It’s been a considerable time since I’ve posted anything regarding my research for my Pride & Prejudice-based historical novels, largely due to the time which the recent novels have taken to write.
The following research post relates to ‘Georgiana Darcy’s London Season & Caroline Bingley’s Coup de Foudre’, which is the 4th book in my Elizabeth Bennet Series and is set during the spring/summer of 1799.
It’s my feeling that the character of Caroline Bingley suffered considerably from the rather dark, almost sinister depiction of her by Anna Chancellor in the 1995 BBC TV adaptation of Pride & Prejudice (I’ve never properly watched the later film). I think that the character deserved a break and was certainly not beyond redemption. We have recently watched a re-run of the BBC TV series Spooks in which Anna Chancellor played one of the characters and even though Spooks was made roughly ten years after the 1995 adaptation, Anna Chancellor actually looks fresher, younger and prettier in Spooks. Therefore, this is how I prefer to think of her in Georgiana Darcy’s London Season & Caroline Bingley’s Coup de Foudre.
To pave the way for Caroline’s transformation, in Easter At Netherfield she sought the friendship of Elizabeth Bennet and asked her advice on matters of the heart to which Elizabeth replied: “Love simply drops out of the sky unsolicited, but you will never notice it if you restrict your sights to just a few narrow criteria.”
Caroline, having offered to sponsor Georgiana’s London Season, finds that the increased social activities of the Season, afford an unexpected opportunity and she falls in love with Mr Davers, a wealthy industrialist aged about forty, the Coup de Foudre of the title. They enjoy a whirlwind romance and within a month they are married.
Mr Davers of course had to have some specific trade. ‘Wealthy industrialist’ is simply too vague. I didn’t want it to be in the cotton mills so prevalent at the time with small children running about having terrible lives and often being badly injured. It had to be a trade or manufacture of something skillful which I hoped would not have employed children in large numbers, or merely as apprentices to be properly trained, not used as cheap, convenient labour. Since in Easter At Netherfield, Darcy was already going to start a paper mill, a process lending itself more to skilled workmanship than to simple repetitive tasks, it had to be something else.
I considered a few commodities such as fine furniture. Ian Mortimer’s ‘Time Travellers Guide to Regency Britain’ has a good section about self-made men of the period ranging from weaving to brewing to jewellery. I suppose I could have chosen one of them on which to model Mr Davers, but I didn’t want a real person to have to research who might not fit in with my timeline or the story at all well. It occurred to me that glass making must have been pretty essential as well as quite specialised. Already by 1799, houses had decent windows and the wealthy had large mirrors in their homes which ‘contributed greatly to lightening interiors, an effect accentuated by candlelight’ according to the book immediately mentioned below.
So I bought a book called ‘English Glass’ by R. J. Richardson which was quite helpful, but rather wide in the timescale and the glass products covered (table wear et cetera). The book referred to the various methods of producing plate glass including a small amount of detail about the British Cast Plate Glass Manufacturer’s Company at Ravenhead, near St Helens, Lancashire which, the book said, began production in 1776 and was ‘the largest industrial installation of the age’.
However, I was unable to find any such factory at Ravenhead by means of a Google search. Wikipedia only provided details of a factory which opened in 1850, much too late. Eventually, probably I think by chance, I came across an article by Hentie Louw entitled ‘Window-Glass Making in Britain c.1660-c.1860 and its Architectural Impact’ in a publication termed ‘Construction history, Vol7, 1991’. I am pleased to say that this did allude to the British Cast Plate Glass Manufacturers, based at Ravenhead in 1773 relating that it took time to get off the ground until the introduction in 1789 of a steam engine to grind and polish the plates. The article says that under new management from 1792, the production of cast plate glass began in earnest.
This tied in nicely with Mr Davers having been about forty in 1799, therefore having been about twelve in 1771 when he might have taken a seven-year apprenticeship (the standard length at the time) and therefore ready to start work properly in about 1778. As to who he would be apprenticed to, I decided after some research that the glasshouse at South Shields originally started by Isaac Cookson in the 1730s where crown and plate glass was made would be a suitable manufactory. Wikipedia says that Isaac Cookson’s descendants built various businesses started by Isaac Cookson into one of the largest materials technology businesses in the United Kingdom.
A factor which puzzled me was why glass couldn’t be produced using wood rather than coal. It seemed unlikely that wood was unsuitable since glass had been made for centuries before coal started to be produced on an industrial scale. The subject was raised at a dinner party at Mr Davers’ house after the banns had been read for the first time for his marriage to Caroline. The point was that coal-mining was a dangerous business including the use in the eighteenth century of small children who were often injured or killed. If wood was used instead, it would eliminate the need for coal. It was during this dinner when the subject of child labour was mentioned that Georgiana first expressed an interest in radical issues.
A little delving established that in 1615 there was a royal proclamation ‘touching glasses’ which banned the use of wood for glass-making so that the wood could be available for house building and later increasingly for ship-building. Petitions seeking permission to use wood failed. This was so even in the case of stockpiles of wood which had been intended for glass-making and already cut up and therefore not suitable for house building or ship building.
All of this has had to be woven into Georgiana Darcy’s London Season in relation to Mr Davers’ business.
Unable to easily find a copyright-free image related to glass-making, the attached image is a picture of what Georgiana would possibly have looked like strolling in the grounds of Moorhouse Abbey which she visited during Georgiana Darcy’s London Season. It might have been a possible cover for the book but I decided against it.
Book 5, ‘Lydia Wickham’s Northern Peril: Darcy and Wickham’s Rapprochement?’, has already been published on 27th April 2055 and is a continuation of Book 4. It’s available on Amazon as an ebook, paperback and under the Kindle Unlimited program.
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