Tag Archives: Jane Austen

December 12, 2016 · 7:29 pm

Jane Austen the apt Nomenclator

This is the first of my series of blogs, Five things you might not know about Jane Austen.

Like many writers Jane Austen was a nomenclator, in that she is the first recorded user of particular words or phrases. In her case the Oxford English Dictionary credits her with four neologisms.

This would not be unusual, however what is unusual is that all of the terms she pioneered are very apt for the ‘domestic’ nature of her works. In most cases the nature of the authors work has nothing to do with the type of word they used for the first time. For example one of the words credited to Johnathon Swift in Gulliver’s Travels is a term for the measurement of agricultural land.

The four words or phrases credited to Jane Austen are;

Double-bedded 1798 In a letter dated 24^th October. ‘We have one double-bedded and one single-bedded room.’

Illustration to Emma by Hugh Thompson

Sponge-cake, 1808 In a letter dated 17^th June. ‘You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.’

Illustration to Sense and Sensibility by Hugh Thompson

Dinner-party, 1816 In Emma ‘He was much out of humour at not being able to come even to Hartfield for forty-eight hours without falling in with a dinner-party.’

Illustration to Sense and Sensibility by Hugh Thompson

Door-bell, 1817 In Persuasion ‘Lady Russell could not hear the door-bell.’

So if you ever leave your double bedded room, ring the doorbell to be admitted to a dinner party, where you enjoy a sponge cake. You can thank Jane Austen.

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Filed under Georgian, Jane Austen, Regency

Tagged as Emma, Jane Austen, Persuasion

December 11, 2016 · 5:30 pm

Five things you might not know about Jane Austen

As readers of my blogs will have guessed, I consider Jane Austen the greatest English novelist. So, as we approach December 16^th, the anniversary of her birth, or Jane Austen Day as celebrated by all Janeites, I thought I would introduce you to five things that you might not know about Jane Austen. Over the next five days my blogs will be about.

1 – Jane the apt Nomenclator.

How are Jane Austen’s neologisms particularly apt to her tales.

2 – When is a candle Snuffed but not Extinguished? Or how to blow a candle in!

In Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland goes to snuff a candle, but accidentally extinguishes it. What is going on?

3 – Who practices magic in Austen?

And I mean real magic, you can take a class in the topic at Hogwarts.

4 – Elizabeth Bennet the unusual tourist, or a stop on the way to Pemberley.

On her way to Pemberley Elizabeth visits a series of places all, bar one, are tourist destinations today. Which is the odd one out? And why was it a tourist destination 200 years ago?

5 – Jane’s other language.

Like most educated women of her time Jane Austen knew some French and Italian. But she knew another language, a far more unusual one. What was it?

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Filed under Jane Austen, Regency

Tagged as Jane Austen

November 17, 2016 · 9:43 pm

Reconstructing the Regency – A Parminter Picture

Of all the buildings of the late eighteenth century, none is so remarkable, or so charming as the delightful ‘Cottage Ornee’ called A La Ronde. Not only is the house, a bizarre sixteen sided structure, wonderful, but it was decorated by its first owners, the Misses Parminter. The Parminter ladies were well travelled and very talented, and the house still contains many examples of their remarkable craftsmanship.

I am currently teaching a class on the Regency using objects and, having seen A La Ronde, remembered the curious way in which some pictures were mounted. This provided an excellent reason to visit the house again, so I could examine the pictures and try and recreate their technique.
The technique is now called ‘block mounting’, pasting a picture on a piece of wood. However the Parminter cousins added a decorative border. So to begin.

I first cut a suitable size piece of wood, larger than the print I wished to mount, and painted the edges. Then I pasted on a sheet of coloured paper.

The print was then pasted in the middle of the board, and a decorative border, made from gold paper trimmed within pinking shears into a series of chevrons, added.

I chose a suitable late eighteenth century print by a publisher called Carrington Bowles (incidentally he seems to have had a thing about hats, just about every lady he drew wears a big hat, even if she isn’t wearing anything else!).
For two independent ladies I chose an image of two Georgian Sportswomen.

