Italians Serenade London for Christmas in the 1820s

Lazzari, Trompe l'oeil Still Life 18th C

Loretta reports:

There are a couple of interesting bits in this excerpt from Hone’s Every-Day Book. The first part reminds us that ordinary Londoners didn’t have anything like the access we do to music. If you were well off, you could go to the opera, ballet, or theater, or you would dance at Almack’s to some of the latest pieces from abroad. For ordinary people, London had its street musicians, true, as well as cheaper theatrical entertainments. Italian music by Italian musicians, however, seems to have been rather uncommon in the 1820s.

The second item I’d call to your attention is Hone’s reference, a little further on, to Londoners’ attitude toward Italian musicians a generation earlier, which this Rowlandson image illustrates. It is a far cry from the gentler and appreciative tone of Hone's report.

"Previous to Christmas 1825, a trio of foreign minstrels appeared in London, ushering in the season with melody from instruments seldom performed on in the streets. These were Genoese with their guitars.  Musicians of this order are common in Naples and all over Italy; at the carnival time they are fully employed, and at other periods are hired to assist in those serenades whereof English ladies hear nothing, unless they travel, save by the reports of those who publish accounts of their adventures. The three now spoken of took up their abode in London, at the King’s head public-house, in Leather-lane, from whence ever and anon, to wit, daily they sallied forth to ‘discourse most excellent music.’ They are represented in the engraving below, from a sketch hastily taken by a gentleman who was of a dinner party, by whom they were called into the house of a street in the suburbs.

Italian Minstrels in London,
At Christmas, 1825

Ranged in a row, with guitars slung
Before them thus, they played and sung:
Their instruments and choral voice
Bide each glad guest still more rejoice;
And each guest wished again to hear
Their wild guitars and voices clear."

Images: Sebastiano Lazzari: Trompe-l'œil Still Life, 18th century; illustrations and clipping from The Every-Day Book or Guide to the Year, William Hone, first published 1826

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on a caption link will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

What Ordinary People Wore in the Early 1800s

1808 Woman Churning Butter

Country Fair 1808

Loretta reports:

Given comments on my last blog, it seemed like a good time to look at resources for what working people wore. Susan and I have written about tradespeople and servants here, here, here, here, here, and elsewhere.

They are rarely the subjects of portraits, although they might be included in scenes of, say, a great estate. Also, a few employers actually had at least some of their servants’ portraits painted. Later in  the 1800s, Victorian servants appear in quite a few photographs. But for those of us who are looking at English dress before photography, there are other ways to get an understanding of what ordinary people wore.

William Henry Pyne is one of my go-to illustrators. I have two reprints of his work dealing with this subject: Picturesque Views of Rural Occupations in Early Nineteenth-Century England and Pyne's British Costumes.

Online, there’s also his Etchings of rustic figures, for the embellishment of landscape.

Rustic figures

Rustic figures

Other sources include satirical prints. Though we need to be aware of exaggerations, they generally seem to get the clothing details right. Images in Ackermann’s Microcosm of London show ordinary people as well as those of the upper orders.

In some cases, we see a distinctive uniform for a trade or profession. The watermen or firemen, for instance. Others might wear a certain type of vest. Many professions and trades required badges. Whether one’s clothes were in fashion or not would depend on one’s business. A dressmaker, for instance, would need to look up-to-date. For haymakers, it was another case entirely.

Images:
14. A woman churning butter with a cloth apron tied about her waist and a mob-cap on her head, another woman milking a cow beyond. Title page lettered "The Costume of Great Britain. Designed, Engraved , and Written by W. H. Pyne." "London: Published by William Miller, Albermarle-Street. 1808." Courtesy the British Museum
Couple at fair looking at a clown and a bell ringer, W.H. Pyne, [1808], courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
Rustic figures from Pyne, Etchings of rustic figures, for the embellishment of landscape.

Rowlandson, Thames Watermen from Miseries of London 1807I courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Friday Video: Victorian Paramedics

Loretta reports:

Researching those of my books in which characters become ill, I’ve grown familiar with 19th century medical practices, many of which were based on theories dating back to the middle ages.

The strange treatments in this Horrible Histories video are mainly superstitions, rather than actual medical procedures. Still, they’re less disturbing than many of the remedies physicians truly believed in, all too often to the fatal detriment of their patients’ health.

