Those were the days

Tags

Cambridge, church, Gregory Hardiman, Regency, research

Beware flashes of inspiration!  I am a demon for making sure that my plots make sense in their time-frame.  (Indeed, one of my most treasured reviews comments that “[Sam and Wilson] do not crack the case in a matter of a quick fortnight, but weeks, months, pass with the crime in hand on-going with other, everyday things, happening in the background”.)  For the Sam series, my main concern was to ensure that things happened in the right order, and that big events did not pass without comment.  But for the Gregory series, my goodness, the calendar takes on the most enormous significance.

Cambridge in the 1820s was a very religious place – the town, and especially the university.  As a result, church high days and holidays were observed without exception, and other events were timetabled to fit in with them.  I found a wonderful – and enjoyably quirky – guide to the university year published by a former university officer in 1854, and I thought, I know, I’ll quickly work my way through it and create a handy ten-year calendar for the 1820s.  Oh the naivete – it has taken me most of the day.

There are certain events whose date is fixed from year to year: there’s Christmas Day, of course, and the Michaelmas (i.e. autumn) term always started on 10 October and finished on 16 December.  But many things move from year to year.  Some are pegged onto other dates – for instance, the Proclamation of the Markets always happened on the second Saturday after the start of the Michaelmas term.  And many depend on Easter, which in turn dictates the start and end dates of the Lent (i.e. summer) term.  Some of these make your head spin.  Have a go at this one: the annual sermon in Burwell was given by the Vice-Chancellor on (wait for it) Midlent Sunday, which is the fourth Sunday after Ash Wednesday.  I am now going to lie down in a darkened room with a cold flannel over my eyes.

Horse artists and bird stuffers

Tags

Cambridge, Gregory 1, newsletter, Regency, research

With a whole weekend of social isolating at my disposal, I allowed myself the luxury of a deep-dive into Pigot’s.  What, you’ve never used this amazing resource?  Let me enlighten you.  James Pigot started out as a publisher of general directories and in 1811 he began publishing trade directories for Manchester.  His big project – the Commercial Directory – was first published in 1814, and in 1823 he expanded to other cities, including London.  And in 1830 our hero brought out his “National Commercial Directory; Comprising a Directory and Classification of the Merchants, Bankers, Professional Gentlemen, Manufacturers and Traders of the Cities, Towns, Sea-Ports and Principal Villages of the Following Counties, viz Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire”.  Catchy title!  But it does what it says on the tin: it’s basically the forerunner to the Yellow Pages.  And for getting the flavour of daily life at the time, it’s fantastic.

For instance, in 1830 Cambridge was the place of business for four artists (including one “horse artist”), two bird stuffers, four breeches makers, thirty-three butchers (four of them women), several chymists [sic] (including “Isaiah Deck, practical chymist to the Duke of Gloucester, and mineralogist”), numerous “coal and corn merchants” (not a combination we would imagine today), plenty of (non-university) professors and teachers (including the polyglot Frederick de Boetticher, who offered lessons in Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch and Russian), 110 pubs and taverns – and one dentist, one piano tuner and one coroner.  It certainly tells you a great deal about people’s interests, concerns and priorities.

I am also taking this opportunity to plan ahead with my monthly behind-the-scenes research newsletters, so do sign up if you’d like more fascinating detail about life in the 1820s, in both London and Cambridge.

Juggling constables

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blogging, Cambridge, Gregory Hardiman, Helen Hollick, library, Martha Plank, newsletter, Regency, research, Samuel Plank

I rather fear that my blog posts at the moment are a bit dull – there’s not much to say when you’re knee-deep in research.  But I am finding it a mental challenge to live with two constables at the same time.  There are six Sam Plank novels out there and I want to take every opportunity I can to promote them and acquire new readers.  In this endeavour I have help from all sorts of lovely people, including – today – Helen Hollick, who has featured a conversation with Martha Plank on her historical fiction blog Let Us Talk of Many Things.  In an imaginative departure for her blog, Helen periodically features conversations not with authors but with their characters, and today it is Martha’s turn.

At the same time, I am ramping up the research for my new series – the Gregory books – which will be set in Cambridge (but still in my beloved 1820s).  This involves long hours in the library (don’t feel sorry for me – it’s my version of paradise) and even the outlay of £20 on a comprehensive and chunky history of the university (I figure that I’m planning five Gregory books, so it’s a bearable investment of £4 per book).

