Fashionable Bookcase for March 1814

Secretaire Bookcase 1814

Loretta reports:

Morgan & Sanders, of Nos. 16 & 17 Catherine Street, Strand, London, made and sold patent furniture that was often featured in Ackermann’s Repository. The globe desk I showed last month is an example.

Readers weighed in about the practicality as well as aesthetics of the item, which made me acutely conscious of the distance between the image and the actuality. This gap is clear when I show fashion plates. Rather like fashion sketches today, they’re stylized images, which often make clothing seem stiff and bizarre.

I think the furniture suffers worse in the illustrations. In both cases, I assume this happens partly because these kinds of engravings did not allow the artist the flexibility that paint did, but also because artists lacked the necessary skills and/or time. While Ackermann’s was an expensive magazine, the illustrations are not all of the same quality, and furniture seems to suffer worst.

In any case, I invite you to compare the magazine illustration with a version of one of these globe desks—this time not literally a globe, but global in form—as presented on the site 1stdibs. While this object may not appear any more comfortable a place to write, it doesn’t look as much like a strange object from outer space, and I think we can understand a little better why the Princess Augusta would buy it.

Bookcase description

In the same spirit, I offer for your contemplation Morgan & Sanders’s “Secretaire Bookcase.” While I couldn’t find a version of the piece online, I did find some similar objects for compare and contrast exercise, here & here.

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.

Intrepid Women: Actress Sarah Siddons, 1755-1831

Isabella reporting,

In my new book, A RECKLESS DESIRE, my humbly born heroine Lucia di Rossi is determined to become an actress, and the hero Rivers is equally determined to guide her to dramatic success. For her debut in London, Lucia appears as Ophelia in a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a role that Rivers chooses as fitting her gift for tragedy.

The inspiration for much of Lucia's budding career comes from the most famous dramatic actress of the Georgian era, the legendary Sarah Kemble Siddons (1755-1831.) Although she was born into a theatrical family, Sarah's parents wished better for her than to be an actress, and also wished to remove her from the handsome but empty-headed leading man in the family troupe. They sent sixteen-year-old Sarah to Warwickshire, far from her sweetheart, where they hoped she would learn to become a lady's maid in a country house.

But Sarah forgot neither William Siddons nor acting, and entertained her fellow servants with dramatic readings in the servants' hall and before her master's guests. Finally her parents relented, and at eighteen, she married Siddons, and with him joined a provincial acting company. Word of her success there reached the famous London actor and producer David Garrick, who gave her her first role at Drury Lane in 1775.

It was a disaster. The critics were not kind, and she herself said that "she was banished from Drury Lane as a worthless candidate for fame and fortune."

But the twenty-year-old Sarah refused to be discouraged. She returned to playing lesser theaters to hone her craft and mature into the tragic roles that would become her specialty, and to bear the first of her seven children. When she returned to Drury Lane in 1782, her performance was a triumph, and she never looked back.

While most successful Georgian actresses were graced with conventional beauty (some things never change), Sarah's appearance was more striking than pretty. She was tall, with flashing dark eyes, a prominent profile, and an intensity that mesmerized audiences. She specialized in playing powerful roles of tragic women, and made Lady Macbeth her own. She fascinated artists as well as playgoers, and she sat for all the major portrait painters of the day - Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Gilbert Stuart, John Downman, George Romney, and Thomas Lawrence - who all attempted to capture her brilliance.

Sarah was remarkably dedicated to her career. Part of this was from necessity - she was the main support of her large family - and part was her own drive to perform. She continued to appear on stage throughout all of her pregnancies, usually up until a few weeks before giving birth. As her children grew, they were incorporated into her performances when her role called for her to play mothers. The audiences loved her all the more for it.

Sarah formally retired from the theatre in 1812 after a career that stretched forty years. As writer and critic William Hazlitt noted, "passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. She was tragedy personified."

Upper left: Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1784, Huntington Art Gallery.
Right: Sarah Siddons by John Downman, 1787, National Portrait Gallery.
Lower left: Mrs. Sarah Siddons by George Romney, c1785, private collection.