Miss Trigger you see is an excellent shot, And forty five notches Miss Wicket’s just got

With young Catherine Morland in the background.

There is plenty of further inspiration to be found at A La Ronde, perhaps I will try something else in the future.

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Filed under Georgian, Jane Austen, Reconstructing the Regency, Regency

Tagged as A La Ronde, Cricket, Jane Austen, National Trust, Northanger Abbey

August 22, 2016 · 6:25 pm

Chance Meeting

Charli Mills from the Carrot Ranch prompts us thus this week
August 17, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that features a fossil or uses the word in its variant forms (fossilize, dino bones, petrification, gastroliths, ichnofossils, etc.). Dig into your imagination and go where the fossil record leads you. So here is another of my historical retellings.

“What have you there, child?” The tall lady smiled at the little girl.
“It’s a curtsy miss.” She replied. It was black and shiny, shaped like a coiled snail.
“She means a curiosity,” said her companion, “They are found in the cliffs, no one knows what they are.”
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Jane.
“Take it to father, he sells them.”
“Will you sell it to me?” The girl nodded, shyly.
“But she is Anning’s daughter, he overcharged us for that cupboard.”
“But she isn’t overcharging me.” The coin changed hands and a legend began.

In 1804 Jane Austen and her family visited Lyme Regis, in a letter to her sister she tells how they had been overcharged by a local carpenter, Robert Anning. As well as woodwork Robert also sold fossils that had been found in the local cliffs. His daughter, Mary Anning, the greatest fossil hunter of the age was his daughter, in 1804 she would have been five. Legend tells how she began her career as a little girl, selling a fossil she had found, to a lady she met on the beach. I have just brought Lyme Regis’s two most famous residents together.

8 Comments

Filed under Historical Reconstructions, Historical tales, Jane Austen, Regency

Tagged as Jane Austen, Lyme Regis, Mary Anning, Persuasion

August 17, 2016 · 7:06 pm

Going for a Dip – Dressed or Undressed

One of the pleasures (for gentlemen) at many of the seaside resorts to be found around the coast in the early nineteenth century, was watching the ladies bathing.

There are even illustrations of this, such as this one of Lyme Regis,

or less realistically at Brighton.

But was this true? did women really disport themselves naked like this? Did Jane Austen, who went bathing at Lyme Regis in 1804, really go skinny dipping? Probably not – at Lyme it cost 1/3 to go bathing. This included the hire the bathing machine, the assistance of the ‘dipper’ – the lady who helped you in the water, as well as the bathing dress.

Bathing Machines were small sheds on wheels that the bather entered and changed. While this was going on the machine was pushed down into the sea, a canvas hood could be let down so that the bather could enter the water virtually unseen from anybody on shore. An anonymous poem, said to have been found in a Bathing Machine in Margate sums it up perfectly.

Though oft I have been

In a Bathing-Machine

I never discover’d till now

The wonderful art

Of this little go-cart

’Tis vastly convenient, I vow.

A peg for your clothes

A glass for your nose

And shutting the little trap-door,

You are safe from the ken

Of those impudent men

Who wander about on the shore.

Though this idyllic view of a Bathing Machine was not shared by my grandmother, who would have been one of the last people to have used one, in holidays on the Kent coast before the First World War. From her description, Bathing Machines were damp, slimy, wet and hot inside, and smelt horrible.

There are also plenty of illustrations of ladies bathing, wearing rather unflattering costumes.

At Brighton

And at Scarborough

But sea bathing wasn’t the only sort of bathing available, it was commonplace for bathing pools to be incorporated in improved gardens. I have just been reading The Secret Life of the Georgian Garden by Kate Felus, an absolutely fascinating book, and in her section on bathing she mentions several times that bathing took place naked. In the grounds of country houses, you could be as private as you liked but even here ladies still wore dresses, as this delightful watercolour shows.

Bathing at Dynes Hall 1812 or 13, drawn by the talented Diana Sperling, who’s watercolours were published many years ago as Mrs Hurst Dancing.

