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Watch the RITA finalists list as it's updated: rwa.org

(And yes, we're working to get my website back up!)

Kensington is hosting a book giveaway! First 50 sign-ups get a free book.

And Jilting the Duke is one of your choices!

So, go here:

It's release day!

And I have a long list of fun blog topics upcoming from this book.

Here's a list...

* Port vs Claret: the politics of wine
* Irregular Marriages; or, A Way to get rid of an unwanted spouse
* Anonymous writers and the book trade (they aren't who you think they are)
* Music and the Country Estate
* Da Vinci in Manuscript
* Keeping servants
* Is that the Odyssey I see before me?
* Adaptations on the British Stage
* An Evening at the Theater; or, What sorts of entertainments would one find there
* Mrs Wells and The World

For now, though, I'm on the way to Barnes and Noble to see my book in the wild!

Do you have your copy yet?

What are you humming? Right now. Is it an earworm or a song that you love?

So much of our lives is bound up in song. The lullabies our parents and grandparents sang to us as children—the songs we sing our own. The songs we dance to. The songs we identify with particular lovers and friends. The songs that give us hope or wrench our hearts. If you are like me, almost any occasion reminds me of snippets of songs or lyrics.

Sadly, when we read regency or other historical romances, we can’t hear the music.

Certainly, for ‘important figures’—Mozart, Handel, Beethoven, and the like—we can trace when particular pieces were composed, performed, and sometimes even when they became popular for private gatherings.

But in the case of popular Regency songs, we are faced with several problems. First, popular music was often published as ephemera, in particular as one-sheet broadsides that one could buy for a penny. To see the sorts of popular songs available on broadsides, look at the surviving examples at the University of California, Santa Barbara, . Or follow this link: .

But remember: these survived either because they were printed in huge numbers or because no one wanted them. Printed poorly on bad paper, broadsides weren’t meant to survive.

One thing you’ll notice, though, is that broadsides and the collections of songs and ballads (like those compiled by Thomas Percy, Walter Scott, Thomas Moore and others) provided just the lyrics, along with an indication of what tune the performer was expected to supply. This worked fine for audiences at the time. Today for example if you indicated a song was to be sung “to the tune of Beyonce’s ‘Single-Ladies,�� people worldwide could sing along.

But that wide-spread contemporary appeal can prove a disadvantage over time. How many of us know the tune of “cooke Laurell, or Michaelmas Terme,�� or “Lilli Bulero,�� or “Packington’s Pound,�� or “Jenny come the my Cravat��?

Broadsides referred their users to commonly known songs, in part, because printing musical settings was far more expensive than simply printing the lyrics on their own. Printing musical settings required providing layers of information on a single page: a staff, a variety of notes, and symbols that gave instructions on how to play the notes. Though some tried to make printing-with-type work for this, ultimately, the best solution remained to engrave an image of the music, just as one engraved pictures. To watch a piece of music being engraved as it was historically, check out . Or follow this link:

And engravings were more expensive, in part because (unlike type) you couldn’t break up the forme and reuse the type in a different project. No, once you used an engraving plate for a piece of music, it couldn’t be reused for another piece.

As a result, printed music remained for most pieces the province of specialists. Hand engraved in wood or copper, and later in steel, musical settings were expensive and their purchasers were rarely the common man (or woman).

The movement from wood and copper engravings to steel-plate engravings takes place across the Regency. As technology changed to allow engravings to make more and more impressions (driving down the cost of the engraving itself), lyrics could be attached to their musical settings. And we begin to see reviews of music in the magazines, particularly magazines for ladies.
In my next blog, I’ll take about a particular piece of music produced in 1819 and reviewed in the magazines…and I’ll even send you to a site where you can see (and play) that piece.

But for now, hum a tune, and wonder what other words you could sing to it!

Or, use the comments below to tell us your favorite singable or hummable song!

Music plays an important role in my October release, Tempting the Earl. And here's some historical music for you....

“Ancient or Modern?�� It’s a question that resonated strongly in Regency Britain.

“Are we as a civilization, better than, equal to, or worse than the civilizations of the ancient world? Is our literature, art, music, etc., competitive with those of the Greco-Roman world?��

Britain saw itself as the spiritual heirs of that classical world. Not Greece—which was enslaved to the Turks. Not Rome—which had become the seat of Catholicism. But Britain. This attitude justified the wholescale appropriation of classical works under men like Lord Elgin, who moved shipment after shipment of Greek antiquities to London. You can see them in the British Museum—and the question of who they belong to (Greece or Britain) still rages.

