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Author Archives: Gail Eastwood

About Gail Eastwood

Gail Eastwood is the author of seven Regencies that were originally published by Signet/Penguin. After taking ten years off for family matters, she has wobbled between contemporary romantic suspense and more Regency stories, wondering what century she's really in and trying to work the rust off her writing skills. Her backlist is gradually coming out in ebook format, and some are now available in new print editions as well. She is working on the start of a Regency-set series and other new projects. Stay tuned!
Simpson's-in-the-Strand

Simpson’s-in-the-Strand

Have you been out to dinner at a nice restaurant lately? When you told your friends, did they look at you with pity and then gossip about you behind your back? Is your reputation ruined? How times change, LOL!

The fact is, during the Regency in England, dining out as a social event the way we know it was not done. The very concept of the modern restaurant was still in its infancy –it evolved in France (of course?) in the later 18th century and had not successfully caught on yet in England. But there was a glimmer on the horizon, and a few eating establishments were heading in the right direction. (I’ll come back to these near the end.)

People did “eat out”, of course. You could obtain a meal in a tavern, pub, or an inn or a fine hotel, particularly if you were traveling. You could purchase specific foodstuffs from street vendors, but that wasn’t a “meal.” And any of these were, in general, patronized out of necessity or convenience, not for pleasure. There were no menus offering choices –only perhaps, a list of what was to be served. Generally only the simplest inexpensive meats and vegetables were served, except for a few taverns that catered to a specific well-heeled (male) clientele.

simpsons-tavern

simpsons-tavern

If you were an upper-class male, you could enjoy a meal at your private club. The food offerings might be somewhat more elegant, but would still be limited. You ate what they served, at the time they served it. Men could also patronize the coffee and oyster houses, which often served other food in addition to their main focus. For females to dine in public was quite shocking, however, unless in a coaching inn, and if you were of the upper class, you would still insist on a private parlor.

Part of the stigma, of course, came from the fact that acceptable households employed their own cooks. Why would you prefer to eat out when you could eat in? “Dining out” socially meant going to dinner at someone else’s private home, eating food prepared by their cook instead of yours.

Another part of the stigma was the idea of rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi –the general public. Not done! People forced to “eat out” were the poor who had no cook, and often, no kitchen at all. Taverns were noisy and crowded, with communal tables. “Even a moderately well-to-do person would have preferred to order food delivered to a private home or a room at an inn or hotel or an elegant salon rented for the occasion…” (1)

No wonder your friends viewed you with pity! What calamity caused you to need to eat out? And if you were female in mixed company, oh, dear. Shocking!

These social aspects of dining out offer a clue to why the modern restaurant was born in France (and why England resisted). The French Revolution brought in sweeping social changes that coincided with some new developments. “Restaurant” originally meant a type of meat soup, like consommé or bouillion, used medicinally as a “restorative”. In 1765 a bouillion-seller had opened a shop with tables where ailing customers could sit and eat their soup. Different customers required different types of restoratives, so the idea of individual customized servings was introduced. Others copied the idea. In the early 1780’s a man named Beauvilliers, the former chef of the Count of Provence, carried the conceit further and opened the first real restaurant with small individual tables and a menu listing individual choices with prices.

In 1786 he opened the first “luxury” restaurant in the Palais Royale, featuring mahogany tables with white tablecloths, trained waiters, chandeliers, a wine list and an extensive menu of fine food choices. That same year, the Provost of Paris issued a proclamation officially recognizing and authorizing these new types of establishments. These developments paired with a ready supply of cooks and servants no longer employed by the artistocracy, the dissolution of the guilds that had restricted how and by whom food could be prepared, and a customer base of displaced provincials without families in Paris, journalists and businessmen, a newly important middle class. Two different principles were suddenly wedded in a successful new way to do business –the personal tastes, budget and choices of the individual now controlled the purchase of a meal, while the egalitarian social climate celebrated that “Eating [well] was no longer the privilege of the wealthy who could afford to maintain a cook and a well-supplied kitchen.” (2)

Dining Out-3estates_2Within ten years there were more than half a dozen restaurants in Paris, and “dining out” was accepted practice there enough to provide the basis for a political cartoon about the 3rd Estate in France (above), entitled “Separate cheques please”:

 

Rules with Glass Ceiling

Rules with Glass Ceiling

Meanwhile, back in London, the oldest still-surviving restaurant in London, Rules, was started in 1798, on Maiden Lane in Covent Garden. Although at first it was simply an oyster bar, as their website states: “Contemporary writers were soon singing the praises of Rules’ “porter, pies and oysters”, and remarking on the “rakes, dandies and superior intelligence’s who comprise its clientele”.

