Author Archives: Sandra Schwab

So you want to review books? (The 1816 edition)

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

Are you a reader with a most impressive number of reviews on Goodreads? Do you run a book blog or write for a review site? Do you LOVE talking about books? But do you worry what would happen if you traveled to Scotland, admired some pretty stone circle, and quite accidentally tumbled 200 years into the past?

Never fear! I have a few most excellent tips for you so you won’t have to forgo reviewing books even while trxing to navigate the delicate politics of Regency ballrooms! In the growing bookmarket of the early 19th century yours will be a welcome new voice!

You are a woman and you fear reviewing books might forever ruin your reputation and destroy all your chances of Mr. Darcy ever sparing you a glance? Rest assured, there is no need to worry as reviews are published anonymously in the periodical press.

Now let’s see what kind of magazine would suit your reviewing style best.

Do you like to write really long (REALLY long) reviews? Then I suggest you try a literary quarterly. You’ve got three months between issues so be prepared to really delve into a book. Reviews of potentially popular books by eminent authors should not be shorter than 30 pages (for new novels by Britain’s most beloved authors such as the author of Waverley, consider 50 pages a bare minimum – though reviews can be published in installments). You may insert large chunks of text and may summarize the rest of the novel to allow people who don’t have the patience to read a complete three-decker (that’s three-volume) novel (or who don’t have the money to buy all three volumes) may still form an opinion on the novel and discourse freely about the plot and the principal characters.

If you prefer slightly shorter reviews, a monthly magazine might suit you better. Monthly magazines are also most suitable for those of you who’d like to review musical publications, including sheet music. The June 1816 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine includes reviews on Complete Instructions for the Harp (by J.B. Msyer, Professor of the harp), A Dictionary of Musick (by J. Bottomly) (what a most delightful name!), and The Comet Waltz, “arranged as a Rondo for the Pianoforte or Harp. pp. 4”:

“This rather pleasing Air is eked out into a rondo with little skill, forming a lesson that may interest learners, and requiring very little power of execution.”

Oh dear. I guess that is a case of damned with faint praise…

If you must criticize a work, this is an acceptable way of doing so. However, in general it is adviceable to refrain from writing too critical a review. After all, your main aim is to suggest to your readers wbich books they ought to read. If you timetravel to 1817 or a later year, this advice is no longer valid: When William Blackwood launched his Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817, he introduced the snark to literary criticism. Consider the following snippet from the review of Harold the Dauntless: A Poem:

“This is an elegant, sprightly, and delightful little poem, written apparently by a person of taste and genius,but who either possesses not the art of forming and combining a plot, or regards it only as a secondary and subordinate object. In this we do not widely differ from him, but are sensible, meantime, that many others will; and that the rambling and uncertain nature of the story, will be the principal objection urged against the poem before us, as well as the greatest bar to its extensive popularity.”

Ouch.

That kind of snark, combined with attacks on such literary icons as Byron, proved to be a most excellent marketing strategy and made the reputation of the magazine across the English-spesking world. Indeed during the early years of its existence, Blsckwood’s paid a small fortune in libel damages. Ooops.

But evidently, this kind of notoriety served its purpose: everybody was talking about Blackwood’s, and it ran until 1980. Not too bad, eh?

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency | Tagged magazines | Leave a reply

The Lives of a Roman Fort

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

a picture of the main gate to the Saalburg

Saalburg: Porta Praetoria (the main gate)

As I have surely already mentioned in an earlier post, one of the settings of my upcoming Roman romance EAGLE’S HONOR: RAVISHED is based on a real fort at the Upper German-Raetian limes: the Saalburg, which today is a renowned open air museum with reconstructions of several of the Roman buildings and fortifications. As I was preparing the Author’s Note for my novel, it struck me how many lives this Roman fort has had – and not just in the Roman period.

The first fort on this site was built in timber, but was soon replaced by a larger fort built in timber and stone. A few years later, that fort was expanded and its defenses strengthened. Finally, at some point in the early 270s, the Romans gave up this stretch of the border and withdrew across the Rhine. The fort was abandoned and fell into ruins.

