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The Pleasures of Men – Kate Williams

22 Jan

‘Catherine Sorgeiul lives with her Uncle in a rambling house in London’s East End. She has few companions and little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination.

But then a murderer strikes, ripping open the chests of young girls and stuffing hair into their mouths to resemble a beak, leading the press to christen him The Man of Crows. And as Catherine devours the news, she finds she can channel the voices of the dead, and comes to believe she will eventually channel The Man of Crows himself.

But the murders continue to panic the city and Catherine gradually realizes she is snared in a deadly trap, where nothing is as it first appears.
And lurking behind the lies Catherine has been told are secrets more deadly and devastating than anything her imagination can conjure …‘

The Victorians were really keen on microcosm paintings, panoramic views of their society crammed full of faces, stories and activity like so many over dressed ants all busying themselves at the same time. William Powell Frith’s amazing sprawling The Derby Day and The Railway Station are perfect examples of this particularly Victorian genre, where the viewer is invited to greedily observe everything, their eyes scanning the myriad of different faces, pausing here and there to ponder what their story is.

In recent years, the ‘Victoriana’ novel has gained popularity and almost become a genre in its own right. Like the microcosm paintings of Frith, there are rules to this genre, certain period set pieces that must be included, descriptions and observations of a more contemporary nature that must be made and they are invariably populated by a vast cast of characters, mostly incidental but who must be described in great and lurid detail.

The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams is one such book. I was very much looking forward to reading it, anticipating something akin to Michel Faber’s brilliant The Crimson Petal and the White. Now, The Pleasures of Men is very similar to The Crimson Petal but only in so far as most other ‘Victoriana’ novels are – there’s the usual description of dirt, decay and damp. The wails of unfortunate babies follow the characters wherever they venture. People drink gin like it’s about to run out. There’s an awful lot of prostitutes.

There are other similarities – like Faber’s Sugar, Catherine, the heroine of The Pleasures of Men is damaged by her past and keen on feverishly writing down fantasies that involve violence, death, murder and destruction. Fascinated by a serial killer, known as The Man of Crows, she writes lurid accounts of his murders and eventually decides to venture out into the city at night to walk in his footsteps, believing herself ‘protected’ by the evil that she has always been told dwells inside her.

This was a complex and often deeply unpleasant book. I’ve seen complaints that it is over written and I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment but I believe that it is intentionally so. The writing is full blown, lavish, feverish and often over wrought, creating a really horrible, almost suffocatingly intense atmosphere of heat, dust and dirt as observed by a sexually obsessed, disturbed Victorian teenager who has spent time in a lunatic asylum.

The narrowness of a young Victorian girl’s life is well described here – not just that of Catherine with her peculiar circumstances but those of her over dressed acquaintances, who sexually torment their maids and fantasise about serial killers while slyly keeping watch for suitable young men.

At times though, the plot, which when you think about it isn’t really all that complicated (you’ll be disappointed when you discover the identity of the Man of Crows) veers not so much into confusion as into vague slapdashness, almost as if the writer herself lost interest about a hundred pages before the end (which was a bit of a damp squib all things considered) and decided that she didn’t care who the Man of Crows was or who he murdered any more. I can’t blame her for that – I didn’t really care either.

Would I recommend this book? Well, yes and no. If you are in the mood for a dip into the revolting iniquity of London’s east end in the 1840s and have a thing for Victorian asylums and the deranged meanderings of cooped up young girls as well as splendid Victorian set pieces like visits to pie shops, trips to gin dens and a splendidly disastrous visit to the vaudeville theatre then you’ll almost certainly love this. Otherwise you’ll probably start to feel a bit queasy and long for something a bit less histrionic.

Personally, although I did, I think, rather enjoy myself while reading it (and also feel slightly alarmed as I have written about similar themes in my own Victorian effort), I went off and had a long bath when I’d finished reading and splashed the water about a bit while muttering ‘A MILLION POUND ADVANCE? A. MILLION. POUNDS?’ over and over again until I felt like booking myself in for a nice restorative stay at Catherine’s lunatic asylum, the lovely sounding Lavenderfields.

