The Geffrye Museum of the Home

Ornamental glass lustres c. 1880

Caughley Tea Service c. 1780

Loretta reports:

Instead of the usual Friday video, I’m offering a tour of the Geffrye Museum of the Home, which my husband and I visited during our time in London. The draw for me was the series of period rooms.

As Susan and I have often lamented, it’s much easier to find paintings and prints of exteriors than interiors. The Geffrye offers a chance to view some interiors and, especially, to notice the way home life changed over time. These aren’t the homes of aristocrats, but, with the exception of the almshouses, of well-off families of the professional classes.

With the museum closed for development until 2020, I invite you to check out the panoramas and the virtual tour offered on the website—which I supplement with these photographs from our visit.

Photographs by Walter M. Henritze
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Friday Video: Knole House, Kent

Loretta reports:

Rather a long time ago, at the end of the England trip that led to my writing Lord of Scoundrels, my husband and a friend and I visited Knole. By this time, we’d explored a number of stately homes, but Knole was an entirely new experience. This wasn’t simply because the early Jacobean structure was older than many of the homes we’d visited, but because so much of the centuries-old stuff inside wasn't renovated or restored, but the original stuff, fading and tattered. While conservation work is ongoing, and a great deal has been done since we visited, it’s still possible to see some these furnishings, and they do give the place a different atmosphere from that of other great houses. Then, too, there’s the sheer size of the place. I'm pretty sure the impression it made led to my fascination with Jacobean mansions, and having my characters live or get married in them.

Video:  Knole - Five centuries of showing off

The video is one from  Knole's YouTube channel where, among other things, you can watch conservation in process.

Image: Knole House, from Francis Orpen Morris, A Series of Picturesque Views of Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland: With Descriptive and Historical Letterpress, Volume 6 (1880)

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.
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Friday Video: What Did Shakespeare's English Sound Like?

Romeo & Juliet

Loretta reports:

Not long ago, I posted a short video about the way the English language has changed over the centuries.

I raised the question about how understandable Shakespeare’s English would be to modern audiences: not only in the sense of unfamiliar words and phrases but also in terms of the sounds.

Lo and behold, wandering through YouTube at some point when I probably should have been working on the WIP, I found the answer as well as more glimpses of what goes on at the new Globe theater.

Image: Francesco Hayez, L'ultimo bacio di Giuletta e Romeo (Romeo and Juliet's Last Kiss)

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.

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.

From the Archives: King William III's Private Place

Loretta reports:

State apartments are all very well, and I can be easily awestruck by, say, a magnificent painted ceiling, or candle stands that tower over my head.

But the most fun for me in touring a historic site is looking into the less public spaces:  kitchens, for instance.  Wine cellars.  Bathrooms.

Previously we looked into Queen Caroline’s (Caroline of Ansbach 1683-1737) bathroom at Hampton Court Palace.

Nowhere in my perambulations, however, did I come upon the King’s bathroom.  I did find his lavatory, though.

King William III (1650–1702) was not an extrovert.  He liked to be alone or with small groups of friends.  One of the places where he could have some privacy was what’s called the King’s Closet.  Here he’d meet with the privileged few and work at his modest-looking walnut desk.  His long-case clock nearby needs to be wound only once a year—highly advanced technology for the time.

And in this private area, not far away, and in plain sight between the jib doors* is King William's own actual close stool.  According to the brochure, “the Groom of the Stool was a senior courtier who not only ran the Bedchamber department but also had to personally attend the king on his ‘stool.’”

I leave you to surmise what attendance entailed.

*"In Architecture, a door so constructed that it stands flush with the adjoining face of the wall on both sides, and without dressings or architraves. Thus it appears to form part of the wall, the intention of a jib door being simply to disguise the aperture." —A Dictionary of Science, Literature, & Art, 1875

A Man, His Dog, and "Two Great Wolves" at Plymouth, 1621

Isabella reporting,

November means that we're in Pilgrim season - the time when advertisers send out the parade of goofy-looking quasi-Pilgrims in buckled hats and white collars, chasing turkeys on their way to Black Friday sales at the local mall. The other alternative isn't much better: the romanticized rosy-cheeked and near-saintly Puritan maids and families, heads bowed over bountiful feasts.

The truth was that during the first years of the Plymouth colony, the lives of the settlers were grim indeed, and filled with an inconceivable degree of everyday danger and risk. This short paragraph is from A Relation or Journal of the Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth by Edward Winslow, a journal for the first years of Plymouth published in London in 1624.

The passage describes a harrowing January evening endured by a colonist named John Goodman. Although suffering from frostbite in his feet (which resulted from an earlier snowy night spent hiding from a lion in a tree in the forest), Goodman decided to go for a short walk with his pet dog. A dog would have been a rare companion to anyone on that difficult voyage on the Mayflower, and one not easily replaced. Any pet-owner will feel horror and sympathy for Goodman, forced to defend his terrified little dog:

"This day in the evening, John Goodman went abroad to use his lame feet, that were pitifully ill with the cold he had got. Having a little spaniel with him, a little way from the plantation, two great wolves ran after the dog, the dog ran to him and betwixt his legs for succor. He had nothing in his hand but took up a stick, and threw at one of [the wolves] and hit him, and they presently ran both away, but came again. He got a pale board [used for fencing] in his hand, and [the wolves] sat both on their tails, grinning at him, a good while, and went their way, and left him." 

Little else is known of John Goodman. He may have survived the wolves, but not disease and hardship. Nearly half of the original colonists died that first winter, and by 1651, Governor William Bradford included Goodman in his list of Mayflower passengers who "died soon after in the general sickness that befell." As for his little spaniel, he was at least spared this kind of canine indignity by living in the 1620s.

Above: Blind Man with His Dog, by Jacques Callot, 17thc. Harvard Art Museums.