Rose Lerner's Blog

Archive for the ‘research’ Category

Today at History Hoydens I’m talking about nineteenth century Sussex slang I think should be brought back into common usage! Example:

“LAWRENCE, s. A kind of imaginary saint or fairy, whose influence produces indolence, thus, ‘I caunt get up, for Lawrence ha’e completely got holt an me,’–“I ha’e got a touch o’ ol’ Lawrence to-dee; I be troubled to git ane wud me work.’ This person is also known in Dorsetshire, &c.”

Another gem from The Folklore of Sussex. She’s talking about various customs requiring men to dress up wearing horns:

“Bawdy humor of this sort is exemplified in Sussex by the eighteenth-century Cock Fair at Ticehurst, at which, according to the Sussex Weekly Advertiser‘s report of an unfortunate street accident which spoilt the fun in 1788, the landlord of the Cock Inn was ‘according to local custom presented with a load of wood, on condition he could get it drawn home by men having the appellation of cuckolds, of whom he had assembled a sufficient number and provided them with a waggon for the purpose.’ Whether the self-professed cuckolds of Ticehurst were expected to wear the symbols of their state the newspaper unfortunately does not say; but a grotesque expression of this sort is known to have taken place regularly in Kent up to 1768, at the famous Charlton Horn Fair[...]”

I just want to hear the stories of every single guy in that group.

This folklore book continues to be fascinating. There’s a section on pseudo-legal rituals created to get around perceived problems with the law. The most shocking and interesting is of course wife-selling.

“That invaluable repository of scandal, the Sussex Weekly Advertiser, describes several cases: at Ninfield in November 1790 a man sold his wife one evening for half a pint of gin, duly handed her over next morning in a halter, but later changed his mind and bought her back ‘at an advanced price’; at Lewes in July 1797 a blacksmith sold his wife to one of his journeymen ‘agreeably to an engagement drawn up by an attorney for that purpose’; while at Brighton in February 1799 a man named Staines ‘sold his wife by private contract, for 5s and eight pots of beer, to one James Marten of the same place,’ with two married couples witnessing ‘the articles of separation and sale.’

“The custom persisted into the nineteenth century. Harry Burstow mentions three cases in his Reminiscences of Horsham:

I have been told of a woman named Smart who, about 1820, was sold at Horsham for 3s. and 6d. She was bought by a man named Steere, and lived with him at Billingshurst. She had two children by each of these husbands. Steere afterwards discovered that Smart had parted with her because she had qualities which he could endure no longer, and Steere, discovering the same qualities himself, sold her to a man named Greenfield, who endured, or never discovered, or differently valued the said qualities till he died.

Again, at the November Fair, 1825, a journeyman blacksmith, whose name I never learned, with the greatest effrontery exhibited for sale his wife, with a halter round her neck. She was a good-looking woman with three children, and was actually sold for £2 5s, the purchaser agreeing to take one of the children. This ‘deal’ gave offence to some who were present, and they reported the case to the magistrate, but the contracting parties, presumably satisfied, quickly disappeared, and I never heard any more about them.

The last case happened about 1844, when Ann Holland, known as ‘pin-toe Nanny’ or ‘Nanny pin-toe,’ was sold for £1 10s. Nanny was led into the market place with a halter round her neck. Many people hissed and booed, but the majority took the matter good-humoredly. She was ‘knocked down’ to a man named Johnson, at Shipley, who sold his watch to buy her for the above sum. This bargain was celebrated on the spot by the consumption of a lot of beer by Nanny, her new husband, and friends. She lived with Johnson for one year, during which she had one child, then ran away–finally marrying a man named Jim Smith, with whom she apparently lived happily for many years.

What fascinates me about this is how often it’s clearly a form of abuse—treating your wife like a commodity that can be traded for money or alcohol—but how sometimes it seems more like a form of consensual divorce…and how blurry the lines between the two are in a patriarchal society. One likes to imagine that the blacksmith who sold his wife to his journeyman with a legal document did it because his wife wanted to marry the journeyman, but we can’t ever know.

Has anyone ever seen a romance with this premise? I don’t count Mayor of Casterbridge!

Reading The Folklore of Sussex by Jacqueline Simpson as research for the WIP.

Everyone who has visited Steyning probably knows how St. Cuthman pushed his mother in a wheelbarrow from Devon to Sussex, waiting for some sign from Heaven to show him where he should settle and build a church. As he came into Steyning, the barrow broke, and he cut some withies from a hedge to make a rope to mend it. Haymakers working in Penfold Field (which is still sometimes also known as Cuthman’s Field) burst out laughing at his stupidity. ‘Laugh man, weep Heaven,’ answered Cuthman, and at once a heavy cloudburst drenched that field, and that field only. And from that day to this, it always rains on that one meadow in haymaking time; indeed, some call it ‘the Accursed Field,’ and declare that nothing will grow upon it.