Having said that, I fully expect this to be made into a film at some point in the near future…

Ps. Where is the woman’s right hand in the cover photograph? Haha, now that I have made you look, you will never be able to UNSEE.

Cross Bones graveyard

20 Jan

‘I have heard of ancient men, of good credit, report that these single women were forbidden the rites of the church, so long as they continued that sinful life, and were excluded from Christian burial, if they were not reconciled before their death. And therefore there was a plot of ground called the Single Woman’s churchyard, appointed for them far from the parish church’ - John Stow, Survey of London, 1598.

One of the saddest spots in central London, a few minutes walk away from the busy, thriving Borough Market in Southwark, Cross Bones graveyard is the final resting place of around 15,000 Londoners, mostly women and infants who were denied a proper burial in consecrated ground, either because of profession (prostitutes and, for a long time, actresses were banned from proper burial) or because they died before they could be baptised.

The earliest burials at the site were of local prostitutes, who were also familiarly known as Winchester Geese as they had been licensed since 1161 by the Bishop of Winchester to work the streets and alleys of the Liberty of the Clink area of Southwark, which was well known to be a squalid den of vice, iniquity and crime. In Medieval London, ‘goose bumps’ was a charming and somewhat alarming term commonly used to describe the first signs of venereal disease, most probably caught in the stews of Southwark around the notorious Clink prison.

Photo – Inspector Juve.

Denied proper burial thanks to their trade, the prostitutes of the area were instead buried without ceremony in the Cross Bones graveyard, where the bodies were piled in an undignified heap on top of each other. Excavations have revealed that most of the skeletons in Cross Bones belong to either women or infants who had either been born dead or tragically expired shortly after birth. Later on in its long and miserable history, the euphemistically named ‘Single Women’s Graveyard’ was used as a general pauper’s cemetery for the poor of the area. It was also a favourite hunting ground for bodysnatchers, seeking out specimens for the teaching hospitals of London and after all, who would miss the poor, sad souls of Cross Bones?

In 1853, Cross Bones was closed due to overcrowding and being a risk to health and would have been built over had not the local residents, fiercely protective of the final resting place of so many of their own, strongly resisted any attempts to develop the spot. Nowadays it is a strange place, loved by locals and strenuously defended by them against the occasional attempts to gain planning permission for office blocks and car parks on the site. The gates to the burial ground are constantly festooned with tributes and flowers left by visitors, turning it into a makeshift shrine to the lost and forgotten women and children of early modern London.

Since 1998 it has become traditional for hundreds of people to gather at Cross Bones with candles, songs, gin and flowers on Halloween night to pay tribute to the ‘outcast dead’ of the graveyard. It’s my intention to join them this year with a bottle of gin to sprinkle in tribute. It’s interesting that when I first visited the grave of Mary Jane Kelly in St Patrick’s, Leytonstone (where it turns out members of my own family of dispossessed Irish Catholic immigrants are interred, although I didn’t know it at the time), I instinctively took along a bottle of gin to leave on her grave. It now seems that this is the right and proper thing to do when honouring a dead lady of the night, which pleases me rather.

Photo – The Centre of the World.

‘For tonight in Hell

They are tolling the bell

For the Whore that lay at the Tabard,

And well we know

How the carrion crow

Doth feast in our Crossbones Graveyard.’ — John Crow’s Riddle, John Constable.

 

Thanks to Lucy Fur Leaps for alerting me to Cross Bones! I’ve been thinking about it ever since…

(Originally posted last year, but I was thinking about it this morning and thought I’d share it with you all again.)

The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned

6 Jan

I was very excited to hear about the new upcoming exhibition at Hampton Court Palace this summer: The Wild, the Beautiful and The Damned, which looks at the beautiful and rather decadent art work produced under the aegis of the later Stuart courts.

This is particularly well timed for me as I am working on a novel about Charles II’s youngest sister and need to go to Hampton Court Palace any way for a bit of a research poke about. I’ve been looking at a lot of Lely paintings lately as part of my work on this book and as usual have fallen hopelessly in love with his peachy, drowsy eyed, sultry lipped sitters. Okay, they may well all look pretty much the same but, seriously, who cares when they look completely gorgeous?

