Behind the Sun: Sarah Morgan & late Georgian jewellery

What I'm Reading: Mr Chen's Emporium by Deborah O'Brien; Netherwood by Jane Sanderson; There's a Riot Going On: revolutionaries, rock stars and the rise and fall of '60s counter-culture by Peter Doggett; and Fair Game: Australia's first immigrant women by Elizabeth Rushden & Perry McIntyre.

Following on from my last post, the third main character in my latest book Behind the Sun is 16-year-old Sarah Morgan, who has no family, except a father she despises. Clever, stubborn, mistrustful and self-sufficient, Sarah is a trained jeweller but has lost her position with the business to which she was apprenticed. Unable to find another job in London, she's been surviving as a pickpocket in a crew overseen by flash man Tom Ratcliffe. She's also skilled at breaking into houses and cracking safes. When the law finally catches up with her, she meets Friday Woolfe and Harrie Clarke in Newgate gaol, though, due to her prickly nature, their initial encounter isn't entirely positive.

Five-colour gold ladies' watch, inscription is [18]87, so the
 white metal will presumably be silver, or grey gold.

As a jeweller, Sarah would have used silver, and yellow, pink, red and green gold in the jewellery she made, though not white gold, which didn't appear commercially until after WWI (after Karl Richter of Pforzheim was issued a patent in 1915, followed by David Belais in New York in 1917)). Platinum was seldom seen until the late 19th century, becoming increasingly popular during the 1920s and '30s. Prior to 1854 in Britain, the only carats of gold permitted were 18 and 22. Pure gold is 24 carat, and too soft to work with. After the 1854 Birmingham Assay Office Act, carats of 9, 12 and 15 were allowed. In 1932, the 15 carat measurement was lowered to 14. http://www.theassayoffice.co.uk/htl.html
So if you're considering purchasing those lovely, genuine, 14 carat gold Georgian  earrings off the internet, you might want to think again.

Most coloured gemstones were set in gold, while diamonds were often mounted in silver, as silver was believed to complement the sparkle. Settings could be closed or open, and sometimes backed with foil to enhance the colour of the gem. Many 18th and 19th century diamonds were 'rose' cut, or 'brilliant' cut, the most common example of the latter being the 'mine' cut. Paste, or 'strass', gems (made from lead glass) were also popular, and quality examples could command a high price.

Other materials used in jewellery at the time include steel (British centres of cut steel jewellery manufacture were Woodstock in Oxfordshire, and Birmingham), iron (frequently imported from Silesia in Prussia, when there was a Prussia, and from Berlin), bog oak, and human hair (which was not, as commonly believed now, exclusively used in mourning jewellery).

Cut steel earrings

In 1720, during his quest to turn base metal into gold, alchemist Christopher Pinchbeck discovered a very good imitation of gold, which he named pinchbeck, after himself obviously (unlike Lord Percy Percy in Blackadder, who only managed a nugget of purest Green).

Apart from the well-known diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires, a wide range of other precious and semi-precious gems and materials were used. The list includes all the varying colours of aquamarine, beryl, chrysoberyl, topaz, spinel, garnet, tourmaline, peridot, jacinth (zircon), and the quartz group, which includes, amethyst, citrine, aventurine, chalcedony, onyx, jasper, opal, and agate. Add to that coral, pearl, turquoise, jade, jet, lapis lazuli, vauxhall glass, iron pyrite, malachite, shell, ivory and lava, and you can appreciate the allure of antique jewellery today.

Competently trained jewellers like Sarah used a very wide range of techniques. Enamelling was common, as were piqué, repoussé, granulation, filigree, engraving, cannetille, and, for some jewellers, mosaic work and cloisonné. All jewellers learnt to draw their own gold and silver wire, hammer and cast metal, use the oil lamp and blow pipe to solder, and handle a vast array of tools.

Pink topaz and cannetille brooch

Fashionable in Sarah's era were parures (a boxed suite of matching jewellery, occasionally up to a dozen pieces), drop earrings, rivières (necklaces of graduated stones, the largest in the middle), 'en tremblant' jewellery (usually brooches and hair jewels, on which gems were designed to wobble and becomingly reflect candle and firelight), and, of course, mourning jewellery, which I'll come back to in a later post.

