Category: History

Field Trip

Updated on December 21, 2014 by Myretta

My WIP features a curmudgeonly hero who would rather be on his estate raising sheep than out and about among society. However, in order to make the most of his extraordinary wool, he feels he needs to get into the textile business. I know nothing about making textiles. But that’s okay, I know nothing about most of things I end up writing about until I start the research. I started my research yesterday with a field trip to The American Textile History Museum in Lowell, MA. Of course, my first choice of research destination in this case is Manchester, England, but Lowell is several thousand miles closer and doesn’t involve getting on a plane.

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The ATHM is not a large facility but it has a rather targeted collection that tells the story of the textile mills in 19th and early 20th century New England. I went particularly to look at the machinery. Not only technology in all its phases a particular interest of mine, but I had a burning desire to be able to picture in detail what an early 19th century mill would look like. I was not disappointed.

The museum houses an extensive collection of textiles, including the detailed scene shown at the left, which was printed at Bromley Hall in England between 1774 and 1811 especially for export to America or other British colonies as evidenced by the blue threads in the fabric’s edge. They have a current exhibit of textiles by artists from Picasso to Warhol. This was not particularly relevant to the reason for my visit, but fun to see, nevertheless. The also have a small but wide-ranging standing clothing collection.

Carding Machine

But, as I said, I was there for the hardware. The exhibits ranged from the late 18th to the early 20th century and it was easy to imagine that changes to the machinery were mostly small and incremental. Even the with change from water power to steam to electricity the machinery function was totally recognizable. I realize I’ll have to do more research to learn exactly what the changes were and how they would have affected my characters.

If you’re in the area and interested in a larger view of the Lowell mills during the mid-19th to 20th century, I recommend including the Lowell National Historical Park in your visit. The park covers a good deal more of the life and work in the mills, including housing for “mill girls” and recreations of an actual mill, as well as canal tours of the area.

This was an excellent first look at what I need to know in order to continue with my Duke’s business plans. It made me anxious to learn more. Now, if I can only arrange a trip to Manchester.

Posted in History, Research | Leave a reply

The Messiah at Christmas

Updated on December 11, 2014 by Janet Mullany

I’m not religious and I don’t do much over Christmas, but one thing I’ve done for years is to attend a performance of the Messiah. I’ve attended performances in concert halls with huge choruses and orchestras; and a memorable performance in York Minster during the power cuts of the early 1970s when we all kept on our gloves and hats and one very short intermission at which we all dashed out to the nearest pub for warming drinks. Last Saturday I heard Messiah at Washington National Cathedral, performed with a baroque orchestra and an “authentic” chorus of a children’s choir plus male voices. It was really spectacular and in a gorgeous setting.

Handel, however, composed it for Easter, and it’s still performed then. It has never waned in popularity–Mozart, Carl Maria von Weber, and Mendelssohn introduced it in Europe and the rise of choral societies in the later nineteenth century ensured its popularity. The world record for an unbroken sequence of performances is held by the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic, which has performed it annually since 1853!

Handel composed the work in 1741 in a breathtaking 24 days, despite a difficult relationship with librettist Charles Jennens:

Messiah has disappointed me, being set in great haste, tho’ [Handel] said he would be a year about it, and make it the best of all his Compositions. I shall put no more Sacred Words into his hands, to be thus abus’d.

Six months later Jennens was still unimpressed:

‘Tis still in his power by retouching the weak parts to make it fit for publick performance; and I have said a great deal to him on the Subject; but he is so lazy and so obstinate, that I much doubt the Effect.

Messiah premiered in Dublin on April 13, 1742 as part of a series of charity concerts in Neal’s Music Hall in Fishamble Street near Dublin’s Temple Bar. Right up to the very date of the premiere the performance was plagued by technical difficulties, and the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Jonathan Swift (under whose aegis the premiere was to be held) postponed it. He demanded that the revenue from the concert be promised to local asylums for the mentally ill. The performance was sold out, with gentleman requested not to carry swords or ladies to wear hoops, to make more room in the hall. Handel led the performance from the harpsichord with his frequent collaborator Matthew Dubourg conducting the orchestra.

Ticket for a benefit performance of the Messiah

Handel continued to work on the score and excerpts were performed in 1749 to raise funds for the Foundling Hospital in London (of which Handel was a founder). In 1750, the final version was presented there and remained the fundraising vehicle for the institution.

Messiah is famous for the Hallelujah Chorus in which the audience stands, a tradition allegedly started at the first London performance on March 23, 1743. King George II rose, and so of course the rest of the audience had to follow. However, there are no eyewitness accounts, and the first mention of it comes 37 years later. Confusingly, it seems that audiences of the time liked to stand to certain pieces of music, such as the Dead March from Saul, and an audience member of a 1750 Messiah noted that the audience stood for the “grand choruses” (note the plural):

Audiences may have been spontaneously standing not because of royal example, but because of the confusing oddity of Handelian oratorio, and the additional oddity of Messiah itself. Handel’s hybrid of sacred subjects with operatic style, moving Bible stories into secular venues, had already struck some puritanical Britons as curious, or worse; Messiah went further, its libretto (by Charles Jennens) not even a dramatic narrative, but a theologically curated collection of Scripture passages.