But, and there is a but, what about swimming? People tend to conflate the two, but bathing could be just splashing about in the water, fun and doubtless exhilarating, but not actually swimming. This is understandable, could a woman swim in the dress shown? and ladies certainly did swim, there are rare, but definite, references to some ladies being strong swimmers. The most delightful has to be the description of Harriot Hoare, the granddaughter of Henry Hoare, the builder of the great house and garden at Stourhead.

“Dear Harriot dives like a Di Dipper {Little Grebe} and there is no keeping her out of the water this hissing hot weather.”

Here I have had to take advice, as I am not female and cannot swim, but the general opinion is that whilst you could paddle and splash around in a bathing dress but not swim.

There are also a few drawings of ladies swimming naked that do not look like Regency soft porn. These, of the ‘Swimming Venus of Ramsgate’, despite the title, look more like illustrations of how to swim.

So, mostly dressed, but occasionally undressed, seems to have been the rule of the Regency bather.

3 Comments

Filed under Georgian, Jane Austen, Regency, Village Fetes

Tagged as Diana Sperling, Dynes Hall, Jane Austen, Ramsgate, Stourhead, Swimming

August 13, 2016 · 8:40 pm

Reconstructing the Regency – The Red Books of Humphry Repton

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. Amongst the rare, and fragile, items are the Red Books of Humphry Repton

Recently there have been a series of exhibitions commemorating the 300^th anniversary of the birth of the great landscape gardener, Capability Brown. So naturally I want to talk about his successor, who was mentioned in Mansfield Park.

“Your best friend upon such an occasion,” said Miss Bertram calmly, “would be Mr. Repton, I imagine.”

“That is what I was thinking of.” said Mr. Rushworth. “As he has done so well by Smith, I think I had better have him at once. His terms are five guineas a day.”

If Mr Rushworth had employed Humphry Repton, instead of having to spend his money divorcing his newly married wife, who had run off with Henry Crawford, there would have been a Red Book produced for Sotherton.

The Red Books, so called from the colour of the leather in which they were bound, were Repton’s innovative method of attracting clients. As well as plans and descriptions of what he proposed doing to the estate, there were before and after paintings of what the view looked like now, and what it would look like when Repton’s works were carried out. Much of this had been done before, but what made Humphry Repton’s pictures remarkable was that before and after were to be found on the same illustration. You first saw the landscape as is at present, then you raised a paper flap and the view turned into what it would be.

It must be said, however, that Humphry Repton had a major character flaw, he was a dreadful snob, always sucking up to his wealthy or titled clients, he was referred to as oleaginous (oily), and was more than happy to approve of his clients more morally doubtful schemes, such as this for enclosing a common and turning it into the park associated with a fashionable villa.

Which reminds me of the famous verse;

The law is hard on man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But lets the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose

To create a facsimile of a Red Book illustration I first downloaded high resolution scans from the websites listed below. I decided to take the pictures showing how he improved his own house. I printed both the before and after views at exactly the same size, on heavy cartridge paper.

Then I cut out the tab and frame of from the ‘before’ view, this was then pasted over the ‘after view.

By lifting the flap you can see how he improved his garden, planting rose bushes, enclosing the village green and getting rid of the geese and inconvenient disabled poor people.

A great gardener but not a very nice man.

Repton’s books can be found on the University of Wisconsin website:

Sketches and hints on landscape gardening, 1794.

Observations on the theory and practice of landscape gardening, 1803.

Fragments on the theory and practice of landscape gardening, 1816.

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Filed under Historical Reconstructions, Jane Austen, Reconstructing the Regency, Regency

Tagged as Humphry Repton, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

August 8, 2016 · 8:33 pm

Reconstructing the Regency – The Dandy Toy

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. Of these toys are the rarest as they were usually played to pieces.

I recently came across a print of 1818 entitled The English Ladies Dandy Toy, it shows a lady playing with a child’s toy, a Jumping Jack. This is a very ancient toy, which works by pulling the string making the legs move. The cartoon is probably a skit on the ‘Dandy’, the hyper-fashionable men of the early nineteenth century, suggesting that they are little more than toy boys for the ladies of the period, not real men.

