Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (53 page)

You would never, ever be seen in public without your cravat; same goes for hair powder when attending balls and routs.

You know and care just as much about dress fabrics, color, and weave as your wife and are not afraid to share your expert opinion with anyone.

You don’t rise before 11 a.m., and then you sit around in your embroidered silk banyan and matching turban half the day sipping chocolate and sorting through cards of invitation.

You can’t imagine life without your valet.

Despite being flattered (even proud) that gay guys hit on you, you still find the thought of actually getting intimate with another man unappealing.

Thus, for all your peacocking, you are quintessentially male. You carry a sword and know how to use it, are good with your fists, love blood sports, shooting, horse racing, and playing cards at your club with male chums.

Dressed in a salmon pink silk embroidered frock coat with matching silk breeches, old gold embroidered silk waistcoat, lace ruffles at your wrists to showcase your white hands, white clocked stockings to set off your massive calf muscles, an elaborately tied lace cravat, powder in your hair, a mouche at the corner of your mouth and wearing diamond buckled shoes with a heel, you watch women swoon at the sight of you! Why? Because underneath that gorgeous metrosexual exterior is a real man just waiting to get his gear off!

Flip, Shrub, and Other Drinks Favored of Georgian Londoners

by Tim Queeney

W
hile researching my novel
George in London
, set in 1751, I came across many intriguing types of food enjoyed by Londoners of the Georgian era. Among the most colorful of these were the names of popular drinks. From small beer and perry to flip and shrub, the drinks of 18th century London often carried names whimsical to our modern ears.

Take rum fustian, for example. It’s a wonderfully old-fashioned name. Not one you’re likely to hear today. If it was, you might at least expect you were getting a rum drink. But you would be wrong. Rum fustian was made with a quart of strong beer, a pint of gin, a bottle of sherry, and twelve eggs, smoothly mixed and flavored with nutmeg, lemon, and sugar.

The key element in the fustian was gin. A distilled liquor that uses juniper berries for flavoring, gin was a wildly popular drink in Georgian London, so popular and so cheap—you could buy a large quantity for only a penny—there were fears that English society would collapse due to the drunkenness, illness, and death brought on by widespread gin abuse during the Gin Craze.

Artist William Hogarth’s engraving “Gin Lane” shows the state of alarm many people felt about the Gin Craze. Gin consumption was rampant from the 1730s to roughly 1750 when the Gin Craze began to taper off. As Rosamond Bayne-Powell writes in
Eighteenth Century London Life
,
“...working men went into gin shops on Saturday night, and were found lying dead drunk on the pavement the next morning.”

Along with gin, the other widely consumed drink in London was beer. In 1725, Londoners drank 1,970,989 barrels of strong beer. London had, by one eighteenth century count, 207 inns, 447 taverns, 5,875 beerhouses and 8,659 brandy shops dispensing beer and other drink. If that prodigious amount of strong beer was imbibed, what was small beer? As its name suggests, small beer had a low alcohol content and was considered fit for servants and children. This dispensing of beer to children, while alarming by modern standards, wasn’t quite as callous as it sounds. Water supplies in the eighteenth century were often dangerously contaminated. The alcohol in small beer was usually sufficient to kill deadly micro-organisms.

Wine was also popular. Since Britain was often at war with France in the eighteenth century, French wine could be hard to come by. The solution was Portuguese wine, including wines shipped from the city of Oporto, hence the name “port” for wine from Portugal.

The 1725 numbers had London consuming 30,000 tuns of wine. A tun was a large barrel holding roughly 256 gallons or about 960 liters. Thus, the 30,000 tuns equaled about 7,680,000 gallons of wine.

What about the other colorful drink names? Perry was a drink made from pears, much as hard cider was made from apples. Shrub was a drink made with a “shrub” or concentrate of orange or lemon juice mixed with sugar and rum. Toddy was hot black tea to which was added sugar or honey, cloves or cinnamon, and whiskey. And porter was a type of dark beer brewed with dark malts. It was from porter that stout evolved.

