The Regency Miss's Survival Guide to Bath

The book I have been researching for is out, and has been described by author Susana Ellis as 'Meticulously Researched'.  It's almost all from primary sources, local newspapers and extant period guidebooks.  All you need to know about travelling to Bath and living there ... between 1810 and 1820.

The Regency Miss’s Survival Guide to Bath is now available!  This book is written for Regency writers and readers alike who love the romance of Bath. It is not a history of Bath, nor its famous sons, it is a book about the everyday things a Regency Heroine might get up to, and what entertainments were available for her delight.

I laboured long and hard to put hyperlinks in the kindle version, I hope I have covered every link needed!

Paperback

UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1688066799

US https://www.amazon.com/dp/1688066799

Kindle

UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07WZJJYFS

US https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WZJJYFS

The Botanical Gardens, Paris, 1815

The next few posts will be celebrating the release of the fourth Brandon Scandal 'The Wandering Widow' with a few gratuitious pictures to illustrate the notes from the back of the book.

this is the pergola on a hill that Leo speculated might have been a mound of rubbish that couldn't be got rid of it, so they made a garden feature of it

The Botanical Gardens in the 5^th Arrondissment were set up under the direction of Louis XIII for the study of medicinal plants by doctors.  The gardens are large and cover many types of plants.  The director of the gardens in 1815, Jean-Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck is the founder of the theory of inheritance of acquired traits on which Charles Darwin built his theory of evolution; indeed, Lamark can be said to be the father of the theory of evolution.  He survived the revolution by changing the name of the gardens from Jardin du Roi to Jardin Des Plantes.  A previous administrator and naturalist, George-Louis Declerc, Comte de Buffon, is commemorated by the pergola on the hill of the labyrinth which the characters visited.  

Plan of the gardens.  Our heroes were staying on the Rue Geoffroy St-Hilaire

A French fashion plate.  The pergola here isn't raised on an eminence, but I wonder if the artist was inspired by the Jardin Botanique? 

 

and here we find Leo and Letty in a Paris which still has narrow streets with medieval buildings, before the redesign of the city in 1848 after the year of revolutions

What the well-equipped milord of Jane Austen's time needs

A big estate like Pemberley had a large number of dependents and estate workers who needed housing, and who managed the various duties that kept the estate prosperous.  As well as the home farm with its various workers there may have been tenant farmers holding land to farm and whose rents took the place of produce grown; there would have been coverts for birds to shoot for sport and for the table, managed woodland perhaps, and gardens both for the enjoyment of the owner and his family, and for the kitchen garden.


The construction of attractive and decorative and cleanly cottages for the estate workers, called cottages orné, according to the principles of William Atkinson, have been thoroughly blogged by Kathryn Kane   here  and here and here.  Worth a read, so do go take a look if you have not already done so.  The idea of nice cottages was so popular that Ackermann's repository published several ideas of such cottages.  And I have to say some of them were rather larger than what I would call a cottage; though as Kat points out, the conceit of having a large 'cottage in the country' was sometimes one that attracted wealthy men too, whose sensibility to aesthetic pleasure probably exceeded their common sense.  I do not apologise for showing a fairly wide selection before moving on to specialist buildings.

Thi

This one at least was a moderately sensible idea, having four cottages together to keep each other warm in winter.  I remark upon this in passing in an as yet to be published romance called 'None so Blind'. 

... and this one is a rich man's beach hut.  As the blurb about it says, Splendour and magnificence are made subordinate to the calmer enjoyments of domestic felicity... 
I doubt the tween maid felt much domestic felicity about looking after the master in his rustic conceit.

However, enough about cottages ornés;and on to the specialist buildings Ackermann's considered essential to illustrate.
First, on entering the estate, the estate gatehouse or lodge  is required both to show status and to indicate where the entrance is [having driven around the wilder countryside frantically looking for places, believe me this IS necessary; you do not want to get stuck in the muddy ruts of any old farm track and spoil your muslins with muddy splashes when you have an invitation to a house party with Mr and Mrs Fitzwilliam Darcy!]. The gatehouse needs a gatekeeper and possibly his wife to turn away the unwanted callers and direct those who are going in the right direction.

The house itself will have various necessary adjuncts like a chapel: 

And as cleanliness is next to Godliness, one must have the ornamental bath in the garden, since once the difficulties engendered by difficult to remove dress and powder in the hair were no longer in force this impediment being removed, it is probable that baths will be employed by us as common and frequent sources of innocent pleasure as well as for medicinal relief. And a relief to the noses of all around them too... The writer pontificates about Roman baths for a while and suggests warm as well as cold baths.  I bet the servants loved trekking across to the bath house to stoke the means of heating the warm bath.

What else does the man of leisure need?  ah yes, the fishing lodge.  No home should be without one.  Note: first make sure you have at least a good sized stream for your fish. 

It looks like another cottage orné to me...

For the comfort of the family and all those ice creams and sorbets, the ice house of course on which I have already written here

Oh but to make those ice creams, the cream is needed - so of course a dairy, served no doubt by a buxom dairy maid and no cows in sight, or perhaps in a field to look attractive and far enough away not to smell at the house guests, or look menacingly large at the ladies.

And of course for the vegetables, a gardener must have a gardener's cottage:

compact and bijou, the way posh vegetables should also be.

And of course all those tenants and estate workers in their cottages ornés will need a bailiff to make sure they pay their rent, don't damage the nice new cottages, nor moon at the master's company.

