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Monthly Archives: July 2008

One can study history, and read memoirs and letters, and devour historical novels by the bushel…and yet I find there are still some aspects of how people really lived and thought which it is hard for a modern person to really thoroughly understand.

Oh, one can have an intellectual understanding — but I mean a gut understanding, a real “feeling” for the way people lived, and thought — an ability to mentally step into their shoes, and see through their eyes.

A few areas that I think are particularly difficult for a modern person to truly grasp:

1) Just how different the attitude toward STUFF was. Nowadays, we have far too much stuff — we’re inundated by it, our homes overflow with it, we complain our kids have way too much junk… We have Jane Austen action figures and joke mugs just for the heck of it, our kids get cheap toys in cereal boxes and at the doctor, charities and realtors send us free notepads and coins and calendars and bumper stickers and postcards…

So how can we truly grasp a world where stuff actually cost money? Where things were used and reused and reused again? Where the Artful Dodger could hang for stealing a handkerchief, because handkerchiefs were actually worth something?

2) And how can a modern person raised in a democratic, multi-ethnic society ever entirely comprehend the mindset of a person who never (or rarely) met anyone who wasn’t a supporter of monarchy, whose whole society believed that men were smarter than women, that aristocrats had superior blood and brains to commoners, that people’s abilities were determined by their race and national origin?

3) And how do we, living in a world with good contraception, where women can support themselves (and their children, if need be) by working as a lawyer or doctor or police officer or computer programmer — a world that has heard from Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and Oprah and Jennifer Crusie and The Joy of Sex — how do we get into the mindset of people who thought a woman’s chastity, modesty and “virtue” were her crown jewels, and who thought a woman’s duty was to obey her husband in the same way her husband obeyed the king?

Anyway, these are three areas that occur to me right off. Which of these seem hardest to you? Or what other things do you think are particularly hard to grasp?

All answers welcome!

Cara
Cara King, whose brain isn’t hampered at all by its common blood

Diane Report: Home from Georgia; STILL writing!!!!!!
It turns out the last chapter is harder to rewrite than it was (or seemed) when I stayed up all night writing the first version. I’m really close to having the book done but I want to take a few more days to go through it once more and polish it.
See? These struggles don’t end once you are published, except having a deadline, even if you miss it, does make a person put butt-in-chair.

When I was packing for Georgia, I searched everywhere for my copy of Howarth’s Waterloo: Day of Battle, but I couldn’t find it. I especially wanted this book because it uses first hand accounts.

I grabbed a couple of other Waterloo books from my shelf and hoped they would do. My book ends at Waterloo. At least this version does. After revisions, who knows? I didn’t need information about the battle, but rather what it would have been like for someone in Brussels before and after the battle.

The Waterloo Campaign by Albert A. Nofi, part of the Great Campaigns series of books, proved helpful in many ways. This treasure does explain the battle in terms I can almost understand, but it also has sidebar vignettes and explanations, biographies of the important players and information about such things as musketry, supplying the troops, and, very helpful to me, the weather.

Even when it didn’t help me in my story, it proved very diverting just to read.

I even had my husband stop at a Borders along the way to see if they had Lady De Lancey’s book, which I think I have, but by the time I thought of it, we were on the road.

Desperation breeds creativity, I’m convinced. In the hotel I did a search on Google Books and found this treasure: Waterloo Days; the Narrative of an Englishwoman Resident at Waterloo in June, 1815 by Charlotte A. Eaton.

This book was written by a Englishwoman who, in the company of a brother and sister, arrived in Brussels on June 15, 1815. She wrote a memoir, describing the trip, the city, the events of the days right before and after the battle. She and her brother and sister fled to Antwerp on June 17, like many of the English did, but my characters didn’t so I had to use my imagination a little, but otherwise she gave a very vivid account of the uncertainty felt by the people who knew the battle was in progress, but did not know anything else. She even visited the battlefield several days afterward.

I highly recommend looking up this little book and reading it and saving it or bookmarking it. It was truly a gift from the Universe for me, just when I needed it most.

That’s how I met my Waterloo (book).

What books have you discovered in that wonderful, accidental, just-in-time way?

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As those of us in the States know, today is the Fourth of July, where we celebrate our Independence.

I’d like to take a moment to celebrate our individual independence, and ask you for your thoughts. I’ll start:

I am grateful to be independent of:

–arranged marriages
–men making all my decisions for me
–having to wear body-covering clothing all the time, even when it’s 90 degrees out
–worrying about how I can survive as a genteel gentlewoman with very little fortune
–dying in childbirth
–those tiny little sausage curls
–ill-fitting shoes
–listening to ladies who cannot play perform on the pianoforte
–not being able to get more education than what is provided by a governess
–feeling guilty for having sexual thoughts

I am grateful to be dependent on:

–air conditioning
–deodorant
–eyeglasses
–swimsuits
–indoor plumbing (you knew it was coming)
–razors
–makeup
–my iPod
–comfortable shoes
–albuterol for my asthma

So–what about you?

Megan

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Bring out the stylized, Italian-influenced birthday cake with the straight, delicately fluted candles. It’s the birthday of architect and designer Robert Adam (July 3, 1728 – March 3, 1792), one of the great innovative designers of the Georgian period.

What made Adam so popular and influential? I like to think it’s because he made the connection between how people lived and how rooms should look, and that furniture should blend harmoniously with the decor. He created chairs that were made to be sat in with some degree of comfort, lower, and with backs that moulded to the spine, like the lyre back and shield back chairs.

His work reflected the tastes of a generation that considered the Grand Tour the final polishing of a gentleman’s education. He was the first designer to contract his work to other companies, notably that of Hepplewhite. There’s a complete list of characteristics of his work here.

Here are some pictures of Nostell Priory in Yorkshire, which features furniture designed specifically for the house when it was built in 1733.

Even the dollhouse at right with its original fittings and furnishings, has Adam-Hepplewhite style furniture.

While I was poking around online trying to find–and choose between–the many examples of Adam’s work, I found this antiques site, apter-fredericks.com, which has a wonderful timeline of furnishings–warning, I noticed some really awful mistakes in the history, but the furniture illustrations are wonderful.

Adam might not have been too easy to deal with–the National Trust site for Osterley Park, a Tudor house he was hired to modernize, describes him as “self-confident, brusque and with an unrivalled command of classical antiquity.” You get the feeling Mr. Adam liked to get his own way and was right more often than his browbeaten clients.

And talking of antiquity, did you catch Antiques Roadshow recently when this fabulous Georgian box desk, from ca. 1805, was appraised? Check it out.

Have you visited any Adam houses? Share your thoughts on decoration and furniture. Tell us about your latest home renovation projects or your antique fantasy wish list. That box desk is at the top of my list…

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