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Category: Regency

Up In The Air

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BalloonIn looking around for a blog topic today, I found out that the first manned hot air balloon flight happened on June 4, 1783, by the Montgolfier brothers of France!  Elena would know much more about this than I would (I just started looking into the event last night!), but I thought it was fascinating.  And, as someone who almost had a panic attack the one time I tried hot air ballooning (in a tethered craft!) I deeply admire anyone with such courage as to leave the ground in a time when the horse was the fastest mode of transport.

Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etiene Montgolfier were 2 of the 16 children of a paper manufacturer in Annonay, France.  The business did well, allowing Joseph to mess about with his dreamy, “impractical” ideas and the more business-like, practical Jacques to train in Paris as an architect.  Until the eldest son died and Jacques was brought back to run the family business (which he made more efficient and modern, gaining a royal commendation)

In 1777 Joseph was watching laundry drying over a fire, forming pockets that made the sheets billow.   He started making a few experiments in November 1782 while living in Avignon.  He was thinking about the possibility of an air assault using troops lifted by the same force that was lifting the embers from the fire, which might be of use to the French military in sieges. He built a square room 1×1×1.3 m (3 ft by 3 ft (0.91 m) by 4 ft) out of very thin wood, and covered the sides and top with lightweight silk. He crumpled and lit some paper under the bottom of the box, making the contraption raise up and collide with the ceiling. Joseph wrote to Jacques”Get in a supply of taffeta and of cordage, quickly, and you will see one of the most astonishing sights in the world.” The two of them built another, larger device and gave it a test flight in December 1782. The device floated nearly 1 and a half miles before it crashed and was destroyed after landing by the “indiscretion” of passersby.

 

The brothers decided to make a public demonstration of a balloon in order to establish their claim to its invention. They constructed a globe-shaped balloon of sackcloth with three thin layers of paper inside. “The envelope could contain nearly 790 m³ (28,000 cubic feet) of air and weighed 225 kg (500 lb). It was constructed of four pieces (the dome and three lateral bands) and held together by 1,800 buttons. A reinforcing fish net of cord covered the outside of the envelope.” (according to Charles Gillispie’s The Montgolfier Brothers, and the Invention of Aviation.)

On 4 June 1783, they flew this craft as their first public demonstration at Annonay in front of a group of dignitaries from the États particuliers. Its flight lasted over a mile for 10 minutes, with an estimated altitude of 5,200-6,600 ft. Word of their success quickly reached Paris. Étienne went to the capital to make further demonstrations and to solidify the brothers’ claim to the invention of flight. Joseph, given his unkempt appearance and shyness, remained with the family.

On 19 September 1783, the Aérostat Réveillon was flown with the first living passengers (a sheep,a duck, and a rooster, even though the king had proposed using a couple of comvicts…) in a basket attached to the balloon: a sheep called Montauciel (“Climb-to-the-sky”), a duck and a rooster.  This demonstration was at Versailles, for King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and their court.  The flight lasted approximately eight minutes for 2 miles, and landed safely after flying.  I guess the passengers had no ill effects!  In October, Jacques-Etienne became the first human to fly in a balloon.  These early flights were a sensation. You could buy chairs  with balloon backs, and mantel clocks were produced in enamel and gilt-bronze replicas set with a dial in the balloon. There was also  china decorated with  pictures of balloons.

The Montgolfier Company still exists in Annonay, France. In 1799, Jacques-Etienne de Montgolfier died and his son-in-law, Barthélémy Barou de la Lombardière de Canson (1774–1859), succeeded him as the head of the company, thanks to his marriage with Alexandrine de Montgolfier. The company became “Montgolfier et Canson” in 1801, then “Canson-Montgolfier” in 1807. They still produce fine art papers and digital fine art and photography supplies, sold in 120 countries.

Have you ever been in a hot air balloon??  What was it like?  Would you have liked to see this first balloon launch?

 

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency, Research, Risky Regencies | 4 Replies

Guest Author Andrea Pickens!

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(My friend Andrea Pickens, aka Cara Elliott, is joining us today to talk about some special new releases!  She and I both wrote for the Signet Regency line, and now we are seeing some of those older titles come back into the world with brand new covers….comment for a chance to win a copy!)

Hi Everyone,

Andrea1It’s always wonderful to be back at the Riskies, but today I’ve switched my Cara Elliott chapeau for my more traditional Andrea Pickens bonnet . . . but hey, we all know Regency bonnets could get quite creative and daring while still staying within the rules. And that’s the great fun of the traditional Regency genre. Yes, there are greater constraints that for a Regency historical. But for those of us who started out writing them—like many of my Risky pals here!—the absence of the “S” word and writing all the rumple-pumple let us add color and texture to our stories and characters by exploring things like offbeat setting and unusual occupations for our heroes and heroines.

