Another Nerdy Girl Visit to Colonial Williamsburg

Susan reports:

It's a grey, grey day here in the capital city of Colonial Williamsburg, VA, but that won't stop us from finding the best of the 18th c. to share with you. We promise new pictures and new/old history, with everything from castor in the garden to ground cochineal in the dye-pot.

And, of course, the ritual visit to see what fabulous fashions the mantua-makers, milliners, and tailors have been creating for our swooning delectation, including buttons engraved with hunting dogs, hats with towering ostrich plumes, and a white fox-fur muff that will absolutely – well, you'll have to see for yourself later this week.


Above: Fall foliage and straw hats outside the Mary Dickinson milliner's shop on Duke of Gloucester Street. 

Colonel Ponsonby's Waterloo ordeal

Loretta reports:

Some years ago, in Miss Wonderful, I had a hero suffering from what’s now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  This was a result of my sticking him in the middle of the Battle of Waterloo and subjecting him to something very like the ordeal that Colonel Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, against all odds, survived.

Since, over the years, Colonel Ponsonby turned up more than once in my reading, I can’t say exactly when or in what book he first caught my attention.  In Richard Rush’s A Residence at the Court of London,  a gentleman “tall but limping” is identified thusly:   "Colonel Ponsonby; he was left for dead at Waterloo; the cavalry it was thought had trampled upon him.”  Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington: The Years of the Sword,  summed up in a few unforgettable lines what Ponsonby endured: “Frederick Ponsonby, desperately wounded first by French sabres and then by Polish lances, ridden over and tossed by the Prussians, robbed, used as a musket-rest by a tirailleur and as a place to die on by a mortally wounded soldier, but later found alive by a British infantryman who mounted guard over him till morning...”

I added a bit of another officer's experience to my hero’s, and made up my own account of how he survived injuries that should have killed him several times over (no antibiotics!!!—he'd been stabbed all over the place, & the doctors treated him by bleeding him some more!!!)—but the great kernel of truth is there, and the credit belongs to Colonel Ponsonby (later a General and Sir Frederick), one tough gentleman. 

Ye of the Nerdy History persuasion can easily imagine how thrilled I was recently to find, not a summary of his experience in a book by or about someone else, but his very own account—all thanks to the magic of Google books— in Ackermann’s Repository of arts, literature, fashions of 1817.     You can read the whole story here.

I think the just-the-facts, ma'am approach makes it all the more poignant, and conveys in a powerful way the experience of being in the middle of that battle.  What with the rumors flying about who was winning, who was losing, who was dead, who wasn’t, I wondered all the more how anybody knew what the devil was going on anywhere.

Jane Austen in (Very) First Editions

Susan reports:

Some old things are valued not for their beauty (like an Old Master painting) or their intrinsic value (like a diamond necklace), but for their sheer scarcity. Such is the case with a major sale of rare and antique books scheduled later this month at Sotheby's.

In the early nineteenth century, books were still a luxury item, and a status one at that. Gentlemen prized their libraries. It was customary to purchase a new book in "drab boards" – a nondescript pasteboard cover – from one's favorite bookseller, and then send it off to one's bookbinder to have it handsomely bound in leather and gold embossing, to match the others in one's library. As can be imagined, few of the drab board versions remain in existence today; in most cases, they would have represented the lowly "remainders" to a bookseller, the failed copies that didn't sell, and shuffled off to an ignominious end.

For collectors of rare books, a first edition in drab boards with uncut pages (in other words, a book unsullied by reader's hands) can be the holiest of holy grails, and more holy still if that first edition represents an author whose star of fame had a posthumous rise. This is certainly the case with the Sotheby's sale, which will include this three-volume first edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, above. If you're interested in bidding, I hope you've been saving your pennies: Sotheby's is estimating the books will sell for 75,000-100,000 GBP at auction, and very likely more.