‘The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned, explores the meaning of beauty, and the lives and loves of the courtesans and libertines who lived and died in the Stuart Court during the reigns of Charles II, James II, William III & Mary II and Anne (1660-1714).

At the heart of the exhibition will be portraits of Charles II’s principal mistresses, including Nell Gwyn and Barbara Villiers, brought together at the palace for the first time. Also on display are the resident ‘beautiful women’ of the Royal Court: Peter Lely’s ‘Windsor Beauties’ and Godfrey Kneller’s ‘Hampton Court Beauties’, as we explore their lives and reputations amidst the elegance and decadence of the late 17th century. They will be joined by other Royal Collection paintings, rarely seen portraits from private and public collections, and exquisite fashion accessories, as the exhibition brings to life the glamour and magnificence of the Baroque period.

Visitors will be taken on a journey through the Queens State apartments, guided by the lives of the virtuous and the corrupt. Discover what beauty meant at court – how to display grace and how to use looks to gain attention and influence. Visitors will learn about the beauty secrets of the day, marvel at the fashions and elegance of court life, but also learn what happens when beauty fades, and when a life of virtue is rewarded by obscurity, and a life of vice by syphilis and death. The exhibition explores the story of how kings, queens and courtesans swept away the Puritanical solemnity of the mid-17th century, and attempted to rewrite the moral code of social behaviour.

Brett Dolman, Historic Royal Palaces exhibition curator, said: “Visitors to the exhibition will discover that ‘Beauty’ is not just an aesthetic experience: it is an instrument of ambition, a conduit to pleasure and a magnet for sleaze. This is a story about great art, but also about mistresses and adultery. Visitors will understand what beauty meant and how it was used in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and they will reflect, perhaps, on their own appreciation of beauty today in the 21st century.

The exhibition explores the ambiguity at the heart of Hampton Court Palace; beauty was a good thing, a reflection of divine perfection, an indication of virtue, but it was also a good excuse to decorate your bedchamber with soft-core private delights. Beauty was admired and revered, but also pursued and possessed. In the exotic world of the Restoration court, beauty could be exploited: women used it to command a new personal and political influence at the heart of government, but were themselves chased and abused, pilloried as whores.”

Charles II, the ‘merry monarch, ruled for twenty-five flamboyant, indulgent and decadent years and pursued ‘beauty’ in all its forms. He ruled over a court famous for its elegance and its magnificence, and he collected artworks and mistresses with equal enthusiasm. He fathered a dozen illegitimate children, but left no legitimate heirs. His brother, James II, matched a similar thirst for infidelity with a less acceptable taste for catholicism, and was turfed out of the country after only three years as king. James’s two daughters, Mary and Anne, who had grown up amidst the debauchery of the Stuart court, each became queens in their own right. The beautiful baroque splendour of Hampton Court was remodelled during the dying days of the last Stuart queens.‘ — from the official press release.

I absolutely cannot wait to see this and will, of course, be reported back to you all straight away just as soon as I have! I can’t imagine anything more splendid than seeing these wonderful art works in such a fabulous setting.

The Wild, The Beautiful and the Damned is running from the 5th April 2012 until the 30th September 2012. Tickets are £15.40 for adults and £7.70 for children under sixteen. There are also going to be special late openings on the first Monday of every month between May and September and also ‘Salacious Gossip’ evening tours giving raunchy little titbits that aren’t suitable for children’s ears!

I’ll be combining my visit to this with a trip to Kensington Palace, which reopens on the 26th March after a £12 million transformation. I can’t wait to see the Victoria Revealed permanent exhibit that I was told about on my visit to the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection and also the new display of dresses worn by Diana, Princess of Wales.

(Many thanks to Tim, the HRP press officer for the information and poster picture!)

Garrow’ Law

15 Dec

I don’t watch much television – mostly because most shows are awful but also because I work from home and like to be able to honestly say that I don’t spend all day watching really terrible television. Instead, I watch really terrible films.

I’m in mourning right now as two of the few shows that I regularly watch are either at an end (Garrow’s Law) or coming to an end (Rev.) – they’d better both come back for another series next year! In the meantime though I have new episodes of Downton Abbey and Sherlock to perk me up over the Christmas holidays so it’s not all bad.