The Germanic people who moved into the area didn’t have much use for stone buildings, but from the Middle Ages onward, the stones from the fort were used for various building projects in the region. The original Roman name of the fort was forgotten; indeed, the very fact that this used to be a Roman fort was forgotten as well. The modern name, Saalburg, dates to the early 17th century and suggests people took the walls to be the remains of an early medieval castle.

It was only in 1723 when a stone altar bearing the name of Caracalla was found that people realized the Saalburg was actually a Roman ruin. But at that point only antiquarians (who were generally considered to be really strange people anyway) were interested in musty ruins, and so the Saalburg continued to be used as a most convenient stone quarry until 1818.

In the early 19th century archaelogy was still in its infancy, carried out by interested amateurs. In England William Cunnington, who started to do excavations of prehistoric sites in Wiltshire in about 1798, revolutionized the methods of archaeology, e.g., by carefully recording digs and finds. But it would take another few decades before archaeology became professionalised.

The increasing professionalisation of archaeology becomes also apparent when we look at the history of excavations of the Saalburg: from 1870 onward, the excavations were state-funded, and the men overseeing the digs aimed at using scientific methods and presenting their findings in a scientific way.

And when plans were made to not just excavate the remains of the fort, but also to reconstruct key buildings such as the principia (the headquarters building), the latest archaeological and historical findings were employed to make the reconstruction as faithful to reality as possible. This first phase of reconstruction work lasted ten years, from 1897 to 1907, and received support from Kaiser Wilhelm II himself.

The military standards at the Saalburg

While this support was no doubt beneficial, it also meant that the Kaiser took an active interest in the project and in some cases influenced the way the reconstruction was done. The most obvious example of this is the presence of an eagle standard in the shrine of the standards in the principia. In Roman times, only legions fought under the eagle standard, and the Saalburg never housed a legion, but only ever auxiliary troops. However, due to the imperial symbolism of the eagle, the Kaiser insisted that the eagle standard was included.

Moreover, in the years since 1900, new research into Roman military architecture has revealed that parts of the early reconstruction are incorrect, for example, the walls surrounding the fort would have been white-washed and the towers of the main gate wokuld have had been higher. Further reconstructions from the 2000s reflect these newer findings.

The Saalburg today thus presents itself as a fascinating hotchpotch of visions of what a Roman fort might have looked like, and it represents yet another phase of that old Roman fort that was first built in this place in the early 2nd century.

Would the soldiers who were stationed here during the reign of Emperor Hadrian recognize their old home in the Saalburg. Bits of it, perhaps. Though I’m not quite sure what they would make of the eagle standard in their shrine…

Posted in Former Riskies, History, Places | Tagged Museums, Romans, Saalburg | Leave a reply

The Dark Side of the Metropolis

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

First of all: Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry I forgot to post yesterday! I was busy putting the finishing touches to Yuletide Truce, one of my Victorian holiday stories, which will be released later this year, so I’d be able to send it to my beta readers. I did send it to my beta readers last night (and of course, I’m now convinced they’ll hate me after reading the manuscript) (but hey, that’s a vast improvement over thinking my manuscript might prove fatal for my poor editor!!!)

Aigee (short for Alan Garmond), one of the main characters in Yuletide Truce, has grown up in one of the poorest districts of London, before he was apprenticed to a bookseller at age eleven. He is torn between his new life and his old, and he often returns to his childhood haunts.

So, not surprisingly, for this story, I looked at some of the darker aspects of Victorian London, and one book in particular proved to be enormously helpful in finding out about the poorer population: Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor.

Mayhew was one of the co-founders of Punch (yes, we always come back to Punch, don’t we *grins*), though he severed the ties with the magazine only four years later. In 1849, the editors of another periodical, The Morning Chronicle, invited him to write a series about the working people of London under the title of “Labour and the Poor.” These articles formed the basis for an extended three-volume study, namely London Labour and the London Poor.

