the visitors who came to call. (We have few visitors. Could a butler manage my social media?)

The housekeeper was, in many households, moreland_henry_robert_500_the_laundry_maid_ironing_1785of nearly equal rank with the butler, and often was trusted with keeping accounts and other management duties, which might have been shared with him. It was her job to supervise all the female servants under her, which would have included all the different types of maids (chamber maids, house maids, laundry maids) and sometimes, the cook, although male cooks were preferred in the wealthiest households, and in many homes the cook and housekeeper were equals.

A housekeeper and a couple of maids would be very welcome in my house –for paying the bills, keeping track of supplies, tending to my clothes, and getting rid of the unwanted stuff that accumulates around here! Most especially, for CLEANING. Everything! And a cook would be worth her weight in gold in my household.

Footmen. Well, who wouldn’t want a couple of those? In the Regency, footmen seeking positions often included their height as part of their qualifications. It seems that you wanted your footmen to come in matched sets, and the more handsome, the better! Experience, reliability and character were not enough. Footmen were handy because they could accompany you on errands and carry your packages, open doors, or if visiting, they would go to the door and present or leave your card. They could assist you in and out of you high carriage if you actually needed to get out. They waited on table at meals, and might be charged with answering the door if the butler was busy with other tasks. These days? I would love to send my footman to run my errands –think of all the time that would save!!

I admit I don’t have need for a coachman or a groom, thank you, but a gardener would be heavenly! For a place that has no lawn, our property needs an awful lot of pruning, weeding, and other kinds of yard care.

exhausted-servantOf course, having servants meant having enough of the ready to cover the cost. During the Regency, there was a tax to be paid on male servants in addition to their wages, their room and board, and the additional expense of clothing them and providing for incidentals. (A candle to light their room at night? Extravagant!) That was one reason the more modest households often employed only female servants. Females were also paid lower wages, even for similar work. (Hmm, some things take a long time to change.) Servants also had to be paid “board wages” if the employer’s family was not in residence for any length of time.

Even other people’s servants cost you money in the Regency, for tips (called vails) were expected, especially if you were visiting. Do you remember to leave a tip for your chamber maid when you stay at a hotel? Well, the same was expected then when you stayed at someone’s country house, and not only for the maid who tended your room, but any other servant who gave you service, whether it was the butler, the groom, or the host’s valet on loan to help your husband with his attire. (A valet today would probably refuse to work with my husband’s wardrobe!) These costs had to be considered before accepting just any invitation.

Employers not only had to follow the terms of the employment contracts, but they had to observe the strict social pecking order among the servants themselves. Heaven forbid if you asked one servant to perform a task that was the duty of another!

If you’re interested in more information about types of servants, wages paid, and more, the blogpost at: https://countryhousereader.wordpress.com/2013/12/19/the-servant-hierarchy/ has some of that information and a good bibliography at the end of it. Another good article is at: http://rth.org.uk/regency-period/family-life/servants. Authors Donna Hatch and Geri Walton, among others, have done more in-depth articles on this and related topics. Thanks to my crazy week (and lack of servants), this had to be a quick one!!

Having some live-in “help” seems like such a great idea, until you begin to weigh the complications of it. I have a feeling the maids would take one look at my house and run away screaming. (or I would need a bunch of them!!)

pearline-soap-ad-1890-granger-revisedMaybe I’m okay just muddling through on my own, thank you –unless a big enough chunk of cash comes along with the fantasy servants I’m wishing for!

How would you have fared in the Regency world having servants? Which ones would you still wish you could have today?

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ge-tmm-banner-750x1125 Happy 2017! I had hoped to give you a date for the re-release of The Magnificent Marquess, but I am finishing up my revisions and still aiming for the end of this month or early February. I just can’t sit on my new cover any longer –take a look!! (click on images to see them bigger)

The hero in this book has lived in India for most of his life, and besides some loyal Indian servants who chose to come with him to London, he also has brought his pet cheetah, Ranee. She is the cause of some trouble right at the beginning of the story. And while you might not think the topic of cheetahs is very connected to the Regency, let me show you how it is!