I came to Garrow’s Law rather late in the day but love it passionately now. Okay, some of the set details and costuming is on the thoughtless side of ropey (plus, how is Lady Sarah a Lady? Does she not therefore have a peer for a father who can use his influence on her behalf? And doesn’t her husband care about the succession of his title and name?) but the quality of the script, direction and acting more than compensates for such niggles. Plus I sort of fancy the actor who plays Garrow. I probably wouldn’t look twice at him without his wig on but c’est la guerre as we like to say while manning the barricades. Oh and I’d happily watch Rupert Graves act in pretty much ANYTHING.

For the unaware, Garrow’s Law is a BBC drama about a public spirited and pioneering barrister (who actually existed) with a complicated private life, operating in Georgian London with all its iniquities, squalor and social changes. Most of the action takes place outside the courtroom as Garrow deals with personal strife, gathers evidence and takes the odd beating but there’s also plenty of legal drama too – all based on actual trials from the time so there’s a mix of riots, murders, nasty slave traders, thieves and forgers.

It’s really fascinating, gripping and often touching viewing.

I watched the last episode of series three last night and was riveted from the very beginning. I won’t give away what happens but it was brilliant with a great courtroom battle, sad goodbyes and a happy ending plus a brief appearance of foxy Mr Fox himself. Cor etc.

I’d definitely recommend watching it if you get the chance.

The notorious murder on Ratcliffe Highway, 1811

7 Dec

The Ripper murders of 1888 were not the first time that the populace of the East End had been scared out their wits and the area had been discussed in hushed tones throughout the country. The crimes of the murderer known as Jack the Ripper are considered quintessentially Victorian nowadays thanks to their gin scented, gas lit ambience and the sinister shadow of the top hatted and opera cloaked murderer slinking through the shadows.

It seems weird therefore to reflect that an equally horrifying murder case had occured in what could be considered the altogether more charming London of 1811, which in the popular imagination belongs to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, Beau Brummell and Quality Street.

But so it was.

At 11.50pm on the evening of the 7th December 1811, linen shop owner Timothy Marr, who was just twenty four years old had just come to the end of a long and busy day at his premises at 29 Ratcliffe Highway and, his thoughts turning to supper, decided to send his family’s servant girl, Margaret Jewell out in search of oysters, which were presumably a favourite snack of both Timothy and his young wife, Celia who had given birth just three months earlier to their son, also called Timothy.

Margaret set out into the darkness with her basket, only to find that the oyster shop was closed, upon which she went back home to see her master working in his office. She then decided to head out again to pay off an outstanding bill at the local bakery, only to be thwarted a second time when this establishment was also shut for the night. Daunted, Margaret then went back to Marr’s shop, only to find all the windows dark and herself locked out. Confused, the girl repeatedly rang the bell, only for it to be apparently ignored despite hearing footsteps and, once, the baby’s cry inside.

It was about twenty minutes past midnight by this time and poor bewildered Margaret continued to hammer at and kick the door and ring the bell, without any response for another forty minutes or so until George Olney, the local nightwatchman came along. They had a discussion about what to do and he decided to hammer on the door also until finally the next door neighbour, John Murray came down and informed them that he’d heard some strange noises come from the shop at around midnight, but had not been concerned enough to investigate further.

By now, the trio were entirely alarmed and Murray decided to try and enter the house through the back door, which proved to still be open. He wandered through the house and eventually came across the body of Thomas Marr’s young shop boy, James Gowan, his head completely battered while close by lay the corpse of Celia Marr in a pool of blood, her head also smashed in. Murray panicked at this point and ran to open the front door of the shop, outside which a small crowd had gathered. ‘Murder! Murder!’ he yelled out into the street as people began to enter the house.

It did not take them long to discover the body of Timothy Marr, dead like the others in the shop but the worst discovery was made shortly afterwards when a cry of ‘Where is the baby?’ went up and the child was found lying dead in his cradle, his throat deeply slashed and his head also battered in a cruel and horrible act of violence.