Henry Mayhew, from Wikipedia

Mayhew’s work is in many ways ground-breaking — not just because he threw light on a class of people who were so often forgotten, but also because interviews made up the bulk of his articles. Through him we get to hear the voices of the streetsellers, the old-clothes dealers, the mudlarks, the omnibus drivers, and chimney sweeps. He let them talk about their jobs, their everyday lives, their hopes and dreams. One of the streetsellers Mayhew introduces is the muffin man:

“The street sellers of muffins and crumpets rank among the old street-tradesmen. It is difficult to estimate their numbers, but they were computed for me at 500, during the winter months. They are for the most part boys, young men, or old men, and some of them infirm. […]

I did not hear of any street seller who made the muffins or crumpets he vended. […] The muffins are bought of the bakers, and at prices to leave a profit of 4d. in 1s. […] The muffin-man carries his delicacies in a basket, wherein they are well sweathed in flanne, to retain the heat: ‘People like them war, sir,’ an old man told me, ‘to satisfy theym they’re fresh, and they almost always are fresh; but it can’t matter so much about their being warm, as they have to be toasted again: I only wish good butter as a sight cheaper, and that would make the muffins go. Butter’s half the battle.’

A sharp London lad of fourteen, whose father had been a journeyman baker, and whose mother (a widow) kept a small chandler’s shop, gave me the following account:

‘I turns out with muffins and crumpets, sir, in October, and continues until it gets well into the spring, according to the weather. I carries a fustrate article; werry much so. If you was to taste ’em, sir, you’d say the same. […] If there’s any unsold, a coffee-shop gets them cheap, and puts ’em off cheap again next morning. My best customers is genteel houses, ’cause I sells a genteel thing. I likes wet days best, ’cause there’s werry respectable ladies what don’t keep a servant, and they buys to save themselves going out. We’re a great conwenience to the ladies, sir — a great conwenience to them as likes a slap-up tea. […]'”

(Can somebody pass me a warm muffin, now, please?) (And we’re talking English muffins, of course, a type of small, flat, round bread, rather than the cake-like American muffins.)

Posted in Food, Former Riskies, Research | Tagged food, Henry Mayhew, London, Victorian era | 1 Reply

Do you love fairy tales?

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

My new book Yuletide Truce, which comes out next week, starts with dueling reviews of a collection of fairy tales: The Fairy Ring, published on 9 December 1845 (though the title page gives the year of publication as 1846), in time for the Christmas season. It contains fairy tales from the collection of the Brothers Grimm, translated by John Edward Taylor.

John Edward Taylor was the cousin of Edgar Tylor, the man who in 1823 had produced the very first English translation of a selection of the Grimms’ fairy tales. He published them as German Popular Stories, with a second volume following three years later.

While Germany had seen a renewed interest in fairy tales since the late 18^th century, it were the Taylors’ translations of the Grimms’ stories and, later on, Mary Howitt’s translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales that led to a similar fashion in Britain, where it would eventually produce a new genre, fantasy fiction, in the second half of the 19^th century.

The publication history of the Grimms’ fairy tales at home and abroad is in many ways a peculiar one. When the first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen was published in 1812/15, it bore evidence of the conflicting aims the Grimms pursued. One the one hand, the collection was meant to be a scholarly project documenting a specific form of German “folk literature,” hence the extensive notes that accompanied the collection. There, the Grimms tried to establish the history of individual tales as well as document connections to the folk literature of other nations. On the other hand, the Grimms built up a fictional version of how they had obtained the tales to establish them more firmly as authentic folk tales. Which is why even today, there’s the persistent myth that Grimms marched from village to village, knocking on people’s doors and asking to be fairy tales, when they received the majority of their tales from acquaintances, in particular middle-class women.

The first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen received mixed reviews, and many felt that, despite the “children” in the title, the tales weren’t really suitable for a young audience, not the least because many of them contained very clear sexual allusions. In subsequent editions, the existing tales were edited (mainly by Wilhelm) to bring them more in line with patriarchal, middle-class values and more tales were added to the collection.

Thus, the text of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen was constantly in flux, and as a consequence there is little conformity among the English translations of the collection. For not only was their selected material taken from different editions of the original collection, but the translators themselves also tended to heavily edit the tales. This is already evident in the very first translation from 1823: Edgar Taylor left out references to the devil and shied away from sexual allusions, which is why his version of “The Frog King” is heavily altered.