Do you ever wonder what people a couple of centuries from now will think of our medical practices? They’ll be horrified, I don't doubt.

Image: Screen shot from video, Horrible Histories- Victorian Paramedics.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

Parisian Porters in 1835

Loretta reports:

As part of Avon’s Diamond Anniversary, they’re highlighting certain of their books, one a month. Since my historical romance, Lord of Scoundrels,* is being honored this month, I’ll be offering bits of related research.

One personage who appears in the first part of the book is the porter for the apartment building in Paris in which the heroine’s brother lives. The porter was the all-purpose servant for everybody in the building.

Porter of Paris

When I wrote the book, believe it or not, I had no access to the Internet. Google didn’t exist. My main source was Frances Trollope’s Paris and the Parisians in 1835.** As is often the case in travel writings, the author’s attitudes and prejudices color her observations. My English characters reflect some of these views, though I may tone them down a bit to accommodate my readers’ sensibilities. (In historical romance, it’s always a balancing act, on so many counts.)

Porter of Paris

In any case, as Ms Trollope makes clear, the position entailed a great deal more than that of the porter in a large English establishment, where many other servants, especially footmen, were available to perform various tasks.

Porter of Paris

You may wish to continue reading the chapter (just click on the link under the image and continue paging through): The author makes some interesting points about Parisian vs London modes of living.

If I understand correctly, the porter/concierge is still part of Parisian apartment life, albeit he/she seems to be a dying breed. Parisian readers, please feel free to chime in!

*EBook on sale this month for $1.99 (U.S. & Canada only, sorry!)

** From whom I’ve quoted before, here and here.

Porter of Paris image from James Jackson Jarves’ Parisian Sights and French Principles: Seen Through American Spectacles (1853)

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

An 1828 Guide to London Pitfalls & Scams

Doctor Syntax Overboard

Loretta reports:

In my Endnotes to Dukes Prefer Blondes, I quote from John Bee’s A Living Picture of London, 1828, which is well worth exploring.

To begin with, there’s the full title:

A LIVING PICTURE OF LONDON FOR 1828 

AND

STRANGER’S GUIDE

THROUGH THE STREETS OF THE METROPOLIS;

SHEWING THE FRAUDS, THE ARTS, THE SNARES AND WILES OF ALL 

DESCRIPTIONS OF ROGUES, THAT EVERY

WHERE ABOUND; 

WITH

SUITABLE ADMONITIONS, PRECAUTIONS, AND ADVICE HOW TO 

AVOID OR DEFEAT THEIR ATTEMPTS; 

Interspersed with 

SKETCHES OF COCKNEY MANNERS, LIFE, SOCIETY,

AND CUSTOMS;

And supported throughout by numerous

CASES, ANECDOTES, AND PERSONAL ADVENTURES. 

By JON BEE, Esq.

AUTHOR OF A DICTIONARY OF THE VARIETIES OF LIFE, &c. 

~

To which is appended, the Author's former 

“HINTS FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE POLICE;”

WITH FURTHER SUGGESTIONS, FACTS, AND REMEDIES.

The short excerpt below, from the chapter about what to expect when you get off the boat, is a fine example. You can find the “regulated fares of watermen” here.

Out-door Delinquencies

Jon Bee, A Living Picture of London, for 1828, and Stranger's Guide.

Image, possibly by Robert Cruikshank, from Doctor Syntax Through London, “Doctor Syntax Shoots London Bridge & Pops Overboard.”

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

The Hairdresser, 1827

Hairdresser

Loretta reports:

The Book of English Trades was a guide aimed mainly at a young audience, explaining what people did and what they were paid. It continued to appear, year after year, and you can find it online in many editions. The clippings here are from the 1827 edition.

You can read the full entry online beginning here.

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Hackney Cab vs. Hackney Coach

Cruikshank, “The Last Cabdriver"

Loretta reports:

My characters in Dukes Prefer Blondes spend time in hackney coaches and hackney cabs. You will often find the terms used interchangeably, as though they were the same thing. However, a hackney cab was quite a different article from a hackney coach. The cab was a two-wheeled, one-horse vehicle. It held only two passengers, and seemed to be generally regarded as a mode of transportation for those who liked to live dangerously.

Leigh’s New Picture of London for 1834 briefly explains the difference here. You can read about them here in Omnibuses and Cabs, Their Origin and History, which includes excerpts from Dickens’s lively descriptions.