When this story was first published by Signet back in 1998, some readers didn’t realize that in the early 19th century there were still (or ever had been) Asian cheetahs in India. They are gone from India (the cheetahs, not the readers) and are very nearly extinct now even in the Middle East, where they used to roam freely. I was very distressed recently to read that cheetahs of every kind are now considered endangered. But in 1816, that was not the case.

In India, cheetahs were often trained for hunting. They are, after all, the fastest animal on the planet. It almost seems like cheating!! cheetahs-2Just because the British were in India where the climate was quite unlike that at home doesn’t mean they were about to give up their treasured leisure pursuits. But not all cheetahs were suited to it, and that is the case with Ranee, who is much happier as a pampered companion.

Of course, Ranee is fictional, and I went with my belief in “what could have been” when I wrote this story. Have you ever read or written something in a story that seems reasonable based on research, even though you couldn’t document that anyone ever did it? Isn’t it exciting when later you stumble across information that supports it? It’s so much easier to do research now!

The Internet was just blossoming back when I wrote the original version of this book. At that time I did not find any actual cases of cheetahs being brought to London. But do you know who had one? George III! And the artist George Stubbs took time off from painting horses long enough to paint a picture of it. Here it is:

stubbs-painting-of-george-iiis-cheetahIt breaks my heart that the king’s cheetah eventually ended up in the zoo at the Tower of London, such a sad fate for a magnificent animal born to run. How long it survived there I have not been able to find out. Even though this happened some 60 years before my story takes place, pre-Regency, the king and many other people from that time were still alive during the Regency and might have remembered poor Sultan, or at least saw Stubbs’s painting exhibited at the Royal Academy.

I still haven’t been able to access much information about Sultan or even the later history of the Stubbs painting, and now I would love to know more. If you’ve ever run across this or know of an accessible source, please share!

In the meantime, please let me know in the comments what you think of my new cover? I always wished Signet had included Ranee in the original one. I hope by next month I’ll be letting you know the new version of the book, revised and expanded, is out and available!! Happy New Year, everyone!    cheetah_trainer-croppedP.S. If you are interested in learning more about cheetahs, there’s a fascinating blog that follows the story of one rescued cheetah from cub-dom to adulthood (click on any of the cheetah pix on the site’s homepage, or go here for a single post:  http://sirikoi.blogspot.com/2013/09/sheba.html   or here for a nice narrative version of Sheba’s story: http://www.care2.com/causes/cheetah-raised-by-humans-who-loved-her-enough-to-set-her-free.html  Also here’s a link to the recent information about how endangered these beautiful cats have become today (with some more lovely photos): http://www.care2.com/causes/worlds-fastest-land-animal-is-now-racing-extinction.html

 

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Money is not an acceptable topic of conversation among the gently-bred, so I beg forgiveness for breaking the taboo. We people our books with wealthy, dashing characters who are the equivalents of today’s super rich –dukes and earls instead of billionaire corporate tycoons –but haven’t you ever wondered, how rich was “rich” in our period? (Alas, I am STILL working on my revisions of The Magnificent Marquess, so no announcement yet that it is up and available! But very soon….)

An income of £10,000 was considered a threshold to “live the good life” among the Beau Monde, with a regular social life in London as well as the country. This is the income Jane Austen gives Darcy. How far beyond that level of wealth could we expect to find in Regency society? A modest estate in Ireland was said to have paid £1,200 a year, enough to live on “comfortably”. Yet in 1815, just the cost of maintaining a stable for hunting could equal that amount. Jane Austen’s Bennett family lived on an entailed estate that paid £2,000 a year.

 Land was the greatest measure of wealth, and in the Regency period, most of the usable land was tied up in great estates held by the peerage and the landed gentry, so acquiring new land ownership was difficult to accomplish. Land provided the income, through the rents and profit-shares from tenant farmers. At least 10,000 acres were generally needed to yield the requisite £10,000 of income.

