More Bright Colors: The Governor's Palace

Susan reports:

There was so much interest in the eye-boggling 18th c. wallpaper from Colonial Williamsburg last week that I thought I'd follow up with two of the most brightly painted rooms in the entire town.

The large blue room is the ballroom in the Royal Governor's Palace, and the green room that opens from it is the supper room. Both were added to the palace in 1752, following the new fashion among English aristocrats to build special rooms onto their houses dedicated to dancing and socialising. The rooms are decorated in the latest London fashion for 1770 as if to suit the last royal governor, the Earl of Dunmore.

The ballroom is especially imposing because it has four life-size portraits of English royalty: King Charles II and his queen, Catherine of Braganza (because Lady Dunmore herself had Stuart blood) and, at the other end of the room, the reigning King George III and his queen, Charlotte. The portraits were meant to remind guests that the royal governor was the stand-in for the Crown, and the king literally stood behind his representative, even here in the distant colonies.

The ballroom is very large, historically large enough to hold a ball with 200 guests in attendance. Obviously not all guests danced at once. There would likely be a good many who never made it away from the

card or dining tables in one of the other

rooms, and others who simply passed the evening sitting in the chairs along the walls, flirting or gossiping.

The ballroom was designed to impress with its high arching ceiling, elaborate moldings, and crystal chandelier, but it's the brilliant blue walls, edged all around with gold, that first catch the eye. The wall-to-wall patterned carpet, woven to match, adds more color with vivid gold, pink, and purple.

With daylight streaming in through the tall windows, the effect is almost gaudy. However, the ballroom was used almost exclusively at night, and by candlelight (we NHG attended an evening ball lit entirely by candles) the colors are much more subdued and more elegant, too.

The same can be said of the adjoining supper room with its Chinese-inspired woodwork, brilliant green painted walls, and more patterned wool carpet. When the evening grew late and the guests exhausted from dancing, the doors to the supper room were opened and a lavish late meal was served here. Another set of doors at the opposite end of the room opened directly onto the formal gardens, where on warm nights guests could wander and amuse one another, and the green walls of the supper room were echoed by the trees outside.

Reader Lyn S. told us how bright the colors were in another 18th c. house, George Washington's Mt. Vernon. Here's the link for a virtual tour -- check out the bright green in the dining room!

The Miseries of Human Life

Loretta reports:

James Beresford’s The Miseries of Human Life, which first appeared in 1806, is still funny.  I own the Past Times 1995 adaptation, whose cover bears the Cruikshank illustration, The Head ache, shown at left, and from whose spine a ball & chain dangles.  This version drops the numerous Latin phrases of the original, as well as the dialogue form--a style popular in the late 18th and early 19th C, which modern readers may find a bit arch and artificial.  Yet I’d suggest you try the original anyway, because it’s full of funny little bits, and many of its miseries apply today as well as then.

MISERIES PERSONAL, EXISTENTIAL AND OF THE BODY
The horror of contriving how to adjust one’s legs and arms at the age of nineteen in a drawing room.

MISERIES OF TRAVELLING
In speeding through towns and turnpikes, the nervous habits and desperate manoeuvres to which you are perpetually driven, to avoid gratifying successive shoals of children, in their eager wishes and strenuous endeavours to be run over.

MISERIES OF SOCIAL LIFE
Sitting down alone in a large party upon a sofa that makes an equivocal noise.

MISERIES OF FASHIONABLE LIFE
Being a lady of a certain age, throwing yourself into your carriage at daybreak, after some long and fatiguing orgy, finding yourself face to face with your gentleman escort, with the killing consciousness that the beams of the rising sun, by pointing at certain derangements in the composition of your countenance, are gradually rectifying a few chronological errors in your own history, into which you had been leading him an hour before.

MISERIES DOMESTIC
Squatting plump on an unsuspected cat in your chair.

Being serenaded at your window, all night long, by the tender war-whoop of two cats, performed with demoniacal variations and professional enthusiasm.

MISERIES OF THE TABLE
Slipping your knife suddenly and violently from off a bone, its edge first shrieking across the plate (so as to make you hated by yourself and the whole company), and then driving the plate before it, and lodging all its contents—meat, gravy, melted butter, vegetables, &c., &c., partly on your own breeches, partly on the cloth, partly on the floor, but principally on the lap of a charming girl who sits by you, and to whom you had been diligently endeavoring to recommend yourself as a suitor.

While swallowing a raspberry, discovering by its taste that you have been so unhappy as to occasion the death of a harmless insect!

Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, among others, illustrated the book.
“The Head-ache” and “Cat-sitting," shown here, are Cruikshank’s work.

First Person History: On-line Diaries & Letters

Susan reports:

No historian's description can rival the words of the people who actually lived that history. More and more diaries, journals, and letters from every time period are being put on-line in websites and blogs, and for any history nerd (not just us), they're completely fascinating and absolutely addictive.

Martha Ballard (1735-1812) was a midwife who lived in Hallowell, Maine. Though she did not begin keeping her diary until she was fifty, the book remains one of the very few such journals kept by a colonial woman, and recounts not only her work as a rural midwife (she delivered over 800 babies), but also her trials and joys as a mother and wife in a turbulent time in American history. Her story was made famous by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale. (The photo, top left, is from the PBS adaptation.) You can read Martha's entire diary on line, in either her handwriting, or transcribed.