An excellent book on jewellery, for researchers or anyone who just likes to look at pictures of beautiful bling, is Georgian Jewellery: 1714 - 1830 by Ginny Redington Dawes with Olivia Collings, photographs by Tom Dawes. 

Watch for an introduction to Rachel Winter.

Behind the Sun: Harriet Clarke - London's semptresses

What I'm Reading: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach; Here Comes Everybody: the story of the Pogues by James Fearnley; and The Secret Keeper, by Kate Morton. I love Kate Morton's books.

Yes, I do read a lot. Last weekend I went to Rookwood Necropolis in Sydney. What an awesome place. It's huge - 283 hectares containing over a million resting places, and one of the largest cemeteries in the world, according to the website. http://rookwood.nsw.gov.au/ The older monumental masonry in particular is stunning, and so are the grounds themselves. I was particularly fascinated by the family vaults, which you don't often see in New Zealand cemeteries. Really worth a visit. Easy to get lost, though. Download the map from the website (under Links). Below is the Maher Cross.

In my last blog I talked a little about prostitute Friday Woolfe, one of the main characters in my latest book Behind the Sun. Harrie Clarke, aged 16, is another main character. Harrie is an accomplished sempstress and designs embroidery patterns. Her father is dead, she has three much younger siblings and her ill mother is unable to work, so Harrie is the only breadwinner.

She's kind, trusting and generous, and knows how fortunate she is to work for deeply unpleasant Mrs Lynch, who has a private business making gowns for wealthy women. Some London seamstresses of the era found themselves working in crowded, poorly-lit rooms heated by gas fires that blasted out heat (hence the term 'sweatshop', which came into common use after around 1830), making only pieces of garments (skirt, bodice, sleeves), which were then assembled by the wholesaler and sold. Hours could be excessively long, especially during the 'season' and the pay extremely low. Long-term workers could develop serious eye-sight problems, and permanent back injuries.

Other women worked from home doing 'piece-' or 'slopwork', sewing shirts and handkerchiefs, and hemming skirts for very little money. But perhaps this suited women with small children to care for? There were very few state benefits then - essentially only 'outdoor relief' and the utterly dreaded workhouse.

Harrie, however, loses her relatively privileged job when, on the spur of the moment and completely uncharacteristically, she pinches a bolt of cloth from a draper's shop. While awaiting trial in Newgate gaol she meets Friday Woolfe.

Watch for an introduction to Sarah Morgan next time.

Behind the Sun: Prostitution in Friday Woolfe's London

What I'm Reading: The Twelve, by Justin Cronin; The Mystery of Mercy Close, by Marian Keyes; Toby's Room, by Pat Barker; Rush of Blood, by Mark Billingham; Nine Days, by Toni Jordan; the last five books in Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series; and Bad Characters; sex, crime, mutiny, murder and the Australian Imperial Force, by Peter Stanley.

My new book, Behind the Sun, was released last week in New Zealand, and is due out here in Australia on December 1. Last night I did a live phone interview about it with a New Zealand radio station. Often, by the time I'm doing interviews for a book, I've forgotten half of what's in it because I will have written it up to a year earlier, but with Behind the Sun that isn't an issue because I've just finished the second book in the quartet, Girl of Shadows, which has the same characters and continues the story arc that spans the whole series.

There are four central characters: Friday Woolfe, Harrie(t) Clarke, Sarah Morgan and Rachel Winter, all aged 17 and under and all transported from London to New South Wales in 1829. In this blog I'll introduce you to Friday.

In 1828, when Behind the Sun begins, Friday is 17 years old, and at five feet six inches quite tall for a woman of that era (the average height was around five feet two). She has a strong build, wild copper hair and amateur tattoos on her arms - hearts and anchors, etc. She's tough, reasonably pleasant-natured, streetwise, foul-mouthed and drinks too much gin. She is also a prostitute - specifically a streetwalker.

Her 'beat' is the streets surrounding Covent Garden, an area notorious for prostitutes in the 18th and 19th centuries until around the 1830s and '40s when the 'trade' drifted towards Haymarket in the West End. Prostitutes abounded in London, however, particularly also in the East End and around the docks, and while prostitution was not illegal, operating an actual brothel was.

Covent Garden Market, circa 1820, by William Henry Prior (1812-1882).