A quick survey of the holdings of modern-day descendants of peers from our period yields some insight. The family seat of the Earls of Pembroke (current one is the17th), for example, is Wilton House outside of Salisbury, with 16,000 acres. The Earl of Bathurst’s seat at Cirencester Park is 15,000 acres. Those are single holdings. The current Duke of Devonshire owns 70,000 acres in three counties, the 175-room Chatsworth, and a 200-room castle in Eire that the family rents out. The Duke of Argyll has 81,000 acres. The rents from owning land in London also provided a source of great wealth for some. The Portman riches stem from 100 acres of London real estate held since 1553.

What were other sources of wealth? Government or court appointments with a nice yearly stipend could supplement a rent-based income quite handsomely. There was no investing in a stock market as we know it today, but Miss Crawley in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, has £70,000 in the 5% funds, which were securities in the national debt (kind of like U.S. Treasury Bonds). This would have given her a yearly income of £3,500. Other investments, for the less well-to-do, were the consols, which paid 3% and were a set of annuities that had been consolidated into one fund. Brummel was said to have made £30,000/year with successful betting on horse races, until his luck turned against him.

How much was a pound worth? Sources vary on this, and equivalents are hard to fix, since modern life is so very different in most ways. How do you compare the cost-of-living? No one is buying carriages these days, and we aren’t using candles to light our homes. I have notes that say a Regency era pound was worth about $50 in 1990’s dollars, but I have also seen a valuation of $33 given for 1988 dollars, and more than twice as much elsewhere! If anyone has more recent figures, or different info, please share? If you use the $50 value, Darcy’s annual income was $500,000 –a handsome sum, to be sure, but far from princely. A man who had an income of £30,000, however, which many of the greater peerage did, had 1.5 million dollars coming in. Hm, maybe now in 2017, the $100= pound valuation does begin to look appropriate? Inflation!!

Taxes were perhaps the heaviest burden on the English populace. Such a vast array of daily necessities and features of good living were taxed, the ability to have or use them was itself a fine mark of one’s status. In The Magnificent Marquess, my heroine is impressed when she sees that Lord Milbourne, my hero, is extravagantly burning candles in his music room –during the day!! Everything from candles to soap was subject to taxation, including windows and servants. Male servants were subject to a higher tax than females. Employers paid a guinea per male servant (21 shillings, or £1.1), a tax instituted in 1777 and not lifted until 1937.

Servants were a necessity for the upper classes. Since a large country estate would include a sizeable house, plus park, gardens, stables, paddocks, and a home farm in addition to all the tenant farms, the army of servants required could be large. Blenheim was said to have employed 180 servants, including both indoor and outdoor. Lord Fitzwilliam employed 70 servants to keep Wentworth Woodhouse running. In the 18th century the “average” number of servants to keep a large country house running was 40.

The wealthiest landowners might own several estates in multiple counties, and while house servants might travel with them from site to site, the servants tending to the physical aspects of each estate stayed there to tend to their continuing duties, requiring a separate set of such workers for each estate. This would include stewards, gamekeepers, gardeners, parkkeepers, dairymaids, stablehands, and a minimal house staff, etc.

The cost of living fashionably in London varied, of course. The Duke of Northumberland might spend £10,000 to run his London establishment in 1810, but if you were of more modest means, like the Bennetts, the average cost of running a London townhouse would be about your entire income for the year, so you would rent one, and only when necessary.

The cost of maintaining a London house did not include such things as a season subscription to a box at the Royal Opera House, which could cost as much as £2,500 (I assume depending on the box location). A 3 month subscription to Almack’s for the weekly Wednesday night dinners with supper “only” cost 10 guineas, or £10.10, but was worth a great deal more in terms of social consequence!

That £10 doesn’t sound like much, but consider that a governess might only be paid about £12 per year (although she also received room and board); a Private in the military might only earn £7.7 per year after deductions for food and some other expenses. Compare the Bennett’s income to that of an average clergyman, who might be paid £150/year, or less. Curates might earn £50/year if they were fortunate. Compare that to Byron’s rent for his London lodgings, at 4 guineas per week, or about £230 a year.

