Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  Black edged mourning envelopes? Popular immediately after the Penny post was introduced, as a way of preparing the recipient for “news from the grave” contained in the letter within. Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1839) and Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1848) both refer to the black edged envelopes as bringing news of a bereavement. The mourning envelope became part of the ritual of coping with death, and would be used by the family of the bereaved for up to twelve months (except for business letters which were always on plain white paper).

  While we are on the subject of bereavement, for me, the saddest letters I came across when researching The Journal of a Georgian Gentleman were the ones detailing the illness and death of my ancestor Richard Hall’s sister-in-law from smallpox in 1769. Not only were the letters sent at almost hourly intervals to Richard from his brother-in-law as the disease progressed, but by a remarkable coincidence, they have all survived. Not only do I have all the letters which Richard received—I also have copies of the ones sent by him by way of reply! Read the book for the story of an extraordinary event which happened 250 years after the letters were written, whereby the whole correspondence was re-united!

  Popular Pigeons and Slanderous Psittacines

  by Grace Elliot

  In Victorian times, bird keeping was a popular hobby amongst city communities. Native birds such as thrushes, bullfinches, and goldfinches were trapped at night in country villages and sent by train to the suburbs to be sold in markets at Greenwich, Hounslow, and Woolwich.

  Bullfinches and goldfinches were especially popular, since they could be trained to sing and fetch a high price, several shillings each, whilst larks sold for six to eight pence apiece. There was even a market for dowdy birds such as house sparrows—once they were disguised with paint—but sadly when they preened they died of lead poisoning.

  Even more unpleasant was the craze in the 1890s for “flying” greenfinches. These birds were sold for half a penny each, with a cotton thread tied to a leg. The idea was to bet on which bird could fly in circles longest before it dropped dead of exhaustion.

  Keeping caged birds was widespread, even amongst prisoners held at the Tower of London. One prisoner wrote An Epitaph on a Goldfinch, on the death of his pet bird: “Buried June 23, 1794 by a fellow prisoner in the Tower of London.”

  The Spitalfields weavers of the 1840s also prized their birds. The breeding of fancy pigeons and canaries, Almond tumblers, Pouting horsemen, and Nuns, was taken very seriously. Bird shows were highly competitive, matching the fashion amongst wealthier classes for dog shows. It could be a dodgy business—the prize winning pigeons at a show in Islington had had their throats stitched back to improve their appearance—the perpetrators were found out and prosecuted.

  London’s pigeons are descended from those that escaped from dovecotes in medieval times to roost amongst the city’s ledges and towers. In 1277, a man is recorded as falling from the belfry of St. Stephens, Walbrook, whilst trying to raid a pigeon’s nest, and in 1385, the Bishop of London complained of “malignant persons” who threw stones at pigeons resting in city churches.

  One parrot owner was W.S. Gilbert, who wrote the words to accompany Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music. He owned a particularly fine parrot, reputedly the best talker in England. When a guest commented on the appearance of a second parrot in his hallway, Gilbert replied: “The other parrot, who is a novice, belongs to Doctor Playfair. He is reading up with my bird, who takes pupils.”

  However, pet birds were not popular with everyone. George Bernard Shaw was given a caged canary which he heartily disliked, calling it a “little green brute.” He was delighted when the bird was stolen and equally disappointed when a friend replaced it. His comment was: “I’m a vegetarian and can’t eat it, and it’s too small to eat me.”

  The Poor Always Among Us

  by Phillip Brown

  The nineteenth century saw a huge growth in the population of Great Britain.

  By the end of the century, there were three times more people living in Great Britain than at the beginning. Families were getting larger, children began to survive infancy better, and immigration, particularly from Ireland, swelled the inner cities.

  In the cities, jobs were scarce. Large numbers of both skilled and unskilled people were looking for work, so wages were low, barely above subsistence level. If work dried up, or was seasonal, men were laid off, and because they had hardly enough to live on when they were in work, they had no savings to fall back on.

  In his book The Victorian Underworld, Kellow Chesney gives a graphic description of the conditions in which many were living:

  Hideous slums, some of them acres wide, some no more than crannies of obscure misery, make up a substantial part of the, metropolis…. In big, once handsome houses, thirty or more people of all ages may inhabit a single room.

  As the century progressed, the middle and wealthy classes, through a mixture of fear of the underclass (sounds familiar today) and genuine compassion, founded numerous societies to give aid and help, particularly to the “deserving poor”. A popular hymn still showed the distance to be travelled, however:

  The rich man in his castle,

  The poor man at his gate,

  God made them, high and lowly,

  And order’d their estate.

  —The third verse of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, first published in 1848 in Hymns for Little Children (London: Joseph Masters, 1848), by Cecil Frances Humphreys. In modern versions of this hymn, the third verse is omitted.