Wood engraving on paper, 1870s, later hand-coloured. 

19th century London definitely had a heirarchy when it came to prostitutes. At the top were the courtesans who serviced a single wealthy benefactor. Often these benefactors provided accommodation, clothing and an allowance in exchange for exclusive access and the right to squire those women in public. Below them, the heirarchy split into those who either walked the streets or operated from brothels. 

 

In the 1820s, the better quality streetwalkers took their customers back to the smart and very expensive apartments they rented around Drury Lane and Bow Street, near Covent Garden. Beneath them were the women who serviced their cullies (customers) in far more basic rooms rented by the hour. Friday is one of these. At the bottom of the streetwalker ladder were the women who worked in alleyways for a shilling a turn, or, most wretched of all, in the open for little more than sixpence.

 

Some prostitutes worked in truly elegant brothels that charged an exclusive and well-heeled clientele the earth, while others slaved miserably in thoroughly undiscerning and unhygienic bawdyhouses. Some enterprising women banded together, sharing the costs of food, clothes and rent, to operate unofficial brothels around Covent Garden, until the watch (police) broke them up and moved them on, while a large number of individual and probably 'part-time' prostitutes worked out of their own homes.

 

Friday makes plenty of money working the street, and has her own reasons for not wanting to work in a brothel. She has no fancy man (pimp), and doesn't run with a crew. She has friends, but no family in London. When she's arrested late in 1828, it is not for prostitution. It's also her third arrest, and she knows that this time she's very likely 'for the boat'.

 

Watch for an introduction to Harrie Clarke next time.

 

   

 

 

 

  

Off to New Zealand

What I'm reading: Roddy Doyle, The Barrytown Trilogy (again); Pat Barker, Union Street (again), Frank Bongiorno, The Sex Lives of Australians: a history.

Right, I'm back from the RWA conference, which was, as usual, pretty good. For me, the full day workshop on screenwriting by Alexandra Sokoloff was one of the high points, as was Bronwyn Parry's lecture on Georgian and Regency fabrics. The hotel, the QT at Surfers Paradise, was excellent; lovely modern rooms, good food, and cheerful, helpful staff.
Tomorrow, I'm off to New Zealand for a couple of weeks, to speak at the Northwrite festival in Whangarei and to visit family, and I'm in the middle of packing. The baggage allowance on the plane is 23kg and I'm struggling. You might be thinking, who needs more than 23kgs of clothes just for a fortnight? But it isn't clothes, a lot of the weight is books. I also need to do a bit of work when I'm away - I have a deadline looming.
The first book in my Australian quartet has just come back from the printer, and I've almost finished the second. This is the one with the deadline, obviously.
Book one is called Behind the Sun, and will be out in New Zealand in November this year, and in December in Australia. The second book, Girl of Shadows, involving the same characters, will be coming out in 2013.
The series is inspired by, but not necessarily based on, a handful of my ancestors who were transported to Australia between 1789 and 1814, and another who was a marine on the First Fleet. My series starts later than that, though - in Newgate gaol in London in 1828.

Blurb: Irreverent and streetwise prostitute Friday Woolfe is in London’s notorious Newgate Gaol, awaiting transportation. There, she meets three other girls: intelligent and opportunistic thief Sarah Morgan, naive young Rachel Winter, and reliable and capable seamstress Harriet Clarke. On the voyage to New South Wales their friendship becomes an unbreakable bond — but there are others on board who will change their lives forever. Friday makes an implacable enemy of Bella Jackson, a vicious woman whose power seems undiminished by her arrest and transportation, while Harriet is taken under the wing of an idealistic doctor, James Downey. Rachel catches the eye of a sinister passenger with more than honour on his mind. When they finally arrive on the other side of the world, they are confined to the grim and overcrowded Parramatta Female Factory. But worse is to come as the threat of separation looms. In the land behind the sun, the only thing they have is each other ...' 

While I'm away I'll mostly edit, as obviously I can't take all my research material to New Zealand, which will leave about another 15k words to write when I get back to Newcastle. Then I'll do another edit, to take out the ugly and unfortunate bits I missed the first time round (and there are always ugly, unfortunate bits in a first draft) before I deliver Girl of Shadows to my publisher.
Watch this space. 

Four days...

