It seems a long time since I’ve posted about my research while writing books in the Elizabeth Bennet Series, not least since I somehow managed to lose a great deal of my research for Easter At Netherfield saved on the USB stick I was working on. Also,2024 was a rather difficult year from some points of view.
However, the fourth book in the series, Georgiana Darcy’s London Season & Caroline Bingley’s Coup de Foudre, has been published and I am pleased to say that the research for that book is intact. Therefore on this rather chilly, grey, January day in North Essex, I am more than happy to share with you a snippet of the intelligence gleaned during the course of writing the book.
Some way through the book, a character wishes to order a ring to be made for another character as a gift. My problem was: which jeweller’s shop he or she might have visited to order the ring in mid-1799? One would think that jewellers’ shops abounded in eighteenth-century London, but I got nowhere searching on Google.
One of the self-made men referred to in Time Travellers Guide to Regency Britain was Philip Rundell whose business Rundell & Bridge was ‘appointed Goldsmiths and Jewellers to the King circa 1797’ (Wikipedia). But what I wanted was a shop which my character could visit and Wikipedia said that Pickett & Rundell had a major showroom at 32 Ludgate Hill from around 1768 to 1785, whereas my story is set in 1799, although Wikipedia does show an 1826 watercolour of 32 Ludgate Hill.
Nevertheless, I wanted something a bit more certain.
Probably more by luck than planning, I came across a paper entitled ‘Jewellery Studies – The Journal of The Society of Jewellery Historians 2022/02 Leslie Southwick’. The paper initially concerned Thomas Gray of Sackville Street, Royal Retail Jeweller, Goldsmith and Sword-Cutter. Pretty early on in the paper it is related that Gray’s firm was immortalised in Chapter XXXIII of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility as the Gray’s of Sackville Street to whom the Miss Dashwoods went to negotiate an exchange of a few pieces of old-fashioned jewels of their mother and where they saw Mr Robert Ferrar ordering an ivory gold and pearl toothpick case. A Wikipedia piece about Sackville Street, London says that this is one of only two real-world shops mentioned in the Austen novels.
A quick look at Sense & Sensibility bears out the inclusion in the book of the visit to Gray’s. I had read the book but had not recalled this small detail. And the 2008 BBC series which I love does not seem to have featured such a scene. Clearly Gray’s of Sackville Street was and is so famous that it is hard to see why the firm did not come up in a Google search for eighteenth-century London jewellers.
The article includes a reproduction of a bill dated 1799 of Thos Gray at his second address, 41 Sackville Street. The bill is addressed to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and the article includes much other information about Gray’s dealings with the Prince of Wales. A further point is that, while Sense & Sensibility was not published until 1811, it was first written as a straightforward narrative (as opposed to previously ‘a novel-in-letters’) during 1797-1798. I have the book ‘Jane Austen The World of Her Novels’ by Deirdre Le Faye to thank for this bit of information.
Thus, I was happily able to send my character to Gray’s of Sackville Street to select and order the gold ring.
The attached image of St George’s Church, Hanover Square is by T Malton 1787, where Thomas Gray was baptised on 17th November 1749, according to the above-mentioned article.
Recent Comments