Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s latest is a sort-of Georgian murder mystery. I say sort-of because there is a murder and a detective (Henry Fielding) and a mystery to solve, though the reader is let in on the solution early on. It’s more a story about a lie that is told for profit and the lies that follow for survival and for love. For love because it is also a love story, albeit a twisted and destructive love, at least to start with. Will the murderer be caught? Will love find a way? You’ll not hear any answer from me. The plot twists and turns and constantly surprises and would make for a great book even without all the other things this has going for it.
What other things, you ask. Well, there’s the sheer joy of the writing that pulls you in and eases you along with the sort of command of language that so many modern thrillers (and it is a thriller) lack. This combines with a wonderful understanding of the contradictions and confusions of personality, especially when strong emotions pull people out of shape. Good people do bad things, bad people do good things, but we always believe in her characters. Some minor characters are sketched in less detail than the main actors, but nothing takes us out of the story. My feelings towards people switched alarmingly: sometimes I was anxious for them to succeed and others I wished them dead and damned.
People are damned. People die. It’s Georgian London: life seems to be lived at a different tempo. Frauds are more elaborate than any Tinder swindler has carried out and stakes are higher. Get caught swindling and you face a short trial and a long rope at Tyburn.
Life in the streets and lodging houses is convincing. Henry Fielding was a real person, not only the author of Tom Jones but the driving force behind the Bow Street Runners. Others, as the excellent historical note makes clear, are based on other historical characters. And the confectionary shop where so much of the action takes place is almost a character itself, filled with delicious things that have me wishing I could shop there: almond wafers, lemon jellies, pickled peaches, pound cakes flavoured with Savile oranges, lozenges, and pastilles, and, wonder of wonders, ice cream. I went out and bought a Georgian cookbook.
The Art of a Lie is a wonderful story, wonderfully told. Do yourself a favour and buy it.
The breakfast room at Marble Hill House features a table set for morning tea.
The house was built for Henrietta Howard, who moved into it in 1734 when she left the court of King George II. The breakfast room, east facing to get the morning light, is the room where she would have taken the first meal of the day. At the time, breakfast would have been a very light meal — probably just bread and butter taken with tea. The room would not just have been used for breakfast. It’s where she would have entertained morning callers — mainly women friends who would have been entertained informally over a cup of tea.
Taking tea was a useful social ritual. In a world where men dominated, the tea table was the realm of the woman of the house. Although both sexes drank tea, men often drank coffee, usually in coffee houses where no decent woman would be seen. The tea party was therefore a predominantly female preoccupation and whether guests were male or female, it would be the woman of the house who poured the tea.
Tea, all of it imported from China, was a valuable commodity and it would be kept in a locked tea box with the mistress of the house holding the key. A servant would bring in a kettle of boiled water which would be placed on a stand with a small spirit burner or a live coal underneath to keep it hot. The hostess would then unlock her tea box, place a little tea in the pot and add hot water. You can see the pot in the centre of the table. Note that it is very small.
The tea would be poured into the cups. Henrietta’s are Chinese and have no handles, which was the fashion for tea cups at the time. (Coffee cups had handles.) Tea was almost invariably taken with milk and sugar and a milk jug and a sugar bowl are shown on the table. The sugar will have been chipped off a sugar loaf and would have looked like rather irregularly shaped sugar cubes. People generally liked their tea quite sweet and lumps of sugar would have been added using the sugar tongs, unfortunately hidden away behind the chinaware in this photograph. (Some people were uncomfortable with the idea that all their sugar was the product of slave plantations in the West Indies and a few, like Mary Shelley, refused sugar on principle.)
Once the tea was drunk, the dregs would be emptied into the slops bowl on the table and the pot would be topped up. With good quality tea, more tea would not need to be added immediately but you could get a second ‘wash’ from the leaves remaining in the pot. (Traditionally, with china tea, the first ‘wash’ should be discarded, though English tea drinkers do not tend to do this.) Dr Johnson, who was a great tea drinker, was known to drink twenty or more cups in a session, driving one poor hostess to suggest he might prefer to take his tea in a bowl.
Henrietta had been a leading lady in the court and, even after she had left, she would have been very conscious of maintaining high social standards at home. She was also a very enthusiastic collector of chinaware that had actually been shipped over from China. Chinese stuff was very fashionable and she had a lot of it. (She even had an extension built to house her China collection — now gone, like the collection it held.) The porcelain on the table is Chinese. It wasn’t until 1710 that at Meissen, near Dresden, Europeans managed to produce an equivalent quality of porcelain. Meissen chinaware was still an expensive import. In Dr Johnson’s house, you can see a similar tea set of Meissen porcelain (below).
This is not quite as old as the set at Marble Hill and it is much more European in style. The cups are larger and have handles. The teapot has a shape much like today. The same elements are there though: the sugar bowl, the tongs, the slops bowl.