Two other London establishments might challenge the “oldest” claim by Rules, but one (Wilton’s, opened 1742 as a seafood street stall, 1805 as an oyster room) has changed locations and nature many times, while the other (Simpson’s Tavern) is more of a pub, and ancient pubs are not rare anywhere in England! Note ladies were not admitted to Simpson’s Tavern until 1916.

Simpson’s-in-the-Strand (not related) was founded in 1828 primarily as a chess club/coffee house/smoking room (“The Grand Cigar Divan”). They are still famous for serving meats at tableside from antique, silver-domed carving trolleys, a practice said to have evolved to avoid interrupting the play during chess games.  Simpson's history

You can see these were not yet exactly “restaurants” in the Parisian sense at the time they opened their doors. The modern form of “dining out” really didn’t take hold in Britain until the mid-Victorian era, when the swelling ranks of the new middle class provided an enthusiastic customer base for it.

Have you written or read characters who needed to dine out for one reason or another? Are you surprised to know what a big difference existed between customs in Paris and London during this time period? Have you ever eaten at any of the London restaurants mentioned, or have a favorite restaurant there to share?

Sources quoted:

(1) “The Rise of the Restaurant,” Food: a Culinary History, Jean-Louis Flandrin & Massimo Montanari

(2) Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999)

For further reading online:

http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html#oldestmenu

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/pleasure/history_restaurant.html

Also, check out:

A History of Cooks and Cooking, Michael Symons [Universtiy of Illinois Press:Urbana IL] 1998 (p. 289-293)

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Thomas_Luny_Blackfriars 1806

Thomas_Luny_Blackfriars 1806

The River Thames has a starring role in my story, The Rake’s Mistake. The heroine, Daphne, Lady Wetherell, lives in a house on the river, and my hero, Lord Ramsdale, is a recreational sailor in an era when that pastime was still developing. Lots of action takes place on the river, from peaceful romantic sailing to a frantic race with much at stake. Researching the river was one of my great pleasures in writing that story, which I will be reissuing one of these days after some revisions I want to make.

The idea for that story was inspired by a single sketch of the Thames that showed a small sailing race on the Thamesflotilla of sailboats, what we’d call “day-sailers” around here, engaged in a recreational race in London. I think it was dated 1795, and my first thought was that it looked just like any recreational sailboat race held today –like this one.  I had one of those moments when it feels as if the divisions between the centuries fall away, leaving a universal moment in time that transcends history.

For centuries the river was the main artery for goods and transport (not to mention jobs), the lifeblood of London. Sailing on the river required a lot of knowledge, not only of the currents and tides, but also of navigating all the various bridges. “shootinbridgeShooting the bridge” –traveling through the bridge openings with their swift current and varying water levels –could be very dangerous, yet was necessary for anyone who needed to get up or downstream for any distance.

As we travel through Regency London in our stories, I think we tend to forget how much construction was going on everywhere. Gas lines were being laid in the streets, and new bridges were being erected over the Thames, adding to those already in place. Unbearable traffic on the existing bridges made the need for new ones pressing.

Watercolour1799 Old London bridge

Old London Bridge 1799

London Bridge, of course, had existed in one form or another since the days of the Romans.  For centuries it was the only bridge across the Thames in London, until Fulham Bridge (first proposed in 1671) was completed in 1729. There’s a lovely story that Sir Robert Walpole pushed for the Fulham Bridge construction after being delayed by the ferryman, who was drinking in the nearest tavern and oblivious to customers waiting to cross the river.

The rights of owners, ferrymen and watermen –not to mention competing bridges, and financing –were all matters of contention each time a new bridge was proposed. A proposal for Westminster Bridge was already being debated in the 1720’s, but the bridge wasn’t completed until 1750.

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Battersea Bridge, sketch by Whistler

Blackfriars (1768) and the rough wooden Battersea bridge (1776) followed.

Prince & Duke at Waterloo Bridge 1817

Opening Waterloo Bridge

The Vauxhall Bridge, the first cast iron bridge across the river, opened in 1816.

The opening of the Waterloo Bridge in 1817 was a festive and crowded occasion complete with military displays and bands playing (my characters mentioned above observe this from Archer’s boat on the river).

southwark-bridge

Southwark Bridge

Parliament authorized the construction of Southwark Bridge in 1811. The work began by 1813, and the cornerstone ceremony was held two years later. The bridge opening took place in March, 1819, at midnight –“the bridge, illuminated with lamps, being declared open as St. Paul’s clock tolled” the hour.

The power of the river is extraordinary, and every one of these bridges has since been replaced.

