Napoleon, Snuff Salesman

In the wake of this week's bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, I've been thinking a lot about Napoleon's long-term impact on the world -- Napoleonic code (still the basis for the legal system in France), the Sphinx's missing nose (shot off by Napoleon's invading soldiers), the westward expansion of the United States (thanks to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase), and the end of the Republic of Venice, just off the top of my head.

Knowing all these things, I was surprised to learn that, during his lifetime, wooden statues of Napoleon were used to sell snuff. The Emperor was known to be an aficionado, and so tobacconist shops would display these statues to advertise their wares, much like American tobacconists displayed wooden statues of Native Americans (commonly called "cigar store Indians").

This particular specimen is the last survivor of three brought to England from France in 1820. It was carved from a single piece of oak and spent more than a century standing outside various shops in York. The statue's 20th-century adventures put me in mind of the Stanley Cup. During WWII, some soldiers having a bit of fun took Napoleon to the River Ouse (he was rescued at Naburn Lock). He also spent a night in jail when the shopkeeper forgot to bring him in for the night.

He is now on loan to the Merchant Adventurer's Company, safe and dry inside their Hall, looking remarkably well-preserved for his age.

Progress Sometimes Isn't

This unlandscaped bit of green space is what now sits on the site of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Who would ever guess that this under-resourced park in a nondescript South London neighborhood (near the Vauxhall train station) once attracted the highest in the land and was painted by great artists like Canaletto? Two hundred  years ago, it looked very different. The Gardens were at their best between 1785 (when admission was first charged) and 1840 (when its owners went bankrupt). New owners reopened the Gardens until 1859.



There were once structures for music, dancing and dining. Trees were hung with Japanese lanterns that were lit at night by means of fuses connecting them, making the lighting an amusing spectacle in its own right. Fireworks provided an exciting finale to the evening's entertainments. Many a historical romance heroine was ruined or nearly ruined along its darkened walks (Katherine Huxtable in Mary Balogh's Then Comes Seduction comes immediately to mind).

You can see some wonderful historical images of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens on this Two Nerdy History Girls' Pinterest board and this terrific blog devoted to Early British & American Public Gardens & Grounds.

Now, no trace remains of its former glory. Perhaps someday the London Borough of Lambeth will at least plant some trees and put up a modest gazebo. I hope the construction activity currently going on has something to do with improvements to the park.

My Love, My Enemy: The War of 1812 through the Lens of WWII

I recently finished Jan Cox Speas' classic novel My Love, My Enemy. Set during the War of 1812, it has several plot elements in common with The Windflower. Both novels feature a naïve 18-year-old American heroine who becomes entangled with an aristocratic British spy and becomes a pampered prisoner aboard a privateer's ship, where she befriends the captain and crew.

The two books are very different, however. The Windflower is a 1980s genre romance of the bodice-ripper era, filled with graphic (if occasionally unrealistic) sensuality. My Love, My Enemy is much more like a traditional regency romance, with only a few kisses and hints of thoroughly-repressed passion. It violates other romance genre expectations as well. The hero and heroine are apart for much of the time. The heroine receives her first kiss not from the hero, but from a rival for his affections. In fact, I found myself wondering which man she was really going to choose toward the end. I wonder if the author had a first draft somewhere with a different ending (like the original cut of the movie Pretty in Pink, where Darcy ended up with Ducky rather than Blaine).

Jan Cox Speas obviously did her research for My Love, My Enemy. The big events of the war are accurately portrayed. The antagonism between the Americans and British however, is continually undermined by the text. Although the story is mostly told through the point of view of American Page Bradley, Speas repeatedly tells us of the discipline and effectiveness of the British soldiers fighting in the peninsula under Wellington. American privateer Daniel Mason (who rather reminds me of Han Solo) takes Lord Hazard prisoner but comes to like and respect him very much, even though they are not only enemies in war but also rivals in love. The New Englanders dislike the British but distrust the French more, and many think the Madison administration chose the wrong side in the Napoleonic wars.