What I'm reading: Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris; Abandoned Women: Scottish convicts exiled beyond the Seas, by Lucy Frost; Illness in Colonial Australia, by F.B. Smith; and Vintage Tattoos: a sourcebook for old-school designs and tattoo artists, by Carol Clerk.

Actually, the title of this blog, 'Four days', doesn't really work now, because I should have written it on Sunday, but I was busy. If I had done it then, it would have been four days until I fly to Surfers Paradise for the Romance Writers of Australia annual conference. Four days of sitting on my bum listening to other people tell me interesting and illuminating things about writing. Excellent.

I'm doing the A-Day on Thursday, which is a professional development day for published authors, followed by a full day workshop on screenwriting on Friday, facilitated by international novelist and screenwriter Alexandra Sokoloff. Apparently there was pre-workshop homework for that -participants were meant to come up with a list of ten films with storylines resembling that of their current wip (I think - I lost the email) - but unfortunately I haven't done it. I've been flat out working on my current wip.

On Saturday I'm doing workshops on 'Relentless Conflict - You Owe It To Your Characters' (timely - my conflict can sometimes run out of steam half way through a book); 'Revisions: Rewriting, Editing, Proof-reading' (can never learn enough about that); and a panel titled 'Love In The Face Of Danger'. Sounds like a book by one of the Mitford sisters. On Sunday I'm doing 'The Most Perfect Cloth: Dress Fabric for Georgian and Regency Characters' (call me a trainspotter but I think it'll be fascinating); 'Why TV Can Be A Writer's Best Friend'; and a panel on 'Dishing the Dirt: Erotic Romance (which no doubt will be packed, given the recent success of Fifty Shades of Grey).

Four days after that I'm going home to New Zealand to, among other things, speak at the Northwrite festival in Whangarei, from 7-9 September. On the Friday night I'll be on a panel with other authors talking about the business of writing, and on Saturday morning I'm taking a four-hour workshop on various aspects of researching and writing historical fiction. During that I'll look at things like the ethics of writing historical fiction (sounds boring but it isn't), using different types of sources when you're researching (with examples), how to blend fiction with fact in a non-lumpy way, and various other issues like dialogue, anachronisms, 21st century points of view, etc. And on Saturday night I'll be talking about my life as a writer and how I go about it my work. I'm looking forward to it. So, a big thank you to the Northland branch of the NZSA for inviting me.








 

Swearing in the time of William IV

What I’ve been reading: Laurie Graham; At Sea and Perfect Meringues and The Ten O’Clock Horses; Catharine Arnold; Necropolis: London and its Dead and City of Sin: London and its Vices; Ginny Redington Dawes with Olivia Collings, Georgian Jewellery 1714-1830

I’m looking out the window at a beautiful, sunny, Newcastle winter day, which makes a change from the spectacularly foul weather we’ve been having here lately. Apparently we’ve had the most rain in July in 21 years, or something. Australians are great ones for comparisons - it’s always the hottest day since 1962, or the worst floods since 1939, or the biggest cyclone since the last biggest one. As bad as New Zealanders when it comes to the weather.

I’ve been enjoying the rain and wind, though. Reminds me of home. Except for last Thursday, when the Surfer and I drove down to Sydney for the weekend. The weather was atrocious. The wind was almost gale force, the rain was sideways, you could barely see the road and we lost a hub cap and that bit of trim that goes along the side of the car.

We went down because I had a meeting with my publisher, HarperCollins Australia. Work on the new book is trotting along nicely, but the Surfer didn’t get to surf because the waves were a murderous four metres at all the beaches. Coming across the harbour from Manly to Circular Quay on the ferry was great fun – the swell was HUGE.



Nobby's Beach, Newcastle, a few weeks ago.



Sydney, view of South Head from North Head, last weekend



And now I’m back at my desk polishing the manuscript – ‘polishing’ being a euphemism for fixing all the bad bits – so it can be ripped apart again at the next meeting. It’s a long process, editing, but always worth it.

The Research

I admit there is a hint of swearing in this new series, so people offended by foul language will just have to read with their hands over their ears. But it’s about convicts and various characters from the underworld in the 1830s, and therefore hard to avoid. So I’ll just dive in here.