There’s a nice brief summary of the Thames history at http://www.southwarkbridge.co.uk/history/the-river-thames.htm

A description of Old London Bridge by Louis Simond (1815) reads:  “Nothing can well be uglier than London bridge ; every arch is of a size different from its next neighbour; there are more solid than open parts; it is in fact like a thick wall, pierced with small unequal holes here and there, through which the current, dammed up by this clumsy fabric, rushes with great velocity, and in fact takes a leap, the difference between high and low water being upwards of 15 feet.”  Simond, in fact, ventured to stay in his hired boat to experience shooting the bridge, reasoning that boats had to do it every day, and he “being quite sure of reaching the shore by swimming, … remained with the boatman.” London Br 1794c J.M.W. Turner

I know other authors who have featured the river and/or the bridges in their stories –Jo Beverly comes to mind, and Regina Scott. But still it surprises me that something so integral to life in London (at any time period) so often has no place in our fantasized Regency version of Town.

Have you ever traveled on the Thames? Can you recall any Regency romances you’ve read (or written) that use the river as part of the story?

 

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Straw work case w drawers -POW 1800 Research rabbit holes are so much fun! Rose’s foray into Regency material culture (May 23) inspired me to share one that fascinated me back when I was writing the original edition of The Captain’s Dilemma (1995). The hero of that story is a French prisoner of war who has escaped (for good reason) into the English countryside, and of course, thereby hangs the tale. But he is an engineer, and actually an artist of sorts, and objects that he makes out of straw (and other materials) to while away time when he is restricted are based at least in part on real POW works made during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

I had known that country people in Britain at that time often made “corn dollies” out of the last sheaves of grain at harvest time, as part of the superstitions that surround the important harvest ritual. Pictured here is one that graces the bulletin board in my writing office as a souvenir of sorts corn dolly (my office has at least one object that represents each of the books I have written). But it was my research into Regency-era prisoners-of-war that led to my discovery of ornamental “straw work” and its popularity (which continued throughout the 19th century), along with bone objects and other things the prisoners made.

Straw work Noah's ark w animals Prisoners had nothing but time on their hands, and boredom sometimes led to disciplinary problems. The prison administrators had a vested interest in keeping the men occupied. Selling the items they made at the weekly prison market also gave these men a way to supplement their rations and make other purchases –so it was a win for everyone. The heroine and her family visit one of these prison markets in my book, at a key turning point in the story.

Work boxes were probably the most commonly made item decorated with straw, and according to some sources were sometimes given as courting gifts, with messages and promises incorporated into the decorations through the choice oPOW straw work marquetry work boxf flowers and symbolic ornamentation ( for example, roses for remembrance or lilies for faith in love).  Pictures, frames, toys and many other types of items were made and decorated with straw, with amazing intricacy. Straw embroidered fan 1740

There’s an American museum devoted to straw work (http://www.strawartmuseum.org), and they divide their holdings into five categories: straw appliqué (which includes the type of marquetry most often seen in POW work), straw weaving (which is how corn dollies are made, and how I imagined Alex made his little bridges), straw lace, coiled straw, and straw hats and bonnets. Their website “tours” are worth checking out! If you want to see pictures of modern straw work, just type “wheat weaving” or “straw art” into Google or Pinterest!!

PPOW bone work ship model-2OWs also made things out of bone, which was another plentiful material available to them. (Mutton bones, NOT human ones –what were you thinking?? <g>) . The first prisoner-of-war artworks I came across in my research were ship models made from bone. Look at how amazing they can be!

The men also made bone toys, gaming sets, boxes –again, all sorts of items, in addition to the ships. The most amazing of all may be the model guillotines!  I have a bPOW bonework guillotineeautiful book on POW ship models, which helped me identify museums in Britain that had collections of POW artworks I was able to visit. Research is so much easier now that we have the Internet! But of course, seeing the real thing in person is a fabulous experience nothing else can equal.

Have you been sidetracked by anything in your research that has become a permanent interest? Or, do you manage not to fall down any rabbit holes when you do research? I would love to hear about it in the comments. If you have any pictures, I think you might be able to post them on the Facebook page. Let’s share!

POW bone work jackstraws spillikins set

 

Met Museum-Tea Table Set-2

Tea Table Setting in the Met Museum, New York, c. 1750-1775

I had planned a lovely post for you today. Really. But I’m hosting another Facebook party this weekend (well, actually Sunday and Monday, it lasts 32 hours!) –a “virtual Tea Party” –and I’m also running a “real” Tea Party on Sunday, both charity fund-raisers for my friend with kidney disease. I have been juggling a sick husband, a sinus infection, and too many things to do. The post, of course, was related to Tea Parties, looking not just at the history of their evolution as a social event, but focusing on the “necessities” of the tea table, which I find interesting. Today we simply have the pot, the creamer and sugar, and the cups and saucers, but back in the day, many more pieces were required.

