Guided tour of "My Inconvenient Duke" Part Two

Almack’s was THE night club for the elite. A group of aristocratic women, the patronesses, gave vouchers for entry to only a chosen few. These amounted to about 400-500 attending the Wednesday night assemblies. You’ll find many articles online, but be aware that a good deal of information, especially about the patronesses, is based on books written long after Regency (e.g., in the Victorian era) mainly by men. You’ll encounter some inaccuracies as well as some rather misogynistic gossip.

The Regent’s Park Zoo still exists although it’s quite different from the place Lady Alice would have known. The Yale Center for British Art has online a beautiful collection of watercolor images of the place in its early days.

Kensington used to be a western suburb of London. It was very much a rural area, and the northern part (which includes Notting Hill) was largely undeveloped at the time of my story. There were prosperous farms as well as the wasteland that was home to the notorious piggeries and potteries. The Bridge Inn is one of several fictional establishments I created here.

The Lovedon Arms, as explained in the notes at the end of My Inconvenient Duke, did exist, but not under this name. It was the White Horse, the White Hart, and the Holland Arms, depending on the source I consulted. It stood on the corner of the road leading to Holland House, a beautiful Jacobean mansion that was badly bombed during WWII. In Don’t Tempt Me, I’d given it to my fictional duke. But for some reason, instead of using his name, I used that of the hero the short story, “Lord Lovedon’s Duel.” Not the first mistake I’ve ever made . . .

The Colosseum, as promised in my notes, I’m giving this one its own post, but I’m including here a picture of the outside.

Blackwood’s house in Brighton is based on Marlborough House, on the Steine, Brighton. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find a pubic domain picture of it so far, but here’s one at Flickr.

The Haymarket Theatre still exists. Like so many other structures, it’s changed over the years.

Tollstone Academy for Girls. If you’ve read Nicholas Nickleby or Jane Eyre, you’ll be familiar with the notorious Yorkshire Schools. I modeled mine after the Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters’ School, which the Brontes attended.

If you are trying to visualize the scene at Hatchett’s White Horse Cellar, when Jonesy vanishes, this Cruikshank image lets you stand in its doorway, to get an idea of the anarchy.

Gunter’s Tea Shop. Unfortunately, to date, nobody has turned up an illustration of this place, which is rather sad, considering how long it was in business and the role it plays in so many Regency-era stories. For this reason, though, one finds numerous articles about the confectioner’s online, like this one and this one.

The Fox and Hare is a fictional location. This illustration from Nicholas Nickleby gives a sense of the inn’s interior. “Boxes” or “box compartments” are what we in the U.S. call “booths.”

SOURCES

Illustration at top: “The Piccadilly Nuisance! Dedicated to the worthy, acting magistrates of the district”, G Cruikshank, published 29 December 1818. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. (The same holds for the other images from the British Museum.)

Highest life in London. Tom & Jerry sporting a toe among the Corinthians at Almacks in the west NYPL. Date Issued 1821-05-01. Cruikshank, Robert; Cruikshank, George. New York Public Library.

Zoological Gardens. Regent's Park. Six Views in the Zoological Gardens, Regent's Park. George Scharf. View inside the zoo in Regent's Park, showing the aviary, with a crowd of visitors; pelicans in foreground at left, caged birds behind, enclosure with lake at right. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Portobello Farm, illustration from Old & New London Vol 5

Illustration from Mrs. Mary Bayly’s Ragged Homes and How to Mend Them (1860)

Holland Arms, from Leigh Hunt’s The Old Court Suburb; or, Memorials of Kensington, regal, critical, & anecdotical 1903 ed.

The Colosseum, Regent's Park c 1830 printed 1846. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

New Haymarket Theatre, opened July 4th, 1821 [graphic]. Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Collections.

Lowood illustration from Life and works of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters v. 1 (Jane Eyre)1875

If you’d like to listen to me talk about My Inconvenient Duke with my good friend, historical romance author Caroline Linden, our chat at the Ashland Public Library is here on YouTube. Yes, it did get recorded after all.

Location, location: Scenes from Ten Things I Hate About the Duke

In a previous post, I showed you the Green Man Inn as it was. It’s still there, not quite the same, but easy to recognize.

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Litchfield House aka deGriffith House, is the building on the left with the trees on the balcony.

Also still in existence is the house I turned into deGriffith House. Currently known as Litchfield House, No. 15 St. James’s Square, it stands in a corner of the square next to the London Library. You can see some interiors here.