  In earlier periods, Victorian artists had typically portrayed the poor of the countryside in rather a jolly way (where in reality, starvation was a shadow that stalked many rural workers—hence the flight to the cities).

  But by the 1870s and 1880s, more realistic portrayals began to emerge in response to Dickens and other writers who were more hard hitting about the challenges faced by the poor. Yet even in From Hand to Mouth—He Was One of the Few Who Would Not Beg by Thomas Faed, you still felt that people knew their place, and of course such pictures were intended for the middle class patrons, who didn’t want poverty on their walls in its utmost reality. But at least the subject was being discussed and portrayed, and a few artists like Luke Fildes went as far as they dared.

  Another attempt to bring problems to light was in the reforming journal The Graphic, edited by the social reformer William Luson Thomas, who believed strongly that art could bring about social reform. John Millais recommended him to Dickens who used him to illustrate The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

  A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with a lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields—or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time—penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like wings.

  —Charles Dickens, Edwin Drood

  In 1888, William Powell Frith portrayed what is almost a photograph of a typical London street, where the rich and poor did intermingle freely.

  Herbert von Herkomer (born in Bavaria but settled in Bushey, Hertfordshire where he built Lululaund—named after his third wife—which was important in the British film industry) captured the real rural poor…though in the later Eventide: A Scene in the Westminster Union (1878) the finished picture was carefully “polished” to show the old age paupers happily drinking tea and content.

  Domestic labour is seldom seen in Victorian art, though photography picked it up, particularly the fascinating if bizarre work of Arthur Munby, who photographed his future wife Hannah Cullwick as a scullery maid.

 
A governess was in an awkward position in the Victorian household, neither quite a servant nor a member of the family. As a sign of this social limbo, she often ate in isolation. She had a middle class background and education, but she was paid and not really part of the family. Being a governess was one of the few legitimate ways an unmarried middle class woman could support herself in that society. Her position was often depicted as one to be pitied.

  Bordering constantly on poverty (and by popular repute, prostitution), the overworked seamstresses were the next level down if education did not allow them to seek a governess position. After several reports, distressed seamstress became something of a cause celebre. The public was barraged with newspaper articles, pamphlets, novels, short stories, poetry—the most famous of which is Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” from 1843:

  With fingers weary and worn,

  With eyelids heavy and red,

  A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,

  Plying her needle and thread—

  Stitch! stitch! stitch!

  In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

  And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

  She sang the “Song of the Shirt.”

  Popular literature was full of stories of a happy, healthy, and virtuous young woman leaving her home in the countryside to become a seamstress in the big city where she encounters an evil employer and/or seducer, and begins an irreversible decline leading to death and/or prostitution.

  This brings me to the last and perhaps the best of the great Victorian painters who dealt with the final end of such women as in Found Drowned, the painting by George Frederic Watts of 1867. (Charles Dickens wrote The Chimes to highlight the issues.) This was by no means uncommon. Newspapers listed drownings from London bridges each morning.

  I could go on to mention the Past and Present triptych of Augustus Egg and the importance of photography in documenting what is to us now a vanished world. But for anyone wanting the feel of the poor of London, just read Dickens or London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew (the founder of Punch).

  The Higher Education of Women in the Victorian Era

  by Lynne Wilson

  University education for women up until the Victorian era in Britain had been impossible, however this was a topic of great discussion at the time with divided opinion on the subject. It was from the mid to late-19th century that real progress began to be made, as a range of women’s issues were at the forefront at this time. However, there were still few who saw education as a way of changing women’s lives and giving them opportunities, with many supporters at the time believing a higher education was necessary simply to make women more effective wives, mothers, and teachers.

  An article in the Glasgow Herald newspaper highlights the problem:

  It may be questioned if the present age is destined to make its mark in history by anything more deeply than its earnest effort to raise the ideas of the sphere and duties of woman, and to elevate the character of her education in accordance with those new ideas…. Every day brings fresh evidence of the genuineness and growth of this demand for a higher culture than can be met by the traditional and conventional arrangements for female education.

  As university education for British women had been fairly unheard of in this era, the application of a prospective female medical student, Sophia Jex-Blake, in1869, to attend lectures at the Edinburgh medical school, caused quite a storm of controversy. The subject was greatly debated, and, encouragingly, it seemed that there was a reasonable amount of support for this amongst the academic community of Edinburgh.

  A report in the Edinburgh Evening Courant newspaper showed an example of some of that support:

  Lady Doctors—”On Saturday night, Mr J A Bevan delivered a lecture at the Hanover Square Rooms on “Women Doctors.”…. Mr Bevan could not understand why women should not be allowed to practice as doctors. He pointed out which, in his mind, they were well fitted.”