“An Oratorio either is an Act of Religion, or it is not,’’ complained one anonymous critic on the eve of the London premiere of Messiah. “If it is one I ask if the Playhouse is a fit Temple to perform it, or a Company of Players fit Ministers of God’s Word.’’ The sermon-like atmosphere of Messiah may have triggered audiences’ churchgoing reflexes, and they may have felt compelled to respond, standing for choruses as if they were hymns – better to be piously safe than sorry. Read more

Tell us about your favorite Christmas music!

Posted in History, Music | Tagged Christmas, Handel, Messiah | 1 Reply

Happy St. Nicholas Day

Updated on December 6, 2014 by Myretta

According to Hone’s Every Day Book (1827), today is St. Nicholas Day. This is, apparently, the anniversary of his death in 343.

Hone reports that

He is in the almanacs, and church of England calendar. He is a patron or titular saint of virgins, boys, sailors, and the worshipful company of parish clerks of the city of London (an interesting collection). Mr. Audley (of Audley’s Companion to the Almanac) briefly observes of him, that he was remarkable in his infancy for piety, an dthe knowledge of the scriptures; that he was made bishop of Myra, in Lycia, by Constantine the Great, and the ‘he was present in the council of Nice, where it is aid that he gave Arius a box on the ear.’

St. Nicholas & the pickled children

One of the stories of St. Nicholas’s virtue concerns him resurrecting two boys who had been killed and cut into pieces with the intention of selling them for pickled pork. (Ick) Nicholas, then the bishop of Myra, had a vision of these proceedings and went to the innkeeper who had salted the boys. Once the innkeeper confessed, asked for forgiveness and “supplicated restoration of life to the children, “the pickled pieces reunited, and the reanimated youths stepped from the brine-tub and threw themselves at the feet of St. Nicholas.

This, and other tales of virtue, caused his festival day to involve choosing a choir boy to “maintain the state and authority of a bishop.” This show of the “Boy Bishop” was abrogated by Henry VIII by proclamation but revived in the reign of Mary “with other Romish ceremonials.”

Hone leaves December 6 with a poem entitled Winter.

Hoary, and dim, and bare, and shivering.
Like a poor almsman comes the aged Year,
With kind “God save you all, good gentlefolks!”
Heap on fresh fuel, make a blazing fire,
Bring out the cup of kindness, spread the board,
And gladden Winter with our cheerfulness!
Wassail! — to you, and yours, and all! — All health!

And so say we all.

Posted in Anything but writing, History | 2 Replies

Gone to the Dogs; or, Sandy Once Again Goes Nuts over Mr. Punch

Updated on November 26, 2014 by Sandra Schwab

My creative work has currently been interrupted – most pleasantly so, I might add! – by my academic work: I have been invited to contribute an essay about a background topic (“Themes of Medievalism in Punch“) to Cengage’s new digital Punch Historical Archive. For this I have also been given access to the archive itself, and it’s – oh my gosh! – fantastic! Not only can you do full text searches across all volumes of Punch from 1841 to 1992, but to make this even better, the large cuts (= the big political cartoons) and the social cuts (=smaller cartoons) have also been indexed. *swoons*

But it gets even better: one of my friends from Liverpool John Moores University, Clare Horrocks, is transcribing the contributors’ ledgers of Punch, and her findings will be incorporated into the archive. This is really important work because for much of the nineteenth century, writing for periodicals was done either anonymously or pseudonymously. So, as was pointed out in an article in a recent issue of American Libraries, Clare’s work helps us to solve questions of authorship and attribution:

Early findings from the project have revealed articles written by William Makepeace Thackeray and P. G. Wodehouse that were previously unattributed. And while Charles Dickens himself never wrote for the magazine, his son Charles Dickens Jr. is known to have contributed a number of articles, which this project expects to uncover.

Yet as awesome as the digital archive is, in certain points it cannot replace leafing through the actual volumes: smaller illustrations like initial letters have not been indexed (and I would imagine that this would actually be a rather impossible task given the vast numbers of itty-bitty illustrations in Punch). Moreover, leafing through volumes and looking at images can reveal certain themes that you would not notice otherwise.

I found this out when I checked initial letters in different volumes from the 1850s, 60s, and 70s (in search for medieval themes, of course!) (or rather, I wanted to pinpoint when medieval themes vanished from the initial letters). And while I was leafing through the 1873 volume, looking for itty-bitty knights, I suddenly noticed an abundance of pet dogs in the social cuts.

Now, it’s not as if dogs hadn’t appeared before 1873: Mr. Punch himself, after all, is accompanied by his dog Toby; in the 1840s Richard Doyle fell into the habit of adding little Toby-ish doggies to many of his drawings; and in social cuts dealing with country sports you can often find hunting dogs. But the many, many pet dogs of 1873 is not something that you see in the 1840s. Clearly, some of the artists who worked for Punch in the 1870s must have been dog lovers.