This grudging respect for the British and distrust of the French in an American novel about the War of 1812 makes a lot more sense when you realize it was written in 1961, by an author who came of age during World War II. Page Bradley's experiences and impressions during her globe-trotting misadventures would have held special resonance for readers who lived through another trans-Atlantic war.

The account of the privateer ship Caprice harassing a convoy and picking off merchantman one by one while their inadequate British navy escort looked on helplessly immediately reminded me of my grandfather's stories about a disastrous North Atlantic convoy that was destroyed by the Germans in July of 1942 after the British Admiralty ordered the military ships to scatter.

When Page and her chaperone are left at the house of an elderly Breton woman until the men's immediate wartime duties are discharged and safe passage can be arranged, the account of her wait is poignant and realistic. They are a house full of women awaiting the return of a British officer and an American sailor. Marie-Therese, the village girl who cooks for the household, laments that she will never marry, for Napoleon has conscripted all of the local men, and most of them will never come home. Fortunately for her, she ends up going to America as the bride of an American sailor, like a great many Frenchwomen did in the 1940s.

There is also a moving description of the English countryside, in which Page observes that the people there never experienced the harsh realities of the war. Their fields and hedgerows were undamaged, and they had plenty to eat. In this particular section, England stands in for America. While the Napoleonic wars were fought entirely outside of England, World War II was not. British cities were heavily damaged during the Blitz, and British civilians suffered hardships that Americans (outside of Hawaii) never knew.

Speas' characters discuss the relative strengths of the British and American navies in a way that foreshadows the eventual shift of superpower status from the former to the latter. That shift finally occurred during World War II. At the beginning of the war, Britannia still ruled the seas. By the end, American shipbuilding capacity (much of it located in the mid-Atlantic states where Speas lived and set her novel) allowed the USA to rule its own worldwide empire.

Christmas in Georgian England Included Christmas Trees and Turgoosen Pies

I am equally amused and frustrated by the annual kerfuffle over American holiday traditions. Amused because I can see humor in the absurd, and frustrated because I hear so many people defending the sanctity of particular Christmas traditions with no idea of their actual provenance.

So I am always fascinated to learn more about Christmas traditions in previous centuries. I had read many years ago that the Christmas tree was introduced into England by the German-born Prince Albert. While I had known that, by Albert's time, England had already been importing its royalty from various German states for a century, I assumed that the popularity of the young royal couple allowed the Prince Consort to introduce innovations in a way that his predecessors had not.

As it turns out, Prince Albert did not introduce the Christmas tree to England. Mass media coverage of the royal Christmas decorations in Victorian times (thanks to the proliferation of literacy and inexpensive magazines) made the Christmas tree popular among the common people for the first time, but the upper classes had been putting up and lighting Christmas trees in their houses since the first decade of the 19th century. The first documented English Christmas tree was set up by Queen Charlotte in Windsor in 1800. So if you read a Regency romance with a Christmas theme, and there is a Christmas tree, it is not an anachronism (assuming it is at an aristocratic gathering).

I was highly amused by this reference to a traditional Yorkshire Christmas pie from 1788. While it is not quite a turducken (because it features a goose rather than a duck nested between the turkey and chicken), it is superior to that modern symbol of excess, because inside the chicken is a pigeon inside a partridge. The pie also includes rabbit and miscellaneous game birds, but they are left outside the matryoshka fowl.

Here is another bit of 18th-century trivia related to German Christmas celebrations. Most Americans of a certain age remember (thanks to Schoolhouse Rock) that the continental army "surprised the Hessians in their lair" after crossing the Delaware "one night" but few realize that night was Christmas. The date chosen was likely deliberate, as one of General Washington's officers wrote "They make a great deal of Christmas in Germany, and no doubt the Hessians will drink a great deal of beer and have a dance to-night. They will be sleepy to-morrow morning."

The assumption about beer-drinking was likely incorrect, as another witness wrote afterward:  "I am certain not a drop of liquor was drunk during the whole night, nor, as I could see, even a piece of bread eaten." The element of surprise was sufficient to carry the day.

The 18th Century Fashion Revolution

The high-waisted, neoclassical women's gowns that we now associate with the Regency actually came into fashion during the last decade of the 18th century, following the French Revolution.

