Category Archives: Picking Darcy’s Pocket

August 11, 2016 · 8:56 pm

Reconstructing the Regency – The Weymouth Cyclorama

As part of a series of classes I will be giving on Regency life, using objects rather just pictures, I am reconstructing various objects that are either very rare or only survive in pictures. One of the strangest is the Weymouth Cyclorama.

In the collections at Weymouth Museum is a small cardboard box containing a roll of paper. The paper roll consists of a series of printed views of the Dorset coast, which have been stuck together on a linen backing to give a continuous picture of the coast from Portland Bill to Lulworth Cove as seen from the sea. From the steamships that are shown off Weymouth, I would date the roll to about 1825-30. It must have been part of a very expensive tourist souvenir.

The box lid describes it as a Cycloramique View of Weymouth Bay, and incudes a drawing of the viewer. Clearly it was intended to turn the roll so the pictures moved in front of the viewer as though they were passing along the coast.
I naturally wanted to reconstruct the viewer.

From high quality scans of the cyclorama images I was able to print off all the images and mount them together in a single strip. Even at ten centimetres high the strip was nearly four metres long.

Then it was necessary to reconstruct the turning mechanism, I had no idea of how the original worked, but after several sessions of trial and error I created this.

The surrounding box both contains the winding mechanism and holds it at a suitable distance from the viewers eyes. An internal partition gives a suitable frame for the view.

The box was finally decorated and, by tuning the knobs, you can experience a voyage along the Dorset coast as it would have been nearly two hundred years ago.

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Tagged as Cyclorama, Weymouth Museum

July 3, 2016 · 8:30 pm

Picking Darcy’s Pocket – A Model Dinner

As people who have read my blog before may realise, my study is a little cluttered, OK very cluttered. For this reason when I am looking for something in the back of a cupboard, or a draw, I often find something I had either forgotten I had, or which I thought I had lost. This happened the other day when I came across a box containing a group of old, miniature, china.

Now I had been looking for this group of china ever since I saw a compete set in Lytes Cary, a National Trust house not too many miles from here. There it was suggested that it dated from about 1800 (with which I would agree) and was a travelling tradesman’s sample set (with which I disagree). The pottery is simply too coarse to be a sample set of anything other than the roughest kitchen china, and who would carry around a set of that. No, I suspect that it is an educational toy, to help a young Georgian or Regency lady learn the complicated business of laying a table.

Today we dine in courses, a dish of fish or meat or something similar is served with a range of accompanying vegetables. These are all placed on the table, served, then the table would be cleared before the next course. This is technically called dining ‘à la russe’, however in the eighteenth century the practice was for dining ‘à la française’ where all the dishes, savoury as well as sweet would be laid on the table at once, the diners would then sit and serve themselves. If there were a large number of dishes, or the dinner was very formal or elaborate there would be two or three removes, when all the dishes would be cleared and a fresh set of dishes laid on the table.

This system was so complicated that cookbooks and advice manuals gave outline plans of how the table should be laid.

From; The Female Instructor or Young Woman’s Companion being a guide to all the accomplishments which adorn the female character C1811

And this is where I think the miniature china comes in. I believe that it would have been used by a girl in about 1800 to lay out an imaginary meal, I like to think of Georgiana Darcy with such a set, laying out an elaborate dinner, under the helpful eye of Mrs Younge (before she turned bad and tried to arrange for Wickham to seduce her). Then nervously using this knowledge to plan the dinner at Pemberley for Elizabeth and the Gardiners, that they were never to eat as the letter from Jane announcing Lydia’s elopement arrived at just the wrong time.

But what was it like to go to a real dinner at this time, that will be the subject of a later blog.

In May 1812, Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy is walking down a London street. As has been his practice of late, he had been turning over the words of Elizabeth Bennet in his mind. ‘Had you acted in a more gentlemanlike manner’. Distracted, he doesn’t notice a shabby young man in a long coat brush past him. Israel Fagin, at the beginning of his long and disreputable career (which was to lead to literary fame and the condemned cell at Newgate), had taken something from his pocket – but what?