The letters home of Lt. David Thomas (1922-1945), left middle, an American airman serving in World War II, offer a different kind of experience. Posted on-line by his grand-nephew, Neal Thomas Hurst, in the form of a blog, these very readable letters bring back the day-to-day experiences of a young man during the war. Who can resist a letter that begins "Dear Mother, I didn't die"? Knowing that the lieutenant was later killed in action during a bombing mission over Germany in 1945 makes the letters all the more poignant.

The Life & Loves of a Victorian Clerk is exactly that: the daily journal of Nathaniel Bryceson (1825-1911), a nineteen-year-old wharf clerk in Pimilico. Documenting the year 1846, Nathaniel's journal is being put on-line day by day by the City of Westminster Archives, and includes wonderful 19th c. illustrations (like the one left) from their collections. So far Nathaniel has written of his job, his long walks around London on his days off, his neighbors, his girlfriend Anne Fox, and everything else that entertains a young man in Victorian London, from a public execution to a carriage accident -- and this is only the first month.

My personal favorite is the diary of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), left. Pepys was a naval administrator and member of Parliament. His daily diary from 1660-1670 chronicles both his personal life (I've already quoted here about his choice of books) and ambitions, and momentous historical events in London like the Plague and the Great Fire. This site posts an entry each day, much like a serial novel, and the comments added by readers greatly enhance the site.

These suggestions are only a beginning. How about the 17th c. extracts of the Royal Society's Journal Books? Or Jane Austen's History of England in her own hand, or William Blake's Notebook, or Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice? They're all here, thanks to the British Library.

Perhaps you have a favorite you've discovered, too. If so, please share the link -- whatever the topic, we're interested!

Miserable females in Bridewell

Loretta reports:

I forgot to identify the second print in my post about The Working Girls of London, and Susan asked me about it.

This illustration of the Bridewell (one of London’s prisons) Pass-Room comes from Rudolph Ackermann’s The Microcosm of London, which was printed in three volumes from 1808 to 1810.  You can read about this splendid publication at the University of London’s Senate House Library site and at the Eighteenth Century Reading Room.  Wikimedia Commons has all or most of the illustrations posted and the Internet Archive has Volume 1 posted.

Many of you will recognize immediately the work of Thomas Rowlandson.  His collaborator Augustus Pugin drew the building interiors and exteriors and Rowlandson, basically, put the people in them.  I used this print of the Bridewell Pass-Room,* as I so often use Rowlandson and his contemporaries, to create a scene in a book.  In this case, I sent the heroine of The Last Hellion to Bridewell on a rescue mission. 

From the Microcosm:  “The annexed print gives an accurate and interesting view of this abode of wretchedness, the PASS-ROOM.  It was provided by a late act of Parliament, that paupers, claiming settlements in distant parts of the kingdom, should be confined for seven days previous to their being sent of to their respective parishes; and this is the room appointed by the magistracy of the city for one class of miserable females.**  The characters are finely varied, the general effect broad and simple, and the perspective natural and easy.”

From the Introduction to Fiona St. Aubyn’s Ackermann’s Illustrated London (a modern, shorter edition which contains plates and excerpts from the Microcosm): “Ackermann kept a check on Rowlandson’s more outrageous drawings, and made him change an unmistakably pregnant woman in the preliminary drawing of the Bridewell print to a less obvious condition in the final version.”

*See pp 92-97 of the Microcosm online.
**single mothers

"To the Finest Taste": Eye-Popping Wallpaper

Susan reports:

It's a modern notion that the 18th and early 19th c. past was a place of genteel good taste: colors were muted and subdued, and the dusty pastels of a Wedgewood vase set the fashion. A pretty idea, yes, and likely there were plenty of houses "done" in exactly those colors, just as there are today. 

But if you were a Georgian homeowner who wanted to follow the absolute cutting edge of London style, you wanted wallpaper, in bright, bold colors and eye-popping patterns. 

The wealthy Virginians who resided in Colonial Williamsburg loved this bravado look in wallpaper. As gaudy as the effect might seem now, these wallpapers were carefully documented as having been in use in the 1770s, and in some cases were replicated by the same London companies (still in business!) who had printed the originals.  But we NHG have to admit that the scale of the patterns surprised us, dwarfing the rooms (and us) with their boldness. The top three rooms, left, are all in the George Wythe House.

But the room that really takes the prize for dizzying wallpaper is the dining room, bottom left, in the newest building in Colonial Williamsburg, Charlton's Coffee House. This room would have been hired out by wealthy gentlemen for private dinners and parties, and everything in it was chosen in the most elegant taste to appeal to them. 

Still, we couldn't help but imagine a group of colonial Virginians, in town for a meeting of the House of Burgesses, gathering in this room for a late supper.  Fueled by the caffeine of Mr.  

Charlton's potent coffee and chocolate and staring at that dancing patterned wallpaper as the night stretched on, it's really no wonder at all that they plotted the American Revolution.

And for anyone who thinks that this kind of gaudy splendor will soon fade before the more refined tastes of the Regency, we offer only two words: the Royal Pavilion.