Yuletide-related reading
Jan. 4th, 2022 07:22 pmI was going to combine this with my general 'reading in 2021' post, but I think it's got a bit long. Er, I may have got slightly carried away with the research reading for 'Thy Kingdom's Pearl'...
The Country Housewife's Family Companion by William Ellis (1750) and The Country Housewife and Lady's Director by Richard Bradley (1727). Two roughly-contemporary housekeeping manuals, which I read to provide details for Margaret Cameron's domestic work. Both books consist mostly of recipes ('receipts' in period vocabulary), with Ellis summarising a large number of fairly plain, everyday recipes and Bradley concentrating on more elaborate dishes for a rich table, and also give details on various tasks around the house and the domestic parts of farm work, such as the purchase and management of pigs, grain and pigeons. Both authors are English and much of the information was not relevant to the Highlands, but I managed to use or adapt some of it (and then cunningly circumvented my lack of local sources by having Margaret do the same thing with a fictionalised version of these books :D). They're both very interesting in their own right, too, especially Ellis's with all its information on typical food of the eighteenth-century farmer's family. (The section on medicine was entertaining in its own way—the passage where Ellis is talking about the grave dangers to health presented by tea, before extolling the virtues of drinking water boiled with mercury every day, was especially memorable). I even tried one of his recipes myself, and it made some very tasty apple pancakes. I hope to try some more! (er, maybe not the mercury water...)
Agriculture and Society in Seventeenth-Century Scotland by Ian Whyte (1979). Read for some more background on the farm and estate side of Margaret's work, this is a useful overview of Scottish farming and rural life and how it changed through the seventeenth century, ending up in the early eighteenth-century setting of my story. It does well at going into plenty of detail (lists of rents in kind, details on the construction of farm buildings, and so on), while also discussing the wider economic picture and the way things were changing throughout the period. The general conclusion is that most historical situations and trends were more complicated than they're usually assumed to be!
Letters from the North of Scotland by Edward Burt (1754, written 1720s-30s). I'd been meaning to read these for a while, and the need for details on the Highlands in about the 1720s provided a good excuse to get to them! Edward Burt was an army officer sent to work on the construction of General Wade's roads in the Highlands, and while there he wrote some detailed accounts of Highland life and society as he found it. Full of very interesting detail, especially as it relates to perception of the Highlands by a contemporary English officer—highly relevant to anyone writing Keith Windham, as well as Margaret Cameron in 1719. Burt discusses Highland manners, the arrangement of society, dress, food, hospitality, agriculture, crime, etc. etc. His writing is very readable, and, allowing for some inevitable prejudice, he's fairly charitable to the people he's writing about—altogether he comes across as a pretty likeable chap. The descriptions of the Highlanders' poverty are rather miserable, although I suspect Burt may have exaggerated in a few places (I included his assertion that no fruit was grown in the Highlands apart from wild berries in my fic, only to come across a reference in another history book to Lochiel's fruit garden at Achnacarry...). His accounts of the actual construction of Wade's roads, which he discusses in the final letter, make for some very interesting reading—it was a pretty impressive feat of engineering!
The New Atalantis by Delarivier Manley (1709), or at least part of it... So, knowing that Margaret likes novels, I went looking for contemporary fiction that she might have enjoyed, and thought that this—an anti-Whig political satire which takes a definitely female perspective on politics and has a lot to say about women's place in society—sounded like a good prospect. The book opens with Astrea, the Greek goddess of Justice, coming to earth to learn more about human society in the fictional Mediterranean island of Atalantis. Astrea and her mother Virtue meet another goddess/personification, Intelligence (in the contemporary sense of 'information'), who tells them all the gossip about the ruling class of Atalantis, who are all thinly-disguised versions of powerful Whigs and who all engage in various unscrupulous, unsavoury and salacious dealings described in a very eighteenth-century style. I thought I probably hadn't read the whole thing—the edition on archive.org was not clearly marked as either only one volume of a longer work or multiple volumes published together, but I knew it had several volumes—but thought this seemed good, so I mentioned the book in the fic. Then![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
luzula told me in her comment that she'd heard about this book on a podcast about lesbian history, and the bit I hadn't managed to read contains a lengthy passage describing—in fairly explicit and not wholly condemnatory terms—the f/f affairs of a group of prominent Whig ladies. I read the podcast transcript, which quotes most of the passage in question—it is a fascinating look at contemporary views of f/f relationships and women's place in the world. A nice bit of serendipity!
Happily my other fic, 'Feathers Anew', did not require very much extra historical research, although I did manage to get one architectural detail from Whyte's book in there. So the only book here is Flemington itself, which I was reading for the second time. I enjoyed it more than the first time—perhaps because I already had the idea of writing a Flemington/Logie story and was reading with that in mind, which predisposed me to like and be more interested in the characters. In any case, I did like them both better, especially Archie, and I enjoyed the delicious slashiness and the gripping drama of the story as material to fashion into a fix-it AU. :D I also enjoyed taking a detailed look at Violet Jacob's prose style—I like her habit of adding an aside to a long explanation with a sentence starting with 'Also...', and the elegant way she shifts between different characters' thoughts in an omniscient POV—no clunky head-hopping at all. I don't think I really managed to emulate her style in the fic, however—whatever my successes or failures with POV, I certainly use far too many em-dashes and ellipses...
