Sold out - but don't panic!

A High Wind in the Park! 1819. 

I had some very good news this morning - A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England has sold out! However, Pen and Sword have scheduled a re-release for the end of November, and you can pre-order here (especially as it would make a lovely Christmas present for a Jane Austen fan!) Alternatively, there are still a few print copies left on Amazon UK and Amazon US, and of course you can still buy my book on Kindle while it's unavailable in print form.

New Release: Tracing Your Manchester and Salford Ancestors

I'm thrilled to announce that Tracing Your Manchester and Salford Ancestors has been released early! It's currently on special offer here on the Pen & Sword website, and should soon be in stock on Amazon.

Suffragist Lydia E. Becker.

Here's the blurb:
'For readers with family ties to Manchester and Salford, and researchers delving into the rich history of these cities, this informative, accessible guide will be essential reading and a fascinating source of reference. 
    Sue Wilkes outlines the social and family history of the region in a series of concise chapters. She discusses the origins of its religious and civic institutions, transport systems and major industries. Important local firms and families are used to illustrate aspects of local heritage, and each section directs the reader towards appropriate resources for their research. No previous knowledge of genealogy is assumed and in-depth reading on particular topics is recommended. The focus is on records relating to Manchester and Salford, including current districts and townships, and sources for religious and ethnic minorities are covered. A directory of the relevant archives, libraries, academic repositories, databases, societies, websites and places to visit, is a key feature of this practical book'.

Salford hero Mark Addy.

Tomorrow, I'm visiting the WDYTYA Live! show at the NEC, and if all goes to plan, I'll be signing copies of my new book at the Pen & Sword stand. Hope to see you there!

Black-and-white images from Manchester Faces and Places, Vol. I, J.G. Hammond & Co., c.1889. 

Manchester New Synagogue and Beth Hamedrash, Cheetham Hill.

Life In the Georgian Court

Today I'd like to welcome the fabulous Catherine Curzon to my blog. Catherine's new book Life In the Georgian Court has just been published by Pen & Sword, and I'm sure it will be a must-read for fans of that era! 

The Greedy End of a Gluttonous King

Whilst researching my book, Life in the Georgian Court, I came across no shortage of dramatic stories and tragic deaths. From smallpox to strangulation, guillotine to gangrene, our 18th century royals didn’t always die the most peaceful deaths.

Spare a thought then for Adolf Frederick, the King of Sweden who met his end on 12th February 1771 not by bullet or beneath the battlefield bayonets, but as a victim of pudding.

 When the Swedish monarch settled down to enjoy a meal that, as the saying goes, really was fit for a king, he wasn’t in the mood for a simple snack. This well-liked king enjoyed nothing more than indulgence and on this day, he was going to indulge himself like no man had before.

As the hours drew on, he tucked into lobster, caviar, sauerkraut and kippers in abundance, the seemingly endless procession of food barely slowing as the evening passed. The ravenous monarch devoured everything that was set before him, swilling it down with glass after glass of the finest champagne. Yet for every plate that he cleared, Adolf Frederick still had room for more.

One of the king’s favourite desserts was a dessert known as semla, a sweet roll popular in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Most diners would content themselves with one or, with a very sweet tooth, maybe two of these super-indulgent treats but at Adolf ’s last meal, the king just kept on going. This was the last meal before Lent so the king was determined to feed himself up, and nothing was going to stop him.

To finish his meal, Adolf wanted semlas… lots of semlas; fourteen portions served in hot milk, to be exact. Once the greedy king was finally sated, he retired to his chambers where his stomach began to grumble and soon, so did he. Adolf died that same day; whether his last meal contributed to his demise we cannot be certain, but posterity has recorded Adolf as the king who ate himself to death, the victim of one semla too many.

About the Author

Catherine Curzon is a royal historian and blogs on all matters 18th century at A Covent Garden Gilflurt's Guide to Life.

Her work has featured by publications including BBC History Extra, All About History, History of Royals, Explore History and Jane Austen’s Regency World. She has also provided additional material for the sell-out theatrical show, An Evening with Jane Austen, which she will introduce at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, in September (tickets are available here).

Catherine holds a Master’s degree in Film and when not dodging the furies of the guillotine, she lives in Yorkshire atop a ludicrously steep hill.

Her book, Life in the Georgian Court, is available now from Amazon UK, Amazon US, Book Depository and all good bookshops!

