Historical notes for Ladies’ Own Bakery

Season 2

Back around 1933, the Worshipful Company of Bakers of London had an anniversary, and their secretary celebrated by commissioning a history. Thanks to Ohio’s wonderful library system, I was actually able to acquire a copy of A Short History of the Worshipful Company of Bakers of London, by Sylvia Lettice Thrupp. It is a veritable treasure trove of information about how the company actually worked, and contributed massively to the drama of Season 2. Enjoy!

Episode 6: Lady Arnold is reading Emery Eccentric Biography, or Memories of Remarkable Female Characters, Ancient and Modern, published in 1802. You can read it online yourself, thanks to the miracle of digital libraries.

Curry is already popular in the Regency! The Hindostanee Coffee House had indeed already opened and closed by the time of the Ladies’ Own Bakery. Curry in public houses dated back to the earlier 18th century, and one could indeed have a curry brought to one’s home, as well as consult a cookbook to find out how to make it oneself.

Digitized versions of Mrs. Mason’s The Lady’s Assistant for Regulating and Supplying Her Table, a popular menu-planning cookbook from the late 18th century, are easily available; and she provides such well-planned menus of every size and type, I adore picking and choosing among her suggestions for the dinners in my books, including Lord Boislegrand’s.

Lord Boislegrand’s beautiful harpsichord is modelled after this one.

And Henry Purcell’s King Arthur, including the song thanking Cupid for keeping them warm, was performed in London in 1784, when the Bickering parents would have been young and solvent; Mrs. Bickering must have seen it.

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I am obsessed with the Frost Fair of 1814. Weather records are available for Britain that give us exactly the chain of events that led to the Thames freezing over, and we even have images of what the fair looked like, as well as existing copies of the tickets and flyers printed on printing presses on the ice as souvenirs.

The fog rolled in late on December 26, and from there it was a series of snowfalls and bitter cold, ending with the Thames itself freezing solid late in January and continuing into the first few days of February. It didn’t last long, but enterprising vendors of all kinds moved quickly to set up shops in tents, including bars; and a stream of pedestrians walked up and down the ice looking at London from a whole new point of view.

Pretty much every detail of our depiction of the Frost Fair is accurate, including tents with drinking and dancing – except that there is no record of bread sellers selling buns! Possibly because, as elsewhere mentioned in the season, selling bread on the street was illegal. (Even though, as also mentioned elsewhere in the season, by 1814 there were tons of bakeries breaking the laws about selling bread left and right.)

Look at that awesome swing ride on the right! I should have written about it! Though I assume Jordan and Sally gave it a whirl.

A final note on the Frost Fair, as I mentioned in my social media posts: the elephant crossing the ice really happened.

I hope you also enjoyed our depiction of the Bickering sisters’ Christmas celebrations! At this point in history, before Queen Victoria (who adored Christmas), Christmas celebrations tended to be much more like our sisters celebrate: with food and games and friends and family. Upper-class folks had pretty wild parties (such as we see in “His Unlaced Love” in the Lords and Lace anthology) that were not at all family-oriented – it was a great time of year for masquerades. But families tended to just enjoy themselves, and gift-giving was not really the big deal it is today, nor were there Christmas trees.

But like every winter solstice celebration, there was enjoyment of lights; and I like to think our sisters’ tradition of watching candles burn was very much in the theme of the night.

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Season 1

I always enjoy incorporating historical research into my work, but I thought that there would be little to do to research the Ladies’ Own Bakery, as I am a lifelong baker myself. How silly I was.

I subscribe to periodicals from the Regency period through the British Newspaper Archive. A desultory search on “bread” just to see what could possibly turn up in the newspapers of the time became a very deep rabbit hole.

The assize laws in Britain at the time did indeed set the price of bread by law – but not flour. So bakers were squeezed when the price of flour went up – as it did in 1813, because 1812 was an abnormally cold year. (Which I did not know when I wrote of Michael and Letty’s sunny June in Not Like a Lady!)

So it was a very tough time to start a bakery.

Newspapers were also heavily taxed, so they were passed around a great deal. Clearly some kind neighbor has passed along the one with the advertisement in it that Anna originally saw.

I also found historical records that told me what tenants actually occupied the buildings around Leicester Square, up until our time period. So some buildings we actually know. I fell in love with the odd-shaped little building on the northeast corner, next to Bear Street. As far as I know, at the time it was actually a pub. But I didn’t think it was too great a stretch to make the pub into a bakery.

Another thing I ignored about reality was that according to the drawings, that little corner building might not have even had access to the mews. But I needed a back door to the bakery, so I have retroactively redesigned number 17 against the truth of history.

Jacquier’s Hotel was real. There’s actually even a picture of it. Turns out that the area had long been populated by French people, as it was originally the location of the French ambassador in London. I couldn’t find any evidence that the French people living in London had any trouble, despite the long war with France; but I am interpreting that bit of history as I see it. Leiceister Square undoubtedly had French people who were expatriate from France, and French people who were first-, second-, or even third-generation Britons; there were likely sympathizers with the French aristocrats, restorers of the crown, republican organizers, and adorers of Napoleon, everything. More on that later…

You can also see in the picture that Leicester Square park proper was a mess. People complained at the time about how overgrown the park was! I had originally pictured that I could put cute little scenes in a pleasant little park, but it was locked to everyone but rich tenants, and it was so overgrown people could barely go in it. Okay.