But what should I do about my monthly updates?  These go out to subscribers on the first of each month (do sign up – I’m currently writing for a very select and loyal audience of thirty-one!) and so far have concentrated on the research that underpins the Sam books.  Indeed, all nineteen updates have been called “Sam Plank update”.  Shall I re-brand them?  Or keep that title and just explain each time that the research – although still late Regency and therefore equally of interest to Sam fans – is being done to furnish Gregory with his life and backstory?  It doesn’t matter one jot at the moment, I suppose, but when the Sam books are picked up for a blockbuster Sunday night telly drama and I’m having to beat journalists off with a stick, I want to have my author profile and presence all neat and tidy.  In the meantime, turn away now if you’re squeamish: I’m off to research facial and eye injuries caused by muskets in the Peninsular Wars.

Sign up, sign up!

Tags

newsletter, Regency, research, Samuel Plank, The Solo Squid, writing

It’s all a bit quiet, isn’t it?  There’s always rather a lull after the publication of a new Sam Plank book, but please rest assured that I am not resting assured: I am working on the next two books.  The immediate project is my book on being a one-person business – almost certainly titled “The Solo Squid” – and the follow-up, to be embarked on fully in January, is the first book in my new Cambridge-set series.

However, my aim for this week is to beef up the number of people subscribing to my monthly update on the research behind the scenes of the Plank books (and, soon, the Gregory books).  The theory is that I do so much research for the books – both while I am deciding on the plots and while I am doing the actual writing – that it seems a shame to leave it to languish.  So I choose a theme each month and write an update, for your delectation and amusement, and perhaps to help other writers with their research.  It takes a bit of time to put it together – each update takes about a half-day to write – and so I am keen for them to be read by as many people as possible.  But I’m stuck on twenty-five loyal readers.

I’m very grateful for you all, of course – except for that twenty-sixth person who unsubscribed after I published an update on contraception (I think she expects the Regency to be all fluttering fans and dainty suppers, but of course we wouldn’t have had the Victorians if they hadn’t had sex in Regency times).  So please, if you know anyone who might be interested, do point them in the direction of the monthly updates (the sign-up ink-splatter appears on the left of every page of this website) – new subscribers get a free Regency glossary as a welcome gift, and I do regular competitions and giveaways.  Here’s a taster of what was in the November update, on education in Sam’s time:

As for girls, you’ll note that Sam talks of the two sons of the family being sent to school – their sister Lizzie was not given the same opportunity.  Charity schools did accept girls but they were offered a different curriculum, concentrating on Bible reading, needlework and singing.  Their upper- and middle-class sisters suffered a similar fate: most of their education focused on the skills that would make them attractive wives, such as embroidery, music and drawing.  Martha has the basics of letters and numbers – from when her father needed her help in his tavern – but it is only when she meets Sam that she learns to read properly, and for pleasure.  Indeed, it was not until the nineteenth century that reading gradually became a private rather than a public act; in the first three decades of the century, if you could read you were expected to read aloud and share your reading with family, friends and workmates.

Shopping for publicity

Tags

cover, Design for Writers, Flybe, Grafton Centre, MailChimp, marketing, Plank 6, publicity, Regency

It’s all been a bit quiet here recently, hasn’t it?  That’s mainly because just sitting and writing, with occasional forays into research, is not much of a spectator sport, but rest assured that work continues apace with “Plank 6”.  And here’s what else I’ve been doing recently:

• Booked time with my fabulous cover designer – that’s Design for Writers – to make sure that they will be available to work on that sixth cover next summer
• Done some fun, extra research on Regency jewellery in preparation for my November monthly update – if you fancy getting your mitts on that, you can subscribe by clicking on the map to the left…
• Appeared in the magazine published by our local shopping mall, the “Grafton Press” – you can see it online here.

The idea for this last one came to me a few months ago when I was walking through the Grafton Centre in Cambridge and spotted that they had their own publication, promoting the shops and businesses in the centre but also highlighting Cambridge-y things – presumably to tempt out-of-town visitors to return again and again.  And friends who work in periodical publishing tell me that freebies like this are always on the look-out for contributed content because they rarely have the budget to buy in the services of more than a couple of writers.  I contacted the editorial email address given in the magazine, suggesting a piece on local authors, and they sent back a set of about six questions – which, as you can see, basically form the piece.

So that would be my top marketing tip for this month: look around for local or trade publications that might welcome unsolicited contact, and think of a way to connect you and/or your writing to their target market.  You might remember that I managed to get into Flybe’s in-flight magazine last year, by writing a piece about London as a destination, while managing to mention Sam Plank or my writing in every paragraph…  I’m cunning like that.  If you can send them a fairly finished piece (with the Flybe one, I looked at past issues of the column and used the same questions to formulate my own submission), they might well use it pretty much unchanged, just to be able to fill a page with minimal effort.  And who knows who might be off on their hols on Flybe, or doing their Christmas shopping at the Grafton Centre – it might be that TV executive casting around for inspiration for their next Sunday evening costume drama, and there will be Sam and Martha, just waiting.

