Regency Research

Two weeks before our departure from Ireland, Mike, Nova and I jetted over to London to visit some friends of mine. While there, I fit in a bit of research. We visited the Soane House Museum, Spencer House, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. There was not enough time for any of it, and I was struggling with the early stages of the head cold from hell, but I managed to glean a few general impressions. Here's a picture of us on the Tower Bridge. We were there, honest, even if my memory is a bit cloudy:

We visited Soane House on Saturday morning, with Nova in a very fussy, tired mood.  She didn't like the closed-in, crowded rooms, so Mike took her out to find some ducks while Meg and I looked around. It was quite an eclectic collection of stuff, and interesting to see the house of a moderately well-off architect in that era. I also picked up a book from the museum shop called The Soanes at Home, which is a fantastic resource on daily life in their era, from the late 1700s through the early decades of the 1800s.  We spent the rest of the day wandering around the city and eating a very long lunch at a nice Turkish restaurant there.

The following morning I dragged our hosts to see Spencer House, which reeked of dizzying amounts of money.  Not only was the original owner of the house fantastically wealthy, but the cost of the renovations we saw was staggering. The palm room is particularly striking in that a large amount of its wall area is covered 23.5 karat gold leaf, but the other room's decorations are nearly lush.  The public tour included only the state apartments of the house, which is owned (or leased on a very long term) by some branch of a Rothschild corporation. The renovations are funded by the rental income from the rest of the building. Whoever rents there, must shell out an awful lot.  

Our final touristy stop in London was the Victoria and Albert Museum. I could have spent all day there, easily.  I felt like I was just getting oriented when the place was shutting down for the evening.  I breezed through the theatre and fashion sections before finding the area dedicated to the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  There was a lot of good stuff there, but my head was all clogged up with phlegm and I didn't have time to write much down until now, so I'm afraid much of it is lost, but at least I have some visual images to turn to when I find various types of furnishings, clothing, etc. mentioned in books.

One thing which impressed me about all of these places is that the rooms were much smaller than I'd been picturing them.  When I read regency romances, I often picture the ballrooms as cavernous spaces, about the size of school gymnasiums, but better-decorated.  They are, of course, nothing like gymnasiums. Even the largest of the rooms in Spencer House was quite modest in size by modern standards, despite being anything but modest in its decor.  Even allowing for the fact that people were smaller in those days, a small group would not have felt overwhelmed by the space.  It reminded me that people then, even the very wealthy, had so much less of the miscellaneous stuff that clutters up modern houses.  

Anyway, I got some "research" done on my trip to London, but I still feel woefully ignorant of the time period. I am planning to power on and finish this manuscript to the best of my ability nonetheless.  

Back in Ireland and America, I furthered my knowledge of the time period and the genre by digging into as many Regency romances as I can get my hands on... well, as many as I can make time for, at any rate.  I finally started reading some of Georgette Heyer's books, something I should have done long ago, and picked up two of the latest by Mary Balogh, who has been my favorite author in the genre since I first read one of her books about five years ago.  I scooped up an array of about a dozen reference books and several more novels at the annual West Tisbury Library Book Sale. The novels include several Regencies by authors I'm not yet familiar with, but at 25¢ a pop, I'm not worried about wasting my money.

My goal is to read about ten Regency romances in the next few weeks, then embark on fixing my manuscript's plot, setting, language, and more.  We'll see.