So, it seems at least within the realm of possibility that this blog about Regency history would bring you this haunting melody—the oldest extant song from the ancient world, from a mysterious people known today as the Hurrians. The Hurrians were an ancient people who built a rich culture in Mesopotamia around the 3rd millennium (Lawler).

Recorded on a cuneiform tablet over 3400 years ago, this hymn addresses Nikkal, goddess of orchards:



For more information on the Hurrians, here’s a short blog from the Archaeological Institute of America:

Books and the book trade play an important role in the Muses�� Salon. In Jilting the Duke, Sophia, Lady Wilmot works on her late husband’s books, finding a publisher and seeing them through the press. In Tempting the Earl, (coming in October!!), Olivia (Walgrave’s wife) keeps her life as a journalist secret, and she collaborates with Constance Equiano (Sophia’s bookseller) to finish a task her late father-in-law left her.

All of which led me to today’s blog post �� What was published today in 1819?

To find out, I turned to the London �վ��������, ‘Books Published on this Day�� column, and here’s what I found. But I should warn you: this is a nerdy post.

Perhaps the most influential work published on August 23, 1819 was Lord Byron’s narrative poem, Mazeppa, in which a Polish gentleman is strapped—naked—to the back of a wild horse and sent galloping into the countryside. In Byron’s work, the ride was a punishment for seducing a Count’s wife.

Theodore Gericault in ;
Eugene Delacroix in ; and ;
Horace Vernet in ;
John Doyle on August 7 and of 1832 ;
;
John Frederick Herring in ;
(of Currier and Ives) in 1846;
and in 1851.

Byron's work was reimagined by Victor Hugo, Alexander Pushkin, and through them to Franz Liszt and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky respectively. His Mazeppa even became a breeches role for (an actress and poet) who wore a flesh-colored body suit during the horseback ride. If you wish to read Byron's Mazeppa, I recommend Peter Cochran's very fine edition with helpful notes available

But Byron’s book wasn’t alone. On this day, the �վ�������� recorded advertisements for 16 books, along with plugs for another 4 titles, explicitly identified as previously published. (Advertisements are frequently altered as the book moves from ‘this day,�� to ‘last week�� to ‘this month,�� etc.) Of course not all publishers advertised their new books in the Times, but even so, it’s an interesting snapshot of the market.

Of the 16 newly published, 5 were by women, 9 by men, and 2 by anonymous writers we know now were male. If you add in the previously published works, the representation of women rises to 8, or a near parity.
The number of books of poetry (4) equalled the number of histories. More poetry was advertised than either novels (1) or plays (1). Five were educational texts on various subjects: on music (1), history (1), and science (3).

The most expensive book—per volume—was by far George Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall, at 12s a volume. Byron’s one-volume Mazeppa, though shorter than Crabbe's volumes, only cost 5s. Crabbe is priced the same as Marcet’s copiously illustrated Conversations on Natural Philosophy (23 illustrations). This tells us that Crabbe, not Byron, was the more famous and popular of the two authors—and that his works could command higher prices.

The cheapest book (perhaps more likely a pamphlet) was Cleary’s defense of his conduct in the recent elections, at 6 pence. 5s seems to have been a price-point, with 8 books priced at around 5s or less per volume.

Illustrations raised the price of books, even tiny ones like the children’s small format A short History of France, where the illustrations added 6 pence to the cost (1 pence each).

We also get a sense of how long it took for a book to make it through the publication process. Not every play would be published, but if one turned out to be popular, it often was sped through the press. That seems to have happened with the play—Ladies at Home—which was published a bit more than two weeks following its August 7 debut. The play enjoyed a run at the Haymarket Theater in London with performances on the 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 21st.

That’s the recap of what was published today in 1819!

But if you are a nerd like me, here are the book titles —with a legend to explain the trade abbreviations for volumes, prices, and bindings. I've rearranged the books into categories, with the biggest categories at the top.

