Searching for the sites in "My Inconvenient Duke"

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Ready for lunch at Ye Olde Cock Tavern

Please brace yourself for some extremely nerdy history—and yes, let’s start by saying I can get a little obsessive about historical details.

For the most part, when writing my stories, I’m living in the past, via books (some of them quite old and crumbling) and online sites. Every book also requires me to consult several maps, from different years. Coordinating between the early 1800s and the 2020s helps me work out distances (not always clear on old maps) and helps me calculate travel times (via online tools + aforesaid crumbling books).

So, yes, I do my best to be accurate. But when I’m in London, I can’t resist checking: finding the places and making sure I got things right. There’s also the thrill of finding a building, for instance, that’s still there. It doesn’t matter if I already know it’s still there. I get excited, as I did the day I was walking alongside the Thames in Richmond, and saw, peeping out over the trees, the top of what I felt certain was Asgill House, aka Ithaca House, where Raven Radford’s parents live in Dukes Prefer Blondes. Yes, I knew it was in Richmond, close to the river—hadn’t I researched the daylights out of it? All the same, to stand in front of it and get a sense of the environment was a joy, which I shared with you in my Asgill House post.

Another place I knew still existed was the Cock Tavern, where Blackwood meets Maggie Proudie, in My Inconvenient Duke. It dates to the 1500s, though changes have occurred. The most startling one—and the one I forgot when I was standing in Fleet Street, baffled (this often happens, as I have no sense of direction)—was that it had moved across the street in the 1880s, fifty years after the time of the story. Then, in the 1990s, a fire destroyed the interior. It was rebuilt, using old photographs, but it does not look as it did in the 1880s, as you can see if you view some of the images at the London Picture Archives.

What it looked like in 1832 is anybody’s guess. I suspect that the sort of layout we see in the 1880s (Image #3) isn’t completely different from the 1830s. It very likely would have had boxes (in the U.S. we call them booths) similar to those in Image #4, a Thomas Rowlandson print of 1800, of another tavern on Fleet Street, either the Rainbow or the Wheatsheaf.

Another, much more elusive location was the site of the Holland Arms, which became the Lovedon Arms in the Blackwoods’ story. I knew that the inn no longer existed, but I wanted to find where it used to be, an interesting challenge in the Kensington High Street. As mentioned in my notes to the book, the Holland Arms was also referred to as the White Hart and the White Horse in some sources.

Image #1 shows it as the White Hart on the travel map in Cecil Aldin’s The Romance of the Road. Image #2 is an 1832 map of the area of Kensington where Blackwood and Alice search for Ripley. The 1827 map in Image #3 pinpoints two locations: the Holland Arms/White Hart/White Horse to the left and the toll gate to the right. #4 is the Holland Arms as it appeared in Leigh Hunt’s The Old Court Suburb (1855). #5 and #6 show where it stood. That’s me, looking triumphant, once I felt sure this was the place. Image #7 is the Kensington tollgate. And #8 was the big surprise. I kept looking at the building and wondering if that had been a tollgate. After double and triple checking the location, I feel reasonably certain that this was site of the Kensington tollgate. I know the gates were abolished in 1865. However, I don’t know if the toll-keeper’s building survived. Is this the original building, renovated? Another building erected on the site? What’s its current function? More sleuthing required.

The London Transport Museum

Characters have to get from one place to another. In the time of my stories, they could travel on horseback, in a private carriage (or lesser vehicle, like a farm cart), or via public transport. Though I’ve spent time before at the London Transport Museum, I always discover something I’ve missed or forgotten. And this visit offered a fresh opportunity to share a bit of this wonderful museum, and perhaps help readers visualize the world of my stories.

London was a vastly different, and definitely smaller, place then. Kensington was “the Old Court Suburb,” and the Notting Hill of My Inconvenient Duke was rural, with gravel pits and piggeries and brick making. I’m currently staying in Notting Hill, among antique shops and not-inexpensive clothing stores and fine restaurants. The “Porto Bello Lane” of my story is Portobello Road, crowded on market days with dealers and tourists. Shops and housing line the streets.