In the case of these toys, perhaps it is in about 1820, and Mr Darcy has just seen a group of china in a shop window, remembering the set his sister once owned he buys one for his own, or Jane Bingley’s, daughters.

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Tagged as Darcy, Dinner, Jane Austen, Pemberley, Pride and Prejudice, Toy

November 19, 2015 · 3:55 pm

Picking Darcy’s Pocket – Sealed and Delivered

In May 1812, Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy is walking down a London street. As has been his practice of late, he had been turning over the words of Elizabeth Bennet in his mind. ‘Had you acted in a more gentlemanlike manner’. Distracted, he doesn’t notice a shabby young man in a long coat brush past him. Israel Fagin, at the beginning of his long and disreputable career (which was to lead to literary fame and the condemned cell at Newgate), had taken something from his pocket – but what?

Now you have written your letter, and dried the ink with ‘pounce’ powdered chalk, crushed cuttlefish bone or something similar. Blotting paper did exist but was expensive and little used until late in the nineteenth century. Rather powder was shaken over the writing with a ‘pounce pot’, a little container that looked like a pepper pot. The excess was then shaken off, creating work for the housemaid who had to dust and sweep the room.
The letter was then folded before being addressed. Envelopes as we know them didn’t exist, references to envelopes in contemporary writing refer to a second sheet of paper wrapping round (enveloping – hence the word envelope) the first. However unless your letter ran to two pages you didn’t use a second sheet as letters were charged by the page.

Seals and Pounce Pot

The folded letter was then sealed to keep the contents secure. There were two ways of doing this, first using wax. A hard material, known as sealing wax, was melted, often in a little ladle, and a small amount poured onto the letter. Left to cool for a few moments the seal was then pressed into the wax to make the seal secure. Seals would be engraved with initials, coats of arms or other devices. In the nineteenth century there was a fashion for ‘motto seals’. It was considered impolite to use a motto seal on letters to anybody other than very close friends, a very wise restriction considering the trouble that Bathsheba Everdene caused in sending a valentine card to Farmer Boldwood, using a motto seal.

Wafer Seal, Wafers and Letter sealed with a wafer

The other way of sealing a letter was with a ‘wafer’. There were two types of adhesive wafers, the simplest and earliest were usually made at home. A sheet of very thin paper was coated with paste (the old fashioned flour & water paste works very well) and left to dry hard. The paper is turned over and pasted on the other side. When hard and stiff the paper is cut into half inch squares. To seal a letter the wafer is moistened with the tongue on either side and placed between the two papers to be sealed. A ‘wafer seal’, a seal with a cross hatched end, was pressed down and so sealed the letter. The second sort of wafer was only glued on one side and was placed over the two sheets and pressed down with a flat seal. This type of wafer continued in use to close envelopes as they developed, sometimes with mottos. They were collected in the nineteenth century.

Wafer Seal and album of Wafers

Now your letter could be posted. It was taken to a local post office and left there. It would then be dispatched to the recipient who had to pay for the letter. This was one of the issues that would be addressed through the genius of Rowland Hill a few years after our period.

I am currently working on a project called Picking Darcy’s Pocket, where I will be using objects that might have been found in the pocket of a Regency gentleman, to discuss various aspects of the period. In due course I will be doing this as a lecture/ performance, but for now I am just collecting the objects real or facsimile

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November 10, 2015 · 5:29 pm

Picking Darcy’s Pocket – Let’s write a letter

Letter writing was commonplace in the Regency, whole novels were written in the form of letters, like Lady Susan. To write a letter you need paper, pen and ink.

Paper has always been made by professionals, but both pens and ink were made in the Regency household. A pen was made from a quill, a birds feather, most frequently a goose, but any feather could be used. I have seen examples made from the tiny feathers of a woodcock. First the feather would have been trimmed away, leaving a little ‘flag’, then the tip softened in boiling water and finally trimmed with a pen-knife.