Legend:
Book sizes: 12mo [duodecimo], 4to [quarto], 8vo [octavo], from small to large (roughly)
Money: s (shilling), d (pence)
Binding styles: boards (plain heavy paper covers with no decoration); half-bound (hard boards with spine and corners covered with some sort of binding material)
Plates: Another term for engravings

Poetry.

Dunrie, a Poem, by Harriet Ewing, 2 vols, 8vo, 7s

Tales of the Hall, by George Crabbe, 2 vols, 8vo, 24s

Mazeppa, Lord Byron, 8vo [no price listed, but listed at 5s 6d in the trade publication, the Literary Gazette]

Ionian Hours, a Poem in 2 Cantos, by J. H. Wiffen, [no size], 7s. 6d.

Politics & History
Narratives of John Pritchard, Pierre Chrysologue Pambrum and Frederick Damien Heurter, respecting the aggressions of the North-west Company against the Earl of Selkirk’s settlement upon Red-river. 8vo, 2s. 6d

A Letter to Major Cartwright, in justification of the writer’s conduct at the late elections for Westminster, and in answer to the calumnies spoken and published against the author, by Messrs. Corbett, Hunt, and Thelwall and certain members of Mr. Hobhouse’s committee, by Thomas Cleary. 6d

A short History of France, including the principal Event from the foundation of the Empire by Pharamond to the Restoration of Louis XVIII, by Mrs. Moore. 12mo, 7s in board, or 7s 6d bound with 6 engravings

The History of France for Children, intended as a Companion to Mrs. Trimmer’s Histories and embellished with 32 plates, by Mrs. Moore. 2 vols, 8s, bound neatly in red

Novels
Melincourt, by the Author of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey [Thomas Love Peacock] 3 vols, 18s, in boards

Plays
Ladies at Home, or Gentlemen we can do without you; a female interlude. By the Author of Bee Hive. [J. G. Millengen, M. D.] 1s 6d.

Religion
A Critical Examination of those parts of Mr. Bentham’s Church of Englandism, which relate to the Sacraments and the Church Catechism, by the Rev. H. J. Rose. 8vo, 5s.
Advertised with
Saeculomastix; or the Lash of the Age we live in, a poem in two parts, by the author of Child Harold’s Monitor. 8vo, 5s 6d

Music Instruction
The Child’s Introduction to Thorough Bass, in a Conversations of a Fortnight, between a mother and her daughter of 10 years old, illustrated by plates and cuts of music, small 4to, 8s, neatly half-bound

Science
Physiological fragments, or Sketches of various subjects intimately connected with the Study of Physiology, by John Bywater, 8vo, 5s 6d, boards

Conversations on Natural Philosophy, by the Author of Conversations on Chymistry [Jane Marcet], 2 vols, 12mo, 12s 6d boards, illustrated with 23 engravings by Lowry.

Note: This new book is advertised with 2 previously published books: her Conversions on Political Economy, 3rd edition improved, in 1 large volume, 12mo, 9s, boards, and her Conversations on Chemistry. Conversations on Chemistry was available in 2 versions—in 2 vols, 12mo, with plates by Lowry, and in the 6th edition, enlarged, 14s boards.

Marine Insurance
A Letter to Robert Shedden, Esq., on Particular Average, by Robert Stevens of Lloyd’s. [No price or format]

Tourism
Cautions to Continental Travellers, by J. W. Cunningham. 12mo, 3s 6d boards

What Elizabeth Gurney Fry (1780-1845) saw when she first visited Newgate Prison in 1813 was horrific.

Men and women together in crowded wards, without adequate clothing or food. The accused and the guilty housed together, violent criminals with the non-violent, murderers alongside pickpockets. If a prisoner had children, they would be imprisoned in the ward as well. Cooking, washing, daily ablutions—all took place in the same cell where the prisoners slept on straw.

The women’s four rooms were a “den of wild beasts,�� (as Fry’s friend Mary Sanderson described it), containing upwards of 300 women and children (32, 27). It was called “hell above ground,�� “people with beings scarcely human, blaspheming, fighting, tearing each other’s hair, or gaming with a filthy pack of cards for the very clothes they wore, (which often did not suffice even for decency)�� (37). The guards were all male.

A devout member of the Religious Society of Friends and a recognized Quaker minister, Fry visited the prison several times in 1813, taking clothes and food, family obligations kept her away until 1816. Fry’s husband was an active father, but, by 1813, the couple had eight children aged 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, and 12, and welcomed three more children, in 1814, 1816, and 1822, respectively.