I’ve written a bit more about hackney coaches here, and you can read Dickens’s full version (which originally appeared in Bell’s Life in London in November 1835) here in Sketches by Boz.

1823 Hackney Cab

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

The Cost of Fashion

Loretta reports:

In response to a recent fashion post, a reader asked, “What class of women could afford this cape? What was the cost of fashion and what fabrics were used to create the cape?”

High fashion was expensive then and it’s expensive today. La Belle Assemblée, where those plates came from, was aimed at upper class women. A very rough analogy would be today’s Vogue or Harpers Bazaar. The fashions are mainly for wealthy women.

The Regency History site provides some LBA prices in the Regency era here. And Mike Rendell has info here. On my own, I found that LBA in 1826 cost 3 shillings. Ackermann’s Repository cost 4s. In 1833 The Royal Lady’s Magazine sold for 2s 6d.

Compare this to the Ladies Cabinet of Fashion which sold for 6d. The Lady's Pocket Magazine, the source of the fashion plates on this page, was another low-priced magazine. These were smaller, and the plates weren’t cruder. But the low price indicates readers at a lower economic level, who still wanted fashionable clothing. Basically, this would mean using less expensive material, since labor costs were negligible.

In Nicholas Nickleby,* a seamstress’s terms of employment are as follows: “Our hours are from nine to nine**with extra work when we’re very full of business, for which I allow payment as overtime ... I should think your wages would average from five to seven shillings a week; but I can’t give you any certain information on that point until I see what you can do.”

But a seamstress is a lowly position. How about this ad from The Sheffield Independent, and Yorkshire and Derbyshire Advertiser for February 1835?

Wanted.

A widow and her daughter, Members of the Church of England, to undertake the Management of the GIRLS’ CHARITY SCHOOL, in this Town, and the Instruction of the Children. Piety, Ability, and Activity are necessary qualifications; and references as to these must be given, as well as to general Respectability of Character ... Salary. £ 52. 10s. a year.

I also happened on this:
“Ladies fashionable Side-laced Boots, Black and Coloured, 4s 6d to 5s6d per pair.”—Brighton Patriot and Lewes Free Press etc. Tuesday, August 18, 1835

A pair of those shoes would take a sizable chunk of Kate’s weekly wages.

I couldn’t track down Luxmore. What I did find was:
"Luxor—A soft, ribbed silk satin: used as dress fabric: also an obsolete French woolen dress goods."— Louis Harmuth, Dictionary of Textiles.

Since this post is already too long, I'll continue with fabric costs and wages at another time.
*Dickens, who was a journalist at heart, tends to be pretty reliable in terms of living and working conditions.
**Six days a week.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.

Friday video: The Clock That Changed the World

Loretta reports:

Years ago, after reading Dava Sobel’s Longitude, my husband and I were very excited to see the actual Harrison chronometers at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

This BBC program does a good job of explaining, in half an hour, Harrison’s achievement. It also might make some elements of Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey series a bit more comprehensible.

You can see one of the clocks we saw at Greenwich here.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

Coaching Accidents Will Happen

Coach Accident

Loretta reports:

We historical romance writers frequently make use of coaching accidents and drunken coachmen in our stories. Unlike the number of dukes we’ve created—which at this point must far exceed the total of all noblemen in 19th-century Great Britain—coaching accidents are, unfortunately, not an exaggeration. They occur frequently in Dickens’s novels because they occurred frequently. He experienced several.

Isabella/Susan sent me a link to Geri Walton’s recent post on the subject, at the History of the 18th and 19th Centuries blog. Ms. Walton explains the many ways carriage and coach travel could go wrong. One method she doesn’t mention is the following, apparently based on an actual incident:

“Heads, heads—take care of your heads!" cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. "Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children —mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch— crash—knock—children look round—mother's head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking!”

Coach Accident

—Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (more commonly known as The Pickwick Papers)

Look into any book about coaching, and you’ll read about accidents.

The clipping at right comes from the 1819 Annual Register* for 13 August.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Image: C.B. Newhouse, "A Passing Remark," from Thomas Cross, The Autobiography of a Stage Coachman (1904), courtesy Internet Archive.


*Account of the year 1819, published in 1820.