‘Tis not the season

Tags

Christmas, Fatal Forgery, Martha Plank, Plank 5, Regency, research, Samuel Plank, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, weather

One of the dangers – well, the joys – of writing historical fiction is that you can noodle around all over the internet and indeed in real libraries, reading whatever you like, and as long as it was written more than, say, fifty years ago, you can call it research and kid yourself that it just about counts as writing.  It doesn’t.  But as it’s nearly Christmas I am not being so hard on myself, and I have particularly enjoyed reading other writers’ blogs.  This festive one caught my eye, as it’s talking about how they celebrated – or, it seems, ignored – Christmas in Georgian times.

Now I know that Sam is not Georgian: he was born in the Georgian era (on 4^th January 1780, if you’re minded to mark it), but by the time we meet him, he’s very definitely a Regency chap.  But even then, Christmas was not the spectacle that it became once Victoria – or more accurately, Albert – got hold of it and draped it with enough baubles and tartan to choke a reindeer.  I realise as I write this that I have never set a Plank book at Christmas, but that has not been deliberate.

As you may know, the Plank books are set in consecutive years: “Fatal Forgery” in 1824, “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” in 1825 and so on.  But when I write my first draft of a new book, I rarely have any idea of precisely when in the year it will be set, and I leave out any references to weather or temperature until later in the process.  During my research for the year in question – I’m immersed in 1828 at the moment – I note down any events that might appear in the story, including meteorological ones.  So in 1828 I know that London Zoo opened on 27th April, and they had a wet summer followed by gales on the night of 9th August in London and the south-east.  If something really sounds fun – like the Bartholomew Fair that takes place in August 1825 – I’ll use it to “anchor” the plot, and so the 1825 book (“Canary”) was set in the summer.  “Plank 5” is still undecided, but I’ll have to make up my mind soon: at the moment poor Martha doesn’t know whether she’s airing the house or stoking the fire.

A vale of tears

Tags

anachronism, London, Plank 5, Regency, research

Once again I was a golf widow for the weekend, and as the weather was not particularly enticing I decided to get in two solid days of writing.  But it has been a difficult two days.  I am writing some sad scenes and so I have been doing a lot of reading about death and mourning.  And this is one area in which I have to be super-pedantic about timing.

The Victorians – as eny fule kno – were Big on Death.  They went the whole hog, with black clothes (Queen Vic herself wore mourning dress for Prince Albert for forty years – a full thirty-nine years longer than the recommended period for a dear departed spouse), mirrors turned to the wall, black crepe draped everywhere, and big funeral processions (for the wealthy, of course, although even the middle classes would get into enormous debt to put on a good show).  And it is very easy, when looking for drama and pathos, to fall into descriptions of these events.  But that would be wrong, as in the Regency things were much more restrained (and, actually, much more familiar to our modern eye).

It has also been, well, interesting, to research what they did with all those dead bodies at the start of the nineteenth century.  London was overflowing with people, both alive and dead, and cremation was very much not the fashion, so the corpses all had to go somewhere – sometimes several deep, and often (prepare yourself) disturbed (that’s something of a euphemism) during later burials.  In fact, some medical men thought that the graveyards and burial grounds were sources of “miasma” that caused all sorts of disease.  It turns out that they did cause a lot of sickness – but through polluting the water course and not through spreading “bad air”.

So that’s my Bank Holiday weekend: death, mourning, burial and disease.  Hope yours has been a bit cheerier!

Clothes maketh the man (and the woman)

Tags

Martha Plank, Regency, research, Samuel Plank

Last week a wonderful, wonderful friend took me along on a tour of the Sands Films studio and warehouse in Rotherhithe.  What, you mean you’ve never heard of it?  Actually, nor had I, but it’s in a fabulously traditional part of London – indeed, in an historic warehouse – and just over the river from some of Sam’s haunts (almost opposite the location of Wapping Old Stairs) and so I didn’t need asking twice.  Well, what a place.  It’s like no working premises I have ever seen before, with a rabbit warren of rooms on several floors, from sewing rooms to storerooms (both stuffed with costumes made and maintained over the past forty years), from laundries to canteens, and even a tiny theatre and a tinier cinema.  If you ever get the chance, do go; they regularly show films, and they have a fantastic costume library and a café, so it’s meant to be seen and used.