In 1816, however, with the death of five-year-old Betsy, Elizabeth Fry returned to her prison work with vigor. Fry advocated separating the men from the women, then she began by establishing rules (voted on by the inmates) for what would constitute appropriate behavior. She next turned her attention to the children incarcerated with their parents, setting up a school.

Believing that the best method for reforming the prisoners lay in religious instruction and useful work, she organizing the women into teams with a female guard, teaching them skills, like knitting or sewing, and helping them earn and save money in anticipation of their eventual release, a “leaving fund�� to which Fry contributed a set amount for each woman as an incentive. Believing deeply in her fellow humans�� value, she opposed capital punishment, and she improved the conditions aboard ships for women being transported to Australia. Kindness, she believed, was essential to reform.

Importantly, Fry also encouraged women in the fashionable set to participate. In 1817, she formed the Ladies Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners at Newgate—the first women’s association to extend across Britain—and from this group, reform spread across the country. These associations became the foundation of her efforts, taking on the responsibility for enacting and maintaining reforms in their regions.

In 1818 she travelled through the country, visiting prisons in England, Scotland, and Ireland, her observations published in her Notes on a Visit to Prisons. In 1818 and 1835, she testified before a Parliamentary Select Committee on the status of prisons—the first woman to give evidence to Parliament. Her 1818 testimony influenced the 1827 Prison Act, in which year she published Observations, on the visiting, superintendence, and government of female prisoners

But Fry’s work extended beyond the prison system. An advocate of vaccination, Fry is credited with helping eliminate small-pox in the villages near her home. In 1819, she opened a “shelter�� for the homeless, providing them with a place to sleep and a meal for the day. In 1824, during a visit to Brighton to recuperate from illness, Fry established a maternal society. She also observed the isolation of the coast guards, and she began a campaign to create libraries for the men. Eventually, with the help of her fellow Quakers, her Ladies Associations, and the government, 600 libraries were created, containing more than 52,000 books.

Sadly, beginning in the 1820s, the Prison Discipline Society, a group of men, determined that—contrary to Fry’s emphasis on industry—reforming the prisoners required them to suffer. Sydney Smith in the 1822 Edinburgh Review dismissed Fry’s efforts as too soft:

Mrs Fry is an amiable and excellent woman […] but her’s [sic] is not the method to stop crimes. In prisons which are really meant to keep the multitude in order, and to be a terror to evil doers, there must be no sharing of profits—no visiting of friends—[…] There must be a great deal of solitude […] ’hard, incessant, irksome, eternal labour [and] a planned and regulated and unrelenting exclusion of happiness and comfort�� (qtd in Roberts 140).

For that labour, the Prison Discipline Society advocated the treadmill (Roberts 139). As men, the members of the Prison Discipline Society were able to gain political appointments (something closed to women), and through those appointments, power. In the 1830s, deeming Fry’s methods ‘amateurish,�� these men ‘professionalized�� the prison system (Roberts 139). And by doing so, they systematically excluded the committed corps of women volunteers working under Fry’s model.

Fry turned her attention to the Continent, and between 1838 and 1843, she made 5 journeys there, visiting prisons, meeting with the powerful. In 1840 she established a society of nursing sisters—the first effort to reform nursing, and when Florence Nightingale went to the Crimea, Fry’s nurses went with her.

Fry authored or co-authored many reports and books, including the following:

1819: Notes on a visit made to some of the prisons in Scotland and the north of England in company with Elizabeth Fry : with some general observations on the subject of prison discipline by Joseph John Gurney

1827: Observations on the visiting, superintendence, and government of female prisoners

1827: Report addressed to the Marquess Wellesley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, by Elizabeth Fry and Joseph John Gurney, respecting their late visit to that country

1827: Observations on the visiting, superintending, and government of female prisoners

1831: Texts for every day in the year : principally practical and devotional

1841: An address of Christian counsel and caution to emigrants to newly-settled colonies

and posthumously,

1847: Memoir of the life of Elizabeth Fry, with extracts from her journal and letters

Fry died in October 1845. At the core of all her efforts was the belief that her fellow human beings should be treated with kindness.