IMG_5601However. It is very late at night now, my brain refuses to do anything more, the post is not finished, and here I am. I am going to leave you with a few pictures of the accoutrements of serving tea. Can you identify all of the pieces in these sets, and their purpose?

Liotard_Jean-Étienne_1781-83-_Still_Life-_Tea_Set

Still Life Painting by Jean-Etienne Liotard 1781-83

If you are in the mood for more on the history of tea drinking, or about tea itself, I refer you to these earlier posts by Riskies Isobel Carr and Carolyn Jewel:

Isobel’s post, December 16, 2015 “Happy (belated) National Tea Day”, about The Tea Purchaser’s Guide, published 1785.

Carolyn’s post Sept 12, 2012 “Tea Redux” which includes some great links to sources for tea history.

If you are on Facebook, please consider yourself invited to my Mad Tea Party! You do need an invitation from myself or another patroness, but all you need to do is send me a friend request and ask. (If we are already friends, I’m pretty sure you’ve been invited!) We have lots of games and real prizes lined up, along with all the virtual partying we can think up!

If I don’t add a small pitch for donations in case anyone would like to help and isn’t on Facebook, I’d have to give up my fund-raiser’s hat, so here’s the info: tax-deductible donations can be made to my friend Joyce Bourque’s campaign at the Help HOPE Live Foundation, which manages fundraising for transplant patients, both before and after surgeries. www.helphopelive.org/campaign/376

My apologies for not leaving you with a “real” post today!! I hope you have a great weekend.

Cooking recipes 1882How many of you researchers love primary sources? Is anyone’s hand NOT raised?

One of the things I love best about researching is that moment when you stumble across some telling tiny detail that just resonates…. Diaries, letters, and other materials from centuries past offer a trove of detail rich enough to make a researching author sing for joy. Where would we be without Jane Austen’s letters? How would we know what colors were in fashion, or how seams were sewn, without period magazines, dressmakers’ patterns or samples of clothing? Just for examples. While we may learn some of these things through secondary sources, we wouldn’t have THOSE without the primary sources to be studied and interpreted first.

I am currently deep in the middle of two quite different published collections of letters and diary excerpts, Penelope Hind’s (thank you for the loan, Elena!) and James Woodforde’s famous “Diary of a Country Parson”. As is so often the case, parts of them are wonderful and parts less so. Woodforde's Diary  Because these published versions have been edited, I wonder about the parts that have been left out –probably dull, but what if something useful to me (not to the editor) was in there? I would have loved to have the job of reading through the originals. Do you also think this way?

What got me thinking about this topic, though, was spring cleaning. My younger son, temporarily out of work, has been helping out at home by bravely delving into boxes that have been sitting in various corners ever since we moved here –and I don’t want to tell you how many years ago that was. Many belonged to my mother, who passed away four years after we moved here, and that was not recently!

Amazing things have been coming out of the boxes, besides trash (junk mail still unopened from when we moved, for example) –two items pictured here were too old to belong to my mother. Who knew we had this stuff?  Caduceus 1908

The 1882 recipe booklet (at top) is filled with ads for local businesses on all the pages facing the recipes. It is too old even for my grandmother. Did it belong to my great-grandmother? The ads remind me of my favorite type of primary resource, old newspapers. Do you have a favorite?

The “Caduceus 1908” was a mystery, even after I saw it was a sort of yearbook from the senior class of Classical High School in Providence, RI. Why did we have it??? As I perused the pages, amused by descriptions of events and the humor, I stumbled across write-ups of the individual class members and discovered that my paternal grandmother was a member of this class. I can pick her out clearly in the class photo (blonde in the center of the 2nd row) –because she looks so much like my sister!

Class of 1908I knew she had been a school teacher, but love this glimpse of her earlier life. My imagination runs with it. She did not live in Providence and must have had a long trip by trolleycar and on foot each day to get to school and home again.

I won’t be keeping these, fascinating as they are. But I hope to find good homes for these treasures. “Museum mentality” is the bane of those of us with cluttered homes. We can’t hang onto everything! But what if no one ever did? Those precious letters and diaries, those old newspapers and magazines from long ago that we now enjoy so much, that give us glimpses into the real lives of people in the past? What if zealous spring cleaners had tossed them all?

Do you wonder, as I do, if all the electronic versions of everything we have now were to disappear (or, as we have repeatedly seen, become inaccessible as technology keeps changing?) –what are we leaving for future generations to study? I know it won’t be stuff from my house.  The chorus around here lately is “just throw it out!” However, at least a few treasures deserve to be “re-homed”, as I call it. I just wish that didn’t require so much extra time. What do you do with your clutter?