The ‘Dandy Toy’ the lady is holding is clearly a caricature of the dandy of the period, a thin, corseted waist (men wore tighter corsets than women at this time!) and the very high neck cloth which could prevent the men turning the head.

I naturally wanted to make a ‘Dandy Toy’, so took an outline plan of a jumping jack, then adapted it to something approaching the toy the lady is holding. This was then stuck to a sheet of card and painted.

Finally it was cut out and fitted together with modern paper fasteners (the original would have used wire) and linked with heavy thread. And there I had a ‘Dandy Toy’.

And here is one being used in a brilliant fashion, indeed just as one might be used today. To distract a child as it is being vaccinated. A contemporary view of the way in which one of the most important medical advances of all time was implemented.

10 Comments

Filed under Georgian, Historical Reconstructions, Reconstructing the Regency, Regency

Tagged as Jane Austen, Vaccination, Working women

August 6, 2016 · 7:18 pm

Blood and Beauty – A Gruesome Georgian question

I was recently reading The Castle of Wolfenbach, a gothic tale of 1793, which is only known today as one of the seven ‘Horrid’ novels listed by Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey, when I came across the following passage. The heroine Matilda is recovering from the shock of being pursued by her ‘uncle’.

Mme de Bouville payed her a visit in the evening: she was sitting up, and, from the quantity of blood taken from her in the morning, she looked uncommonly delicate and beautiful.

Bleeding a Young Woman picture from the Wellcome Collection

Bleeding was one of the commonest treatments in pre-modern medicine, it was the standard treatment for so many conditions, it seems to have often been carried out ‘just in case’. Some people seem to have been bled even when they weren’t ill, just as people today take vitamin supplements, and for more or less the same reasons.

Lancet (above) for bleeding people, and Fleam (below) for bleeding animals

Since Eliza Parsons describes Matilda looking ‘uncommonly delicate and beautiful’ shortly after a ‘quantity of blood’ had been taken from her, other people must have noticed this effect of bleeding, and considering how crazy people have been are, when it comes to looking good, I wonder if bleeding was ever done for cosmetic reasons?

I have found no accounts of cosmetic bleeding, I rather hope they don’t exist, but would love to know if they did.

6 Comments

Filed under Georgian, Jane Austen

Tagged as Fleam, Jane Austen, Lancet, Northanger Abbey, The Castle of Wolfenbach

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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Filed under Georgian, Historical Reconstructions, Jane Austen, Picking Darcy's Pocket, Regency

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

April 22, 2016 · 7:09 pm

Sugar, the first Fair Trade product

A little while ago I wrote about reconstructing the taste of Georgian tea, this was invariably drunk with sugar. Sugar doesn’t seem to have altered in taste in the past two hundred years, only the way it is presented. Sugar arrived in syrup form and was refined in Britain, this process led to the purest sugar being sold in conical ‘sugar loaves’ which had to be broken up into lumps for dissolving in tea and coffee, or ground down for use in cooking.

Sugar was broken up with a specialist tool, sugar nips or cutters. Children always enjoyed helping with this task, as did Jane Austen who had a sweet tooth, not surprising as she was the first person to use the term ‘Sponge cake’. In one letter she wrote about enjoying breaking up the sugar loaf.

But for many middle class households there were moral doubts about using so much sugar. Not the health worries of today’s parents, but a much more serious one. Most sugar came from the West Indies where it was produced by slave labour. But there was an alternative, sugar from India was grown using free workers. Not only was Indian sugar promoted as not being made by slaves, but specially designed sugar bowls were made to advertise your abolitionist credentials.

However when some abolitionists suggested reducing the tax on Indian sugar the pro-slavery lobby began to get very concerned. They suspected a plot by the East India Company (the organisation importing Indian sugar) to increase their profits. This famous cartoon is the result, showing hypocritical abolitionists, with bribes in their pockets, misleading the public about the horrors of slavery.

So as you stir your sugar into the tea, remember the moral women, and it was mostly women, who carried out the first public boycott and bought the first fair trade product.