Stolen Bodies in 1826

Resurrectionists at work

Loretta reports:

In the days before x-rays (near the turn of the 20th century), the only way to see what was inside the human body was to cut it open and actually look inside, preferably after death.  As Judith Flanders points out in The Invention of Murder, “medical schools officially used only the corpses of executed criminals for dissection.”  The trouble was, there weren’t enough dead criminals to keep up with the demand.  Enterprising individuals started digging up the recently interred from graveyards and selling the bodies to anatomy lecturers.  Desperate for fresh corpses, the latter didn’t ask awkward questions.

What I didn’t realize until reading Ms. Flanders’s book was, this was only “semi-illegal (‘semi’ because dead bodies in law belonged to no one; resurrectionists could be charged only with stealing grave clothes).” The info comes as part of her introduction to the Burke and Hare case of the late 1820s.*

My excerpt from The Gentleman’s Magazine (Volume 96, Part 2; Volume 140, 1826) is shortly before Burke & Hare, and the “friend of anatomical pursuits" is a lot more finicky about how the bodies are obtained than medical schools were.

Resurrectionists

Image: Hablot Knight Browne, Resurrectionists at work, accompanying the story of John Holmes and Peter Williams, whipped for stealing dead bodies in 1777, from The chronicles of crime; or, The new Newgate calendar, being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841 (later ed. 1887)

*More here.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the captions will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Budgeting for servants in 1825

Loo in the kitchin

Loretta reports:

Once upon a time, labor was cheap.  Mr. Darcy’s ten thousand pounds a year would have made for a large staff at Pemberley.

The following budgets, from Samuel & Sarah Adams's, The Complete Servant, show that even ladies and gentlemen of modest means could afford at least one servant.  Though the figures are for 1825, we can get a general idea of what, say, Mr. Bennett’s annual income might have been, based on the size of his household staff.

staff acc. to income

staff acc. to income

Household

 The Complete Servant is available online at Google Books.

Image, Loo in the kitchin [sic] or, High life belowstairs, 1799 courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
 
Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the captions will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

"Mr. Evans's Cushions": More Secrets of the Big Hair of the 1770s.

Isabella reporting,

Two of our most popular posts of the summer dealt with the towering hair styles of the 1770s and how these styles are being recreated by apprentice mantua-maker Abby Cox and the other ladies of the Margaret Hunter shop in Colonial Williamsburg. When I spotted this 1779 advertisement, left, from a London newspaper online this morning, I knew I'd have to share it here on the blog.

Although this advertisement is over two hundred years old, it has all the marketing tricks the beauty trade still uses. There's the name brand of EDWARD EVANS, there in caps so it can't be missed. And why is his name so important? Because it carries the endorsement of a mega-celebrity - he's the Hairdresser to the Queen, which was about as celebrated as a celebrity could be in Georgian England. (He might even as skilled as this hairdresser, lower right, who is forced to balance on a stool to reach the top of his client's hair.)

Mr. Evans is offering hairdressing cushions that are apparently the new, new, newest thing, and promises that ladies will be able to achieve the latest styles with ease and speed. He knows, because his products have often been imitated, but never equaled by his competitors. Then Mr. Evans finishes off with a promise that he has the lowest prices. If there had been infomercials in 1770, Edward Evans would have been a tonsorial king of late night TV - the Chaz Dean of hair cushions.

And yet as detailed as this advertisement is, it still leaves so much unsaid. What made these particular cushions so suitable for summer wear? How large were they? What fabric was used so they didn't slip from the head or require hair pins? Of course, Mr. Evans's ladies would have known all this, just as their modern counterparts know exactly how a Bumpit works. But oh, what we Nerdy History (and Historical Hair) people would give for even one illustration to make everything clear!

Many thanks to Neal Hurst for spotting this advertisement for us!

Above: Advertisement, Public Advertiser (London, England), Saturday, June 26 1779; Issue 13952.
Below: The preposterous head dress, or, The Feather'd Lady, published by M. Darly, London, 1776. From the collection of the Walpole Library, Yale University.

Crime in 1830s London

Oliver Twist scene

Loretta reports:

Isabella and I were talking recently about the differences in London crime fighting in the times of our respective books.   One of the things I’ve found so interesting about the mid-1830s is the evolution of London’s police.

The Metropolitan Police came into existence in 1829, in an unfriendly environment.  In 1830, when the first policeman was killed trying to break up a drunken fight, the coroner’s verdict was justifiable homicide.  The history of the force

Crime statistics 1838

is fascinating—and I’m likely to acquire way too many books on the subject—but for today, I only wanted to give you an idea of what they were dealing with. 