I have to admit that I see these plain-clad books not as a collector would, but as a fellow writer. Was this the version that Jane first saw of her new "baby"?  When the package arrived from the London printer, did she open it with the same trepidation that modern authors do, worrying that sentences might have been transposed or signatures inadvertently omitted? Did she cradle the fresh new book in its drab cover, and marvel at that personal victory of imagination and hard work now transformed into printed words for all the world to see and, with luck, to buy?

I wonder....

Many thanks to Michael Robinson for suggesting the idea for this blog.

Above: [Austen, Jane] Pride and Prejudice: A Novel in Three Volumes. By the Author of "Sense and Sensibility." London: G. Sidney for T. Egerton, 1813.

A walking dress for October 1817

Loretta reports:

I think the blue satin spencer must have been quite beautiful in person, and I would love to see that embroidered hem up close—but what struck me about this ensemble was the bonnet with its "very large" front.  It seemed unusually tall and towering for this era, and reminded me of the extraordinary hat on the cover of Behind Closed Doors, a NHG Library selection I blogged about a while back.
 ~~~
PLATE 22.— PROMENADE DRESS. A high dress of jaconot muslin, richly embroidered round the bottom of the skirt. The body is composed entirely of work. Long sleeve, finished down the arm in front by bouillons of lace. With this dress is worn the Charlotte spencer, composed of cerulean blue satin; it is tight to the shape, the back a moderate breadth, and the waist short. The sleeve is rather wide. The trimming is extremely elegant, and it is disposed in so tasteful a manner, as to give an appearance of perfect novelty to the spencer. We are not allowed to name the materials of which it is composed. The sleeve is ornamented at the wrist, and on the shoulder to correspond. Bonnet, à la Ninon, composed of French willow. The crown is fancifully ornamented with the same material, cut in small squares, edged with white satin, and turned a little over at the ends. The front is very large; it displays the front hair, which is simply braided across the forehead: it is edged with puffed gauze, disposed in points, and confined by a narrow fold of white satin. A sprig of acacia ornaments it on the left side, and it is finished by white satin strings. French ruff and ruffles of rich lace. Blue or white kid shoes and gloves.


~~~
 Excerpted from Rudolph Ackermann's Repository of arts, literature, fashions &c, 1817.

Gone to Sea A-Ratting: the Tale of a Tudor Terrier

Susan reports:

One of the most famous shipwrecks in English history was the sinking of the Mary Rose. An important vessel in Henry VIII's navy, the Mary Rose had a long career spanning three decades of warfare before she finally sank during an attack on French forces on 19 July 1545, near the Isle of Wight.

More than four centuries later, the Mary Rose was raised and recovered in an extraordinary feat of maritime archaeology. Not only was much of the ship itself recovered, but a wealth of Tudor-era artifacts – over 19,000 in all – were salvaged, ranging from weapons and navigational tools to the personal belongings of the lower-deck crewmen.

But perhaps the single most engaging discovery was the skeleton of the ship's dog. Nicknamed Hatch by the archeologists (because the remains were discovered near the hatch door of the ship's carpenter's cabin), the skeleton is believed to have belonged to a young female mongrel terrier. Sixteenth century sailors, a superstitious lot, were convinced that cats brought bad luck to ships at sea. Rat-catching dogs became an important member of the shipboard company, and Hatch was likely not only a working dog, but a favorite with the rest of the crew.

Certainly Hatch is continuing to serve her ship in the twenty-first century. A new museum to house the  Mary Rose is being constructed as part of the Historic Dockyard, Portsmouth, UK, and to help raise awareness and funds for the project, Hatch recently made an appearance at the 2010 Crufts dog show in Birmingham as the special guest of the sponsoring Kennel Club. While Hatch might not have claimed a ribbon, she was, in her own way, Best in Show.

Above left: Skeleton of Ship's Dog, The Mary Rose Trust.
Above right: The Carrack Mary Rose, illustration by Anthony Roll, c. 1546

A Gothic Cottage, 1817

Loretta reports:

I usually shorten the title of one of my favorite early 19th century magazines to Ackermann’s Repository, and present here mainly its fashion entries.  The full title, in fact, is (depending on the year) some variation of The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics.  And it is truly a repository, a storehouse of all manner of things. 