Of course, I was salivating to see outfits from the 1820s – not the fancy stuff, but the sort of clothes that Sam and Martha might have worn.  And I saw this wonderful rail for Martha – wouldn’t she just have loved that flowery print?

There were no constables’ uniforms on show, but I did spot a selection of coats that looked possible for our hero, until I saw how they were labelled:

I’m not sure Sam would take at all kindly to being dressed as “seedy and rough”!  Apart from human costumes, the Sands seamstresses and craftspeople also make other pieces for films, including all the animal heads for their own 1971 film of “Tales of Beatrix Potter”.  And I couldn’t resist trying the mouse…

Regency adornment

Tags

Fatal Forgery, jewellery, Regency, Samuel Plank

When I finally published “Fatal Forgery” – which those of you who endured the process with me will know that it took four years, not the slick one-year-per-book I aim for now – I was so delighted that I decided to treat myself.  In my research I had come to realise that Regency-era English jewellery (approximately 1810-1830) is quite distinctive in style, and indeed that it matches my taste.  I am no expert at all, but earlier Georgian jewellery is very golden and often modelled on snakes and Egyptian and classical motifs – not my thing at all – while later Victorian stuff is frankly bizarre (lots of elaborate mourning pieces containing or made of the hair of dead people), but the simpler Regency pieces suit my preferences.  So I went along to an antique jewellery dealer in London who had a good selection, and bought myself a Regency diamond ring.  This sounds extravagant, but of course diamond cutting was in its infancy, and they are mostly rather rough little chips and so not valuable at all – but I love it.  When I got home with my purchase, my husband was outraged as he had wanted to buy it, so since then he has marked each publication with a Regency ring – including one bought on eBay…

Yesterday the Antiques Roadshow came to a stately home about twenty miles outside Cambridge (where I live).  For those of you not familiar with the format, this is a beloved UK television programme, where antiques experts gather in the grounds of some lovely place and the public goes along, queues for hours (part of being British) and then shows their treasures to these experts for their comments.  We decided to cycle there, which rather limited what we could take – our mystery oil painting which hangs over the mantelpiece was not an option – so we took two Regency rings.  All I wanted to know was, are they genuine Regency – particularly that eBay one.  And you – and Sam – will be relieved to know that they are: jewellery expert Joanna Hardy peered at them through her loupe and declared them entirely typical and correct.  As I cycled home with them safely in my back pocket, I did marvel that I was carrying something created two hundred years ago in Sam’s home city – marvellous how these things are treasured and survive.

Catching the mail

Tags

Regency, research, Samuel Plank, writing

Yesterday was bitterly cold here in Cambridge, and today is rainy, so what better to do than to turn on the heating and spend two who days with “Plank 4”?  What I enjoy about this stage of writing is that things are still very fluid: I have the general plot outlined, and some of the details, but for the most part I can go where Sam takes me – and this weekend he has taken me to Sittingbourne.  I’ve never been there in real life, but I now feel I could have wandered around it quite happily in 1827.

Sittingbourne, you see, is on the route of the nightly mail coach from London to Dover.  England in the 1820s was very proud of its speedy postal service – soon to be improved even further by the industrious Victorians, but already streets ahead of everyone else’s – and one of the most important destinations was Dover, where mail was loaded onto mail packets (a type of boat) and carried across to France.  (And of course mail came back the other way too, from Calais.)  In order to guarantee fastest travel times and to fit in with the demands of commerce, the mail coaches travelled at night, leaving London at 8pm precisely and arriving in Dover, for instance, at 7.30 the next morning.  En route they stopped to change horses – that’s a seventy mile journey, after all – and to drop off and collect mail.  This was by far the speediest way to travel – much faster than the more plodding stage coaches – and anyone for whom time was of the essence would pay the extra to “take the mail” and avoid “the slow coach”.  So why is Sam is such a hurry to get to Sittingbourne?  Well, you’ll just have to read “Plank 4” when it comes out.

But as I was researching all of this – mail coach timetables and routes, and coaching inns – it struck me how infinitely simpler this all is with the Internet.  I could just sit there in the warm and find nearly everything I needed – or at least get a firm steer on which archive I would need to consult in person.  Pity the historical fiction writers of old, who had to spend hours leafing through books in order to find (or perhaps not find) their information.  It may be that Sam’s trip to Sittingbourne doesn’t make it into the final edit of “Plank 4”, but it won’t really matter because it only took me a few hours to research it.  If, on the other hand, I had devoted a weekend to visiting Sittingbourne and going through local archives at the library, I might be much more reluctant to change tack.