Crime statistics 1834-39

Some readers may be surprised at the number of executions.  Others may be unfamiliar with the name of the penal colony.  New South Wales I was aware of.  But I had to look up Norfolk Island.


Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the captions will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

The Hackney Coach in the 1830s

Hackney coach

Loretta reports:

My characters often take hackneys.  It wasn’t a classy way to travel, but the vehicles were ubiquitous, as one of the links in this post indicates. Also, it’s a preferred mode of transport for someone who's traveling incognito.  But what were hackneys like?

Here’s Charles Dickens’s description, from Sketches by Boz.*

"There is a hackney-coach stand under the very window at which we are writing; there is only one coach on it now, but it is a fair specimen of the class of vehicles to which we have alluded - a great, lumbering, square concern of a dingy yellow colour (like a bilious brunette), with very small glasses, but very large frames; the panels are ornamented with a faded coat of arms,** in shape something like a dissected bat, the axletree is red, and the majority of the wheels are green. The box is partially covered by an old great-coat, with a multiplicity of capes, and some extraordinary-looking clothes; and the straw, with which the canvas cushion is stuffed, is sticking up in several places, as if in rivalry of the hay, which is peeping through the chinks in the boot. The horses, with drooping heads, and each with a mane and tail as scanty and straggling as those of a worn-out rocking-horse, are standing patiently on some damp straw, occasionally wincing, and rattling the harness; and now and then, one of them lifts his mouth to the ear of his companion, as if he were saying, in a whisper, that he should like to assassinate the coachman. The coachman himself is in the watering-house; and the waterman,*** with his hands forced into his pockets as far as they can possibly go, is dancing the 'double shuffle,' in front of the pump, to keep his feet warm."

Hackney cabriolet

At this time, there were two different varieties of hackneys.  The other is a hackney cab (or cabriolet), which looks a bit more like the hansom cabs that appear later in the century.  Dickens distinguishes between the two, but elsewhere the hackneys seem to be lumped together as a mode of public transportation.

 *First published November 1835, in Bell’s Life in London.



**many of the coaches were vehicles previously owned by aristocrats.
***more about watermen here.
Images are from Henry Charles Moore, Omnibuses and cabs, their origin and history 1902, courtesy Internet Archive. 
Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source.

Dressmakers in the 19th century—an interview

View at source here

Loretta reports:

With Vixen in Velvet’s big day rapidly approaching, I’ve been rapidly doing interviews.  Today’s interview, at All About Romance, focuses sharply on Nerdy History Girl matters, and what I’ve learned about dressmakers in the 1830s.

Though I offer fashion plates monthly, and will offer them more frequently in coming days to complement my new story, this Q & A goes a bit more behind the scenes.

Many thanks to All About Romance for this wonderful opportunity to take readers a bit more deeply into my work!

The illustration is edited from an August 1831 fashion plate in La Belle Assemblée.

Paying Charles Dickens

Dickens in his study at Gad's Hill

Loretta reports:

A commenter on one of my recent posts wrote:  “Paid by the word, that was done in my youth when I wrote a newspaper column. Are you saying that it wasn't done in Dickens' time, or that it was not done with Dickens?”

The idea of Dickens being paid by the word may be based on misunderstandings about his career as well as the 21st century view of his prose style.

Dickens started out as a freelance reporter, and these men were penny-a-liners, often viewed as hacks.  He was soon hired, though, for a regular salary.

His fiction followed a different route.  For his first few published fictional pieces—which eventually became part of Sketches by Boz—his only pay was the delight of seeing his work in print.  But not long thereafter he was paid an extra two guineas a week for these sketches.

He received one hundred pounds for the copyright to the Sketches by Boz printed to that point, then £100 for the second edition, then £150 “for a new volume of previously uncollected sketches.”  For The Pickwick Papers, he was to provide 1-1/2 sheets (16 pages of finished product) per month at 9 guineas per sheet.  The rates soon went up.

By the 1840s, he received an advance of £1800 for American Notes. In 1863,  “he proposed that [his publishers] pay him £6000 for the half copyright throughout and outright" for Our Mutual Friend. 