Interestingly, the word f***ing, and I’m referring to the ‘ing’ part, didn’t come into use until c.1840, although the obscene f*** by itself first appeared in writing in 1503. The etymology of the actual word isn’t clear, but it doesn’t come from ‘fornicate under command of the King’ as is popularly thought. I’ve occasionally used f***ing anyway, despite the anachronism, because it has the 21^st century impact I’m looking for. Bloody, as in ‘you bloody bastard’, just doesn’t cut it, even though back then bloody was considered a foul word and was very popular with the London underworld. Or anyone who felt like swearing, really.

Shit has been in constant use since the 14^th century, so not much has changed there. Bugger comes from the French bougre, which came from the Latin Bulgaris. Something to do with a sect of allegedly homosexual Albigensian heretics, apparently. It originally meant sodomy, as defined by England’s Buggery Act of 1533, but by the 19^th century bugger had become a general and versatile swear word.

C***, which has Greek origins, appears to have started out as a descriptive word rather than obscene. There was a Gropec***elane in the brothel area of Southwark c. 1230, and Lanfranc of Milan used it when writing about surgery in 1400. But by the end of the 17^th century it had become legally obscene and you could be prosecuted for printing it. That didn’t stop people saying it, though.   

Which all goes to show that there’s nothing new under the sun. Note that most of this information is not the result of my own painstaking research – I’ve pinched a lot of it from a fascinating tome called Slang Down the Ages: the historical development of slang by Jonathon Green (Kyle Cathie Ltd, 2003). Very handy book. In future posts I’ll look at insults from the 18^th and 19^th centuries – much more colourful than swearing – and the fascinating subject of cant, the language of London’s criminals.

So who was William IV?

I decided when I started this blog I’d post regularly every three weeks or so, and look, I’ve got behind already. Perhaps I shouldn’t have started when I was rushing to get the draft of the new book finished. Well, it is finished now, and I’ll be spending the next month or so editing it.

For me, this means fixing (hopefully minor) plot holes (quick note to self – sort out where Angus the cat has ended up), adjusting pace so there are no boring bits, reworking ugly sentences and stilted dialogue, and fixing silly mistakes, eg. characters whose brown eyes in chapter three have turned blue by chapter eleven. Spell-checker deals with (most) spelling mistakes, though I always leave the grammar-checker turned off. This is because correct grammar can ruin dialogue and, I find, wreaks havoc with what I like to think of as my ‘voice’. Also, frankly, I’m not very good at grammar and wouldn’t know what’s ‘correct’ anyway. Clearly I wasn’t listening at school during that bit of the curriculum.

     

After this the manuscript goes to my publisher, where it gets edited several more times. This is a long and extremely thorough process, and then there’s the cover and all that sort of thing to be done, so it’ll be ages before this book appears in the book shops. In the meantime I’ll be starting work on the next volume in the series.

The Research

I’m contemplating writing a few paragraphs on swearing during the era of William IV, seeing as that’s the time period for the new series and it’s an interesting subject, but first who was William IV and when did he reign?

Well, William IV was the third son of George III, and brother of George IV. George IV had been Prince of Wales (or Prince of Whales, as he was known, because he weighed 17 stone) and was George III’s first son. The second son, Frederick, died before his chance came to get on the throne. To see the most excellent Oscar-winning film about George III, check out ‘The Madness of King George’, 1994, on DVD with Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren.

When George IV died in June 1830, leaving no surviving children, William succeeded and reigned until he died in June 1837, also leaving no children, after which Victoria, as heiress presumptive, became queen. Victoria’s father Edward had been George III’s fourth son, who had died in 1820, the same year as his father, leaving Victoria his only surviving heir.

William’s reign is sometimes included in the somewhat all-encompassing term ‘the Georgian era’ named for Georges I-IV, and even more loosely lumped into ‘the Regency period’, due to George IV having been the Prince Regent from 1810 to 1820, when he took the throne on his father’s death, depending on what site you look at on the internet. But neither term fits particularly well, given that all the Georges had slipped their clogs by the time it was William’s turn.

It’s strongly suspected that George III had the dreadful blood disease porphyria, which turns your wee purple and can cause severe mental disturbance. He talked incessantly and obscenely, which brings me back to bad language. Swearing in the late 1830s was different to swearing now – more words to choose from for a start – but I’ve run out of space so I’ll consider the subject in more detail next time.