About Life in the Georgian Court

As the glittering Hanoverian court gives birth to the British Georgian era, a golden age of royalty dawns in Europe. Houses rise and fall, births, marriages and scandals change the course of history and in France, Revolution stalks the land.

Peep behind the shutters of the opulent court of the doomed Bourbons, the absolutist powerhouse of Romanov Russia and the epoch-defining family whose kings gave their name to the era, the House of Hanover.

Behind the pomp and ceremony were men and women born into worlds of immense privilege, yet beneath the powdered wigs and robes of state were real people living lives of romance, tragedy, intrigue and eccentricity. Take a journey into the private lives of very public figures and learn of arranged marriages that turned to love or hate and scandals that rocked polite society.

Here the former wife of a king spends three decades in lonely captivity, Prinny makes scandalous eyes at the toast of the London stage and Marie Antoinette begins her last, terrible journey through Paris as her son sits alone in a forgotten prison cell.

Life in the Georgian Court is a privileged peek into the glamorous, tragic and iconic courts of the Georgian world, where even a king could take nothing for granted.

Jane Austen and the 'Infamous Mistress' Connection

Grace Dalyrmple Elliott - Met Museum.

Today I'd like to give a warm welcome to fellow Pen and Sword authors Joanne Major and Sarah Murden, authors of An Infamous Mistress - a biography of Grace Dalrymple Elliott. But what was the connection between Jane Austen and Grace? You can find out more in Joanne and Sarah's guest blog post:

Jane Austen: The Dalrymple and Elliott Connection

Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, written in 1816 and published posthumously just months after her death in 1817, has at its centre the Elliot family – a surname we’re all too familiar with after writing our biography of the eighteenth-century courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliott.

Jane Austen.

Anne Elliot, the novel’s heroine, had been persuaded to break off an early engagement to Captain Wentworth of the Royal Navy and, while in Bath, was courted by her cousin and heir to the Elliot estate, the recently widowed and caddish William Elliot.

There is also a Viscountess Dalrymple mentioned in Persuasion, from an Irish family who is related to the Elliots. Anne’s vain father Sir Walter and elder sister Elizabeth court Lady Dalrymple’s attention, determined to make use of their connection to this titled lady (for the finances of the Elliot family are in a decline – they have to rent out their family estate, Kellynch Hall).

It’s possible, as Margaret Doody has speculated in Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places, that ‘there is a hidden joke, a potentially dirty meaning, in wishing to see Lady Dalrymple’, because Grace’s notoriety would still be remembered when Austen was writing – was this a sly dig at Grace, the name chosen by Austen in the full knowledge that many of her readers would get the joke, especially with the connection between the names Elliot and Dalrymple?

Grace was still alive at the time, although her star had faded somewhat and she was living largely in the shadows of society – wouldn’t you just love to know if she read the novel, and if she did, what her thoughts were on the names of the characters!

Lady Dalrymple, PBS.

Persuasion:Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret.

Austen’s Elliot family had Scottish origins and Sir John Eliot, Grace Dalrymple’s husband, was a Scotsman, hailing from Peebles. Grace too was from a Scottish family, although hers was more noble in its origin for her maternal ancestors were once the Lairds of Blackburn in the Berwickshire borders. She also counted a countess amongst her close relations for her maternal aunt, Robinaiana, became the Countess of Peterborough, although only after many years of being the Earl’s mistress first, a path her infamous niece was later to follow with significantly less success. Grace never got a title; she was divorced by her husband Dr John Eliot before he became Sir John and her subsequent lover, the Earl (and future Marquess) of Cholmondeley refused to make her his Countess.

If Grace is recalled somewhat in the character of Lady Dalrymple, was her husband Sir John Eliot at all the inspiration for Sir Walter Elliot? Both baronets, Sir John and Sir Walter, were vain and self-satisfied men (although Sir John was certainly more careful of his fortune than Austen’s Sir Walter), and neither man had a male heir (John Eliot’s son by Grace died as an infant, and his only other male progeny was born illegitimately to an unknown woman).

There is another similarity too – Sir Walter takes into his house, ostensibly as a companion to his daughter Elizabeth, a Mrs Clay, an impoverished widow with children to provide for and who has designs on becoming the next Lady Elliot for all that she is beneath Sir Walter on the social ladder. Both before and after his divorce from Grace, Sir John Eliot embarked upon a series of affairs with women well below him socially (one was a tea dealer from the Tottenham Road). At his death his final mistress was, like Austen’s Mrs Clay, angling for marriage and a title – and hoping that her daughter (by another man) would benefit from Sir John’s fortune to the detriment of his own illegitimate offspring.

