News from the 18th & 19th centuries

The Two Nerdy History Girls, Susan Holloway Scott & I, have returned from our latest junket to Colonial Williamsburg, and we're ready to Tell All. You can learn what we learned about 18th-19th c. coaches, clothes, dancing, and other delights. In case you were wondering, our sources' knowledge extends far beyond Colonial America. For one thing, in Colonial times, Americans viewed themselves as English subjects, and imported just about everything from England. For another, the CW interpreters' scholarship is wide-ranging. They're as comfortable talking about a Regency era carriage as an 18th C one, and the milliners and tailors make clothes for the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. We've got the pictures to prove it--detailed photos you won't find anywhere else. Intrigued? Just click on My Other Blog over there to your right or, if that's too far for you, right here.

Mystery vocabulary

I just finished re-reading (for about the sixth or tenth or eighteenth time) Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, and am once more overwhelmed by my ignorance. Yes, this was an edition with notes, but no, it was not a Norton Critical Edition (there isn't one, I discovered to my intense annoyance), and whoever wrote the notes took an excessively optimistic view of the average reader's knowledge of historical arcana.

Being a Nerdy History Girl, I know weird, useless stuff, make it my business to know weird, useless stuff. But page after page, I was stumped. Here are a few mystery terms:

"plush shorts and cottons"

"Oxford-mixture trousers"

"bagman"

So I thought, if I'm puzzled, what about high school and college students? Then I remembered how tedious I found most of the 19th C "classics" I read back then. Would I be writing the kinds of stories I write now if a friend hadn't explained the joys of David Copperfield to me, sometime in the middle of my lengthy college career?

Two Nerdy History Girls debut

You may have noticed the new link under My Other Blog.

Susan Holloway Scott & I have joined forces to indulge our historical obsessions.

We've been working on it quietly in the background for a while, but finally decided it's time to spring it on an unsuspecting public.

Michelle Buonfiglio at Romance B(u)y the Book hosts our launch party.

She's got more at her Heart to Heart blog at Barnes & Noble.

It's not too late to stop by and say something.

Scandalous prints

In Don’t Tempt Me, I make frequent mention of satirical prints. These were something like today’s editorial cartoons. They were often but not always political. They tended to mock Society, high and low. Most interesting of all, I think, is what the artists got away with. True, the erotic prints tended to be kept under the counter for special customers, but a great deal hung in print shop windows for all the world to see.


An online exhibit of works by Gillray at the New York Public Library shows you Humphrey’s Print Shop in St. James’s Street--where my fictional Duke of Marchmont would have paused to study the prints dealing with Zoe.

And here, in case you were wondering, is the print, Is She Not a Spunky One, that Marchmont plants in the journalist’s mind.

Them's fightin' words

A Central Massachusetts columnist today called for civility in the discussion about health care. I, too, would prefer civilized discussions to scream fests, on this and all other topics. I found myself thinking, though, how differently these things were handled a couple of centuries ago. I’ve been watching, courtesy NetFlix, John Adams. The shouting matches in Congress (and hey, how interesting that our legislators all fit in one small room in those days) reminded me that the debates often went beyond shouting to shooting.

In Gentleman’s Blood: A History of Dueling, Barbara Holland quotes Adams: “ ‘Politics . . . had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.’” According to Holland, “Every faction considered all other factions a threat to the republic and a personal insult.”

In those days, gentlemen stuck to their guns, literally. They weren’t likely to retreat from a long-held position simply because people were yelling at them. If a man did retreat, someone would call him a coward, and then he’d have to fight a duel to prove he wasn’t.

I don’t know if we’re doing better today because our politicos don’t shoot each other so much, or our forefathers did better because they'd put their lives on the line in defense of principle (or manly pride).

History simply makes me ask questions. And watching the miniseries has made me want to read the book.

Don't Tempt Me still in favor

More good news today. Don't Tempt Me is in its fourth week on the New York Times Mass Market list and the USA Today list.

It's gone into a third printing, too.

We'll return to our irregularly scheduled blogging soon, but these moments of triumph are all too fleeting in the writerly life, and we want to make the most of them.

Readers, THANK YOU!

Me--or at least my cover--in People

Yes, Sarah and Candy have done it again. They've made mathematicians and NPR interviewers read my book. Now they've got it into People magazine. No, I'm not kidding. 3 August 2009 issue. Lord of Scoundrels, in living color. For all the world (the part that reads People, that is) to see.

Read it all about it at Smart Bitches Love Trashy Books.