Pens & penknife

Ready-made pens could be bought cheaply from a stationer, but everybody would have known how to make a pen, as you would have needed to constantly trim your pen whilst writing. Miss Bingley, trying to get Mr Darcy’s attention, interrupts him writing a letter to say;

“I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well.”

“Thank you — but I always mend my own.”

Penknives were often given as wedding presents to brides, on marriage the lady of the house would be expected to handle the household accounts, and the knife was symbolic of that. For this reason large numbers of decorative penknives survive in perfect condition, never having been used! A wedding present pen knife is the subject of the sinister exchange in Little Dorrit, between the unscrupulous financier Mr Merdle and his step-daughter-in-law.

‘So I am off,’ added Mr Merdle, getting up. ‘Could you lend me a penknife?’

It was an odd thing, Fanny smilingly observed, for her who could seldom prevail upon herself even to write a letter, to lend to a man of such vast business as Mr Merdle. ‘Isn’t it?’ Mr Merdle acquiesced; ‘but I want one; and I know you have got several little wedding keepsakes about, with scissors and tweezers and such things in them. You shall have it back to-morrow.’

‘Edmund,’ said Mrs Sparkler, ‘open (now, very carefully, I beg and beseech, for you are so very awkward) the mother of pearl box on my little table there, and give Mr Merdle the mother of pearl penknife.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘but if you have got one with a darker handle, I think I should prefer one with a darker handle.’

‘Tortoise-shell?’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘yes. I think I should prefer tortoise-shell.’

Edmund accordingly received instructions to open the tortoise-shell box, and give Mr Merdle the tortoise-shell knife. On his doing so, his wife said to the master-spirit graciously:

‘I will forgive you, if you ink it.’

‘I’ll undertake not to ink it,’ said Mr Merdle.

The exchange is sinister in that Mr Merdle, his frauds about to be discovered, is about to commit suicide and wants the knife to cut his throat!

Pens would be made and carried, either in a little box, or simply wrapped in a scrap of paper. In the early nineteenth century metal nibs were invented, probably in Sheffield, and soon became popular in business as they didn’t need trimming. Quills, however, remained in use throughout the nineteenth century, many people preferring them – Tennyson, for example, used quill pens throughout his long life. His old ones were kept as souvenirs by his numerous fans, indeed fake ‘pens used by Tennyson’ were sold by unscrupulous dealers.

The vital ingredient of Ink

Ink could be bought ready-made, but household books contained many recipes for making it. The one I used involved walnuts. This year has been very good for walnuts, and the trees in our village have born a heavy crop, scattering their black fruit on the ground. I collected a quantity of the black outer fruit, and put the nuts to one side to eat later. The soft outer layers were soaked in water for a couple of weeks, then put on to boil. Every so often I tested the ink and, after three hours, I was satisfied with the colour. I filtered the liquid, added alcohol to preserve it, and bottled it.

Travelling ink wells

Ink would have been carried in travelling ink wells, these were expensive items and were often stolen by pickpockets, and hence listed in the court records.

Now you have written your letter, it needs to be posted – but that is another story.

I am currently working on a project called Picking Darcy’s Pocket, where I will be using objects that might have been found in the pocket of a Regency gentleman, to discuss various aspects of the period. In due course I will be doing this as a lecture/ performance, but for now I am just collecting the objects real or facsimile

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September 2, 2015 · 8:03 pm

Picking Darcy’s Pocket – Money, money, money (Banknotes)

A Riddle by Jane Austen;

You may lie on my first by the side of a stream,

And my second compose to the nymph you adore,

But if, when you’ve none of my whole her esteem

And affection diminish – think of her no more!

In a previous post I looked at the purses or wallets in which a gentleman might carry his money, now let us consider the money itself.

Living today with a comparatively limited range of coins and notes, it is difficult to get to grasp with the complexity of money in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Now I don’t mean the pre-decimal system, of pounds shillings and pence, I am old enough to remember it and as a child found it easy enough as long as you knew the twelve times table.