Other trappings of wealth were also dear. A carriage could cost between 45 and 100 guineas ($2,475-$5,500 @ $50=pound), depending on the size and style; a pair of horses to pull that carriage could cost another 50-65 guineas. (Then you might also need a coachman to drive it.)   Renovations to a London house or country seat could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds: the Londonderrys spent £200,000 on Holdernesse House, and the Lambs spent £100,000 on Melbourne Park. Lavish entertaining was expected of the rich. In 1799 the Duke of Rutland turned 21 and spent £5,000 for food and entertainment for a 3-day celebration at Belvoir Castle.

If you’d like to read more, here are some additional sources for information of this sort:

http://web.stanford.edu/~steener/su02/english132/conversions.htm  (using the 1988 valuation, offers tables to compare Jane Austen characters’ incomes and wealth, by books, also offers a list of typical Victorian incomes.

https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/tag/cost-of-living-in-regency-england/ (excellent article focused on Sense & Sensibility, but also including links to additional articles)

http://haleywhitehall.com/wealth-position-regency-england/  (nice article contrasting Darcy and Bingley to explain their respective social status)

How rich are your characters, or favorite heroes and heroines you’ve read? How rich do you want your fantasy heroes to be, or don’t you care? Have any favorite anecdotes of Regency extravagance you want to share?

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As I pondered a topic for this month, a friend suggested “spring fashions” and here’s what happened: 1) I decided fellow Risky Isobel’s expertise on Regency fashions so far exceeds my own, I should leave that topic to her, and 2) I started to suffer an almost rabid craving for spring in England. Is anyone else feeling it?

Spring comes earlier to England, at least to much of it, than it does to my own location in New England, in the U.S. I recall vividly my surprise to discover snowdrops blooming in London in January the first time I ever crossed the pond. This month, March, is when I usually begin to look for them here, and not this early in March, either, despite the very mild weather we’ve recently had here.

But, oh, in England! March is a month for daffodils and other spring flowers we are only still wishing for where I live. Here the green tips are only just beginning to show in the gardens. I found some potted primroses in my local market and had to buy them, even though they are already fading. This tiny watercolor by E. Daniels (it’s only 2 inches by 2 ¼ inches) graces a shelf in my office, a beloved souvenir from a past trip to England that gives me primroses year-round.

In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare wrote: “Daffodils/That come before the swallow dares, and take/ The winds of March with beauty”. This image has lasted through the centuries. The seasons and nature offer a wonderful bridge between us and the past. The same kind of March winds that Shakespeare mentioned are roaring outside my windows today as I write this, even if I haven’t yet any nodding daffodils. These kinds of seasonal details help us as storytellers trying to make our historical fiction feel real. We need those threads of common experience that transcend the centuries to help anchor our characters and plots!

Several of my books are set in late spring, or at least begin then. In my first one, A Perilous Journey, I took a little liberty to have my characters find late-blooming daffodils even though it was May, but at least they were in the north on their way to Scotland…. I’ve always loved the playful cover created by artist Alan Kass for the original (OP) Signet edition of that book.  (It is only available now from Penguin Intermix as an ebook.)

The arrival of spring, when it finally does come here, probably won’t cure my craving for England (I am sooooo overdue for a visit!). However, it will help. In the meantime, I’ll go out and check the forsythia to see if it has started to bud. I’ll bring some branches inside to “force” into bloom and tide me over while I wait! I’m certain that’s something a Regency heroine might do, if I ever start a story in March. But not with forsythia, and not because it would already be blooming. It wasn’t introduced in England until after the Regency. A Regency heroine would have to use flowering quince, or pear, apple, or cherry branches from the orchard, or lilacs, or mock orange or….hmm, more research required. Perhaps she’ll just pick some daffodils!!

Where do you like to ferret out what would be blooming when in your stories? Or, what sources do you love to go back to for inspiration, not necessarily information? My favorites for inspiration include both the Country Diary and the Nature Notes of an Edwardian Lady (Edith Holden), even though these are not from our period. For sheer visual inspiration, I’m currently enjoying a lovely book called The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired Our Best-Loved Authors, by Jackie Bennett with photography by Richard Hanson. A picture book that visits the homes and gardens of 19 authors, starting with Jane Austen at Godmersham and Chawton, it is a visual treat and a delightful way to travel by armchair! I highly recommend it, especially if you’re craving spring and it hasn’t come yet where you are!!

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