Each month's issue of about sixty pages contained a remarkable range of material.  Along with considerably more literature—serial fiction, essays, poetry, etc—than we’re accustomed to seeing in today’s women’s magazines, Ackermann offered his readers glimpses of the hottest new styles in interior design and architecture.

From the October 1817 issue:
~~~
FINE ARTS
—><—
ARCHITECTURAL HINTS

Plate 18.—A GOTHIC COTTAGE
This building is suited to a small family, and would make a very convenient parsonage-house to a living of moderate income:  it consists of a parlour, dining-room, and library; a kitchen, scullery, larder, &c. on the ground floor; and of four chambers and a dressing room on the bed-room floor.  The design is picturesque in its effect; and if executed with a judicious attention to the forms of the doors, window, ceilings, &c., it would be come a very simple and neat example of domestic Gothic architecture.  It is intended that the roof should be covered with tiles, but great care should be taken that they are from some other building, and have lost the offensive glare that red tiles always possess when new, for such a colour would be fatal to the pleasing effect of the building.

Poignant Scraps from the Past: "Threads of Feeling"

Susan reports:

Most surviving clothing from the past belonged to upper class women, princesses and peeresses and the daughters of wealthy merchants. But one of the most important collections of 18th c. English textiles came from a far more humble group: the unwanted children given up to London's Foundling Hospital.

Created by Royal Charter in 1739, the Hospital was one of the earliest attempts to combine private philanthropy with organized charity. Led by prosperous shipbuilder Thomas Coram (1668-1741), the organizers of the Hospital had two goals: not only to offer a more humane alternative to parish workhouses (in whose dubious "care" over 75% of abandoned children died), but also to provide a suitable workforce for the growing Empire's industry, agriculture, domestic service, and the military. The project became a fashionable charity among the nobility, and was endorsed by Queen Charlotte herself. The Hospital's handsome new buildings included paintings by William Hogarth and a chapel financed in part by concerts given by George Frederic Handel. During the early years, admitted children were given excellent care by 18th c. standards, including inoculation against smallpox, and were taught marketable skills as well as how to read and write.

In the beginning, the only requirement for admission was that a child be under two years of age and in good health. Children were to be left anonymously and without questions, and at once the new Hospital became the best hope of desperate mothers. Over 4,000 infants were left between 1741-1760, and the billets cataloguing their admission (and often, sadly, their too-early deaths) have been preserved. Pinned to each child's page is an identifying token that had come with the child. In some cases, this is a tiny linen cap, sleeve, or ribbon rosette, but most often the nurses simply cut a swatch from the clothing the child was wearing when admitted. The tokens were kept in case a mother's circumstances improved and she came to reclaim her child. Almost none did.

Today the Foundling Hospital is a museum, and a selection of these admission billet pages is currently on display in an exhibition called Threads of Feeling (the show runs until March 6, 2011); the exhibition also has a Facebook page. Eighteenth century children's clothing was most often cut from adult clothing, and the swatches show a wide range of textiles, from the simplest threadbare linen to costly printed silks. While the billets are of great interest to historians and sociologists, as a novelist (and a mother), those little scraps are heartbreaking. They represent the last contact a mother had with her child, her last chance to make her baby "look pretty" for the strangers who could provide a better future than she could herself.

If, like most of us, you can't make it to London for the exhibition, a selection of the billet pages appear in the excellent book The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth Century England by John Styles.


Above: Yellow Satten Flowered. Silk woven in a flowered pattern. 
Foundling number 13187. A girl aged about 14 days, admitted 20 June 1759. Died 2 July 1759. Photograph from the Foundling Hospital Museum. 


Update: The excellent catalogue for this exhibition is now available for order in America, from our friends at Burnley & Trowbridge (a most tempting website for those who enjoy all things 17th-18th century.)