Charles Horton of the Thames Police, which were based at Wapping was called out to the scene and began his investigation by looking around the house, where the bodies still lay as they had been found. It must have been a horrible task, but despite the confusion of the moment, the darkness, the inevitable disturbance of the scene and the lack of proper forensics, he was able to discern various important points: that the blade that had cut the baby’s throat was absent, that the murder weapon was most probably a shipwright’s hammer that was discovered covered in blood and matted hair, that a considerable sum of money in cash was in the house but had been left undisturbed and that there were two sets of bloody footprints leading away from the back door of the house.

The horrifying and seemingly senseless murder of an innocent family on Ratcliffe Highway was to send ripples of horror and fear throughout the capital. Attacks and murder were every day life in London, particularly in the East End but this was different – this case not only involved a perfectly ordinary and respectable family, not to mention an innocent baby but it had also occured indoors and that was enough to send everyone into a panic. Everyone could cope with the notion that roaming the streets late at night wasn’t the wisest thing to do and you were courting the possibility of a smack to the head and an opportunistic mugging, however, the possibility that you could be butchered in your own home? No.

The investigation continued for the next fortnight and gradually fear and speculation began to simmer down until a night watch man walking past the King’s Arms taverns on New Gravel Lane encountered a young man, John Turner, who turned out to be lodger at the tavern, hanging half naked out of a window and attempting to make his escape down some sheets that he had knotted together.

‘There’s been a murder!’ he shouted down to the night watchman, whose heart must surely have sunk when he heard this. They entered the tavern through the hatch that led down to cellar and quickly discovered the bodies of the publican, John Williamson, his wife Elizabeth and their maid servant, Bridget – all of whom had had their heads battered in the same manner as the victims on Radcliffe Highway and then their throats cut. The only survivor was the unfortunate Turner and also the teenaged granddaughter of the Williamson couple, Kitty Stillwell, who had managed to sleep through the entire attack and had, for some reason, not been discovered by the culprits.

At this point, panic reached fever pitch and a serious investigation was instigated, with many arrests being made. The government also offered a large reward for the apprehension of the murderer and speculation was rife as to who was responsible and why and if there were to be more murders.

It seemed as though the case was solved when on the 21st December, a seaman called John Williams, who was lodging at the Pear Tree pub in Wapping, was arrested on suspicion of committing the murders after an anonymous contact had supplied the police with information about him. It was said that he and Marr had been shipmates at some point, had fallen out and that he had harboured a murderous grudge against him ever since.

There was other alleged evidence against the unfortunate Williams – he had been seen drinking at the Kings Arms just before the murder of the Williamsons and he was also said to be of a bad character. In a period that didn’t have the same exacting and scientific processes as we have now, for someone to be considered of ‘bad character’ was considered evidence enough of possible wrong doing.

Williams was therefore arrested and taken to Coldbath Fields Prison and it was decided that on the 27th December he should be brought out to face the magistrates and be cross examined about the murders. However, when the day came, he hanged himself in his cell.

Even though the chief suspect in the case had thwarted them, it was decided that the trial should go ahead and it was decided that Williams must surely be guilty with his suicide rather than facing them all presumably being taken as the greatest indication of all of his guilt. However, the case against him was flimsy indeed and it is almost certain that he was not guilty of the murders.

However, at the time, his guilt was absolutely accepted and it was decided that although he had committed suicide, the people of the district were not to be cheated of a spectacle of guilt and punishment. Therefore, the rather morbid decision was made that his corpse should be paraded through the streets of the area so that all of the London could see that he was dead and that justice, of sorts, had been served.

Therefore, on New Year’s Eve 1811, a vast crowd gathered in Wapping and Shadwell, lining the route that the grisly procession was due to take. It’s estimated that around ten thousand people came out that day to watch the corpse of John Williams, exposed to all their eyes as he lay on his back on a piece of wood, being pulled slowly past. In a mark of respect to the victims of his believed crimes, the ghastly cortege paused for ten minutes outside each murder scene before moving on.

Eventually the procession came to an end at the crossroads of Cable Street and Cannon Street, where a grave had already been dug for the dead sea man. As befitted a suicide, the body was dragged down from its cart and a stake driven through the heart before it was buried in an upright kneeling position into its grave, only a few yards away from the final resting places of the murder victims in the church yard of the imposing white Hawksmoor church, St George in the East.