Like George du Maurier:

(Or perhaps, he just wanted to poke fun at bourgeois ladies and their pet dogs.)

And then, there is GB, whose dogs are truly delightful:

And do you know what else is truly delightful about GB? GB is a woman!!! The initials stand for Georgina Bowers. In his History of Punch (1895) Spielmann calls her “[b]y far the most important lady artist who ever worked for Punch […],” and continues,

Miss Bowers was a humorist, with very clear and happy notions as to what fun should be, and how it should be transferred to a picture. Her long career began in 1866, and thenceforward, working with undiminished energy, she executed hundreds of initials and vignettes as well as “socials,” devoting herself in chief part to hunting and flirting subjects.

Of course, being a woman, she had to be shown the proper way of doing illustrations for the magazine *snort*: “It was John Leech [Punch‘s chief artist] who set her on the track; Mark Lemon [Punch‘s first editor], to whom she took her drawings, encouraged her, and with help from Mr. Swain [the engraver] she progressed.” (Oh, Mr. Spielmann! *shakes head sadly*)

Georgina worked for the magazine for ten years until differences with a new editor made her resign. But she seems to have continued to work as an illustrator for many more years.

Isn’t that a lovely find?

Posted in History | Tagged Punch, Sandy and the Periodicals, Victorian era | 2 Replies

Accession Day 1558–And Winners!

Updated on November 18, 2014 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

First of all, the winner from last week’s Andrea Pickens post is…Linda!!! Congrats, and please email Andrea at Italicscript AT aol.com to claim your wonderful prize.

I can (almost) see the light of day at the very end of this tunnel of a WIP, but I had to mark a very important day in English history. November 17, 1558 marked the accession to the throne of Elizabeth I, and the start of one of the most remarkable periods in history! (At the end of my Amanda Carmack book, Murder at Hatfield House, I loved writing the scene showing the legendary moment when she received the news!). Here’s a repeat of a blog I did way back in 2007….

This is also how I know that November 17th was a Very Important holiday in the England of the late 16th century. It was Elizabeth I’s Ascension Day.

Queen Mary died at St. James’s Palace early on the morning of November 17, 1558, and members of the Privy Council immediately set out for Elizabeth’s residence at Hatfield House (where she was practically under house arrest) to tell her the news. They carried Mary’s betrothal ring from Phillip of Spain, to prove to Elizabeth that the queen was dead, so long live the queen. The legend is that they found her sitting under a tree, reading a Bible in Greek. On hearing the news, she proclaimed, “It is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” (Now, I am not at all sure someone would just “happen” to be sitting under a tree reading in November! Maybe she was just out for a stroll, maybe the story is apocryphal, or maybe she heard they were coming and stage-managed the whole thing. She was one of the great stage managers in history). On a side note, the original tree is no longer there, but one was planted in its place by Elizabeth II in 1985. On another side note, when Elizabeth I died in 1603, after a reign of 45 years, she was buried with Mary in Westminster Abbey. The inscription reads, “Partners both in throne and grave, here rest we two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, in the hope of one resurrection.” Kind of ironic, but I admit I got a little emotional when I saw the tomb (or maybe it was jet lag?)

Anyway, thereafter November 17 was a Big Party at court, and around the country. The big event was always a tournament, with a joust and sports where all the men vying for the queen’s attention could show off. Pomp and chivalry were paramount–all the men carried banners and shields adorned with symbolic images of the queen and their devotion to her. (Jousts, of course, were not all Renaissance faire-ish fun–Henri II of France died in one, and there were always injuries at Ascension Day tournies. No fatalities that I could find, though).

The jousts would be followed by a banquet and ball, maybe a play or tableau celebrating the glorious reign of Elizabeth. At one banquet, the court polished off an ox, 40 sheep, 12 pigs, 132 capons, 5 swans, several pheasants, partridges, herons, pigeons, peacocks, and calves, not to mention fish, chicken, barrels of wine, vegetables and eggs, and sweets. Subtleties made of sugar and almond paste, shaped into castles and other fanciful things, were great favorites on such occasions.

Some of the best-known Elizabethan dances were: pavanes (a stately processional), usually followed by a lively galliard. There were gavottes (a circle dance to a medium tempo), sophisticated courantes and sarabands from France, and almains. The Volte was one of the of only dances that allowed couples to closely embrace (the man showed off his strength by lifting the woman high in the air–this is probably why it’s used so often in movies! See Shakespeare in Love, both Elizabeth movies, and probably various Masterpiece Theaters).

Celebrations were not just held at court. There were bonfires, dances (maybe not pavanes, but bransles and Morris dancers), games, lots of wine and ale, and illuminations all across the country.

So, happy Ascension Day, everyone! We might not celebrate with a Volte and a barrel of wine, but we can toast Good Queen Bess. And look forward to our own bacchanalia–Thanksgiving! I hope you all have a great one. Any big plans? I’m very, very thankful for the Riskies and our friends this year.

Posted in Giveaways, History, Winners announced | Leave a reply