Rather the complexity was caused by the sheer diversity of what you might carry in your purse of wallet. There were not only coins produced by the Royal Mint, and notes issued by the Bank of England, as there are today. There were coins issued by businesses large and small and notes by private banks.

The subject is a large one and I will consider it in a couple of blogs, this one will deal with the solution to Jane Austen’s riddle – a banknote.

An early Bank of England note

Bank notes, although they were first issued in China, began for our purposes in the seventeenth century as a way of moving money safely between the firms that were developing into banks. In exactly the same was as cheques were developing at the same time. Indeed the earliest bank notes were handwritten like cheques. As banks developed in the eighteenth century printed notes appeared, but were still individually signed and numbered, they were first made out for a specific sum, but in time were ready printed, and made out to ‘bearer’. Bank notes were both good and bad for security, good in that stolen notes were not easily exchanged as they were individually marked, bad as forgery now became widespread.

A very low value private banknote

Any bank could issue a note, and most did. The notes tended to have only a local circulation as they could only be exchanged by the bank that issued them. Banks often issued more notes than they had cash reserves and this was the cause of their disappearance. In the financial crisis that followed the Napoleonic war, banks often found themselves without enough capital and they could fail, often causing local financial disaster, as described so effectively in Cranford. The government finally acted with the Bank Charter Act of 1844, which eventually led to the disappearance of private banknotes in England and Wales.

One of Henry Austen’s banknotes

Jane Austen is going to be the next person depicted on the £10 note. She has an interesting family connection with banking as her brother Henry was a banker. He was badly affected by the financial collapse and his banks failed and he became bankrupt.

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August 26, 2015 · 11:06 am

Picking Darcy’s Pocket – Money, money, money

Of course, the one thing that a pickpocket wanted to get every time was money. You could spend it straight away, it didn’t need to be sold to a fence – though in the early nineteenth century that wasn’t always true.

Though before I talk about the actual money that might have been in the pocket of a Regency gentleman, I want to consider how it might have been carried. Very low denomination coins, pennies, half pennies and farthings might have been carried loose, as they were relatively large (as I will discuss later some were very large), but as there were a number of high value, small size coins, purses were common. Banknotes were carried in pocket books, these looked exactly like modern wallets. Indeed some even have spaces that look as if they could take credit cards! – thought these were for visiting cards.

Purses were another matter, they were very varied and gentlemen, as well as women, might carry brightly coloured ones.

Miser’s or ring purses are long, sausage shaped, purses with a slit in the middle where the coins could be inserted, then slid to one end and held in place with a moveable ring. The practice seems to have been for one end to hold lower value coins, and the other higher value. They were common from the late eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. They were called miser’s purses because of the difficulty removing money, it takes time to get the coins out so the user seems to be reluctant to hand over their coins.

Netted purses, this type of purse is just the sort of thing that might have been made by a lady and given to friend or relation (I can imagine Georgiana Darcy making one of these under the tutelage of her governess, the replacement for the disreputable Mrs Younge, and giving it to her brother). Netting was a very popular handicraft at that period, so much so that it led to a revolution in fashion that reverberates today. Up until the late eighteenth century women had pockets under their skirts, which were tied to a band round their waist and accessed through a slit in the skirt or petticoat. Then fashion changed, the Empire Line came in with a straight, close fitting, dresses with nowhere to hang a pocket without spoiling the line of the garment.

However ladies no took to carrying their netting equipment in small bags, which the French thought silly and called them Ridicules, in England they were welcomed and as they carried netting tools were named for the craft Reticules – from the Latin Reticulum, netting. These bags have been carried by women ever since, as the craft disappeared they were renames simply hand bags, though in America for some reason they were thought to look like purses, and that name had stuck to them.

The clasp, of gilded brass, would have been bought from a haberdasher. It was almost certainly made in Birmingham – where absolutely everything was made at this time.