Both include a porcelain tea caddy (called a tea canister at the time). These containers were the way that tea was stored in China and the design followed the tea to England before being replaced by the wooden lockable tea boxes in the course of the 18th century. At Marble Hill, we tell people that the tea was probably kept in a locked box and the china tea cylinder is essentially decorative, but the fact that the later Meissen set includes a tea cylinder suggests that tea was still served from such containers well into the 18 century.
Gradually tea became more affordable. By 1742, Scotland’s senior legal officer, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, complained that “the meanest families, even the labouring people in Scotland, made their morning meal of tea to the disuse of ale”. By 1784, Pitt’s Commutation Act effectively reduced the tax on tea from 119% to 12%, setting tea on its way to becoming the national drink of Britain. Locked tea chests were no longer necessary.
Tea caddies in our kitchen and not a locked box in sight
Please note that I have switched to posting on Substack and posts here are gradually fading away. If you like my posts, can you please switch to subscribing to me on Substack: Tom’s Substack | Tom Williams | Substack
I’ve recently written a piece for the Historical Novel Society around a book that is set in the French and Indian War. (War on the Inland Sea by Thomas Briggs.) The war is in some ways almost a mirror image of the War of 1812, which is where Burke and the War of 1812 is set. In the French and Indian War, the French, who then held the eastern part of what would later become Canada, attacked British forces holding what would later become the eastern United States. Half a century later, the forces of the United States attacked British forces in Canada.
Both were scrappy wars, with strategic movements of troops hampered by poor communications across the vast areas of land where the conflict took place. The French and Indian War ended in a decisive British victory, while the War of 1812 had no clear victor and resulted in a return to the borders that had existed before the war began.
In both wars, the armies relied on the assistance of the indigenous communities. Anybody writing about these conflicts (especially a historical novelist) runs into problems about the language they use to describe the native allies of the armies.
Nowadays, referring to the indigenous people of North America as ‘Indians’ is often regarded as offensive, which is a bit tricky when talking about a conflict usually referred to as ‘the French and Indian War’ (an odd name, given that the main combatants were the French and the British).
Ideally, I would like to call the native people the First Nations, which is the term they often used for themselves. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense, though, to people who think of ‘the Indians’ as being a single political or cultural whole, rather than recognising that there were hundreds of tribes with different political and social arrangements and very different economies. The tribes reasonably enough saw themselves as nations and, as they were there before the Europeans, ‘First Nations’ makes sense.
When I’m writing about the people that my hero deals with in Burke and the War of 1812, I try to use tribal names as much as possible, as individual identity was tied to tribal identity. Indeed, the difficulty that the First Nations had in putting aside their tribal differences and forming a unified front against the European interlopers was a major contributor to their eventual destruction.
One of the reasons why, even today, we tend to think of the various tribes as more of a unitary culture than they actually were is because the United States government deliberately treated tribal differences as relatively unimportant in their political dealings with the local population. By denying each tribe a separate political existence, they were able to negotiate with some native leaders who claimed to speak on behalf of tribes other than their own. Treaties were made giving Europeans territorial rights over land where the signatories to the treaty had no authority.
Even today, the office within the US Department of the Interior that deals with tribal governments is the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA is one of the oldest federal agencies in the US, with roots tracing back to the Committee on Indian Affairs established by Congress in 1775. Unsurprisingly, especially when dealing with the US government, local people began to refer to themselves as ‘Indians’ and there are many examples of English-speaking natives using this term.
“Let the poor Indian attempt to resist the encroachment of his white neighbours…”
William Apess (Pequot) writing in English
“… their scouts … were always checked at the river Canard… by a small detachment of troops and Indians”
Teyoninhokarawen (Mohawk) writing in English
Nowadays, many people, particularly in Britain, prefer the term ‘Native American’, but I am told by Canadians that this term, too, is considered offensive and that they should be referred to as ‘indigenous people’.
What is sad is that while we argue about what the original inhabitants of America should be called, it is all-too-easy to forget about their world. A very long time ago, I travelled to America as a student and visited the Smithsonian. Nowadays, the Smithsonian has a Museum of the American Indian (not, in view of what I’ve just been saying, the most sensitive name) which must be worth seeing. When I went, hidden away in a basement, there was a large room, perhaps two, with some mannequins wearing native dress and a few artefacts. That, as far as I can remember, was it. I had sought the exhibition out specially, because I had hoped to learn about a culture not well presented in the UK. I was, to put it mildly, disappointed. Last year, I visited the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, where the representation of North American native people was even worse.
Knowing I was going to write this, I went to the British Museum to see what they had to offer. The exhibition, in a single large room, does at least confront the issue of the near annihilation of the indigenous people of North America, as you can see in the introduction shown below:
Even so, the material available is sparse. The photograph below shows everything from the display on the tribes of the Northeastern woodlands.
