Victorian Parlour Games: A Book Review By Cheryl Bolen

In today’s article, award-winning Regency romance author, Cheryl Bolen, reviews the book Victorian Parlour Games. As Cheryl tells us, despite its title, this book is a very useful reference for Regency authors who are planning to include the playing of games in their stories. Many of the games in this book were played long before the Victorian era and are quite appropriate to a novel set in the Regency.

Once you read Cheryl’s review, the existence of which game in our favorite period surprises you the most?

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Lady Hertford’s Chinese Drawing Room

A cross-post from The Regency Redingote:

Last week I wrote about Chinese paper-hangings in the Regency, and mentioned that one set of these very expensive papers may have had special significance in the life of a young girl. In 1806, the Prince of Wales made a gift of a full set of Chinese paper-hangings to the mother of a woman who would later become his mistress. However, the facts seem to suggest this gift was actually made in an effort to gain custody of a child in order to please his current inamorata.

How a set of Chinese paper-hangings may have been an attempt to sway the choice of who had custody of the little girl who gave the Prince his nickname …

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Chinese Paper-Hangings

A cross-post from The Regency Redingote:

Last month I wrote a general article about paper-hangings in the Regency. That was the first in a series of articles I have planned on various aspects of paper-hangings. In this article, I am going to focus on one of the more expensive and fanciful genres of paper-hangings, those imported from China, and the imitations of those papers made in Europe.

The Prince Regent was very fond of Chinese papers, and used them lavishly in his residences. And, of course, only the very best, and therefore the most expensive, papers would do for him. It was one of the reasons he was so heavily in debt for all of his various building and decorating projects. Following the Prince’s lead, Chinese papers began to appear in a number of great houses across England, and retained a certain popularity even into the Regency.

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The English Print Room Phenomenon

A cross-post from The Regency Redingote:

In recent weeks I have written about both paper-hangings and the private display of art during the Regency. Those divergent topics intersected during the second half of the eighteenth century and through the decade of the Regency to produce a unique phenomenon which occurred in the decoration of rooms in many private houses. However, this phenomenon was restricted primarily to England, though there were some instances of it in Ireland and America at about the same time.

The phenomenon of the English Print Room …

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Marriage at Gretna Green by Jane Lark

Ah, June, a popular month for weddings. And during the Regency, quite a number of those weddings took place at the small village of Gretna Green, the first hamlet over the English border in Scotland. Last year, Jane Lark, whose most recent Regency is The Scandalous Love of a Duke, spent some time in modern-day Gretna Green. Today, she shares with us what she learned about the famous, or infamous, Scottish capital of clandestine wedding.

What really happened in Gretna Green …

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Regency Diamonds — A Banked Fire

A cross-post from The Regency Redingote:

Most people today are familiar with modern diamonds which have been cut with great precision, giving them the mathematically exact facet size and number which allows them to reflect and refract light for optimum brilliance or fire. These precise cutting techniques were first discovered and introduced into the diamond industry in the early twentieth century. Yet I have read any number of Regency novels in which the heroine or some other character has acquired a diamond which by description is clearly a diamond of a modern cut, a diamond which could not possibly have existed during the Regency. In fact, all of the diamonds which were available during the Regency would appear rather dull when compared to diamonds cut after the early 1920s.

And now, how the diamond intensified its sparkle across the centuries …

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