5 Comments

Filed under Georgian, Historical Reconstructions, Jane Austen, Regency

Tagged as Jane Austen, slavery, sugar

Tag Archives: Jane Austen

One of the pleasures (for gentlemen) at many of the seaside resorts to be found around the coast in the early nineteenth century, was watching the ladies bathing.

Though oft I have been

In a Bathing-Machine

I never discover’d till now

The wonderful art

Of this little go-cart

’Tis vastly convenient, I vow.

A peg for your clothes

A glass for your nose

And shutting the little trap-door,

You are safe from the ken

Of those impudent men

Who wander about on the shore.

Though this idyllic view of a Bathing Machine was not shared by my grandmother, who would have been one of the last people to have used one, in holidays on the Kent coast before the First World War. From her description, Bathing Machines were damp, slimy, wet and hot inside, and smelt horrible.

There are also plenty of illustrations of ladies bathing, wearing rather unflattering costumes.

“Dear Harriot dives like a Di Dipper {Little Grebe} and there is no keeping her out of the water this hissing hot weather.”

Here I have had to take advice, as I am not female and cannot swim, but the general opinion is that whilst you could paddle and splash around in a bathing dress but not swim.

There are also a few drawings of ladies swimming naked that do not look like Regency soft porn. These, of the ‘Swimming Venus of Ramsgate’, despite the title, look more like illustrations of how to swim.

So, mostly dressed, but occasionally undressed, seems to have been the rule of the Regency bather.

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. Amongst the rare, and fragile, items are the Red Books of Humphry Repton

Recently there have been a series of exhibitions commemorating the 300th anniversary of the birth of the great landscape gardener, Capability Brown. So naturally I want to talk about his successor, who was mentioned in Mansfield Park.

“Your best friend upon such an occasion,” said Miss Bertram calmly, “would be Mr. Repton, I imagine.”

“That is what I was thinking of.” said Mr. Rushworth. “As he has done so well by Smith, I think I had better have him at once. His terms are five guineas a day.”

If Mr Rushworth had employed Humphry Repton, instead of having to spend his money divorcing his newly married wife, who had run off with Henry Crawford, there would have been a Red Book produced for Sotherton.

Which reminds me of the famous verse;

The law is hard on man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But lets the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose

To create a facsimile of a Red Book illustration I first downloaded high resolution scans from the websites listed below. I decided to take the pictures showing how he improved his own house. I printed both the before and after views at exactly the same size, on heavy cartridge paper.

Then I cut out the tab and frame of from the ‘before’ view, this was then pasted over the ‘after view.

By lifting the flap you can see how he improved his garden, planting rose bushes, enclosing the village green and getting rid of the geese and inconvenient disabled poor people.

A great gardener but not a very nice man.

Repton’s books can be found on the University of Wisconsin website:

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. Of these toys are the rarest as they were usually played to pieces.

The ‘Dandy Toy’ the lady is holding is clearly a caricature of the dandy of the period, a thin, corseted waist (men wore tighter corsets than women at this time!) and the very high neck cloth which could prevent the men turning the head.

I naturally wanted to make a ‘Dandy Toy’, so took an outline plan of a jumping jack, then adapted it to something approaching the toy the lady is holding. This was then stuck to a sheet of card and painted.

Finally it was cut out and fitted together with modern paper fasteners (the original would have used wire) and linked with heavy thread. And there I had a ‘Dandy Toy’.

And here is one being used in a brilliant fashion, indeed just as one might be used today. To distract a child as it is being vaccinated. A contemporary view of the way in which one of the most important medical advances of all time was implemented.

Mme de Bouville payed her a visit in the evening: she was sitting up, and, from the quantity of blood taken from her in the morning, she looked uncommonly delicate and beautiful.

I have found no accounts of cosmetic bleeding, I rather hope they don’t exist, but would love to know if they did.

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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Recently there have been a series of exhibitions commemorating the 300^th anniversary of the birth of the great landscape gardener, Capability Brown. So naturally I want to talk about his successor, who was mentioned in Mansfield Park.