This simple leather purse is very small and plain, it has two compartments and will only hold a few coins. However in the past century it has had another, much more unusual and romantic role, holding wedding rings. At my parents wedding, at my and my brothers weddings and at my son’s wedding, the best man kept the wedding rings safe in this purse. I hope to keep up this tradition if and when my other son and nephew and nieces get married.

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August 12, 2015 · 9:30 pm

Picking Darcy’s Pocket – Something to Read

At the end of the eighteenth century, publishing really took off. Books were published in their thousands to satisfy the new readership. We tend to think of books of this period in terms of the large volumes we see in country house libraries. However novels and poetry were usually published in small volumes, about the size of the modern paperback, but there was another class of books that are almost forgotten, pocket size books. These are really small, about 3inches by 5 inches and could easily be slipped into the pocket of your frock or tail coat ( or tucked into your reticule). I have several in my library, and have picked out a couple that Mr Darcy could well have had in his chaise as he headed north to Pemberley, in that memorable summer of 1812.

The first is Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son. This was an incredibly popular book of advice on behaviour, and would certainly have been studied by Mr Darcy in his youth. Lord Chesterfield had decided views on things like;

Laughter – There is nothing so ill-bred as audible laughter. (Mr Darcy might have agreed)

Good Company – Consists of people of considerable birth, rank, and character. (Mr Elliot would have agreed, Anne Elliot would have not)

Dancing – A silly, trifling thing (Sir William Lucas, and all Austen heroines, would have disagreed)

Pride – Nothing vilifies and degrades [a man] more than pride (clearly Mr Darcy had missed this bit)

There is useful advice on spelling,

A woman of a tolerable education will despise and laugh at an ill-spelt letter.

and cleanliness,

Nothing looks more ordinary, vulgar, and illiberal, than dirty hands, and ugly, ragged, and uneven nails.

This last was clearly something that was noticed in polite society. The delightful Lady Nugent disliked Lord Balcarres because of his hands.

July 31^st 1801

I wish Lord B would wash his hands, and use a nail brush, for the black edges of his nails really make me sick. He has, besides, an extraordinary propensity to dip his fingers into every dish.

This led her to deliberately commit a social error and place a lowly ranked officer in a more senior position at the Governors dinner table.

August 24^th 1801

I behaved very ill, having placed an Aide-de-camp between me and his Lordship; for really his hands, we so dirty, I could not have eaten anything any thing he had been near.

My second book is the Poems of Ossian, by James Macpherson. This was an immensely popular work in the late eighteenth century. Translations of Scottish Gaelic poems, the manuscripts had been discovered by James Macpherson and translated before publication as, he claimed, his publisher only wanted to print the work in English.

The poems were an immense success, here was a Scottish equivalent to the tales of Finn McCool in Ireland, the poems of Bards of Wales or the Arthurian romances of England. Then doubts arouse, Dr Johnson thought they were a monstrous imposition, a complete fake. When Macpherson was asked to produce his manuscripts, he left Scotland for ten years!

Now it is thought that he collected oral tales and then fitted the fragments together in a coherent whole. If he had just published his collection of oral traditions he would be honoured today, as it is he is considered one of the greatest literary hoaxers of all time.

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Tagged as Fitzwilliam Darcy, James Macpherson, Lord Chesterfield, Ossian

July 7, 2015 · 9:09 pm

Picking Darcy’s Pocket – A Matter of Protection

In a comment on an earlier post, my brother remarked on my long history of experimenting with archaeological and historical reconstructions.

Well as Gordon would admit, the experimentation hasn’t always been a total success. Dad accused him of trying to poison him when he tried to recreate the food stuff of the ancient Britons and offered it to Dad.

Well, after that I have made it a principle to always try things out myself, rather than testing them on volunteers, however willing. I have ridden reconstructions of early bicycles, a Hobby Horse and a Penny Farthing, sailed in various historic craft, and cooked and eaten Roman, Medieval and Tudor food. But this latest reconstruction is one I have absolutely no intention of trying.