There were dozens of tribes in this area, which included three distinct language groups: Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan. The tribes included the Shawnee, who feature prominently in Burke and the War of 1812 and whose leaders included Tecumseh, whose powder horn was shown in my post about the National Army Museum. So much culture reduced to one display case – and several of the items shown, like the pipe tomahawks, were made by Europeans as gifts to native allies or, like the box at the front right of the picture, were made by locals to sell to Europeans.
After the War of 1812, the British tried to negotiate some protection for their native allies into the peace treaty. The US promised some rights to the tribes that remained south of the border, but it was obvious to everybody that the British would not reopen hostilities simply to protect the native people. Deprived of the opportunity to expand northwards into Canada, the United States pursued its movement west with renewed vigour and acted ruthlessly against any native tribes that got in the way. In 1800 the Native American population of the coterminous United States was estimated at 600,000. By the decade 1890-1900 it was down to around 237,000.
Admitting to the mass slaughter of the indigenous peoples is probably more important than squabbles over the name we give to the survivors.
References/Further Reading
Benn C (2014) Native Memoirs from the War of 1812 John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore
Benn C (ed) (2019) A Mohawk Memoir from the War of 1812. John Norton – Teyoninhokarawen University of Toronto Press
Charles River Editors (2013) The Shawnee
Hacker DJ & Haines MR (2005) American Indian Mortality in the Late Nineteenth Century: the Impact of Federal Assimilation Policies on a Vulnerable Population. Annales de démographie historique, no 110(2), 17-29. https://doi.org/10.3917/adh.110.0017
BURKE AND THE WAR OF 1812
Burke and the War of 1812 is the latest of the series of books about James Burke, a real-life spy for the British, though most of his adventures in my books are made up. I sent him to North America because someone who enjoys the books kept on telling me what a great background the War of 1812 would provide and he was right.
James Burke (a real person, though not someone who visited North America, as far as I know) was a British spy. Back then, though, spies were expected to be diplomats (and many diplomats were spies) and Burke represented Britain in high-level negotiations, notably with the Spanish court. In this book, he is negotiating with the Shawnee leaders to make an alliance with Britain. The book is fiction, but the alliance is fact.
I was at the National Army Museum recently for a lecture on the life of the rather splendidly named Shadrack (or Shadrach) Byfield. He was a private soldier in the War of 1812 and he wrote a memoir of his life in the army. Unusually for the period, he wrote it himself, rather than having it written for him by one of his officers. The lecture was more about his life after leaving the army rather than the memoir itself, which should make interesting reading. He spent years arguing about the pension he should have received and did eventually get compensation for the loss of his arm during the war. It was a fascinating view of how soldiers returned to civilian life.
After the lecture I explored what I could find on the War of 1812. To be honest, there wasn’t much, but I’ve not found anything on previous visits, so I was happy to turn up an “Indian contract pistol”. Burke and the War of 1812 has Burke supplying native Americans with muskets, ostensibly for hunting but, in reality, so that they can attack American settlers. This was ahead of the outbreak of war when the British were anxious not to be seen as arming the natives. By 1814, we were openly arming the tribes that were, by then, actively fighting with us, and this is an example of a weapon specifically intended for this. There was clearly no pretence that this was a hunting weapon.
An important character in Burke and the War of 1812 is the Shawnee war chief, Tecumseh, so I was excited to find his powder horn on display. Tecumseh was an important British ally, killed by the Americans in 1813.
BURKE AND THE WAR OF 1812
Burke and the War of 1812 is the latest of the series of books about James Burke, a real-life spy for the British, though most of his adventures in my books are made up. I sent him to North America because someone who enjoys the books kept on telling me what a great background the War of 1812 would provide and he was right. It’s a story that sees Burke negotiating with native tribes to forge alliances ahead of the war, spying in Washington to discover American plans and, at the climax, joining the attack on Detroit that ended up with the town in British hands.
There’s more on Substack
I’m cutting back on this blog because I am moving to Substack. My Substack posts include everything I post here plus some different stuff. This week, there’s an article on Napoleon’s return to France in 1815 and a very beautiful church in London that’s easily overlooked.
Readership of my blog (and, I suspect, all blogs) is fading away, while Substack seems flourishing. This week on Substack, I’m reposting an old post about Napoleon’s escape from Elba, a note on Georgian furniture, a poll on what readers want to see and a pretty picture to round it all off. I’m finding it easier to use than WordPress (that’s here) and more fun. I will still cross-post, but not every week and I’ll probably gradually fade away here. Apart from anything else, maintaining this site costs me money and I don’t feel it generates enough enthusiasm from me or my readers to justify it.