Okay, everything about that is interesting, but I’m going to focus on…he pushed his mother in a wheelbarrow from Devon to Sussex. Apparently this is how St. Cuthman is iconically depicted! Here is a stained glass window design:

Here is the Steyning town sign:

Here is a beer label:

A couple more depictions based on this are here and here.

I want a Woody Allen-style short film about that where she kvetches the whole way.

When I was visiting my uncle in Hastings-on-Hudson, he took me to a wonderful local bookstore (Riverrun Books, with a rare bookroom and a secondhand bookshop across the street from each other–I’ve never spent much time in the rare bookroom since it’s a bit beyond my means, but it looks amazing) and bought me some books for my birthday. I got two books about the history of English furniture, a cookbook, a book to teach me how to dress like a gentleman (which has already given me and my roommate hours of entertainment), an old pulp paperback mystery, and Sporting Art in Eighteenth Century England: A Social and Political History.

Listen to this:

[WARNING: the following paragraph contains a description of animal cruelty.]

“Meanwhile, the critical acclaim [Gilpin] initially received for his ‘Death of the Fox’ was sadly negated by the patron’s public announcement that, far from being a work of elevated imagination, the picture was in fact painted directly from nature–with carefully arranged dead dogs pinned into place as models.”

By the way, I got a tumblr! If you have one let me know so I can follow you! I am mostly using mine to reblog pictures of James McAvoy at the moment, but can you blame me?

I’m staying with my uncle outside NYC for a few days after the RWA conference. He used to be a printer so he’s explaining the mysterious workings of flatbed presses to me and letting me use his pretty impressive library (the heroine of my WIP is the widow of a provincial printer/newspaper publisher). Look at this, from Phillip Meggs’s A History of Graphic Design:

“[Playfair] introduced the first ‘divided circle’ diagram, called a pie chart today, in his 1805 English translation of a French book, The Statistical Account of the United States of America. Playfair included a diagram of a circle cut into wedge-shaped slices representing the area of each state and territory. Readers could see at a glance how vast the newly acquired Western territories were in comparison with states such as Rhode Island and New Hampshire. This engraving included a legend stating, ‘This newly invented method is intended to show the proportions between the divisions in a striking manner.’”

The first pie chart! Awesome.

In other news, my aunt is watching the Murder, She Wrote marathon. I’ve never watched much of the show before, and I’m really enjoying it! The mysteries are really well-constructed, the characters are engaging, and overall the show feels very generous-spirited. I do love a good cozy mystery.

Overheard at various RWA workshops/speakers/conference functions:

“Brokeback Mountain is tragic. Titanic is merely sad.” (I should point out this was NOT a comment on their respective quality! It was about the story structure.)

“The Regency is a shared world fantasy like Star Wars or Star Trek.” –Mary Jo Putney. Hell yes! That is one smart lady.

“Our ‘voice’ emerges when we embrace that exposure [the stuff about ourselves that authors reveal in their writing] and allow the barriers between ourselves and readers to become porous.” –Madeline Hunter. Yes! That!! This is what I was trying to say in this blog post and couldn’t quite express.

New genre concept created by my table at the Keynote Lunch: Space Regency! I think this is a great idea. I can see it now: the short but tough emperor of Beta Gaul IV out to conquer the Europa galaxy! Many planets have fallen under his sway. In his way stands tiny Albion Prime, ruled by a decadent Regent, protected only by its natural asteroid belt…(All roads lead to Nathan Fillion wearing a Rifleman’s uniform, that’s all I’m saying. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, go to Susanna Fraser’s blog here. Wow, time for a sidenote: when I first read that post I was NOT as into Ian Somerhalder as I am now. He’d make a great James! So compelling and adorable.)

Did you know if you google image search “Jane Austen goggles” you find nothing? NOTHING! What is that? …Sorry, I think my brain is falling out my ears a bit from all that conference and I’ve gotten a bit scattered. Which leads me to:

I started researching Sussex for the WIP. I am stealing this parish church: “Above the tower clock is a figure of Father Time, who, according to legend, jumps down from his perch at midnight and scythes the churchyard grass; the legend is said to have been started by a former rector, who could not afford to pay for the grass to be cut and did the job himself under cover of darkness. Another rector left a unique and useless addition to the fittings of the church—the tall stone ‘tub’ for total immersion, standing against the south wall and reached by a flight of steps. This was installed in 1710 in an attempt to lure Baptists back to the church on the grounds that ‘anything you can do we can do better’; but it was only used once.”

