Category: Risky Regencies

I did a post at Risky Regencies about Regency ghosts!

Completely silent ghosts became the norm to a much greater extent over the course of the nineteenth century. Generally ghosts who did speak were wrong-righting ghosts. (Although there were exceptions! In 1706 Mr. Shaw, a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, chatted with the ghost of a dead colleague for two hours before receiving word of his untimely death.) Murder victims were the most common. Conflicts over inheritance were also a big one: “Mother’s ghost appeared to me and she says I get the antique dining set!”

Read the whole thing!

I’m at Risky Regencies today talking about Regency shop windows, shoplifting techniques, etc!

Windows with lots of small panes were popular in Regency storefronts for at least two reasons:

1. Glass was still taxed by weight. A larger pane requires a thicker weight of glass. (This applied to greenhouses as well, by the way. You see them with lots of little panes.)

2. Shoplifting and property crime was endemic, and a small pane of glass was easier and cheaper to replace if someone broke it to steal your goods.

Read the whole post!

I have a blog post up at Risky Regencies today about eighteenth-century working-class poets!

There were actually a fair number of working class poets in eighteenth-century England, though their work has been excluded from the canon. A few of my personal favorites are:

1. Mary Collier. Wikipedia notes:

“She read Stephen Duck‘s The Thresher’s Labour (1730) and in response to his apparent disdain for labouring-class women, wrote the 246-line poem for which she is mainly remembered, The Woman’s Labour: an Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck. In this piece she catalogues the daily tasks of a working woman, both outside the home and, at the end of the day, within the home as well:

‘You sup, and go to Bed without delay,
And rest yourselves till the ensuing Day;
While we, alas! but little Sleep can have…'”

Read the rest!

I have a blog post up at Risky Regencies today about Anglican church layouts, seating, and box pews in the Regency.

I had never heard of box pews until I started writing the Lively St. Lemeston series! However, they were much more common in England during the Regency than bench-style pews. Wikipedia explains:

“Box pews provided privacy and allowed the family to sit together. In the 17th century they could include windows, curtains, tables and even fireplaces, and were treated as personal property that could be willed to legatees. Sometimes the paneling was so high it was difficult to see out, and the privacy was used as a cover for non-devotional activity….By the eighteenth century it became normal to install formal box pews instead of random personal constructions. This provided a more classic line to the church, although Sir Christopher Wren objected to pews in his churches. With the mid-19th century church reforms, box pews were generally swept away and replaced by bench pews. However a number of examples still remain in various churches throughout the United Kingdom.”

Note that part of the church reforms involved changing how clergymen were paid—fees from renting pews provided a good chunk of their salaries previously, so they resisted replacing them with more efficient seating.

Read the rest. (There are a lot more illustrations!)

Today at Risky Regencies I shared the recipe for Toogood’s onion pie (and included some other links about the food in Listen to the Moon).

What it says on the tin. This journalist’s name kept coming up in my research on early Alexander Hamilton-related US politics (he leaked the original Reynolds documents that led to Hamilton writing the notorious pamphlet, his prosecution for libel by Adams was a major campaign issue in the 1800 presidential election, and he also broke the Sally Hemings story).

I then found out that he conveniently died right around the time Alexander Hamilton would have subpoenaed him to testify against Jefferson in a prominent libel case…

Read all about it.

My Risky Regencies post today is a repost of my scans and excerpts from Barbara Cartland’s amazing “romantic” cookbook, The Romance of Food. This was one of my very first blog posts ever, so if you are a new reader and haven’t seen them, you owe it to yourself to check it out. A sample caption (for a lobster):

An exotic creature from the deep, the color of two red lips, which can invite, provoke, and surrender.