But the most important change to the German source material was the inclusion of illustrations by George Cruikshank. This new feature proved to be so successful that it inspired the Grimms to let their brother Ludwig Emil Grimm illustrate their own Kleine Ausgabe of 1825.

Like Edgar Taylor’s German Popular Stories, his cousin’s translation The Fairy Ring was also illustrated — and by one of the most popular artists of the 1840s: Richard Doyle.

Christoper Foreman, one of my characters in Yuletide Truce, takes issue both with John Edward Taylor’s text and Doyle’s illustrations, which allowed me to write a snarky Victorian style book review. 🙂

This is what Kit Foreman has to say about the illustrations:

“The illustrations of The Fairy Ring were done by Richard Doyle, whose illustrations in Punch regularly delight that magazine’s readership. It is, however, debatable whether his whimsical style is quite suitable to adequately depict fearsome dragons, malicious dwarves, and giants, no matter into what raptures of praise the pictures have thrown our colleague at Munro’s. Are we really to believe in the fearsomeness of a dragon whose heads resemble those of sad puppy dogs?”

Oh dear! Poor Dicky Doyle! (And poor Aigee, whose review Kit trashes so mercilessly!)

If you’d like to get a longer sneak peek at Yuletide Truce (and Kit’s review!), check out the excerpt on my website!

Yuletide Truce

London, 1845

It’s December, Alan “Aigee” Garmond’s favorite time of the year, when the window display of the small bookshop where he works fills up with crimson Christmas books and sprays of holly. Everything could be perfect — if it weren’t for handsome Christopher Foreman, the brilliant writer for the fashionable magazine About Town, who has taken an inexplicable and public dislike to Aigee’s book reviews.

But why would a man such as Foreman choose to target reviews published in a small bookshop’s magazine? Aigee is determined to find out. And not, he tells himself, just because he finds Foreman so intriguing.

Aigee’s quest leads him from smoke-filled ale-houses into the dark, dingy alleys of one of London’s most notorious rookeries. And then, finally, to Foreman. Will Aigee be able to wrangle a Yuletide truce from his nemesis?

WARNING: Contains a very grumpy writer, snarky Victorian book reviews, a scandalous song, two men snogging, and fan-girling over Punch.

Now available for pre-order: Amazon US | Nook | ibooks | Kobo

Posted in Former Riskies, Risky Regencies | 2 Replies

Advertisements in Newspapers & Magazines

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

When you look at surviving copies of 19th-century periodicals (typically bound in volumes) today, you will perhaps notice a distinct lack of advertisements. Ads were printed on the wrapper (the cover) of single issues as well as on additional pages, and when periodicals were privately bound into volumes, the wrappers and the pages with ads were typically thrown away. Some magazines, like PUNCH, released annual or bi-annual volumes of their publication as special keepsakes – and these didn’t contain any ads either.

So imagine my delight when earlier today I stumbled across a volume of PUNCH on Google Books that not only consists of individual issues bound together, but has also retained most of the wrappers with ads.

*squee*

The issues are all from 1874, which means that thanks to changes in taxation and technological improvements, the ads all look very different from what you would have found in periodicals in the early decades of the century. By 1874, many ads came with pictures or with interesting typography.

There wasn’t any particular order to them, so Howard’s Parquet Flooring stood side by side with anchovy preparations, the latest novels (such as TAKEN AT THE FLOOD by Mary Elizabeth Braddon), or Thomson’s Unbreakable Corset Busk.

In the early decades of the 19th century, by contrasts, ads tended to be text only, and they were very short and to the point. The reason for this was the tax on paper and the tax on ads. The latter was a reaction to social unrest: the government believed that there was a connection between ads and politics. On the other hand, most periodicals couldn’t survive without the income from ads. Indeed, it is thought that the majority of radical publications folded due to a lack of advertisers.

As the political climate changed, the tax on ads was first reduced in 1833 and was finally abolished in 1853. The tax on paper, however, remained in place until 1861, keeping paper expensive and forcing publishers and advertisers to be economical with the space on paper. Hence, illustrated ads as seen in the examples here in this post, only started to appear with regularity after the repeal of the paper tax, and the following decades are often referred to as the Golden Age of advertising.

Posted in Former Riskies, History | Tagged Sandy and the Periodicals | 1 Reply