What’s the smartest or funniest thing you’ve heard someone say recently? Also, can anyone photoshop me some Space Regency images?

The heroine of my current WIP is the widow of a small-town printer/newspaperman, her brother-in-law having inherited the paper on his death. It’s an important part of her story, so I’m reading Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England by R. M. Wiles. It mostly focuses on the first half of the 18th century which is a little early for me obviously, so I’ll have to do some supplemental reading, but I’m guessing there was a lot of continuity.

“It takes a twentieth-century reader a little time to accustom himself to look at the end of a paper for the latest news [because it was typeset last], but the eighteenth-century reader had no reason to look elsewhere for it.[...I]f anyone perused the six-page Worcester Post-Man, number 267 (Friday, 6 August 1714), only as far as page 4 he would see on that page that the ailing Queen Anne, after suffering ‘a Fit of Convulsions, others say the Appoplexy,’ had been given ‘much Relief by Blisters’; only on page 5 of that same issue would the reader discover that the Queen had died on Sunday, 31 July.”

Food seems to be one of the things I do the most googling about while writing–maybe because so many things about the way we eat seem so “natural” but have actually changed a great deal in the last two hundred years. Or maybe because I’m a cook and food seems to work its way into a lot of my scenes. Who knows? Anyway, I was looking up common shapes for Regency marzipan molds, and I found this, from this site:

Picture cakes were one of the main attractions of fairs and festivals – the cookies represented a lively and subtle form of communication, often using a traditional symbolic code to convey the message. These “cookie messages” were shaped by the baker’s molds – more importantly, the common man was being shaped (influenced) by the MASS MEDIA OF COOKIES.

An example of a mold used for political propaganda (other than the 4000 gingerbread cookies in the image of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III): In 1800, an unknown carver added a Napoleonic hat to a billygoat rider/monkey companion mold symbolic of evil, carved five years earlier. Thus Napoleon was ridiculed – by the gingerbread baker – throughout the Austrian and Germany lands that he had invaded that summer!

How cool is that? I want to know more! I may have to get my hands on the books cited…

This month I am giving away a signed copy of Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair! Check it out! I love that book a LOT, and the series just keeps getting better.

I just started his new book Shades of Gray, too.

I also made my second post over at Favorite Thing EVER, on The Online Etymology Dictionary. I also talk about Regency words for blowjob and how I CAN’T FIND ANY GOOD ONES.

I am reading a biography of Ann Yearsley, the working-class poet “discovered” by Hannah More: Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton by Mary Waldron. I’m really enjoying it; the author has the perfect mixture of affection and humorous clearsightedness about her subject and it’s got lots of great information about smalltown life in late 18th century England. But it just said this:

Few even of the agitators for political reform or supporters of the American revolutionaries would have contemplated doing without their servants. Most people–even, it must be said, many of the poor themselves–would have agreed with Bernard Mandeville, writing in 1723 about the charity school movement, which had begun in 1699: “Going to School in comparison to Working is Idleness, and the longer Boys continue in this easy sort of Life, the more unfit they’ll be for downright Labor, both as to Strength and Inclination. Men who are to remain and end their Days in a Laborious, Tiresome and Painful Station of Life, the sooner they are put upon it at first, the more patiently they’ll submit to it for ever after.”

I just don’t think that’s a fair transition. I agree completely that very few people (maybe no one) were free of class prejudice in Georgian England. (But then, the same is probably true of modern America.) But unless you’re going to get argue we should get rid of social class altogether and redistribute the wealth, which this author doesn’t seem to be doing, saying that having servants was unprogressive seems to me to completely ignore the reality of 18th (and 19th) century life.

1. They didn’t have vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves, sewing machines, central heating, food processors, electric lighting, or much in the way of processed/prepared food. Very, very few people had any kind of indoor plumbing.

Maintaining even a small middle-class family home was a full-time job for more than one person. Doing without servants entirely would have meant turning the women of the household into unpaid drudges who worked every minute they weren’t sleeping and slept five hours a night. How progressive!

Even women who had servants spent huge amounts of time in household chores. Even the Lucas girls in Pride and Prejudice (a VERY upper-middle-class home, with presumably more servants than most) helped in the kitchen (or so Mrs. Bennet says with some degree of plausibility, even if she’s being catty).

2. Domestic service was a huge part of the economy. Not employing servants meant depriving working-class people of jobs without, as far as I can see, empowering them in the slightest.

3. There’s no connection between employing servants or not and supporting mass education or not. Servants can go to school as children just like anyone else.

Anyway. Sorry, awesome biography author! I do love your book.