  The education of another budding female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett, was thrust into the spotlight at this time as an example of a success story resulting from female education. Elizabeth Garrett had tried some years prior to Sophia Jex-Blake to gain entry to the Edinburgh medical school and had been refused admission. The Scotsman newspaper reported on this story:

  Miss Garrett, who seven years ago strenuously endeavoured to induce the Universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh to admit her to study for a degree of Doctor of Medicine, but in vain—who subsequently passed the examinations, and became a licentiate of the Apothecaries’ Company of London—and who has now for several years been in successful practice of her profession in the Metropolis, has, we learn, just been admitted by the Faculty of Medicine of Paris to examination for a degree of M.D…. It is curious to have to notice Miss Garrett’s continued success in other quarters at the very time at which we have also to record that another lady applicant is now knocking at the gates of our Scottish Colleges…. It may well be that public opinion has now so far advanced in this matter that Miss Jex-Blake’s application to the Medical Faculty of the University will not be refused at all.

  Subsequently, many persons in both in the Medical Faculty and Senatus voted that Miss Jex-Blake should be admitted to the summer classes at least as a tentative measure. Unfortunately, however, this did not come to fruition, due to an outcry against the impropriety of “mixed classes”. The idea of women learning about male and female Anatomy whilst in a classroom filled with men was just too much for prim Victorians to bear.

  In the meantime, however, several other women, on hearing about Sophia Jex-Blake’s fight and the discussions taking place in Edinburgh, came forward as prospective students, and, as a result, a second petition was presented to the Senatus Academics. Finally, there was light at the end of the tunnel, albeit, with some conditions, as this article in The Scotsman newspaper showed:

  On the recommendation of both the Medical Faculty and Senatus, our University court has given its sanction to the matriculation of ladies as medical students on the understanding that they pass the usual examinations, and that separate classes are formed for their instruction.

  However, despite the efforts of Sophia Jex-Blake and other supporters for women’s education, women, although being allowed to begin medical study in this year, were not permitted to graduate from Edinburgh University at the end of their study. The protesters against female medical education gathered near Surgeons Hall in November 1870, where the women were due to take an examination in Anatomy, and heckled and threw rubbish at them. The incident became known as the “Surgeons Hall Riot”.

  Then in 1873, the Court of Session ruled that the University had the right to refuse the women degrees. Sophia Jex-Blake moved back to London and established the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, and later returned to Edinburgh in 1878, setting up practice at Manor Place in the New Town. She also opened a clinic for poor patients, which is now Bruntsfield Hospital. The other members of the “Edinburgh Seven” who had attempted education at Edinburgh gained their qualifications elsewhere, with the exception of Isabel Thorne, who gave up on her plan to practice as a doctor. Edinburgh University eventually admitted women as undergraduates in 1892, after an Act of Parliament had been passed.

  Flirting With Fans: A Victorian Tradition

  by Karen V. Wasylowski

  With so many restrictions regarding proper behavior between a lady and the gentleman of her choosing during the Victorian Age, how was a girl ever to express her interest in a young man? The Regency era and its overt sexual freedoms were a thing of the past (supposedly); nice young ladies no longer could dampen their gowns (tell me another one) to show off their lovely figures, nor could they rouge their nipples (perhaps).

  Pity the poor Victorian lady. Without the allurements allowed in the past, these pioneering women were reduced to using props. Parasols, gloves—anything with which to flir
t; these sisters of ours were desperate.

  And the most interesting, the most useful of all, was the fan. Position, posture, and pressure—the three keys. Flirting with fans was an artform dating all the way back to 17th century Italy. It should be reinstated and pursued during our lifetime. I wonder if Snookie ever considered one...?

  Here are some of the popular fan signals and what they mean. Perhaps one can practice at home on husbands?

  The fan placed near the heart: “You have won my love.”

  A closed fan touching the right eye: “When may I be allowed to see you?”

  The number of sticks shown answered the question: “At what hour?”

  Threatening movements with a fan closed: “Do not be so imprudent.”

  Half-opened fan pressed to the lips: “You may kiss me.”

  Hands clasped together holding an open fan: “Forgive me.”

  Covering the left ear with an open fan: “Do not betray our secret.”

  Hiding the eyes behind an open fan: “I love you.”

  Shutting a fully opened fan slowly: “I promise to marry you.”

  Drawing the fan across the eyes: “I am sorry.”

  Touching the finger to the tip of the fan: “I wish to speak with you.”

  Letting the fan rest on the right cheek: “Yes.”

  Letting the fan rest on the left cheek: “No.”

  Opening and closing the fan several times: “You are cruel.”