The second woman—after Florence Nightingale—to appear on a British bank note, Fry has appeared on the 5 pound note since 2002: she will be replaced in fall of 2016 with the new polymer Winston Churchill fiver.

Her work continues today with the Elizabeth Fry Society.


All information comes from one of the following:

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) provides a useful biography of on their website.



Roberts, M. J. D. Making English Morals. Voluntary Associations and Moral Reform in England.> Cambridge, 2004.

You might also enjoy the short of Elizabeth Fry from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

I love reading—and writing—historical fiction. I love discovering new things I didn’t know about our shared past, and I love learning about historical figures who have shaped our modern values…even when we have forgotten their names and their stories.

In my novels, these stories form a backdrop for our heroine and her hero: a set of ideas that resonate in the wings (to use a theater metaphor), while, on stage, the couple find each other and their happily-ever-after.

Let me use as an example a real person: the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Born in 1788, Byron was not yet 1 when the Bastille was stormed, starting the French Revolution; he was 11 when Admiral Nelson defeated the French fleet; and he was 26 when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. For Byron then, the World was always at war.

Lucy and Colin—our heroine and her hero—live roughly the same timeline as Byron. And for them, in Chasing the Heiress, a series of reform movements shape their world.

Here's one of those stories.

In 1756, French privateers captured the Lisbon packet Hanover on its way to Portugal. The passengers—among them John Howard (1726-1790), a wealthy Englishman on a Grand Tour—were sent to French prisons. Howard negotiated for his freedom--in exchange for that of a French officer held by the British.

But Howard's experience in prison shaped the course of his future life. When in 1773, Howard was appointed the High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, he began to address the conditions of the local prisons.

Because the jailer earned his pay from fees owed by the prisoners, many who had been found not-guilty remained in prison because they couldn’t discharge their bills. Howard proposed changing the system to one where the state paid the jailer, and to discover better methods of managing the jails, Howard visited all city, town, and county jails. As a result Howard was called in 1774 to give evidence to the House of Commons.

Howard’s testimony led to legislative (though not actual) reform: jailer’s fees were abolished in favor of the jailer receiving a municipal salary; prisons were required to be more sanitary, and prisoners were required to receive medical treatment.

For the next 15 years, from 1775-1790, funded from his own resources, Howard inspected prisons in Scotland and Ireland and across Europe (Austria, Bohemia, Denmark, Flanders, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Livonia, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Saxony, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland). He recorded the results of his inspections in his 1777 The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (which went through 3 editions during his lifetime), as well as in supplementary volumes until his death in 1790.

The hard work of prison reform was continued by Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845), a Quaker, beginning in 1813. But that’s for our next blog post.

Information about the life of John Howard comes from the Dictionary of National Biography.

In Chasing the Heiress, Colin and Lucy spend perhaps half the book on the road. And by our measures, they don't even travel very far!

Colin begins his journey in Holywell and meets up with Lucy outside Shrewsbury, then by a rather circuitous path, the two continue on toward London. The distance from Holywell to London was 208 miles, according to the 1822 16th edition of Paterson's Roads; being an entirely original and accurate description of all the direct and principal cross roads in England and Wales with Part of the Roads of Scotland, edited by Edward Mogg.

Colin and Lucy take around a month for their journey, but if one weren't evading villains, how long would the trip take?

Mail coaches in 1819 could travel 7 miles an hour, making a trip between the Holywell and London take around 32 hours.

But in 1819, private coaches--depending on their quality--could go around ten. As a result, wealthy travelers with their own carriages should have been able to reach London from Holywell in no more than 21 hours--or two very long days, if one were in a hurry and had good access to new horses.

By comparison, today in the US, one needs only around 30 hours to drive from New York City to Albuquerque, New Mexico--or, in another comparison, from San Diego to Atlanta.
Even in the UK, one can travel from Land's End, Cornwall, the southernmost tip of the island to John o' Groats, Scotland, the northernmost tip, in a little less than 16 hours.

So, next time you plan a road trip, mark off 208 miles and see how far it gets you! and in how much time.

Here's some benchmarks: Chicago to Indianapolis is 183; Dallas to Oklahoma City, is 206; Lexington, KY to Nashville, TN, is 214; Houston to Dallas is 239; and New York City to Boston is 226.

I'm the guest romance writer at Margaret Locke's . Come by and say hi!