Perhaps the quaintest name for an eighteenth century drink enjoyed by Londoners is flip. Flip was made by mixing ale with sugar, adding eggs and a spice such as nutmeg or cinnamon, and pouring in a liberal portion of rum or whiskey. Then the liquid was made to “flip” or froth by immersing a red-hot poker from the fire. This was a popular drink with sailors, and Darius Attucks, the mariner who accompanies young George Washington on his adventure in London in my book
George in London,
would likely have had flip often.

During George and Darius’ adventure in London, they attend a gala ball at the house of George’s patron, the Baron Mowenholtz. Darius describes the refreshments for the guests:

The back hall nearest the kitchen was provided with several long tables and lit by four candelabras. Across the tables was arrayed a rich selection of sweet meats, roasts of beef, quails, pigeon pie, cold mutton, veal chops, Colchester oysters, ox palates, pickled whiting, turtle soup, peas, boiled potatoes, leeks, apples, oranges, plums, cheeses both white and yellow, loaves of bread, cakes, syllabubs, Atholl Brose, fruit pies and tarts. To drink were bottles of cherry wine, a bowl of brandy punch, fustian punch, mulled wine, French claret, Madeira Sack, heavy port wine, porter, ale, gin and rum—as this last was a sailor’s spirit, I fancied the baron had provided it for my benefit and so availed myself aplenty.

A Midnight Masquerade in 18th Century London

by Linda Collison
(disguised as a ship surgeon’s mate)

“D
o you know me?” the black domino, a masked figure wearing a full length hooded cloak, croaks as we present our tickets and enter the Haymarket masquerade in our costumes. We exchange glances; indeed, we do not know if the cloaked figure is a friend or a stranger. Yet the domino seems to know
us
(or is he or she just bluffing?) Feeling bold in our disguises, we answer flirtatiously and dart away, losing ourselves in the crowd. The great theater is filled with
masks
(an 18th century figure of speech for people wearing masks). Many liberties will be taken and much mischief will happen here tonight, mark my words!

The English word “masquerade” is of foreign origin and had come into common usage by the second decade of the 18th century when the masquerade as a commercial entertainment became established in London. Advertised in newspapers, the event required attendees to purchase a ticket. Count Heidegger is credited with the development of the public masquerade in England as a capitalist venture. Stylized and commercialized, these urban masquerades were a vestige of the ancient carnival.

In one form or another, ritualized disguise has been around for a very long time and is an important part of many cultures. The 18th century masquerade, like those of Renaissance-era Venice, allowed the different levels of society to mix and mingle. When in costume, one is free to say and do things one wouldn’t ordinarily do. There was a lot of excitement associated with these masquerades, as well as license taken. They were an excuse to speak one’s mind, express one’s secret self, flirt, fondle, or be carried away. Masquerades brought out the exhibitionist or the voyeur in all who attended.

“I love a masquerade,”
wrote Harriette Wilson in her memoir of the period,
“because a female can never enjoy the same liberty anywhere else.”

Rooted in medieval English and Celtic festivals such as May Day, Midsummer’s Eve, All Hallows’ Eve, and the Christmas Gambol, the Masquerade developed into an urban phenomenon in 18th century England, influenced by the carnivals of Venice.

The 18th century London masquerade enjoyed both popularity and reproof throughout the 1700s. Many novelists, including Henry Fielding, Francis Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Daniel Defoe all made use of the masquerade as a setting for intrigue. Sometimes shocking things
happened at masquerades, including prostitution and rape, and many essayists and religious reformers railed against them.

Three types of costumes predominated in London’s 18th century masquerades. The “domino” was a neutral costume, a great hooded cloak that totally enveloped the body. Worn with a mask or a hood, it was a complete disguise but a generic one. “Fancy dress” was the second general category, including a wide array of character types (milkmaids, clerical figures, military officers, exotic foreigners such as Turks, Orientals, or pirates). The third type were costumes meant to portray a particular character, a specific individual. The goddess Diana, Van Dyke, Rubens and his wife, Harlequin and Punch, Don Quixote, Henry the VIII, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Old Harry himself were ubiquitous characters at London masquerades of the period.

