Lord of Scoundrels & Bertie's Overworked Porter

This year, Avon Books celebrate their Diamond Anniversary. Among other events and activities, each month they highlight a  "classic" Avon title. It started in January with Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower. February was Johanna Lindsey's Gentle Rogue. March was Julia Quinn's Dancing at Midnight. April highlighted Rachel Gibson's Simply Irresistible. May starred my hero Susan Elizabeth Phillips's It Had To Be You. (She made me care about football!!!)

June is—as you may have deduced, what with this blog post and all—my Lord of Scoundrels. Avon will be doing a read/reread-along, as well as offering the eBook for $1.99 for the entire month of June (with apologies to readers outside North America, the offer applies to the U.S. and Canada only).

Porter of Paris

As I try to do from time to time, I'll offer a few background notes on the book. With Lord of Scoundrels, it's quite an experience, since I wrote the book before I had access to the Internet, and well before Google and others started scanning and posting online the ancient tomes I had to go into the bowels of libraries to find. And they were not searchable! You turned crusty, dusty pages, looking for what you wanted in magazine collections, for instance, that were not indexed.

So, when I installed a porter in the apartment building in Paris in which Bertie Trent lives at the story's start, I depended mainly on Frances Trollope’s Paris and the Parisians in 1835.** As is normally the case in travel writings, the author’s attitudes and prejudices color her observations. I try to give my English characters similar viewpoints, though I may tone them down a bit, so as not to jar my readers too much. It's always a balancing act, finding a happy medium between 19th and 21st century outlooks. I want to use a little of  the "foreigners are not as cool as we are" attitude, both for comic effect and because that outlook is hardly unheard of today. But a little goes a long way.

I do think Ms. Trollope is fairly balanced in this particular context. From what I've read elsewhere, the position of the apartment building porter entailed a great deal more than that of the porter in a large English establishment, where many other servants, especially footmen, were available to perform various tasks. But read for yourself—and you may want to go on reading, by clicking on the link below to this section of Paris and the Parisians, now online.

~~~

Another accommodation which habit has made it extremely difficult for French families to dispense with, and which can be enjoyed at an easy price only by sharing it with many, is a porter and a porter's lodge. Active as is the race of domestic servants in Paris, their number must, I think, be doubled in many families, were the arrangement of the porter's lodge to be changed for our system of having a servant summoned etime a parcel, a message, a letter, or a visit arrives at the house.

Nor does the taking charge of these by any means comprise the whole duty of this servant of many masters; neither am I at all competent to say exactly what does: but it seems to me that the answer I generally receive upon desiring that anything may be done is, " Oui, madame, le portier ou la portiere fera cela;" and were we suddenly deprived of these factotums, I suspect that we should be immediately obliged to leave our apartments and take refuge in an hôtel, for I should be quite at a loss to know what or how many additional "helps" would be necessary to enable us to exist without them.—Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 1835, Letter XXXVI.

Images: Parisian Porter from James Jackson Jarves’ Parisian Sights and French Principles: Seen Through American Spectacles (1853). Street scene: Eduard Gaertner, Rue Neuve Notre Dame à Paris, 1826.

 

The Grecian Style Bed & the Cupid Clock

Grecian style bed

Part 4 of my guide to Dukes Prefer Blondes*—

“The bed was a modern one in the Grecian style, with bare-breasted females supporting the bedposts. Apt enough. Lady Clara ought to have a pair of caryatids at the foot of the bed, guarding the goddess’s temple. Other Grecian-style articles looked on from the mantelpiece. An elaborate urn clock dominated the center. Cupid stood on its pedestal, pointing to the time on the revolving band encircling the urn.”

This bed in Ackermann’s Repository for October 1828 was my inspiration.


As to the clock: I was looking through Eric Bruton’s fascinating History of Clocks & Watches** when I came upon the lovely time-keeper below right, made in the later 1700s. According to the book, it’s in the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague—unfortunately, closed, from what I could ascertain during my online search for a better image.

I found some other annular urn clocks online, most from a later period.

c.1900 French Miniature Figured Green Marble and Gilt-Bronze Annular Urn Clock with Cherub.

French 19th Century Louis Xvi St. Marble And Ormolu Annular Clock.

Leroy & Cie Louis XVI-Style Annular Clock.

Gubelin Alabaster & Bronze Annular Clock.

*A version of this post has appeared at the Two Nerdy History Girls blog.

**The book has provided inspiration for other watches and clocks in my stories, most notably the naughty pocket watch in Lord of Scoundrels.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

 

The Old Bailey

The Old Bailey, from Ackermann's Microcosm of London.

Part 3 of my guide to Dukes Prefer Blondes (originally posted at Two Nerdy History Girls).

Several scenes in Dukes Prefer Blondes occur in or around the Old Bailey. Since this area is rather different now from what it was in the early 1800s, I highly recommend the Proceedings of the Old Bailey online, where I researched not only the building and environs, but my criminals and court cases.

“The Old Bailey, also known as Justice Hall, the Sessions House, and the Central Criminal Court, was named after the street in which it was located, just off Newgate Street and next to Newgate Prison, in the western part of the City of London. Over the centuries the building has been periodically remodelled and rebuilt in ways which both reflected and influenced the changing ways trials were carried out and reported.”

You can read more about its evolution here, as well as pinpoint the Sessions House (where trials were held) and Newgate Prison, conveniently located next door.

The color image of an Old Bailey trial is a couple of decades before the time of the story, but according to the website, the “basic design of the courtroom remained the same.”

Here’s an interesting historical detail from the Old Bailey site:

“Before the introduction of gas lighting in the early nineteenth century a mirrored reflector was placed above the bar, in order to reflect light from the windows onto the faces of the accused. This allowed the court to examine their facial expressions assess the validity of their testimony. In addition, a sounding board was placed over their heads in order to amplify their voices.”

Old Bailey scene 1848

By the time of the George Cruikshank illustration in 1848, the gas lights were in and the reflector was gone—although I’d think they could still use the sounding board.

Images: Thomas Rowlandson, “The Old Bailey,” from Ackermann’s Microcosm of London, Vol 2, courtesy Internet Archive.

George Cruikshank, “From the bar of the gin shop to the bar of the Old Bailey it is but one step,” from The Bottle in Eight Plates (1848), Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.