As to his verbosity: We 21st C authors are expected step briskly into the story, and to keep digressions and subplots to a bare minimum.  Not at all the case in his time.  Readers had longer attention spans; they wanted big stories and lots of detail.  But he told big stories and conveyed detail in a lively way, and his style seemed fresh and vibrant and modern to his readers.  His early newspaper pieces sometimes make fun of the over-ornate style of the time—and it’s a joke he uses again and again in his fiction, especially in portraying hypocrites, humbugs, and windbags.


While there seem to be an infinite number of Dickens biographies, I relied for the above information on two I had close at hand, Fred Kaplan’s Dickens: A Biography, and Peter Akroyd’s Dickens.

Image courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the information page there.

View from the Coachman's Seat

View at source here

Loretta reports:

Stanley Harris is one of several late 19th century authors of books about the golden age of coaching, which he says reached a state of perfection from 1820-40.  Thomas De Quincey was a fan of riding outside the coach. Others were not. Here’s the view from the coachman’s seat, pro and con.

~~~

…The box-seat in those days was a seat of honour: in a good, stout double-breasted coat, and with a good whip to handle the ribbons by your side, with rattling-bars, and with fair weather and a fine country, what could be more delightful!  Instead of tunnels and cuttings we had hills and dales; one saw the country and its inhabitants. The driver of a coach had his privileges in those days, as the following story, told by Lord William Lennox, will show:

'When we stopped to change horses at Slough, I saw the faithless Lothario [the coachman's wife had given him a bunch of violets at starting] present the pretty barmaid of the Red Lion with the bunch of violets, which she placed near her heart. Nay, more, if my optics did not deceive me, he implanted a kiss on the rosy lips of the blooming landlady, who faintly exclaimed, "For shame, you naughty man!"'

All this shows the bright side of coach-travelling; but there is another picture, and one equally true. 

View at source here

The outside of a coach in mid-winter, with darkness and cold mist such as eats into the very marrow, or with biting wind or pitiless continuous rain, is not pleasant, and is well exchanged for the inside of a railway carriage. What avails scenery when you can only discern the horses' heads through mist by aid of the coach-lamps? Though, when the air was steady, the night bright, and the roads firm, life on the box was not undesirable. The little villages, with lights shining through the diamond panes of the cottages, the odd weird shape of the trees, the interchange of conversation at any stoppage, were pleasant things enough.
—Stanley Harris, The Coaching Age

Illustrations—
Upper left: Charles Cooper Henderson, Mail Coaches on the Road: the Louth-London Royal Mail progressing at Speed (between 1820 and 1830) Oil on canvas, courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.  Lower right:

James Pollard, The mail coach in a thunderstorm on Newmarket Heath, Suffolk, 1827, courtesy Wikipedia.

Children's Winter Maladies 1811

View at Internet Archive

Loretta reports:

This being prime cold and flu season, I wondered what the average Regency-era physician might encounter in his practice.  The Medical Report for January-February gives an inkling of one reason so many children failed to survive into adulthood.  In the days before intravenous feeding, dehydration was often fatal.  At least some physicians were on the right track about this (and horribly wrong about other ailments), as well as understanding the difficulties of feeding a sick, miserable child. 

The medical commentary here made me wonder as well whether it was lack of antibiotics or lack of a way to combat swift dehydration that killed so many people during the 1830s cholera epidemics. 

Read at Internet Archive

Clicking on the captions will allow you to read at the source, where you can enlarge images as needed.

Return Engagement: Pierre-Jospeh Redouté and his flowers

Loretta reports:

[Things here in New England are viciously cold, making this a good time, I think, to revisit a warm posts  This one originally appeared in January 2010.]

Spring comes late to New England, and after days of snow, I’m ready for flowers.  The ones illustrated here are by Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840).  He was a court painter to Marie Antoinette as well as the Empress Josephine.  After the latter fell out of favor, he got friendly with the Bourbons.  It’s no small feat to survive those sorts of political upheavals.  One must be extremely charming or extremely talented.  It’s clear he was talented, and I’m guessing he was charming, too.  He’s one in a long line of amazing artists from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Jane Austen’s World  offers a wonderful appreciation of Redouté.  If you scroll down the post, you’ll see his family in an entry from the 1889 Dictionary of Painters and Engravers.  At some online sites you’ll find Pierre confused with his brother Henri-Joseph, one of the naturalists on Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt.  The tale of the scientists and artists who created the Description de l’Egypte is a different, far more harrowing story—but with beautiful pictures—which I’ll get to one of these days. 

For now, though, let’s just enjoy the flowers.