“There is something inherently appealing in the idea of the masquerade—an ineluctable charm in the notion of disguising oneself in a fanciful costume and moving through a crowd of masked strangers,”
writes historian Terry Castle in
Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction
. This excellent scholarly work is a must for students of the 18th century British novel.

Personally, if I weren’t an author I would surely be an actress. I love the adventure of putting on a disguise and pretending to be someone else, exploring the world in someone else’s shoes. Come to think of it, that might explain why I am compelled to write fiction....

I have not yet employed the public masquerade in my novels, but the theme of disguise figures prominently into my historical fiction.

Feeling a Little Flushed, Dear? (The Invention of the Flush Toilet)

by Mike Rendell

I
have always wanted to write a truly lavatorial post for this blog, and this is it—the story of the flush toilet!

Its origins lay back in Elizabethan times when in 1596 Sir John Harington came up with his mighty Ajax (his name for a flushing privy). His invention was therefore the very first “john”. The Ajax closet (a pun on the fact that “a jakes” was the medieval name for a toilet) consisted of a seat perched over a brick tank with a cistern of water which could be directed by means of a valve being opened. Once a week it was necessary to empty the contents of the closet into a cesspool. Harington made two, one for himself and one for his godmother, who happened to be Queen Elizabeth.

Harington published a book entitled
The Anatomy of the Metamorphosed Ajax
giving builders details of how to build his privy. The Frontispiece reads:
“How unsavoury places may be made sweet, noysome places may be made wholesome, filthy places made cleanly”
. Harington never got over the ridicule and scorn heaped upon him for his invention, and in particular for having written a book about it, and it never caught on.

People continued to use the “close stool”, and it appears in all its glory in a number of Gillray’s cartoons. It was perfectly acceptable to show a caricature of the monarch (George III) sitting next to his Queen on a toilet, while courtiers rushed to and fro!

By the second half of the 18th century the world was finally ready for the flush toilet. The saviour had come in the form of Alexander Cumming, a watchmaker who in 1775 patented his design. This consisted of a pan with a sliding valve at the bottom called the Strap, which could be released by the user at the same time as water was delivered from a cistern operated by a separate tap.

Around this time a young locksmith and cabinet maker called Joseph Bramah appeared on the scene. He was working with a Mr. Allen, installing closets based upon the Cummings patent, when Mr. Allen decided on a few improvements aimed at stopping the water freezing in cold weather. He replaced the Strap with a hinged flap which sealed the base of the bowl.

To Allen should go the credit, but to young Bramah went the patent. He opened a factory in Denmark Street, St. Giles, and throughout the next century the Bramah factory poured out the new-fangled sanitary ware. They were generally housed in fine mahogany furniture, and there is a particularly fine example to be seen in Kew Palace, and another at the residence of Queen Victoria at Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight.

It wasn’t long before potters like Josiah Wedgwood got in on the act. Wedgwood designed his first decorated closet pan in around 1777. Small wonder they became status symbols with their beautiful designs. Mind you, there was no sewerage system to go with them, so “the problem” of the effluent was merely moved further downstream, so to speak.

Fortunately, another design improvement hit the market in 1782 when the stink trap was introduced by John Gallait. This consisted of a water trap (similar to a modern bottle trap). Unfortunately, it was impossible to keep clean…but at least it was a step in the right direction.

And what of Thomas Crapper, widely believed to have invented the flush toilet? Well, he wasn’t even born until 1836 and, in fact, what he invented was the ballcock. And no, he didn’t give his name to the human waste we all associate with his name—”crap” had been in use for some time, although quite possibly it became fashionable because of the association with his toilets.

The story has it that American servicemen, visiting these shores in the First World War, popularised the phrase “going to the Crapper” because that was the name in the bowl! Try telling that to the compilers of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, who point out that the word was in use in its modern sense by 1846, probably deriving from the Old French “crappe” meaning waste.

Post script: “spending a penny”? Look no further than the Great Exhibition of 1851 where visitors wishing to avail themselves of the facilities (known as Monkey Closets and designed by George Jennings) were obliged to part with one penny for the privilege.

So there you have it: if the characters in your novel need to visit the “smallest room”, you know what was historically accurate!