Peacock's Polite Repository

While researching other things recently I came across, quite by chance, "Peacock's Polite Repository or Pocket Companion".

I thought it was a charming and very handy book. It was also a very long-lived publication. Appearing yearly, from about 1788 to at least 1830, it was a small book (115 mm x 74 mm), often in a slip-case. It contained diary space and an almanac of all sorts of useful information. It was exactly the sort of thing that anyone new to the country, or desirous of exhaustive information about the country, would have owned. In my new book, the hero buys the heroine a copy; she is definitely in need of the information.

From 1790 to 1811 Humphrey Repton supplied the illustrations for the books, generally a frontispiece and headings for the diary pages. The copy I am using is from 1812, and I have not yet discovered the illustrator but the pictures are charming.

St. Bernad's Well near Edinburgh

The information that filled the pages--about 125 of them--was wide-ranging.

With the number of dukes appearing in Regency fiction these days, it is interesting to have the actual list of those peers. There weren't very many.

 Below is the type of calendar that appears for each month before the diary blanks.

Each month has an illustration in the diary.

 

 

The universities figure large in the plethora of information:

Holidays which seem to have been organized by major organizations or business were not neglected. A little more explanation of them would not come amiss. There are more than I would have expected.

It was not a completely insular book. Below is part of the list of foreign rulers:

Even the esoteric was covered by the Repository:

I wonder what were the duties of heralds in 1812? I can feel more research coming on!

'Til next time,

Lesley-Anne


Sources: a Google search on Peacock's Polite Repository will bring myriad results. I used several of them, but cannot list one definitive source.

J. C. Loudon and his Gardening Vision

J. C. Loudon 1783-1843

John Claudius Loudon was a Scot, educated in horticulture (biology, botany, etc.) at the University of Edinburgh and a prolific garden and landscape designer and writer, despite significant physical frailty.

His most notable publications appeared in the 1820's after the Prince Regent had become King George IV. But Loudon published pamphlets and articles almost from moment he began designing gardens, landscapes and the layout of farms.

One of his most interesting pamphlets was published in 1807. Titled

Engravings, with Descriptions, illustrative of the difference between The Modern Style of Rural Architecture
and the Improvement of Scenery, and that displayed in A Treatise on Country Residences,
and practised by Mr. Loudon

the pamphlet contained 'before' and 'after' engravings of some of Loudon's work. He aimed to improve the 'picturesque' work of Capability Brown with his own 'gardenesque' style.

Mr. Loudon describes the intent of his pamphlet in the introduction:

His engravings of Barnbarroch (Barnbarrow) House, in Scotland, show clearly the significant extent of the changes he proposed.

Barnbarrow House in 1805

Barnbarrow as it would look three years after renovations commenced

In his pamplet, Loudon also used illustrations of some grounds at Harewood House (where he undertook a substantial renovation). In this area he proposed to join three sections of water into one.

Harewood House grounds 1805

Same Harewood location with proposed changes

In a telling series of illustrations of a 400-500 acre portion of an imaginary estate, Loudon shows the progression of design through one hundred years.
Figure 1 shows the formal early 18th century plan:

Figure 2 shows the layout as it would have been conceived by Brown, Repton and their contemporaries:

And Figure 3 shows his own concept for such a property. In all three cases the house is difficult to locate, clearly secondary to the overall landscape design.

A study of Loudon's work shows the development of landscape architecture into the early years of Queen Victoria's reign. In his later years, he undertook city and cemetery planning. But he began his work, in gardens, in the early 1800s, challenging the ideas of the great Repton who died in 1818.

Many of Loudon's works including his "Gardener's Magazine" are available free from Google Books. Those of his wife, Jane (nee Webb), an established author who undertook to write also on botany and flower gardening, are likewise available.

'Til next time,

Lesley-Anne