18th Century Sources

Oct 15

3 min read

Sifting years of research, I do my best to present 18th century England in all its bestial beauty. Here are some of my favorite references:

Rosamund Bayne-Powell Books: Travellers in 18th Century England, Housekeeping in the 18th Century, English Country Life in the Eighteenth Century, The English Child in the Eighteenth Century, Eighteenth Century London Life

RBP wrote mainly in the 30s and 40s. Her books on English life in the 18th century are a revelation, peppered throughout with gritty detail, narrative wit, and copious direct voice examples from letters and journals of those who lived in the period. She will craft her point, list data and general conclusions as all historians must, but she homes in on real world examples that let the reader judge these early UK citizens for themselves.

Her books are eminently readable, each one flows almost like a novel, and her folksy diction gets you into the spirit of it all. One favorite example is from Travellers in 18th Century England, which sounds boring as hell but I couldn't put it down- so don't let the titles fool you! My example from this particular book is a character named Sophie de la Roche, who despite her name was a young woman from Germany, who traveled to England in the early half of the century. She's privileged and certainly has some wealth about her, and at first she's only used as a cheerful counterpoint to all those letters left to us from people who wept and moaned over the deplorables state of the English roads at that time. Sophie postively enjoys traveling by coach through the countryside, an attitude which the author takes note of, quipping "but then nothing tiresome ever seemed to happen to Sophie."

This turns out to be more true than any casual reader would expect, when we learn that Sophie and her friends were at one time held at gunpoint by a young highwayman. The ladies could see the lad was very nervous, being new to the trade, and they set to bravely arguing with him, pointing out that such a career was only likely to end in a noose. To his great fortune the young man listened to them, and went his way. Arriving in London the women took up a collection among themselves, pooling 150 guineas and taking out a newspaper ad to try to track the man down, offering him a profitable interview for his trouble. Well the would-be highwayman saw their article, met the women, accepted the money in grateful shock, and apparently retired from the city to start a reformed life under the care of his uncle. We know this because he wrote to them declaring they were his guardian angels, and included the eternal gratitude of his uncle.

These real world stories paint vivid pictures of the actual lives of people in the country so long ago, in a society we know now had a great deal more problems than our own, and was only just beginning to learn how human beings really should treat each other. This kind of granular history is a joy for me, when it comes to both reading and research, and helps me to write plots and characters, because it reminds me that just as today, everyone living then had a reason for what they did, even when they were wrong. In 1735 England the moral depravities expressed through racial and sexual descrimination, and the inequalities of class, cannot be exaggerated, but beneath those systems of privilege and poverty were real people, of all backgrounds, just trying to live their lives.

A Pocket Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

By Captain Francis Grose first published in 1785, this little book has been a great source for euphemisms of the period, slang, nicknames, shorthand and all sorts of day-to-day stress-easing turns of phrase.

A few standouts:

Cull: a man, honest or otherwise, though a low term often used to describe the patron of a brothel. Offensively mild, 4 out of 10.

Diddle: gin. Being 1735 falls straight in the heart of the "gin epidemic," there were more nicknames for gin than almost anything else. Formally called Geneva, other nicknames include blue lady, juniper water, jackey, max, sangree, heart's ease and make shift (possibly where we get the phrase!) many of these being invented to encode talk of gin manufacture, which was increasingly (and ineptly) regulated.