DiamondCoverAndreaTake for example, Diamond In The Rough (The above preamble is, as you may have guessed, a rather longwinded introduction to the fact that I have just released two trad Regencies as self-pubbed e-books, which are the first two in a trilogy) It first appeared in the Signet line, and features a story revolving around golf in Scotland. The heroine is a caddie in disguise and she’s a better player than most of the men. When a friend asks her to help an English lord learn the sport in order to win an match and save his ancestral home, the games begin, both on and off the links . . . I loved researching the esoteric elements about the clubs and courses of the times, and weaving them into the decidedly offbeat romance that ensues. It was a classic sporting wager trope, but with a twist. (The Riskies could all offer lots of examples of their books that featured really original plots and people—but for reasons of space I shall let them bang their own drum!)

SweeterCoverThe second book is a brand new original book, entitled Sweeter Than Sin. The hero likes to dabble in . . . chocolate. Now in doing research for a historical mystery series I wrote, I learned a lot about the history of chocolate, and how edible chocolate was known in the Regency era. (Marie Antoinette’s physician mixed her medicine in solid chocolate wafers flavored with fruits or nuts to disguise its bitter taste. He later opened a chocolate shop on the Left Bank of Paris in 1802.) So it was fun to create a plot where that element could “sweeten” the romance. Rafael is a half Spanish-half English war hero who has come to England to recover from a serious wound. To help draw himself out of his black moods, he decides to work on translating his Spanish grandmother’s diaries on the lore of chocolate and her recipes. His neighbor is the disgraced daughter of a duke, who is suffering from guilt. A chance meeting brings them together, and they slowly begin to discover the healing power of chocolate—and of course love. (There is also a dog they rescue from the stews named Hero who helps save the day!)

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love drawing room stories, “comedy of manners” plots and sexy romps too, but trads with offbeat elements have always had great appeal for me. How about you? Do you like regencies that stray off the beaten path. Have any favorites to name? I’ll be giving away a copy of one of my e-books (your choice!) to a winner chosen at random from those who leave a comment here.

Posted in Former Riskies, Giveaways, Guest, History, Regency | 7 Replies

Why I Heart the Regency – also Chocolate

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My second historical was set in 1844, which is firmly Victorian. I picked that year because I really liked the clothes. But the book got a Regency cover:

That’s the power of the Regency, folks, that a novel set in 1844 got a Regency cover. Yes, there were orchids in the story, so someone knew enough about the book to get that right. And now I confess that at that time I DID NOT WANT to write in the Regency. I didn’t like the dresses. Those Empire waistlines made everyone look pregnant and they reminded of the hideous maxi dresses that were briefly popular while I was in High School about a bazillion years ago. But as I was flogging my doorstop book and etcetera it was clear that Regency sold because readers loved the Regency. I finally abandoned the doorstop book and started another one which, eventually, became Lord Ruin, which was set in the Regency and for which I had to do LOTS of research because I’d been writing Georgian and Victorian. And the period kind of got to me. I began to understand the appeal. I had never read Georgette Heyer, you see, and I did not, myself, read Traditional Regencies and had the somewhat inaccurate notion that books set in the Regency did not have sex, and I wanted to write books where the door did not close.

So, I researched the Regency — pre Google days mind you — and learned there was a war on and all kinds of transition stuff going on as the Georgian Era ideal of class began to crack just the teensiest bit from the tension of behaving as if poor people wanted and probably deserved to be poor. People were getting different ideas about that— Reform???? Gasp! And the poetry rocked. The Regency won me over. I must say.

Getting around to the Chocolate

Over a my blog, I’m having a contest where the prize is 2 lbs of Leonidas chocolate. Go enter Also, at my blog, there’s a poll about what kind of fiction you read. Paranormal Romance is now leading Historical Romance . . . Just saying.

So, why do you love the Regency? Did you ever NOT love the Regency? Were you seduced? How did it happen?

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency | Tagged , | 9 Replies

Can we Reconstruct the Social Past?

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I had an interesting conversation recently regarding present-day misconceptions about the past. In this conversation we floated the idea that historical romance had created its own, essentially false, depiction of life during the Regency. We talked about whether or not these inaccurate ideas were so deeply embedded that an accurate depiction of them could be roundly denounced.

