Flight of the Heron read-along: Part II chapters 1-2

[regshoe]

Charlie is my darling, the Young Chevalier...

Flight of the Heron (under the title The Jacobite Trilogy) is doing very well in Yuletide sign-ups—3 requests and 4 offers at present :D

Next week we'll read the second half of Part II, chapters 3 and 4.

Comments

[regshoe]

Yes, I like the light tone of the ball—less knowledge of what's going to happen later and more of an immediate sense of things as they are in this historical moment, which works well.

Oh dear, those chamber-pots are a good historical detail!

I suppose Ewen's hair being powdered would affect what colours he might wear with it—amber-colour and grey could go together fairly well. But I don't have any idea about eighteenth-century colour tastes either!

[luzula]

Oh, of course--his hair is powdered, I forgot that! And it would affect the color. Such a weird thing to do...

[regshoe]

Such a weird thing to do...

Fashion! :D

[impala_chick]

Now I'm trying to Google pictures of what powdered hair looked like...

[regshoe]

The historical fashion/hairstyling side of Youtube has some videos of people demonstrating the use of hair powder—here's one using a real 18th century hairdressing manual. Very interesting context...!

[luzula]

Oh my god. I hadn't actually realized what went into making those hair styles. *boggles* The person in that video is brave! I'm not sure I'd dare to try that--well, I couldn't, since my hair is less than a centimeter long, but I wouldn't dare if I had long hair. Somehow it seems typical that women had to go through all that, and men could just put on a wig!

Well, I had actually already planned in an upcoming fic to write more about the time in Edinburgh, some of it from Alison's POV, so I've got to work this in. : ) But surely Alison doesn't have a hairdo like this in the scenes at Ardroy? It seems impractical.

*checks the book* We have Who was this pretty Miss Grant with the blue fillet in her dark hair? And a fillet is a ribbon to tie up the hair, according to the OED. So it seems her hair isn't powdered. I wonder if she would wear a snood, which unmarried Scottish women seem to have done?

[regshoe]

I have to imagine that hairstyles like that were largely a way for very grand ladies to show off how much leisure time and how many skilled servants they had—surely women like Alison would have worn much simpler styles most of the time. Certainly the portraits of women in the illustrations to Damn' Rebel Bitches look a little bit simpler.

The snood is nice! I shall picture something like that.

[ethelmay]

Having red hair would also affect his complexion, which was presumably not powdered. The 1788 Trumbull portrait of Thomas Jefferson shows him with an amber sort of waistcoat.