The body of John Williams remained there, undisturbed and mostly forgotten beneath the feet of Londoners and an ever changing city until finally it was dug up again in 1886, when a gas main was placed on the spot. The landlord of the nearby Crown and Dolphin pub helped himself to the skull, which was then kept behind the bar.

Dickens’ London

29 Nov

Longterm readers of this blog will know that I am passionately interested in Victorian London, particularly its grimy, seedy underbelly so I was thrilled when Haus Publishing sent me a copy of Dickens’s London by Peter Clark to review.

‘Few novelists have written so intimately about a city in the way that Charles Dickens wrote about London. A near-photographic memory made his contact with the city indelible from a very young age and it remained his constant focus. Virginia Woolf maintained that, ‘we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens,’ as he produces ‘characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks.’

But the ‘character’ he was drawn back to throughout his novels was London itself, all aspects of the capital from the coaching inns of his early years to the taverns and watermen of the Thames; these were the constant cityscapes of his life and work.

Based on five walks in central London, Peter Clark illuminates the settings of Dickens’s London, his life, his journalism and his fiction. He also explores ‘The First Suburbs’ (Camden Town, Chelsea, Greenwich, Hampstead, Highgate and Limehouse) as they feature in Dickens’s writing.‘

There’s several books available about Victorian London but this is one is unique as it actually guides you through the streets on five fascinating and in-depth walking tours, which lead you past buildings and places that appear in Dickens’ work (with relevant quotes) or were important to his life. I haven’t attempted one of the tours yet (but will do next time I am in London) but found this a fascinating armchair read as it really leaves no stone uncovered and also highlights just how intertwined Dickens and the city were.

This book is ideal for anyone interested in Victorian London – especially those who are keen on really long walks! I can’t wait to give one of the walks a go.

This brilliant book is a bargain at £7.99 from Haus Publishing’s site and readers who use the Exclusive To This Blog discount code of MMG25 will get 25% off! (It says it is coming out in February but is actually available to buy right now.)

Thanks so much to Haus for my review copy!

As Shadows Haunting

25 Oct

I’m rereading the most marvellous book at the moment. Oh dear, that sentence sounded very Grand Dame didn’t it? I expect you are all imagining me now – reclining in my peach marabou negligée on a pink brocade and gilt chaise longue, eating violet cremes out of a box with an enormous pink silk bow and petting a cluster of sulky faced pugs as I dictate this post to my long suffering secretary. Well, I’m not one to burst bubbles (although have you ever noticed how people who start sentences with ‘I don’t want to burst your bubble’ always seem to take the most extreme glee in doing so – FUN SPOILERS that they are) but I am in fact perched on an Ikea sofa and watching Upstairs, Downstairs as I type this nonsense into my MacBook with my own fair hands.

Anyway, back to the point, the CRUX if you will of this blog post. I am, my dears, reading the most MARVELLOUS book. What’s that you say, Agnes? No, I will not stop letting the pugs drop violet fondant on my negligée. One can always send off to Paris for another.

Oh very well.

Anyway, this book is great. It’s As Shadows Haunting by Dinah Lampitt, which is a time slip ‘ghost’ novel set in London. No, no don’t run away! I don’t usually like this sort of thing to be honest – the works of Barbara Erskine and Diana Gabaldon have never really appealed to me all that much but this book is, I think particularly good.

Dinah Lampitt is of course the author of Pour The Dark Wine which is a great novel set at the Tudor court, which I am particularly fond of as it doesn’t portray Jane Seymour (boo! hiss!) as a simpering little miss. In As Shadows Haunting, however Lampitt writes about the much later court of George II and III as seen through the eyes of the beauteous Lady Sarah Lennox (yes, she of The Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard) who is the dashing and strong willed heroine of the Georgian part of the book.

The heroine of the ‘modern’ (I say ‘modern’ but this book was published in 1994, which is when I first read it so oh woe, it’s not really modern at all – oh crikey, you know you’re Getting On A Bit when years that you remember very well are not modern any more. I was quite woebegone when a drama set in the year I was born was described as a ‘costume drama’) part of the book is a musician called Sidonie (one of my favourite names – if there had ever been a Miss Guillotine-Towers, she was to be called Eliza Sidonie) who plays old instruments to immense acclaim in large London venues.