I can hop on a bus a short walk from my place, while an almost-as-short walk takes me to a Tube Station.

My characters had to travel via other means, but, given the traffic, not necessarily more speedily. Depending on the time of day, I suspect the bus would move only a little more quickly than Blackwood and Alice did.

Some notes about the images:

The museum includes not only prints of construction under way in London, but also scale models. And let us bear in mind that virtually all of this work was done by hand, with a few mechanical devices to help. Artist George Scharf made many drawings of numerous demolition and construction projects in London. It’s the closest we can come to photographs, before photography happened. You can find many of his works in the British Museum’s online collection.

The horse is all-important throughout the Regency and Victorian eras. Although the photograph of the stables is much later than the time of my stories, it gives a sense of the great number of horses needed for the various kinds of transport. Huge stables like these filled vast blocks in and about the coaching inns. At a future date, I hope to show a map of the George Inn, which Alice and Blackwood visit in search of Jonesy . Today, one may see a remnant—a rare example of the galleried coaching inns—and a fraction of what one would have encountered in its heyday.

If you’ve been subscribing to this blog for a while, you’ve probably seen the image of a hackney cabriolet before. When I mention vehicles speeding along the London streets or “occasionally throwing out passengers,” this is the vehicle. It’s a nice model of a single-passenger vehicle, but there were cabs that could hold two people, not very comfortably.

Once again, I have to apologize for the randomness of some of the images. My available technology while traveling is limited, and procedures possible on my laptop are not possible on my tablet. This is why—among other things—the omnibus information and images are not in proper sequence.

What they wear in "My Inconvenient Duke"

Margaret Sarah Carpenter, Portrait of Lady Harriet Georgiana Brudenell (1799-1836), married Richard William Penn Curzon-Howe, 2nd Viscount Curzon (later 1st Earl Howe) in 1820. Portrait date 1834.

I’ll be the first to admit that 1830s women’s fashions are baffling and not necessarily attractive to 21st century eyes. But for a writer, they offer solid gold material. The male characters marvel at what the women are wearing, although these men are mainly preoccupied with a strategy for getting the lady out of the clothing. And if a man gets lucky, and gets to test his strategy, the process makes for fun, because there are so many layers, and one must deal with tapes and buttons and hooks and eyes. Oh, and those sleeve puffs, too.

As I’ve mentioned more than once, I also like the way women made themselves so big with these ensembles—not simply the big sleeves and swelling skirts, but also their hair and their headwear. The 1700s had big hair, and so did the 1980s, but the knots and rolls and swirls of the 1830s are something else altogether. It’s amazing what they could do without our blow dryers and gels and pastes and lacquers. Instead, it’s pomatum (aka pomade, and made of grease of some kind and natural scents) and pins and various hairpieces. There’s nothing shy and retiring about these fashions. And none of the “less is more” way of thinking. It’s “more is more.” And I find it fascinating and stimulating.

Of course, when you read, you’ll picture the clothing in a way that’s appealing to you—and that’s as it should be. Reading let us use our imagination.

Even when I write descriptions, I usually keep details to a minimum. This is partly not to slow down the story but also to allow readers to make the mental image they want. For instance, in Chapter 2 of My Inconvenient Duke, Lady Alice wears “a redingote of deep onyx.” That’s it. Not that I’ve been able to discover where that came from. After searching my numerous books and the images on my hard drive, I’ve begun to suspect that I made it up or created one dress from a couple of fashion descriptions.

But a redingote is, basically, a close-fitting (from the waist up) dress that fastens all the way down the front, like a coat. And the color onyx is not mysterious, unlike so many other fashionable color names one encounters.

In the gallery below you’ll see most of the clothing mentioned in the book. Many of the images will be slightly distorted. This is because I photographed them from my copy of the 1832-33 The World of Fashion, in which the monthly magazine is bound. It’s very old, very thick, and I don’t have the right (i.e., expensive) kind of scanner for this kind of work.