#regency research

as i mentioned in my author's notes of the chapter, there's a few references that i would like to share with those who are interested in them. you don't need to know about them to understand what's going on in the story, obviously, but perhaps it's nice to have some visual aids to go with some of the things that are happening.

if you haven't read the latest chapter yet, and you want to remain spoiler free, it's best to skip this post (or perhaps come back to it later). you can find chapter 24 of our love is these days' piano here!

so here's a short list of things that might be interesting - but definitely not necessary - to know about chapter 24:

penelope's dress at the trowbridge ball is a silvery sea green. the one i had in mind was kind of like this one, from the season three behind the scenes pics. nicola looks stunning in green, especially with the red hair. i found beatrice knight's regency color compendium, a stunning overview of all the fashionable colours of fabric in the regency era, with some fantastic descriptions of how they were made and when they were worn. the willow/sea green colour shown on this page is exactly the hue i was picturing while writing.

lady trowbridge's decorations: i spent days and days researching how lady trowbridge might showcase her wealth and peculiar tastes during this ball, but honestly, i didn't find much info about ballroom decorations and i didn't want to make up things that definitely could not have happened. so i settled on things that i was already fairly certain of were pretty decadent for the era: pineapples and ice cream. after reading up on ice cream in regency times through several sources, i came across the website of ivan day, who is a food historian and has worked on some bbc regency costume dramas. he had a very insightful youtube video on how ice cream was made in those days. in it, he makes one of the ice cream pineapples i mention in the story. ivan day's actual website is under construction, but i found a photo of moulded ice groups, as they were presented in regency times, on another page which was taken from his. it includes ice cream shaped like a swan (which may have been parmesan flavoured, which apparently was a popular ice cream flavour back then).

another food decoration that both eloise and penelope mention is a flummery solomon's temple. i found out about these through watching the bbc documentary pride and prejudice - having a ball, which talks about accurate representation of balls during regency times on television. the part of the doc i'm linking to is the part where ivan day reveals a solomon's temple and explains that this would be a staple on all upper-class tables in those days. the white bits, if i'm not mistaken, are milk-flavoured, the brown is chocolate and/or coffee, the pink is coloured with cochineal.

he also has a page on solomon's temples on his blog, which has a very amusing short clip of how exactly these jellies moved. if you watch it (highly recommend), i'm sure you'll understand why eloise would think it was a good thing to comment on. ivan day himself describes it as:

Because it is made of flummery, which is a kind of opaque milk jelly, the central obelisk wobbles and cavorts in a most entertaining manner, while the four little cones shake, rattle and roll in a very naughty way.

the dance: i must have watched at least fifty different dances that were popular at the time - shoutout to regencydances.org, which not only has a very extensive list of dances, but also a youtube channel and animations showing what the dances would have looked like. i based penelope and anthony's dance on the northdown waltz - which granted, only became a thing from 1820 onwards, so it's technically an anachronism for them to be dancing it. it simply was the only dance that best fit with how i wanted the scene to go. you can find an instruction video on the northdown waltz here. anthony, in this case, would be the red rectangle, penelope the green ellipsis. here's a clip of actual people performing the dance, so you can kind of imagine what it would have looked like. i always knew anthony's confession would happen during a dance, my main inspiration for that was this scene from becoming jane. if you've seen the film, you undoubtedly know exactly which scene i'm talking about without even clicking the link. i remember that when i first saw this part of the film, i stopped breathing for a minute, because it was just such an intense moment, which was exactly what i wanted for anthony's big moment.

there you go, some insight into the tiny things mentioned in the latest chapter that you might perhaps enjoy knowing more about. hope at least some of you found it interesting!

I am working on a fanfiction and I'm trying to make it as period-accurate as possible, but research is hard and I have questions.

What were some old-timey terms that were the equivalent of "getting butterflies in your stomach?" Or other ways people would describe crushes/romantic love? (specifically ones that distinguish it from platonic love, especially terms that would have been popular amongst women).

How did the upper class view sex? I'm getting that there was a lot of semi-open infidelity (particularly by men), but what did that mean for the role of the wife in a relationship? Was she also expected to provide sex or was marriage more for public appearances/status/titles/money? Did they just have sex in missionary or were they more adventurous (and what was considered proper/improper, specifically between a man and his wife)? How much did women know about sex/how it worked before they got married?

If George IV was a hedonistic libertine, did that mean that the older generation was more open-minded than the younger one in the regency era?

There was a post making the rounds the other day about how us with ADHD don’t experience the dopamine boost of finishing/completing a task the same way as most people. It got me thinking, that yes while I do experience that relief of finishing a task sometimes, the path there is often much more rewarding.

Currently I am writing up a presentation for a lit theory class on New Historicism and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and I know that book backwards and forwards and I know of a bunch of things to use to make that comparison between fiction and non fiction. Yet, even after having stopped myself from taking on the whole book and deciding to only focus on Lydia and Wickham and their marriage. I’m now having to cut myself off my dopamine high of research.

I have this urge to go deeper and deeper down the research rabbithole. I was just planning on using Mary Wollstonecraft and Fordyce and maybe reference that one review by Sir Walter Scott (I forgot I was making this post cause I forgot his name and remembered in the middle of reading said review). However, instead of sticking to that plan I am now reading David Hume and The Earl of Shaftesbury and wanting to go research a quote I found there but I must do this presentation first. Yet I know that once I finish this presentation, I will not have time or will to read up on those again because the research dopamine carrot thing is gone.