Fun with WordPress Plugins! Take my “How Well do you Know the Regency?” quiz and share the results with the world! (also, any suggestions for improvement in quiz format and presentation are welcome)
One of the questions has some long answer possibilities, so that one may look a bit strange. But let’s get going!
Tell us how you did in the comments, too!
[slickquiz id=1]
I’ve pulled out my copy of The Epicure’s Almanack for this post. This will appear to ramble a bit, but it’s only an illusion, K?
The Blind Beggar of Bethenal Green described as “a house of entertainment” Let’s put that in oh, riiigght. Entertainment.
tossing up piemen “that attend executions, fairs, boxing-matches, and other polite assemblies.” Category: local color (apparently it was a thing to toss a coin and allowing the vendor to call heads or tails. Free pie if the customer won. If the vendor won, he kept the money and the pie.) This was also called “tossing the pieman.”
Plympton’s Pastry shop: Category: local color. Although we think of pasty shops as a place to buy things with sugar in them, Plympton’s sold sweet and savory pastries.
A ham and beef shop: Category: puzzling. Why ham and beef? Why not ham, beef, and veal?
Eating House: Category: vernacular. Not a restaurant, but an “eating house.” Even so, some of these eating-houses had accommodations upstairs. One displayed a variety of meats in the window.
Hyde Park Coffee House, Hotel and Tavern: Category: Regency Starbucks. Located at 242 Oxford Street. Commanded a view of Hyde Park and the hills of Surrey
Copping’s Ham and Beef Shop: Category: less puzzling now. 178 Oxford Street. “A good mart for purchasing those articles, and tongues ready drest, by weight, to carry away with you, which you must do, since there are no eating-rooms attacheed to the shop. Mr. Copping has acquired fame by the sale of his excellent plum puddings.”
The Prince Regent’s famous confectioner, Monsiuer Parmentier, had a shop (“emporium”) at No.9 Edward Street. At 29 Duke Street was the emporium of Signor Romualdo. The nobility ordered supplies from these two places. In this area [Mayfair] there are china and glass shops that on “a few hours notice” could “furnish a splendid equipage for tea and turn out, as well as all the moveables and ornaments for large rout parties.”
Our author, Mr. Ryland, in this book, is having us on. He describes a party at the Earl of Shrewsbury’s new, but empty, house. A party that, alas, did not actually happen as descried. The local emporiums, he says, completely furnished the house from a room ablaze with light — lots of chimney glass — and another “somber” room decorated so as to resemble an Acadian grove. “It was filled with orange and lemon trees in full bearing, myrtles, and a great variety of odoriferoius shrubs and plants, in part natural and in part artificial, tastefully disposed and arranged in gradins.”
I had to look up gradin, but it’s what you’d suspect: an arrangement of tiered seating– in this case for the plants.
It makes sense, when you think about it, to have someone supply the china, glasses, and silverware for a large party. Otherwise, the family china might disappear, be damaged or broken. When I planned my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party, I found a place that would deliver the correct number of place settings, dishes, etc. And they came the next day to take away the dirty dishes, too. Boy, was that nice!
What I find fascinating about this is the dozens of clues about what London was like — A London I wish we saw more of in the pages of books. Eating-houses, dozens of “ham and beef” shops, where you might, or might not, be able to sit down and eat your purchase. And all around Mayfair, shops to cater to the wealthy. Things feel close together for us because, well, relative to what it can be like in the US, you didn’t hop in your car (or the metro) and zip across town and back to run your errands. You walked, rode a horse, or drove a carriage. For us, Regency London would be smaller in every way, more condensed and compact.
Ironically, I just moved my WIP out of London and into the countryside.
Has your vision of London changed at all?
I’m in the midst of writing the Next Historical and it seems like this book is going to be a time management challenge. I sat down at the computer with full knowledge that I had several tasks to take care of before I opened up the book.
Every single one of those tasks turned out to have several subtasks. Like, someone ordered a signed copy of a book, easy enough to deal with. But I offer a free digital copy to purchasers of a signed book (because they have to spend almost 3x the cost of the digital version for the print version) and this order came with a request for a copy. Which was fabulous! But it did mean I had to confirm I had the right file version (omitting some key facts here, just roll with me on this) so to be safe I had to generate a new file and then email it to her.
And then I remembered I owed a reader who designed the world’s most awesome Cat Woman T-shirt and sent one to me. (I have the ONLY one in the US of A! And she has the only one in Australia) and I said, well, in return I will send you books! And I waited on that until I had print copies of My Darkest Passion so I could send her 5 books instead of just 4, and I had to get that ready to be mailed.
