Education: The Key to RichesThe East India Company College

"1500 pounds will be given to any person who has influence to procure for the advertiser an appointment of writer either to Bengal or Madras. Address to A.Z. at the British Coffee-house"

This advertisement, which appeared in an English newspaper in 1800, makes it clear that a position with the East India Company was a valuable commodity. A 'writer' was a clerk, and if you were a clerk looking for a position in Bengal or Madras, you were almost certainly looking for work with the East India Company. Such a job ensured a wealthy future, always provided you lived through the dangerous sea voyage, the difficult climate, and the fevers and sicknesses of the sub-continent. The advertiser's investment of 1500₤ could be recouped many times over.

above East India House, Leadenhall Street, 1817

The British East India Company (BEIC) was a venture for pursuing trade with India and China that was already two hundred years old by the time of the Regency. But it was from about 1750 to 1850 that it virtually ruled India, and made fortunes for its directors, its merchants, and even its clerks or, as they were called, writers.

Positions as writers might be bought and sold and were undoubtedly objects, occasionally, of corrupt practice. But there was another way to obtain a writership, and that was through education. Education specifically at the East India College.

The East India College was established in 1806 to train young men, sixteen to eighteen years of age, for positions of clerks with the civil service in the East. It was situated temporarily at first in Hertford Castle which was a property of the Cecil family and leased out to various tenants over many years.

In 1809, the College moved to a purpose-built facility at Hertford Heath--four classically designed buildings surrounding a quadrangle which was the largest of its type in Britain. Its architect was William Wilkins, who also designed the National Gallery in London. Below is a modern photograph of Haileybury College, which is housed in the East India College buildings. I have altered the photograph, removing a dome added in 1877, in the hope that it simulates the appearance of the College in about 1810.

The hard work undertaken by the students of the College had a purpose which outstripped the classics courses of the scholarly universities. There was a Classical and General Literature course but practicalities were emphasized. Languages were chief among the classes--Hindustani, Urdu, Bengali, Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian were all taught, by prominent scholars. Thomas Malthus, the great economics philosopher, was professor of Political Economy from the origin of the College to 1834. Law, Mathematics and Natural Philosophy were also important courses of training at the College in preparation for residence and work in a very different world.

Imagine the excitement of a young man of the middle or gentry classes, nominated by the directors of the BEIC for training at the College. It was a passport to a new world, to adventure, and to a secure future. The high spirits in the College Quad can only be imagined, and nearby there was a pub, The East India College Arms (it still exists as The College Arms) which must have seen its share of larks undertaken by the students. The 'nabobs' of Regency fiction perhaps began their careers at the East India Company College!

'Til next time,
Lesley-Anne

Ratafia -- The Lady's Choice

Ladies in Regency novels frequently drink ratafia. It has become the quintessential Regency romance drink, in fact, favoured by authors. I knew it was a sweet wine, but I really knew nothing more until I came across several recipes and options for making ratafia in "The Professed Cook", a wonderful cookery from 1812 which I found downloadable at Google Books.

"The Professed Cook" has a section titled Des Ratafiats or Of sweet Drams or Cordials. It includes some ten recipes for different versions of ratafia. They all begin with brandy and they all take thirty to forty days to prepare and infuse. The adventurous cook, it seems, can add almost anything to the brandy. Some of the ingredients listed in "The Professed Cook" include walnuts, quinces, orange-flowers, juniper-berries, lemon-peel, aniseseeds and apricots. Plenty of sugar is included and three spices in these receipts in particular--coriander, cinnamon and cloves.

Ratafia was commercially bottled during the Regency and sold at wine merchants like Berry Bros. and Rudd in London. Supplies must have been limited during the Napoleonic Wars and no doubt ratafia, like so many other wines, was a prime article for smugglers. Ratafia is still commercially produced today.
left photo by Yeza, via Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons

Presumably ratafia was considered a drink suitable for ladies because of the addition of fruit, sugar and spices. The brandy was there, but it was diluted and infused with innocuous ingredients which would not turn 'weak' female heads. Grrrr! One of my heroines demanded madeira instead! Modern day ratafia has an alcohol content of 25%; if the Regency version was similar, the ladies should not have been supping it so freely!

Ratafia still makes the news today, and modern day receipts are to be found on the Internet. Check out these websites:

The Catalan newsagency--ratafia-sweet-green-walnut-liqueur-finds-new-public

The Old Foodie--for-love-of-ratafia

The Kitchn.com--quince-ratafia-how-to-make-fruit-liqueur

I would like to buy and sample some ratafia; I don't think I'll try my hand at making it!

'Til next time,

Lesley-Anne

The Devil is in the Detail Or, How not to write a Regency novel by Lynn Shepherd, Guest Blogger

If you decide to write a novel set in the Regency you have one real labour of love before you, and that’s to negotiate a veritable minefield of complex etiquette. There were so many rules governing social interaction – particularly between men and women – that it’s very easy to get the details wrong, and commit an unintentional howler.