The Country Housewife's Family Companion by William Ellis (1750) and The Country Housewife and Lady's Director by Richard Bradley (1727). Two roughly-contemporary housekeeping manuals, which I read to provide details for Margaret Cameron's domestic work. Both books consist mostly of recipes ('receipts' in period vocabulary), with Ellis summarising a large number of fairly plain, everyday recipes and Bradley concentrating on more elaborate dishes for a rich table, and also give details on various tasks around the house and the domestic parts of farm work, such as the purchase and management of pigs, grain and pigeons. Both authors are English and much of the information was not relevant to the Highlands, but I managed to use or adapt some of it (and then cunningly circumvented my lack of local sources by having Margaret do the same thing with a fictionalised version of these books :D). They're both very interesting in their own right, too, especially Ellis's with all its information on typical food of the eighteenth-century farmer's family. (The section on medicine was entertaining in its own way—the passage where Ellis is talking about the grave dangers to health presented by tea, before extolling the virtues of drinking water boiled with mercury every day, was especially memorable). I even tried one of his recipes myself, and it made some very tasty apple pancakes. I hope to try some more! (er, maybe not the mercury water...)
Agriculture and Society in Seventeenth-Century Scotland by Ian Whyte (1979). Read for some more background on the farm and estate side of Margaret's work, this is a useful overview of Scottish farming and rural life and how it changed through the seventeenth century, ending up in the early eighteenth-century setting of my story. It does well at going into plenty of detail (lists of rents in kind, details on the construction of farm buildings, and so on), while also discussing the wider economic picture and the way things were changing throughout the period. The general conclusion is that most historical situations and trends were more complicated than they're usually assumed to be!
Letters from the North of Scotland by Edward Burt (1754, written 1720s-30s). I'd been meaning to read these for a while, and the need for details on the Highlands in about the 1720s provided a good excuse to get to them! Edward Burt was an army officer sent to work on the construction of General Wade's roads in the Highlands, and while there he wrote some detailed accounts of Highland life and society as he found it. Full of very interesting detail, especially as it relates to perception of the Highlands by a contemporary English officer—highly relevant to anyone writing Keith Windham, as well as Margaret Cameron in 1719. Burt discusses Highland manners, the arrangement of society, dress, food, hospitality, agriculture, crime, etc. etc. His writing is very readable, and, allowing for some inevitable prejudice, he's fairly charitable to the people he's writing about—altogether he comes across as a pretty likeable chap. The descriptions of the Highlanders' poverty are rather miserable, although I suspect Burt may have exaggerated in a few places (I included his assertion that no fruit was grown in the Highlands apart from wild berries in my fic, only to come across a reference in another history book to Lochiel's fruit garden at Achnacarry...). His accounts of the actual construction of Wade's roads, which he discusses in the final letter, make for some very interesting reading—it was a pretty impressive feat of engineering!
The New Atalantis by Delarivier Manley (1709), or at least part of it... So, knowing that Margaret likes novels, I went looking for contemporary fiction that she might have enjoyed, and thought that this—an anti-Whig political satire which takes a definitely female perspective on politics and has a lot to say about women's place in society—sounded like a good prospect. The book opens with Astrea, the Greek goddess of Justice, coming to earth to learn more about human society in the fictional Mediterranean island of Atalantis. Astrea and her mother Virtue meet another goddess/personification, Intelligence (in the contemporary sense of 'information'), who tells them all the gossip about the ruling class of Atalantis, who are all thinly-disguised versions of powerful Whigs and who all engage in various unscrupulous, unsavoury and salacious dealings described in a very eighteenth-century style. I thought I probably hadn't read the whole thing—the edition on archive.org was not clearly marked as either only one volume of a longer work or multiple volumes published together, but I knew it had several volumes—but thought this seemed good, so I mentioned the book in the fic. Then
luzula told me in her comment that she'd heard about this book on a podcast about lesbian history, and the bit I hadn't managed to read contains a lengthy passage describing—in fairly explicit and not wholly condemnatory terms—the f/f affairs of a group of prominent Whig ladies. I read the podcast transcript, which quotes most of the passage in question—it is a fascinating look at contemporary views of f/f relationships and women's place in the world. A nice bit of serendipity!Happily my other fic, 'Feathers Anew', did not require very much extra historical research, although I did manage to get one architectural detail from Whyte's book in there. So the only book here is Flemington itself, which I was reading for the second time. I enjoyed it more than the first time—perhaps because I already had the idea of writing a Flemington/Logie story and was reading with that in mind, which predisposed me to like and be more interested in the characters. In any case, I did like them both better, especially Archie, and I enjoyed the delicious slashiness and the gripping drama of the story as material to fashion into a fix-it AU. :D I also enjoyed taking a detailed look at Violet Jacob's prose style—I like her habit of adding an aside to a long explanation with a sentence starting with 'Also...', and the elegant way she shifts between different characters' thoughts in an omniscient POV—no clunky head-hopping at all. I don't think I really managed to emulate her style in the fic, however—whatever my successes or failures with POV, I certainly use far too many em-dashes and ellipses...