We are often told about Sidonie’s ‘fox coloured’ hair, green eyes and pale face so I imagine her looking a bit like Tori Amos, which means that I imagine her hot doctor love interest as looking a bit like a cross between Nick Cave and Trent Reznor. This is possibly not what was intended. He is very Irish though, so he is, to be sure. No, I’m not mocking Irish people, that’s just how he talks in the book.

Look, I’m not really selling this to you am I? Anyway, Sidonie buys a flat with a garden door that leads onto the grounds of the now ruined Holland House, where Lady Sarah had once lived while it was in its glory days with her sister, Lady Caroline Fox and her rambunctious husband and offspring. It doesn’t take long for Sidonie to find herself making visits to Sarah’s world, where the other girl is swiftly falling in love with the new young king George to the consternation of his advisors while all the while she is troubled by the apparently spectral visions of a lovely young woman with red hair who stands and watches her from the edge of her world…

Anyway, if you like time slippy type books and especially those with bits set in Georgian London then you’ll probably love this one. It’s a massively entertaining read and, like The Children of Green Knowe which is keeps recalling to mind for various reasons, makes perfect winter reading.

The RNA Regency Day

9 Oct

First of all – look at my new hair! FINALLY, the perfect pink!

Now, I’ll be honest and say here that I didn’t actually have that great a day. In fact, it has almost made it into my Top Fifty Bad Days Of All Time, mainly because it culminated in me bursting into hysterical tears in the middle of Paddington Station but also because of other stuff which I won’t go into here in case I drive you all away.

I’d been looking forward to the Romantic Novelist’s Association Regency Celebration Day for MONTHS as it was going to be focussed on two of my all time favourite authors – Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. What could be more perfect than a day of talks with like minded enthusiasts? Nothing, that’s what.

Perhaps things would have been better if I hadn’t got up at 5am to get my train to London. I’m not usually up and about at such hours but did enjoy the sight of the sun rising over Berkshire as I queued up in the buffet car. I felt quite lively, in fact, when I got to Paddington so I decided to walk through Hyde Park and along Piccadilly to get to the event venue, which was the rather imposing Grade I Royal Over-Seas House, just off St James’ Road.

I was still feeling lively when the event started (I just want to digress to say in a giddy Lydia Bennet manner that there were SOLDIERS in Regency costume everywhere) and so opted to pass up the first talk, about Sense and Sensibility in favour of a guided walk by Louise Allen (who is fabulous btw) around the area surrounding St James’ Palace, which was a den of iniquity and fashionable larks in the Regency period. To our delight, the walks were accompanied by two of the aforementioned Regency soldiers, which was really splendid.

We took in the famous gentlemen’s clubs of St James’ Street: Brookes’, Boodles and White’s as well as several of the fabulous shops that have stood the test of time and still stand where they were in Regency times – selling cologne, boots, hats and waistcoats to the upper class gentlemen of today. One thing that really struck me is that St James’ and Jermyn Streets are still very much Men’s Streets, even now and we spotted more than one ruddy faced Barbour garbed gentlemen popping into said shops.

Of course, the GOD of sartorial Regency shenanigans is Beau Brummell and rightly, his statue presides over Jermyn Street just as he had done in life. Naturally, we all posed with him before continuing on to take in the London Library, St James’ Square, the site of Almacks (so sad -it’s a hideous modern monolith now) and St James’ Palace as well as a few taverns and alleyways (including one that still has gas lamps!) along the way.

After this, it was back to the venue for a break. Unfortunately, I have a caffeine intolerance and when I asked if they had anything other than tea or coffee to drink, the young lady serving handed me a cup full of boiling hot plain water. Which was nice. Actually, it wasn’t. It was rubbish.

After this there was a talk by Dr Jennifer Kloester about her new biography of Georgette Heyer, which was really fascinating as she has been fortunate enough to have access to the Heyer family photographs and a LOT of information that has previously not been seen by researchers. Her love and enthusiasm for Heyer, faults and all, really shone through and some of her theories about the conception of her books were really interesting. I look forward to reading the book and reviewing it here!