I became very much aware of this when writing my Jane Austen pastiche, Murder at Mansfield Park. You would have thought that simply mimicking what Austen does would be a sufficient guide, but even if you manage to do this without mishap, there are some delightful nuances that Austen employs, which we’ve since lost. For example, a man could not shake a woman’s hand unless she first offered it to him, and when you understand that, there’s an added poignancy to the scene at the end of Emma, when Frank Churchill speaks to Emma for the first time after his secret engagement has come to light:

“I have to thank you, Miss Woodhouse, for a very kind forgiving message in one of Mrs Weston's letters. I hope time has not made you less willing to pardon. I hope you do not retract what you then said." "No, indeed," cried Emma, most happy to begin, "not in the least. I am particularly glad to see and shake hands with you--and to give you joy in person."

I employ this same convention in my own novel, as a way of signposting the subtle shifts in the relationship between my heroine, Mary Crawford, and the detective ‘thief-taker’, Charles Maddox, whom she first dislikes, then fears, and finally comes to respect. This scene marks the lowest point in their relationship:

He would have taken her hand, had she offered it, but she remained seated, and would not catch his eye. He said nothing immediately, but took a seat on the bench beside her. “I see we do not meet as friends, Miss Crawford. I am at a loss to know how I have so far forfeited your good opinion.”

Of course you might reasonably say that very few readers will pick up on such a fine distinction, but those who do will gain an added pleasure from the scene. More to the point, the more things like that you get wrong, the more the reader’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ comes under threat. I may be a purist, but I firmly believe that you can only create a viable illusion of authenticity by remaining completely faithful to the conventions of the period. In fact one of the most telling measures of the vast social distance between my thief-taker and the Mansfield family is his willingness to use the precise niceties of social convention to his own advantage – to observe them when it suits him, and flout them when it doesn’t, as in this Regency version of an ‘interrogation scene’:

“It appears you have little regard for the niceties of common civility, Mr Maddox,” Maria replied archly. “I dare say you will sit down whether I give my permission or no.” “Ah,” he said with a smile, as he sat down beside her, “there you are wrong, Miss Bertram, if you will forgive me. There are few men who are more watchful of what you term ‘niceties’ than I am. Many of my former cases have turned on such things. In my profession it is not only the devil you may find in the detail.” Maria replied only with a toss of her head; she seemed anxious to be gone, but unable to do so without appearing ill-mannered. Maddox smiled to himself – these fine ladies and gentlemen! It was not the first time that he had seen one of their class imprisoned by the iron constraints of politeness and decorum.

Much fun was had in the writing of scenes like this, as I’m sure you can imagine. But it’s not only custom and practice you have to observe as a Regency writer, but the ‘iron constraints’ of contemporary diction.

I spent an enormous amount of time studying Jane Austen’s style, in an effort to pull off what is – admittedly – a rather presumptuous act of literary ventriloquism. Some of that was about catching the rise and fall of her sentences – a difficult thing to describe, but every author has their own unique ‘rhythm’, and Austen more than most. Some of it was also about the tone she uses – the mix of ”playfulness and epigrammatism”, as she herself described it. You see this most obviously in her characteristic ‘balanced’ sentences, where the first half appears to be perfectly straight-faced, only to shift suddenly into delicious irony. This example comes from Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice:

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine."

The other area that can be a bear-trap for the unsuspecting is the vocabulary. Many words we use now were also common in Austen’s day, but the context in which they appear has sometimes radically changed. So even if you word-check everything you want to say against Austen’s novels (which I did), you can still make a faux pas if you don’t check the context as well. For example, you might want to refer – as I did - to the ‘atmosphere’ in a room, and be relieved to find that the word does indeed appear once or twice in Austen. However, if you look at these references more closely you’ll see that they all refer either to the weather, or to the physical nature of the air (‘poisonous atmosphere’), and never in our more general sense of ‘mood’.

Another snare for the unwary is ‘assume’ and ‘presume’. Austen only ever uses the word ‘assume’ in the sense of ‘taking on’ or ‘putting on’, and not in the modern sense of ‘making an assumption’. She uses ‘presume’ in the latter case, so I had to do the same (though one instance of ‘assuming’ did slip through the net, so it just shows you how stern you have to be with yourself!).

My own personal favourite here is the word ‘intriguing’. I had a wonderful sentence in my mind in which my thief-taker refers to one of his (female) subjects as “intriguing in both senses of the word”. But when I dutifully forced myself to look the word up, I found that while ‘intriguing’ in the sense of ‘plotting’ is perfectly acceptable in 1811, ‘intriguing’ in the sense of ‘fascinating’ does not come into use until 1909. It cost me dear to press the delete key on that one!

Like I said, you can call me a perfectionist, and I’m sure that there’s hardly one reader in a thousand who would have noticed. But if an author’s worth pastiching, they’re worth pastiching properly. Or at least I think so!

Lynn Shepherd is the author of the award-winning book "Murder at Mansfield Park". She has a doctorate in English Literature from Oxford University, and has published an academic work on the ‘Father of the English novel’, Samuel Richardson. Her next book – another ‘literary murder’ – will be published in 2012. Her website is www.lynn-shepherd.com, and you can follow her on Twitter at @Lynn_Shepherd.