Regency Cheshire on Amazon Kindle!

I'm thrilled to announce that my book Regency Cheshire is now available as an e-book on Amazon Kindle!

The late Georgian period was an age of unique style and elegance - the era of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Regency Cheshire explores the scandals, sports and pastimes of the great county families such as the Grosvenors of Eaton Hall. Their glittering lifestyle is contrasted with conditions for humble farmers and factory workers. The gentry and mill owners created elegant new villas and beautiful gardens while workers huddled together in slums with inadequate sanitation.

The Prince Regent and his cronies danced and feasted while cotton and silk workers starved. In my book, I explore the county’s transport system and main industries: silk, cotton, salt and cheese. Stage coaches rattled through the streets, and packet boats and barges sailed down the canals.

Lyme Hall, Cheshire.

But reform and revolution threatened the old social order. Blood was spilt on city streets during election fever and in the struggle for democracy. Balls and bear-baiting; highwaymen and hangings; riots and reform: Regency Cheshire tells the story of everyday life during the age of Beau Brummell, Walter Scott and Jane Austen.

You can read a free sample of Regency Cheshire here!

New Book Contract: Regency Spies

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve just signed a new book contract with Pen and Sword for their new Social History imprint!

‘Regency Spies: England's Rebels and Revolutionaries Exposed’ will explore the shadowy world of the network of government spies and agents provocateurs which kept watch on Britain’s underprivileged masses during the Napoleonic wars.  The upper classes feared a replay of the French Revolution on British soil: the threat of an armed insurrection or a French invasion was taken very seriously.  Any hint of sedition was ruthlessly suppressed.

The ‘Great War’ against Napoleon had a devastating effect on the British economy.  Taxation reached record levels to pay for the war, and the poorer classes endured great hardship.  Hunger fuelled riots for cheaper food and Luddite attacks on mill-owners, factories and machinery.

The spy network had some famous successes, like the discoveries of the Despard plot, the Pentrich Rising and the Cato St conspiracy.  Sometimes the government’s efforts descended into high farce, like the ‘Spy Nozy’ affair, in which poets Wordsworth and Coleridge were shadowed by a special agent.  But the stakes were incredibly high: agitators risked the horrors of a traitor’s death if found guilty.

The book will tell the stories of the real conspirators against the government, and the tragedies which befell ordinary folk entrapped by agents provocateurs.  The provisional launch date for ‘Regency Spies’ is mid-to-late 2015.

Images from the Library of Congress British Cartoons collection:

Satire identifying reform with revolution by Cruikshank, 1819. 
‘True reform of Parliament: patriots lighting a revolutionarybonfire in new Palace Yard by Gillray, 1809. Sir Francis Burdett is making a speech and waving a bonnet rouge [cap of liberty] shaped like a fool's cap as Horne Tooke lights on fire a pile of acts and charters, as well as a Bible, with a flaming baton labeled "Sedition" while three creatures add to the flames. James Boswell, Samuel Whitbread, Lord Folkestone, and Henry Clifford add documents to the pile as a mob destroys Parliament in the background.

A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England!

I am thrilled to announce that I have just signed a new contract with Pen and Sword!  My new book will be a social history of Jane Austen's time. I am so excited about my new project, as I have adored Austen and the Regency era since I was a little girl.

In 'A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England' I will be exploring everyday life for the upper and middle classes from 1775, the year of Austen’s birth, to her death in 1817. Drawing on contemporary diaries, illustrations, letters, novels, travel literature, and so on, I hope to recreate the vanished world inhabited by Austen and her contemporaries: the scents, sights, and sounds of the period.

Discover a lost era of corsets and courtship!

Images:
Lady's Monthly Museum ‘Cabinet of Fashion’ fashion plates for October 1798 – the Moorish Habit and the Fatima Robe.