The radicals who toppled the ancien regime in 1789 deliberately rejected the aristocratic fashions of the day. Citoyens wore long cotton pantaloons rather than velvet knee breeches and silk stockings. Citoyennes turned away from stiff corsets and elaborate silk skirts supported by panniers and toward simple cotton gowns with neoclassical lines.

The new gowns were meant to evoke the days of the Roman republic. Ironically, the fashion developed at least in part out of a style that was favored by Marie Antoinette (and called the chemise a la reine in her honor).

French fashions, then as now, were soon adopted in other parts of Europe. The round gown, a garment made from a column of fabric gathered at the neckline and just below the bust, was the height of fashion in 1795. By the end of the decade, it was old-fashioned, replaced by the chemise dress (a more tailored version of the neoclassical gown). You can see several examples of round gowns on my Pinterest board for 1790s fashion.

The evolving political situation in Paris during the 1790s continued to impact fashion. An anti-Jacobin petit-bourgeois militia known as the Muscadins (for the musk cologne they supposedly favored) came to prominence in 1794-5. They wore bright, contrasting colors and coats with large lapels. Their fashion choices were taken up and exaggerated during the Directoire period (1795-1799) by the aristocratic subculture known as the Incroyables (for men) and Merveilleuses (for women).

Diaphanous gowns with scanty or no undergarments were worn in public (and were lampooned by British cartoonists at the time). Men's frock coats and waistcoats were shortened, and lapels became more popular. With the rise of Napoleon at the end of the decade, women's fashions became less risqué. New styles of corset, without boning, were introduced in the early years of the 19th century, after several years of less supportive fashion.

This is not to say that the older fashions disappeared completely. The two very different modes coexisted, with the younger generation preferring the radical new fashions and their conservative parents often clinging to the old. Knee breeches continued to be worn for formal occasions. The specialized costumes for court presentations preserved the longer waistcoats for gentlemen and skirts with hoops for ladies through the Regency (although these garments were only worn for court events).

So, while we are tempted to think of knee breeches and hooped skirts as Georgian and trousers and column dresses as Regency, the reality is that the two eras and two styles overlapped.

Re-Reading The Windflower Part III: the Forgotten Conflict

(In honor of Read-a-Romance Month, I am re-reading my all-time favorite romance novel, The Windflower and remarking on how my perceptions of the book differ this time around).

The novel opens in 1813 Virginia and rather quickly references the ongoing war against the British (which naïve patriot Merry calls The Second War for American Independence). The heroine's brother and father are directly involved in the war effort and her brother occasionally involves her in a bit of espionage on behalf of her country.

The Windflower can be classified as a Regency-set historical romance (since it takes place during the Regency and its hero is a British aristocrat). I did not realize in 1984 how unusual it was for such a book to deal with the War of 1812 in a substantial way. It is usually seen as a sideshow of the Napoleonic Wars (which, from the British point of view, it rather was).

Very few Americans know much about it; most believe that it was an aggressive attempt by the British to re-take her former American colonies, and that the British lost (as documented in Johnny Horton's classic pop tune "the Battle of New Orleans").  In reality, it was part trade war, part labor dispute (over the shortage of able-bodied seamen) and part land war between the U.S. and Canada.  Both sides sustained a great deal of damage, and in the end everyone agreed to return to the status quo antebellum.

There are many reasons why the average American school textbook presents such an oversimplified (to the point of being misleading) version of the War of 1812, and they all have to do with cultural propaganda. As a nation, we are uncomfortable talking about the wars that did not end in glory for the American military and new territory for the United States. Also, during the first half of the 20th century, Britain was an important ally during both world wars, helping to strengthen the "special relationship" between our two nations. We did not care to dwell on the spats early in that relationship.

In the 1990s, I read a book by Donald R. Hickey called The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict.  I found it to be fascinating.  When I started re-reading The Windflower, I wondered if the war would be portrayed superficially and/or inaccurately.  Much to my surprise, the historical references seem pretty accurate (given that 20 years has elapsed since I read that scholarly tome about the war).  Characters hear news about actual battles.  Merry's brother eagerly declares that, if the coming campaign in Canada is successful, the British will soon be driven out of North America (taking Canada from the British was a major motivation for the American war hawks to pursue the war in the first place). The New York merchants grumble about the ruinously expensive war disrupting trade. Devon muses about the poor decisions by the Madison administration.