Most interesting to Heyer fans will be the information that contrary to common report, Georgette Heyer was actually DESPERATE for her books to be adapted into films and television series! There’s been quite a few attempts to make them into films (let’s not mention The Reluctant Widow) but they’ve all floundered over the years. Apparently a version of Sylvester almost made it onto screen a few years ago and, most excitingly, one of the screenwriters of Cranford was apparently working on something similar involving interweaving three Heyer books together. How amazing would that be?! I’ve found a mention of it here, which suggests it was to be a BBC production…

After all this excitement, I had a choice between being taught Regency dancing or learning more about Regency scents and smells. I was seriously flagging by this point so opted for the latter, which was very interesting and involved sniffing and spraying a lot of pungent aromas that would have been used by Georgian and Regency ladies and gentlemen.

Lunch followed, which I had been dreading after the Hot Water Incident earlier on. I’d made sure that the organisers knew that I was vegan but would I be fed? What would I do if they didn’t have any food for me? I walked in to see a bazillion trays of sandwiches and my heart sank. After lurking about a bit while everyone else tucked in, I finally found one of the serving people who went off and found me my lunch – avocado with a lemon dip and also salad, which was nice. However, I’d lurked about for so long that there was nowhere on any of the tables for me to sit so I was told to eat standing up on my own at one of the serving tables at the back. Someone took pity on me (thank you!) but there were no chairs so although I was now at a table with actual people, I had to kneel on the floor to eat until a chair was found (thank you to the person who offered me theirs!). This didn’t make me feel all that great, to be honest.

After lunch, there was a panel talk about sex and the Georgians or more specifically, sex in novels about the Georgians and Regency period. This was very interesting as clearly writers do have to decide if they intend to follow their characters past the bedroom door. Personally, I try not to but do anyway. I dread to think what that says about me.

After this, there was a walk to the East India Club on St James’ Square to take afternoon tea in the actual room where the Prince Regent received the news of the Allied victory at Waterloo and also the French eagles captured from Napoleon’s troops. This was an extra that my husband had very kindly paid for (in fact he paid for the whole thing – thank you! I just wish I’d had a better time) as part of my birthday treat. The building itself looked really interesting and the room itself was lovely, although clearly much changed since 1815. The afternoon tea also looked wonderful – really gorgeous cakes with tea and coffee with, you guessed it, nothing for me. Another attendee asked what I was supposed to have with my glass of sodding tap water and it turned out that the caterer had said that they couldn’t provide me with anything so they’d decided to buy me some biscuits, which had been forgotten. They arrived eventually but only after everyone else had finished so I had to noisily and rather self consciously munch them through the rather interesting presentation about the arrival of eagles.

The day ended with a panel discussion about Austen and Heyer and whether they realised how great they were, which was also very interesting. After this, I grabbed my hot pink goodie bag and headed off to Paddington, which I eventually reached over an hour later and two minutes after my train had left. However, Atif at Paddington Station (and I’ll be writing to them to tell them just how marvellous he is) is the kindest man in the world and not only put me on the next train without me having to spend all my housekeeping on another ticket but also rang Dave to tell him I’d be about fifteen minutes late (my iPhone battery died during the day) and then texted him when I was on the train to let him know what time I would be in Bristol. What a genuinely lovely person.

I was in a right old state when I got to Bristol – tired, hungry and emotional after a day of feeling weepy and low so I had to sit down and have a bit of a cry and also eat one of the fortifying peanut butter sandwiches that Dave, realising that I hadn’t eaten much during the day, had brought with him (see, I’m not so hard to cater for!) before we went on to Tampopo for noodles and weird black rice pudding.

We were supposed to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy after this and did indeed make it into the Cinema de Luxe next door to the restaurant. We even made it into the film, but then we both ended up dozing and getting confused throughout the film. It’s one of those films where you have to actually WATCH WITH YOUR EYES AND ALSO BRAIN or it’ll never make any sense. Possibly, we should have watched Shark Night instead…

I feel bad for not being altogether happy about the days events and for having a bit of a complain, however it wasn’t all bad and I loved the walk and the talks. It’s just the bits in-between that were not exactly great.

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