There is a difference between history and historical fiction. In the case of the former, the point, one hopes, in writing about history, is to be accurate. Fiction serves a different role. Fiction, at some level, has to recognize the ways in which, say, a Regency Romance, privileges the needs of modern readers over historical accuracy.

What I constantly find odd, however, is that way in which we sometimes talk about the past as if those people were a different species. There is, I think, a speed at which evolution progresses — over millions of years, punctuated by the odd catastrophe that challenges the very survival of a species, and the speed at which social culture evolves. Millennia vs. a few years.

The human sex drive is an evolutionary survival tactic and our bodies have evolved to make procreation likelier than not. The way human cultures deal with that fact seem to be fairly fluid. I think historical researchers sometimes conflate cultural sexual norms with the human sexual drive.

In the West, we have this notion of sexual repression that comes to us from the Victorian age — women weren’t supposed to like sex, everyone was all uptight and people, particularly women, who appeared to embrace their sexual nature were punished. We could talk all day about the ways in which Western cultures have attempted to control and repress human sexuality. There is plenty of evidence of that.

However, no amount of social repression negates the fact that sex feels good. Our bodies are hard wired for sexual desire and to experience sexual pleasure. Repression is bound to fail. It cannot help but fail. We exist today because it did, in fact, fail.

My point, after all that, is that this trope of the innocent, unsexual female who has no curiosity or drive to engage in sex (and I do mean the act) seems to me to be fundamentally false. Of course there were people who refrained from sex until marriage, but there simply had to be a lot of people who didn’t. The idea that women didn’t have any non-social way to control their fertility also seems suspect to me.

The Heyer-esque innocent, however compelling she is on the written page, with an almost complete denial of female sexual agency sometimes bothers me and is, I think, more a representation of Heyer’s social millieu than the actual Regenecy — In other words, she wrote about a world as her culture norms imagined it ought to have been. Lydia in Pride and Prejudice is an example of that tension.

So, after all these ill-formed thoughts, what do you think about the accuracy of Regency Romance and do you care?

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency | Tagged | 5 Replies

We’re all in Trouble Because I’ve been Thinking

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Here’s what I’ve been thinking.

1. It’s important, to me, to know a lot about the historical era I write about (The Regency).

2. Some things were invented/discovered/thought of AFTER the Regency

3. People haven’t changed all that much.

4. People today have been affected by things invented/discovered/thought of AFTER the Regency.

5. Because of No. 4, people in the Regency used/believed/needed things we don’t today.

So. If you’re going to write historical fiction, you should know about the things invented/discovered/thought of AFTER the Regency so you don’t have your hero driving a car a wee bit before Henry Ford started mass producing the automobile.

Number 5 is interesting, though. There’s all these things we know nothing about that people in the Regency used every day. And it shaped their world and their view of the world.

How you interact with the spaces around you is different if there’s no electricity. When you enter a darkened room, you don’t automatically reach for the light switch and speed along into the room on your merry way.

Instead you have to go a little slower, maybe. You, or your servant, might be carrying a light source already. But it’s not as bright as electric light, right?

And if you don’t have your light source with you, then there should be one by the door. Where else would you put it? It has to be by the door so you don’t kill yourself walking about in the dark.

Since the room is darkened (assuming you didn’t bring your light with you) you have to pause to light a candle or a a lamp or something else before you proceed.

Now you’re carrying something flammable…. I’m not aware of non-flammable light sources until electricty came along (no sun, doh, the room is darkened, besides, the sun IS a flammable object)  you need to be paying at least a little bit of attention to how and where you’re walking.

Your light source is also unlikely to light the entire room the way turning on the electric light does. Again, you probably have to watch your step.

We know there were clever ways to increase the amount of light in a room, mirrors, for example.

I really do sometimes just sit and think about all the ways things were different and how that shaped what people did. In the dark I can proceed to the light switch and flick. Instantaneous light fills the room. Now I can walk quickly to my destination. Also, I am not wearing layers and layers of clothes…. I am less encumbered by my clothes, I’m pretty sure, than a Regency lady was by hers.

I do my thing and turn out the light on my way out.

The Regency woman is either still carrying her light source or still followed by the servant with the light or is headed where she won’t need the light. But the light needed in the darkened room can’t be disposed of with a flick. Someone has to deal with that.

That what I was thinking lately. About all those extra things people had to do or think about. More steps. More work. More time.

Thank you Mr. Edison. And Mr. Tesla.

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency, Research, Writing | Tagged , | 10 Replies