I have read a great many historical romances that really skimped on the historical research.  The Windflower isn't one of them.

The Ubiquitous Anachronism of Afternoon Tea

About 20 years ago, I read Daniel Pool's delightful popular reference What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. Pool taught me that the "traditional" British practice of afternoon tea first became popular in the 1840s. In Jane Austen's time, tea was a beverage for breakfast (to help begin the day with a dose of caffeine) and after-dinner (when it was served in the drawing room to help revive guests and keep them lively for cards and conversation).

Kim Wilson's lovely coffee-table book Tea with Jane Austen is also honest in saying that the custom of afternoon tea would have seemed very strange to Austen (the book talks about the rituals of tea associated with Austen's time, not the mini-meal known as "tea" in Victorian and modern Britain).

As the 19th century progressed, social habits evolved and dinner was served later and later (at least in Town). Most sources credit Anna, Duchess of Bedford with beginning the practice (around 1840) of taking afternoon tea with a few tidbits to tide her over until dinner. It was an honor to be invited to join the Duchess for this light repast, and it soon became fashionable to imitate the custom in one's own home.

So, the "tradition" of afternoon tea began during the reign of Queen Victoria.  Somehow, that knowledge has not become general.  I have read a great many historical romances set before 1840 that make reference to sitting down to tea in the afternoon, or being invited to join another lady for tea in the afternoon. Even authors who are usually very good about researching the period often include this obvious anachronism.

Afternoon visits in the early 19th century (called "morning calls" even though they did not happen in the morning) were expected to be brief (no more than a quarter hour, so as not to monopolize anyone's time) and did not include refreshments.

Perhaps authors know it is an anachronism but choose to include it anyway because the idea of afternoon tea is so beloved to history nerds and anglophiles.  I have to admit that I greatly enjoyed visiting the "Regency Tea Room" at the Jane Austen Centre in Bath and partaking of afternoon tea accompanied by small sandwiches, scones and desserts (on a lovely three-tiered serving tray). Even better, a nice painted portrait of Mr. Darcy (as portrayed by Colin Firth) looked down from the wall while I had my tea. Anachronisms can be delicious.

Gift Ideas for that Jane Austen Enthusiast in Your Life

If you are reading this blog chances are that you, or someone close to you, is a fan of Jane Austen. I am such a fangirl that I dragged my ever-supportive husband to Winchester Cathedral to visit her tomb and to Bath, which is full of Austen-connected sites.

If you can't afford a trip to the UK, however, there are any number of books and videos that will be of interest to the Austen fan in your life, and some of them are obscure enough to make a delightful surprise gift.  Here are some of my favorites:

Books

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: from Fox Hunting to Whist - the Facts of Daily Life in the 19th Century by Daniel Pool.  This is a wonderful introductory reference for any author of historical novels set in the 19th century, or anyone who enjoys the literature of the period.

An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England by Venetia Murray. Another delightful reference that will inform modern Americans about the ways of the upper ten thousand.

Tea with Jane Austen by Kim Wilson and Tom Carpenter. A light coffee-table book that gives some background on the use of tea in Jane Austen's time.

Walks through Regency London by Louise Allen.  I wish I had known about this book before my last trip. Written by a writer of historical romance novels, it is a delightful read, full of quotes from Austen's letters describing places she visited, accompanied by maps of each walking tour, some history of the neighborhoods and pictures of the locations, then and now.

Videos

Austenland starring Keri Russell.  A light comedy about an Austen-obsessed young woman who splurges on an immersion weekend at an Austen-themed resort. It's fun to see Jane Seymour returning to costume drama, and true Austen fans will appreciate the stunt casting of J.J. Field as the Darcyesque hero.

Pride and Prejudice (Restored Edition) starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.  Do not be fooled by the Keira Knightley version or the 2004 BBC miniseries.  The A&E miniseries with Colin Firth is the one true adaptation of P&P.