You can read more about the house here at Patrick Baty’s blog.

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St. James’s Square in 1812, image from Ackermann’s Repository.

St. James’s Square looked very different in the time of my story.

“In the centre is a large circular sheet of water, six or seven feet deep, from the middle of which rises a fine equestrian statue of William III. Erected here within these few years.” Thomas Allen, History & Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark ... Vol 4 (1829).

Apparently, the pool was still there in the 1839 edition.

Another, much later writer has this to say about the pool: “The basin of water was not even then removed, and is still remembered by many persons now living, the stagnant slimy pool having only been finally drained within the last fifty years, after one of our periodical panics of cholera, when the existing garden was laid out and planted with trees.” Arthur Irwin Dasent, The History of St. James's Square and the Foundation of the West End of London: With a Glimpse of Whitehall in the Reign of Charles the Second. (1895)

Images L-R:

Furnival's Inn, Holborn was demolished in the 1890s.

Lord Grosvenor's Gallery, Park Lane - Shepherd, Metropolitan Improvements (1828)—Grosvenor House was my model for Ashmont House. It was demolished sometime about 1926-27. A hotel now stands on the spot.

The Hanover Square Rooms, where the fancy fair takes place in my story, was demolished in 1900.

The Adelphi (the image dates to when it was the Sans Pareil) theater, which has been renovated and rebuilt and enlarged over the years, remains in active use.

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Charles Cotton’s Fishing House, photo by Neil Gibbs 2 August 2006. Attribution Neil Gibbs

And this is the Fishing House, which I moved from Derbyshire to Surrey for story purposes. You can see other images here at Derbyshire Life.

Rediscovering an American Community of Color

William Bullard, Portrait of the Thomas A. and Margaret Dillon Family, about 1903, courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum

A little over a hundred years ago, a white photographer named William Bullard took hundreds of pictures of people in central Massachusetts. Among these were more than 230 portraits of people of color who lived within easy walking distance of my home. I had no idea this community existed until early 2018, when I saw Rediscovering an American Community of Color: The Photographs of William Bullard at the Worcester Art Museum.

The Beaver Brook neighborhood became a new home when the Ku Klux Klan and white backlash, combined with a national depression and the end of Reconstruction, destroyed the lives that former enslaved people had been making for themselves in the South. They came north to start again, and some came to Worcester, “a city with a deep abolitionist tradition and influential white residents sympathetic to their plight.”*

William Bullard, William Bullard’s Camera Reflected in a Mirror, about 1911 (detail), courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum

The collection’s existence is a rare and wonderful confluence of circumstances. Somehow, the glass negatives survived for over a century and ended in the hands of Frank J. Morrill, a retired history teacher and collector, who was also a devoted Worcester historian. Somehow, the photographer’s logbook also survived, and stayed with the photographs. Because of this, it became possible to identify the people in the photographs. This in turn made it possible for the Clark University students who researched the photographs to contact many of photo subjects’ descendants, one of whom I met during one of my visits to the exhibition.

A little more about the photos, from the website gallery. Image at top: “Virginia-born coachman Thomas A. Dillon and his wife, Margaret, a domestic servant and native of Newton, Massachusetts, pose in the parlor of their home at 38 Tufts Street with children Thomas, Margaret, and Mary. A poster on the wall commemorates President Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to the Worcester Agricultural Fair in 1902.” (The website gallery of images includes another photograph of Mr. Dillon.) Image at bottom: “James J. Johnson, of Nipmuc, Narragansett, and African American descent, and Jennie Bradley Johnson, a migrant from Charleston, South Carolina, pose with their daughters Jennie and May. James worked as a coachman and belonged to the King David Masonic Lodge. He died soon after this portrait was taken. Jennie later worked as a laundress.”

William Bullard, Portrait of James J. and Jennie Bradley Johnson Family, 1900, courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum

But in this case it’s probably best to let the pictures do the talking, and there are a great many to study. Most appear on the Bullard website, where you’ll find a gallery of the photos, a page about the collection and the photographer, a map of the neighborhood in 1911, essays connected to the images, and a chance to add information and/or comment on individual photos.

This Maureen Taylor podcast is loaded with fascinating insights into the photographs’ history, the photographer, the collector, the researchers, the project, and more. This article offers a sampling of large scale photographs from the collection. And here are scenes from the 2018 exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum.

**quote from the beautiful exhibition catalog