On Saturday, I saw the final concert in what is possibly the final tour ever for the rock band Genesis. Fantastic concert, fabulous band, great experience.

So how, you ask, does a Genesis concert relate to the Regency? In, oh, so many ways! Here are just a handful:

1. The founding members of Genesis all met while students at Charterhouse School, which Wikipedia explains is “one of the original nine English public schools as defined by the Public Schools Act 1868.” (The other eight are Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Westminster, Winchester, St Paul’s, Merchant Taylors’, and Shrewsbury.)

Other famous alumni of Charterhouse (which was founded in 1611) include Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, William Blackstone (of “Blackstone’s Commentaries”), Henry Luttrell, Henry Siddons (son of Sarah Siddons), William Godwin (Mary Shelley’s half-brother), and Thackeray.

2. If Gerard Butler exemplifies how an insanely muscular Regency man might look under his clothes, then surely Genesis are a great example of what a Regency progressive rock band would sound like???

3. Casual radio listeners probably associate Genesis with their hits from the late 1970’s through early 1990’s, songs like “Invisible Touch” and “I Can’t Dance,” which were often accompanied by lighthearted videos.

But many of their fans are more interested in their earlier albums, both those with their first lead singer, Peter Gabriel, and also the first few with their second lead singer, Phil Collins. (Phil, by the way, did not go to Charterhouse; he was a child actor who once played the Artful Dodger in a London production of the musical “Oliver!”)

Songs on these earlier albums were rife with the sort of allusions that might occur to a well-educated public school boy: references to classical mythology (Narcissus, Tiresias, Salmacis, Lamia), Lilith, Arthurian legend, the Book of Revelation, Marlowe, Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Keats, Wordsworth, and Wuthering Heights, to name a few.

Of these, it was the classical allusions that have always struck me most. I think it’s far too easy, as writers, to have our Regency gentleman running around talking about Shakespeare and Johnson and Fielding and Sheridan and Austen and Burney and Byron — folks who come to our minds when we think of either England or, more specifically, the English Regency. But I try to remind myself that our Regency gentlemen had educations that focused on the classical world, not on England. They probably went around talking about Hector and Neptune and Cicero much more than we give them credit for.

So, you see, Genesis have helped me write better Regencies. 🙂

And don’t forget our next meeting of the Jane Austen Movie Club, on November 6. (Always the first Tuesday of the month.) We’ll be discussing the 1996 BBC/A&E adaptation of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, a.k.a. the Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle version!

Cara
Cara King, who never saw a lamb lie down on Broadway

A few weeks ago, I did something I know people here at Risky Regencies will sympathize with–I ordered a couple of books from abebooks, and when they arrived realized I already had them. Ooops. (The duplicates will probably pop up here as a giveaway soon, so stay tuned!). Then I knew it must be time for a Book Check.

I do this once or twice a year, going through my shelves, the stacks of books on the floor, and the plastic storage tubs of books. It gives me a chance to do some much-needed dusting (I am really glad you can’t actually see my house, because honestly housekeeping isn’t my forte), find books to donate to the library book sale (though this doesn’t really often happen–I think I got rid of all of 2 books last time), and see what I have that I might have forgotten about (and thus not order them again). This process takes quite a while, as I usually end up sitting on the floor re-reading stuff or looking at pictures in art books.

One book I found hiding on the shelf this time was Benjamin Woolley’s Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter. Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, aside from her father (who she never knew, of course, her parents having separated so acrimoniously when she was an infant) was a very interesting person in her own right. Raised by her wackadoo mother in an uber-strict manner, emphasizing science, logic, and morality (i.e. the anti-Byron), she was a part of the early Victorian interest in new technology and science. She was a gifted mathematician (something about using punch cards to calculate Bernoulli numbers, and an interest in the concept of imaginary numbers), and although some of her interests were, er, questionable (mesmerism and magnetism, and later using her own mathematical system to lose disastrously at the horse races) some was of lasting impact. She worked with her friend Charles Babbage on an invention called the Analytical Engine (this is where the punch cards came in) that is considered an early forerunner of the computer. She died at 37 (still harangued by her mother) and was buried next to her father, but her influence can still be seen–the US Department of Defense called their computer language “Ada.”

I’ve often said that the one kind of hero or heroine I could never write about would be a mathematician. I’m a terrible dunce with numbers–they lost me somewhere around first grade with those pesky multiplication tables. In school, my abstract brain preferred things like analyzing poetry, where there was no “right” answer. After all, who can say what “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” really means, yet 2+2 is always 4 no matter how you might feel about it at the moment. I’m so deeply impressed by people like Ada (or like my future sister-in-law, an engineer) who are good at such things. They’re so mysterious and strange to me. It would take an immense amount of hard research to make any mathematical character I wrote about believable. And yet inspiration is a strange thing. A heroine who is interested in algebra has taken up residence in my mind, and may one day have to come out on the page (though she is in line behind at least 4 other projects, all with stubbornly non-scientific heroines).

What were your favorite subjects in school? Any that you hated? What sort of character would you feel challenged to write or read about?

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