So, gentle reader, what plot bunnies have you in mind?  will your heroine, like my heroine Penelope, hasten to shout at the bold bad land owner who is pulling down the tenants' cottages only for her to find out that he is replacing them with ideal cottages instead, but showing him her spirit?  Will a house party with an ornamental bath turn up one member too few, because he or she turns out to have been drowned - and was it an accident or was it foul play?  Is the ornamental chapel the scene for impious young bloods emulating the Hell Fire Club, and is the heroine abducted for their debaucheries?  Will your fishing party at the fishing lodge catch something unexpected that has drifted downstream?   Will the gatekeeper alert Mr Veryrich to tell him that a man has driven neatly in through the narrow gates as though he was a top sawyer but being missing his head is hardly likely to be driving them nags, sir?

Ice Houses

What would life be like without ice-cream? consider all those Regency heroines beguiled by a visit to Gunter's for ice cream, and too all the exotic dishes served at the feasts of the gentry necessitating ice in their manufacture.  Where would they be without a means to procure ice in midsummer?  here we come to the humble ice house that flourished long before anyone invented the freezer. 

The ice house was, in general, introduced into Britain in the mid 17th century according to Wikipedia, however as I have several much earlier recipes that call for ice I am half inclined to dispute this - ice was imported to Britain from Norway  up to the 19th century, but it would seem strange indeed if one spent a lot of money on ice and could not then store it.  The Country House Kitchen  [Sambrook and Brears, Sutton publishing 1996] conjectures that the ice conserve may have been copied from Spanish examples in Grenada, and cites those built in Greenwich Park and Hampton Court grounds in 1618 and 1626, and mentions earlier Elizabethan ones, and explains that it was with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 that such structures became more widespread and commonplace, in imitation of the luxury of which Charles had partaken in exile in France.
I  conjecture that the  expensively imported ice was stored in cold cellars, well insulated, before the idea of separate ice houses was thought of.  In 'Farmer Boy' by Laura Ingalls Wilder, set in pioneer America, the ice cut from the nearby lake was stored in straw in a cellar and kept well enough to provide ice for ice creams, so it is possible.  As ice houses were not commonly marked on estate maps [thanks to Adrian Howlett for that information] it could also be that any earlier ice houses were just lost, especially if not of the refined, below ground design that was developed later.

Francis Bacon  first proved that ice can preserve meat by stuffing a fowl with snow.  He famously caught pneumonia and died of it, which proves my contention that clever men almost always have no common sense.  However it was not usually for the preservation of food that ice was used but to make iced creams and other confections; though by the 1820's, JC Loudon is advocating the use of the outer part of the ice house to freeze surplus fruit to use through the winter as well as discussing the siting and building of them as part of estate design [Encyclopaedia of Gardening, Loudon, 1822]. [available on Google Books]

The basic concept of the ice house is simple enough; that it should, ideally, be on a north facing slope, be largely underground if possible or with very thick walls if not, with a drain dug below to carry away any melting water.  Some were loaded from above through a hole in the usually domed ceiling, some through the door.  The ice was pounded down and then packed tightly where it froze into so solid a mass it needed picks or mattocks to dig it out as required.  Straw around the edges of the room helped to insulate it, and the passageway into the icehouse was also packed with straw for insulation.  Ideally it was also near water, partly for the cooling effect of the same, and partly so that there was less far to carry the ice when it was cut in winter to be stored.  It must be remembered that the mini ice age was in full swing from the 17th century  until 1814, and the winters still very cold for a long while after that. 
Though the design in the Encyclopaedia  is from 1822 the design is very similar to others of earlier times too and did not change significantly in anything but detail, including the one recently excavated in Ipswich, in Holywells Park which was mid Victorian and probably built in the 1860's by John Chevalier Cobbold who was responsible for much building work.  [My thanks for information on that to local historian and Holywells Park expert,  Adrian Howlett, whose 2004 dissertation included a map of the same taken from living memory of its situation before it was razed and filled in.].  Adrian has kindly permitted me to use two of his own photographs of a similar ice house:

this narrow entrance through the thickness of the walls shows how deeply tucked away the ice was kept. Photograph Adrian Howlett, copyright

the typical domed roof of an ice-house, this one has a small hole, presumably for evaporation to avoid condensation and the build up of unwanted water, some had access to the ice house through the roof with a chute for the ice. Photograph Adrian Howlett, copyright

Ice houses were either hidden away out of sight, or made to be decorative features in a landscape; Sambrook and Brears tell us:

"The early nineteenth-century architect and landscape designer, J.B. Papworth, designed a number of ice-houses in the styles of Egyptian temples and country cottages.  The ice house at Myerscough Farm in Lancashire is a small version of Papworth's Egyptian temple, and those at Buckland in Oxfordshire and Newbattle Abbey in Lothian were hidden behind classical facades."  [Sambrook and Brears 1996]

And the reason I was inspired to write this post was the discovery of some decorative ice-houses in Ackermann's Repository which I was browsing HERE a wonderful online source.  
So here they are, delightfully far from utilitarian! one from 1817 and one JUST inside the Regency in 1820.

 

So now, the challenge for the authors who use my page is to find a way to use an ice house.  Will it be the relatively prosaic wonder of a poor relation being served ice cream from an estate ice house?  will a heroine fleeing from some fate worse than death run to hide in an ice house, unaware of the drop into the ice at the end of the passage, finding herself out of the frying pan and into the - er, ice, in deadly peril of freezing to death, only to be rescued by the hero and finding her thin muslin suddenly transparent as the ice melts outside?  will some villain use the ice house to conceal a body and keep it from decomposition to hide the time of death to permit the last will and testament of some other person to devolve upon whoever is kept on ice?


Thanks to Frances Bevan for providing a link to her blog with regards to the ice house at Lydiard Park, Swindon HERE


Additional information, 11/8/13, regarding the use of saltpetre for cooling which might be used instead of, or in conjunction with, ice from an ice house, on Kathryn Kane's excellent blog, HERE