From the Archives: Hair Care in the 1820s-1830s

Hair for evening 1828

Loretta reports:

Susan’s posts (here and here )about 1770s hair care sent me to my beloved The Lady’s Stratagem by Frances Grimble.* to see how much had changed (or not) in the 1820s-1830s, the setting for my books.

For those fluent in French, the text from the original, Elisabeth Celnart's Manuel des dames (published between 1827-1833), is here.  Those, like me, who aren’t fluent, will be grateful for Ms. Grimble’s translation.  You will note that, as Isabella pointed out, clean doesn’t necessarily mean what a modern reader thinks it means.  Recipes abound for oils and pomatums.  Shampoo?  Not so much.  It’s more or less a last resort, as you’ll see.

“Your principal task must be to keep your hair extremely clean.  Every morning, before arranging your hair, disentangle it with a large comb, holding it upright in a straight line in order not to break the hairs...When your hair has been well cleansed*...rub it with a square brush with a handle, whose bristles are very soft, or better yet are replaced with fine rice roots...

“When night comes, very gently undo your coiffure, first removing all the black pins which you find there, and shaking out the locks as you let them down.  These steps are especially necessary when your hair has been dressed by a hair-dresser.”

After this the lady is urged to comb her hair well and plait it.  Unplaited hair becomes damaged.  It also easily escapes one’s night cap and soils the pillow.

Hair product c. 1860

“When by nature, or by the prolonged or exaggerated use of oils and pomatums, your hair is greasy to the point of being dull, dense, and flat, you must resort to soap solutions.  Pour a demi-tasse of lukewarm water into a saucer.  Soak a very lightly-perfumed toilet-soap in the water for a few moments, and stir it a little.  Soon the water will be foamy.   Then spread the locks of your hair well apart, and with a sponge dampened with the soapy water, wash them well from all sides.”

You dry the hair with warm linen, then brush it with the rice brush.

Madame recommends that blond hair be “washed very rarely.”

*More about this fabulous compendium here and  here and here and here.)

**by combing

Breakfast Links: Week of March 7, 2016

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Was bundling in the winter really less dangerous than a sofa in the summer?
• Be amazed by the many achievements of France's most-decorated woman, Marie Marvingt.
• The bawdy history of medieval playing cards.
• Cow's dung, ash-boughs, and rose petals: how to sleep safely in early modern England.
• The truth about Lady Barrymore, the boxing baroness.
• Image: American author John Steinbeck totally used the "dog ate my homework" excuse.
• "On board the schooner Pilgrim at sea, a prisoner."
• Days before John Adams' inauguration, his wife Abigail was working out the year's farming at home in Massachusetts.
• Waterproof garments in the 19thc.
• St. David meets the Victorians.
• Image: Beautiful flowered shoes that belonged to the Empress Josephine.
• Thirteen women who changed science.
• Edgar Allen Poe writes a story based on a Boston Harbor legend.
• Real-life "Downton Abbey": drudgery, abuse, sexual harassment.
• Making a black ball gown and social change in the 1870s.
• The "Lady Nurse of Ward E" watches the Civil War come to Washington, DC.
• Why are goats associated with the Devil?
• Battle-scarred skull from Culloden now 3D scanned.
• Image: Cats dance in The Witches Cove, a 16thc Flemish painting by a follower of Jan Mandijn.
•A baffling story from Victorian London: a mother arranges for her daughter to marry her stepfather bigamously.
• How to defraud your lord on a a medieval manor.
• The Anti-Slavery Alphabet: 1846 children's book designed to teach the ABC's of slavery's evils.
• The story of lorem ipsum: how scrambled text from Cicero became the standard for typesetters everywhere.
• Just for fun: a quiz to determine how Jane Eyre you are.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Friday Video: The Changing Face of Europe

Loretta reports:

Maps have changed so rapidly in my lifetime that I’ve lost track of the correct names for many countries, not to mention cities. But the problem existed in the early 1800s, too. I’ve found myself checking and double checking borders and names.

Online we can find any number of videos showing the changing face of the world. If you have one you like better, please feel free to share in the comments.

Meanwhile, I offer this “History of Europe (3000 BC-2015 AD)"

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.