Riding a Hobby Horse, the first bicycle

Carrying out research for Picking Darcy’s Pocket I have made use of a remarkable online resource, the records of the Old Bailey. Looking up cases of pickpocketing, to discover what was actually stolen in the early nineteenth century, I soon discovered that the group most likely to be accused of ‘Theft from the person’, were prostitutes. They were also most likely to be found not guilty, juries tended to believe that men tried to pay them with objects like watches, then accuse them of theft to get their property back. So the object I decided to reconstruct was an early condom.

Condoms have been around since the sixteenth century at least, they were initially intended as protection from sexually transmitted disease rather than as contraception. The earliest were made of fabric, soaked in vinegar before use, then animal gut was used and became the standard material until vulcanised rubber became available in the mid nineteenth century. Gut was far from perfect, it needed careful treatment if it was to remain usable. Famously James Boswell, the biographer of Dr Johnson, recorded soaking his ‘armour’, in a pond in St James’s Park before he could ‘enjoy’ a prostitute. I wonder if there are bylaws against soaking condoms in ponds in Royal Parks?

I had no access to animal gut, so decided to make one out of fabric, based on original specimens preserved in the Wellcome Collection. The condom is eight inches long, two inches across, and was held in place by a ribbon at the open end. Apparently they were made in different sizes, Casanova described trying on different condoms until he found an English Overcoat that fitted perfectly.

Now I very much doubt that Mr Darcy would have had one of these in his pocket, but what about Jane Austen’s sexually immoral characters, John Willoughby, George Wickham, Henry Crawford, and William Elliott. The first two almost certainly would have had used them I, however, will not try.

Willoughby & Marianne

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July 2, 2015 · 9:57 pm

Putting Lead in a Pencil – reconstructing the first propelling pencil

I am currently working on a project called Picking Darcy’s Pocket, where I will be using objects that might have been found in the pocket of a Regency gentleman, to discuss various aspects of the period. I will be using either genuine or facsimile artefacts, and was recently thinking about writing equipment. A gentleman might have a pen, ‘travelling’ pens were made where the nib was fitted into the handle and there were ‘travelling’ inkwells with specially tight lids, but these often leaked. Therefore more commonly gentlemen used pencils when travelling. Most pencils were similar to those we use today, a lead made from a strip of graphite, surrounded by a wooden sheath. Though there was one slight difference, as the graphite was quite valuable the end of the pencil had no lead in it, hence in Emma. ‘It was the end of an old pencil,—the part without any lead.’ But our gentleman might have had a propelling pencil. The mechanical pencil as we know it was invented in the 1820’s, but before that there was a curious wooden propelling pencil. The only surviving examples come from two shipwrecks, on opposite sides of the world. HMS Pandora which was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef in 1791 and the East Indiaman Earl of Abergavenny which sank in Weymouth Bay in 1805. I have often handled the examples from the latter wreck, so decided to try and make a copy. The version was made of balsa wood, as it is easy for the unskilled worker to carve. I also made the pencil thicker than the original, simply because I didn’t have the tools to do the fine carving, that the Georgian carpenter would have had.

Carving the two sections

First the two halves of the pencil were cut out, and the ‘male’ and ‘female’ section were carved. The groove in the ‘female’ was the hardest part to carve as when fitted together it has a dovetail section. When the two parts slid together easily the pencil was whittled to give it a circular section.

Fitting the two sections together

The final cross section, showing the ‘dovetail section of the joint and the grove for the lead.

The pencils from the Earl of Abergavenny have square ends, they were part of a collection of artists equipment being taken out to India and the Far East for sale to western artists, and would have been trimmed to a point. Ordinary pencils found on the Abergavenny also awaited trimming (just like modern pencils) the one from the Pandora had been pointed.

The reconstructed pencils.

Using the reconstructed pencil.