N.B. – while Sir John was an Eliot, after her divorce Grace habitually spelled her surname differently, using both Elliot and Elliott.

Sources:

Thomas Gainsborough, Jane Austen and Fashionable Society by Catherine Engh on NASSR Graduate Student Caucus, a fascinating read which looks at Gainsborough's portraits of Grace in conjunction with Jane Austen's use of the Dalrymple and Elliot surnames.

Jane Austen's Names: Riddles, Persons, Places by Margaret Doody, University of Chicago Press, 2015.

 Our book, An InfamousMistress: The Life, Loves and Family of the Celebrated Grace Dalrymple Elliott is available now from Pen and Sword and all good bookshops.

Divorced wife, infamous mistress, prisoner in France during the French Revolution and the reputed mother of the Prince of Wales’ child, notorious eighteenth-century courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliott lived an amazing life in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London and Paris.

Strikingly tall and beautiful, later lampooned as ‘Dally the Tall’ in newspaper gossip columns, she left her Scottish roots and convent education behind, to re-invent herself in a ‘marriage-a-la-mode’, but before she was even legally an adult she was cast off and forced to survive on just her beauty and wits.

The authors of this engaging and, at times, scandalous book intersperse the history of Grace’s tumultuous life with anecdotes of her fascinating family, from those who knew Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and who helped to abolish slavery, to those who were, like Grace, mistresses of great men.

Whilst this book is the most definitive biography of Grace Dalrymple Elliott ever written, it is much more than that; it is Grace’s family history which traces her ancestors from their origin in the Scottish borders, to their move south to London. It follows them to France, America, India, Africa and elsewhere, offering a broad insight into the social history of the Georgian era, comprising the ups and downs, the highs and lows of life at that time.

This is the remarkable and detailed story of Grace set, for the first time, in the context of her wider family and told more completely than ever before.

You can also visit Joanne and Sarah at All Things Georgian where they blog about anything and everything to do with the Georgian era.

Images supplied by Joanne and Sarah:

Grace Dalrymple Elliott by Thomas Gainsborough. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tilly Tremayne as Lady Dalrymple in the PBS version of Persuasion.

Jane Austen, coloured copy of a drawing by her sister Cassandra, held by the University of Texas.

Lady Dalrymple and [her daughter] Miss Carteret escorted by Mr Elliot and Colonel Wallis, from a 1909 copy of Persuasion.

Book Giveaway - Regency Spies!

I hope you all had a lovely peaceful Christmas and New Year! What better way to beat those January blues than a book giveaway? There's a chance to win a free signed copy of my new book Regency Spies on Goodreads! The competition, open to UK residents only, ends on 10 February 2016.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Regency Spies

by Sue Wilkes

Giveaway ends February 10, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

The Spymasters II

During the age of the French Revolutionary Wars, the Home Office wanted good, reliable intelligence on the domestic front as well as in the sphere of war. Persons of interest to the authorities included the government's political opponents and critics, disaffected Englishmen, Irish and Scots, and even workers agitating for better wages and working conditions.

If the government believed that trouble was brewing, it was a far better use of resources to ensure that troops were already in place before they were needed, and this is one of the reasons why spies were needed. Whitehall relied heavily on reports from local magistrates and concerned loyalists for news of potential troublemakers in the provinces.

Many local JPs were active intelligence-gatherers.

Unfortunately many local justices seem to have been particularly pusillanimous and communicated every minor happenstance. Letters poured into the Home Office on a daily basis, and the clerks had the unenviable task of winnowing the chaff to determine which letters and spy reports were important and required immediate action, and which were trivial.

Several local officials employed spies and informers to gather information, which they forwarded to London. For example, magistrates like Col.Ralph Fletcher in Bolton, Rev. William R. Hay in Manchester, and clerk of the peace John Lloyd of Stockport, were highly active correspondents. Their spies and informers were given code-names in correspondence, such as ‘B’ or ‘S’; sometimes the term ‘confidential agent’ or ‘confidential person’ was used. 

Images:

John Bull fighting the French single-handed. Unknown artist, c. 1800. Courtesy Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-10749.

'The Bench'. Hugh Thomson illustration for Our Village, Macmillan & Co., 1893.