Welcome to the Regency Insider

A monthly look behind the scenes of my research into the late Regency

“Easy reading is damn hard writing”

So said Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. It’s not exactly spending days down the salt-mines, but crafting those words into a story and a shape that people can enjoy is sometimes a challenge. And as an author of historical fiction, I have another maxim to bear in mind…

“Wearing all that weight of learning lightly like a flower”

This time it’s the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in an otherwise rather turgid poem called “In Memoriam, Epilogue”. In short, I have to know as much as I can about the period and locations in which my books are set – the 1820s, and London and Cambridge for the most part – but not make the readers feel as though they are sitting through a lecture. I need to drop in nuggets of information that illuminate the story, and leave out anything that would just be me showing off what I have learned.

The result of all this is that I have oodles of unused research. Well, not exactly unused, as it all informs my own understanding of the background of my books – but certainly not overtly obvious in the text. Several years ago I decided to send out a monthly e-newsletter to subscribers (via Mailchimp) so that they could enjoy the bits that didn’t make it into the books. And now it seems that Substack might be the place to find new readers.

So if you are interested in the late Regency*, this could be the Substack for you. The Regency Insider goes out on the first of each month, so there are twelve a year. And it won’t cost you a penny (or a cent, or whatever your smallest coin may be). My dastardly motive is to get people as excited as I am about the 1820s – which is, let’s be clear, Best Decade Ever.

*But let’s back up just a moment – what is all this about the “late Regency”? Surely the Regency ended on 29 January 1820, when King George III finally died of pneumonia and his son – the Prince of Wales, and regent – took the throne as King George IV.  How can we talk of a Regency when there is no longer a regent? The best explanation I have ever read is found in the author’s note at the start of Ian Mortimer’s marvellous book The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain: “[Although the official Regency ended in 1820] George IV hated the very idea of constitutional change, largely as a result of the fate of the French royal family [following the French Revolution of 1789]. He thus did all he could to thwart it. It was only after his death that the government of the day was free to draft the much-needed Reform Bill and set about tackling some of the social issues raised by the French Revolution. Hence the terminal point of the [Regency] period is set by the king’s death, on 26 June 1830.” In other words, the term “Regency” refers not simply to the presence of a regent, but also to the unchanging attitudes of that regent when he becomes king. And to distinguish from the Regency proper, I – and many others – talk of the “late Regency”, which in essence is the 1820s.