And that statue is of George II. The north side of the square had originally featured a large fine house for the Earl of Leicester himself (fittingly enough). In the 18th century, that house was occupied by successive Princes of Wales, who leased it from two ladies who inherited it from the Earl. It was demolished in 1791, making Mr. Morley’s shop and the rest on that northern side the newest part of the Square.

So by 1813 the area is caught between upscale and downmarket, and full of all sorts of people whose fortunes are moving in every direction. There are noble families who own houses there, and noble families who lease. Almost all the leasing was in the hands of one rich family who owned many of the buildings.

The roads were packed earth, but pavements existed all the way around and had since the 18th century. As you can see in this 18th century rendering, the thoroughfare was pretty broad, and cattle did indeed get herded through there on their way to one place or another. Careful of your toes, Rose. (This image shows how open the park was originally, and there’s no statue. You can see the old Earl’s house on the north side, and there’s the Ladies’ Own Bakery location at the top right. Jacquier’s Hotel is about halfway down the street on that side.)

The Quakers had indeed led the widespread sugar boycotts in England in the 1780s and up to 1791. The boycotts were credited with affecting governmental stance toward slavery, and helped Britain’s abolition of slave trading in 1807 – but not slavery itself, which wasn’t abolished till a generation later in 1833. Such slow progress toward what was obviously right, and supported by half a million Brits forty years before!

Devastatingly, slavery was bolstered by the sugar trade during the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon abolished slavery in 1794–then put it back in place in 1802, partly because French sugar makers said they couldn’t compete with British sugar, still made with slave labor and therefore cheaper. (This also led to the development of sugar from beets, as there was a huge public and economic desire not to be tied to the Caribbean sugarcane plantations and industry.) It’s a horrifying story that makes clear that the arc of history doesn’t bend toward justice in a smooth line, and not all by itself. People are what make the difference. And there was never a time when “everyone thought” that slavery was fine, as the backing and forthing over the legality of the violent and horrific enslavement of human beings during these decades clearly illustrates.

The housekeepers in Leicester Square, of every class, would certainly have known of the 1791 sugar boycott less than twenty years before if they were old enough to buy sugar at that time. And the Bickering sisters’ mother clearly remembered, as they were all tiny children then, or not yet born, and yet knew of it very well.

I’ll add notes here starting with Episode 5, for those who are interested:

Episode 5:

The price of a loaf of bread was set by law, but what could vary was the weight of the bread. (Can you imagine?) Bread that was a day old or less had weigh a certain amount to qualify as one of the priced loaves.

Quartern loaves were what most families bought: huge four-pound things.

Maslin bread was what we might call whole-wheat bread, but browner, as it often also contained rye. More about maslin as the series continues! As wheat grew expensive, the King tried to convince more British people to eat maslin, to save wheat; the public mocked him as Brown George and went on buying the purest white bread they could afford whenever they could.

Jane is pointing out a basic problem if any business doesn’t control their costs: the more they sell, the worse off they are.

As for Rose’s social evening, it is as accurate as I could make it. Many books against slavery were written by subscription, where people would pay a share towards the production of the book – rather like crowdsourcing. In 1813, the slave trade had been abolished for several years, but slavery itself had not, and wouldn’t be till 1833.

Rose, Mr. Russell, and their friends are as correct about the facts of what happened with slavery as I can be with a very broad brush and a comedy. The French did abolish slavery in their Caribbean islands, and then they did reinstitute it, and a large part of that was indeed the drive to keep sugar prices down, as the French plantation owners complained to their government that they could not compete with British slave sugar farms if they had to pay their workers.

The famous sugar boycott was indeed 25 years ago by the time of this story, but clearly Mrs. Bickering, the sisters’ mother, stayed with the cause well into their childhood. It is easily found with an internet search.

And the Society of Friends were indeed one of the main forces behind the push to abolish slavery at this time – the speaker at Mr. Russell’s political evening, Mr. Thomas Clarkson, is my fictional interpretation of the real historical figure.

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Episode 11:

By now you may be wondering what the heck maslin or maselin is. It’s wheat and rye bread, a little like pumperknickel, but not much. Wheat and rye could be grown together, but bread with rye in it was regulated differently, with different prices, from white bread.

As I said in one of the backmatters (for the single episode 11), there are websites that will tell you that poor people loved maslin, and maybe they did. But Londoners were very suspicious of it. When King George III ate maslin to show people it was healthy and patriotic, worried as he was about the wheat supply during his wars with France, the populace made fun of him and called him “Brown George” for years. Poor people might have enjoyed it (it must have been delicious) but it was not high-class!

Here’s a little background on maslin, with a recipe. Let me know if you try it.

I hope if you have questions you let me know on Facebook or on Twitter, I’d love to hear them!

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