The pencil works by holding a separate lead in a groove in the ‘male’ section. It is held in place by pressure between the two parts of the pencil. As it wears out it can be pulled down, until the lead has to be replaced. This must have been a very inefficient system as, when the modern type of propelling pencil was developed in the 1820s, this type of pencil vanished almost completely. As for the phrase ‘Putting Lead in your Pencil’, signifying increasing male sexual potency, that phrase must be connected with a propelling pencil (the only type of pencil you can put lead into), but is recorded no earlier than the 1940s (in Australia) though I suspect is very much earlier. It leads to my next Regency reconstruction, but that will be another story.

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June 15, 2015 · 1:44 pm

Five Photos Five Stories – day two Bold Sir George

A reconstruction of Cayley’s 1804 glider in flight

The Ballad of Bold Sir George

1780
When bold Sir George was a little boy
He looked up in the sky
He told his parents, teachers, friends
He wanted to learn to fly.

‘Oh No, Oh No’, The wise men said,
With their wisdom quite profound,
‘Those who have tried, have ended up dead,
So keep your feet on the ground.’

Elmer the Monk once made a jump
From the Abbey in Malmesbury Town
His wings collapsed and he broke his leg
As he tumbled to the ground.

1804
Bold Sir George took his first machine
‘I have built it from a kite,
Across the field, for a score of yards
Watch it take its flight.’

‘Oh No, Oh No’, The wise men said,
‘That thing is but a toy
Nothing of any interest
Just a plaything for a boy.’

Abbot John had feather wings
And from Stirling Castle sprung
His wings came from a flightless bird
So he tumbled in the dung.

1820
Bold Sir George took his next machine
With wings near ten foot wide
‘For half a mile across the vale
Watch my beauty glide.’

‘Oh No, Oh No’, The wise men said,
‘T’would do for a county fair
To amuse the folk, but a learned man
Would find nothing of interest there.’

Wise Leonardo, years ago
Wanted to learn to fly.
But if even he could not succeed
Why should we bother to try?

1850
Bold Sir George took his last machine
Like a boat beneath a sail
A brave man held the tiller rod
This time he wouldn’t fail

‘Oh No, we were wrong,’ the wise men said,
As it rose into the sky.
On the Yorkshire Wolds long time ago
Man finally learnt to fly.

Remembering Elmer of Malmesbury, crashed about 1010, John Damian de Falcuis crashed at Stirling Castle in 1507, and Sir George Cayley (1773 – 1857) – who flew!

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Category Archives: Picking Darcy’s Pocket

As part of a series of classes I will be giving on Regency life, using objects rather just pictures, I am reconstructing various objects that are either very rare or only survive in pictures. One of the strangest is the Weymouth Cyclorama.

The box lid describes it as a Cycloramique View of Weymouth Bay, and incudes a drawing of the viewer. Clearly it was intended to turn the roll so the pictures moved in front of the viewer as though they were passing along the coast. I naturally wanted to reconstruct the viewer.

From high quality scans of the cyclorama images I was able to print off all the images and mount them together in a single strip. Even at ten centimetres high the strip was nearly four metres long.

Then it was necessary to reconstruct the turning mechanism, I had no idea of how the original worked, but after several sessions of trial and error I created this.

The surrounding box both contains the winding mechanism and holds it at a suitable distance from the viewers eyes. An internal partition gives a suitable frame for the view.

The box was finally decorated and, by tuning the knobs, you can experience a voyage along the Dorset coast as it would have been nearly two hundred years ago.

This system was so complicated that cookbooks and advice manuals gave outline plans of how the table should be laid.

From; The Female Instructor or Young Woman’s Companion being a guide to all the accomplishments which adorn the female character C1811

But what was it like to go to a real dinner at this time, that will be the subject of a later blog.

In the case of these toys, perhaps it is in about 1820, and Mr Darcy has just seen a group of china in a shop window, remembering the set his sister once owned he buys one for his own, or Jane Bingley’s, daughters.

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The box lid describes it as a Cycloramique View of Weymouth Bay, and incudes a drawing of the viewer. Clearly it was intended to turn the roll so the pictures moved in front of the viewer as though they were passing along the coast.
I naturally wanted to reconstruct the viewer.