And then I had to book my flight to Orange County because I’m speaking at the Orange County RWA the weekend before RWA, and I didn’t know which airport to fly into and I thought they’d told me, but after looking at all the emails, I couldn’t find that info, so I had to email them. They got back to me quickly so I booked the flight which entails a lot of staring at departure and arrival times and trying to figure out the whole, get up early or stay up late thing, and how long do I want to sit around at the airport.
I’ve come to realize that I am incapable of dealing with uncertainty and would actually rather sit an hour at the gate than freak out over the possibility of being late or lost or both. So, yeah.
And then I had to organize some important emails (seriously, if I don’t file away the important emails the day they land in my in-box, it’s hopeless.) AND I had to log income in the spreadsheet — because I live in fear of under-reporting income during the year and having my accountant calculate the wrong estimated tax (I paid the June taxes and now my bank account is gasping…) because if you end up owing more taxes than you thought, it’s just not pretty. So income gets logged the minute the deposit notices hit.
Then I had to email a woman in Hong Kong about the PO returning the books I mailed her back in OCTOBER. I am not kidding. The Post Office returned the books by mule, I guess.
Then I had to post here.
And now it’s 9:37 pm and my bedtime.
Thank goodness I wrote on my lunch hour. If I get cracking I might make word count before it’s too late….
Also, the dog, bless her little black heart, CHEWED UP MY COPY OF Epicure’s Almanack that cost me $50. It used to be in pristine shape and though I think it’s still kind of readable, I’m not sure if a book with the binding chewed off is going to last very long after I open it. I don’t think she ate any pages, but I’m too depressed to check.
::sob::
Do you ever have days like this?
One of my favorite Romances is Loving Julia, by Karen Robards, which came out in 1986. I probably read that book a bazillion times. The hero, Sebastian, was :::gasp::: blond! Here’s the cover:
Cover of Loving Julia
Yes, it’s a little beat up, but I read this book a lot. On page 36, Sebastian is described like this:
This man was blond, lean, and blindingly beautiful with the flawlessly molded face of one of the Lord’s archangels.
On that cover, people, the hero is BLOND.
Blond heroines abound in Romance, but sometime in the mid-1990’s I think, the blond hero became anathema on the cover and almost as rare between the pages. Word was, blond heroes don’t sell. I checked on Amazon, by the way, and the available paperbacks of this book have a yellow cover with flowers, not a shirtless blond dude about to ravish a brunette beauty. Readers complain about covers that don’t match the story, but this one comes pretty darn close.
I loved the icy, remote, Sebastian, and I loved how he learned to unbend. It’s a Pygmalion story and I had the same issues with the trope here as I do with My Fair Lady; the quickness with which women are trained up to be worthy of a man. But Sebastian is no asshat ‘Enry Higgins, thank goodness. I think it’s the blond hair. Like Eliza Dolittle, Jewel, the heroine, is not stupid. She really, really, wants to take advantage of this chance to change her life.
Sebastian gets drunk and has intercourse with her, and for Jewel it’s emotionally transformative and for him–so he says later, it’s a blank.
Robards writes a good grovel and you know it’s coming.
And that’s why I LOVE this book.
As I thumbed through my copy of this book, I could not help noticing that the pages are yellow, getting brittle, and though the pages are still glued in, if I read it again, I’d have to be careful.
Which makes me wonder about people who talk about the permanence of paper books.
Not really, right? They only mean certain books. Not all books.
Alas, alas, alas, Loving Julia is NOT available as an eBook, and that makes me sad.
What’s one of your favorite romances?
I’m working away at The Next Historical and I’m making progress. The story is starting to gel which, you know; :::Sigh of Relief::: This writing gig is hard work. Yesterday when I was reading through my current chapter one, I thought to myself, hey! This is pretty good! :::runs around cheering::::
I’ve hit the first third of the story when typically things are slightly less sucky and slightly more focused. It’s a good feeling.
I think I might have mentioned already that at first the book was set in London. I was reading a lot of my Epicure’s Almanack that the dog chewed on and I was all ready to start using some of that great research. But then I ended up moving the story to the country and so far no one is showing any sign of wanting—
omg, I just had a great idea! ROAD TRIP!!!!! They will travel somewhere…. and do something…. and exciting stuff will happen!!! And there will be hotel rooms and possibly shenanigans.
—to leave the country.
That does not mean my research was wasted because, as it turns out, this whole section I read on a totally wild, extravagant party that Ryder made up (it NEEDS to be TRUE!!!) has turned into this backstory-ish thing based on that and it’s working out well.
Next week is RWA and some of the Riskies will be there, including yours truly. I will do my best to post.
What are your plans for next week?