Evidence and Speculation: Coming to You From the Plum Room

In my last post, I promised I'd tell you what the Plum Room is -- because I hadn't yet found out about it myself. All I knew that it was one of many in the house that's the subject of the book I was enjoying so much -- At Home: A Short History of Private Life, in which the popular historian Bill Bryson takes us on a virtual tour of the rooms and sundry recesses of his house in England, for an delightfully informative and thoroughly engaging ramble through the byways of (mostly) modern western history.

Bryson, by the way, is much more than "just" a popular historian: if you check out his Wikipedia entry, prepare to be gobsmacked by the breadth of his occupations and accomplishments.

In any event, so engaged and delighted was I by this most recent book of his (even if it did sting to have a hitherto unsuspected anachronism in my novel Almost a Gentleman exposed) that I rushed to blog about it in mid-tour. Breathless from a trek through the hall, kitchen, scullery and larder; electrified by the contents of the fuse box; entertained and diverted by the conversation in the drawing room (about period furniture, furniture design, and the best furniture wood that ever existed but which exists no longer) -- when you last saw me (in the dining room, fortified by what I'd just learned about the history of the vitamin), I was fairly rubbing my hands with glee that I still had "the cellar, the passage, the study, the garden, the plum room (??!!), the stairs, the bedroom, the bathroom, the dressing room, the nursery, and the attic" still to go.

Especially the plum room -- and comments on my blog post revealed that the name had which piqued other imaginations besides my own. But although the remainder of at Home did indeed constitute a gleeful journey -- and one that I still recommend to history hoydens everywhere -- sadly, the plum room didn't yield up as much juicy substance as we'd hoped.

"Plum" was simply what Bryson and his family called that room when they moved in, the walls being painted that color. The original architect had called it a drawing room; but soon after the place was built in 1851, the original owner -- a country rector, the Reverend Dr. Marsham -- made some changes. There are bookshelves; the plum room might have become a library; Bryson doesn't know. Nor does he know why Mr. Marsham, a young single gentleman of quite sizable income, chose to have the plum room adorned with all manner of wood and plaster moldings, popular in the earlier part of the Victorian era, a bit dowdy and provincial by the 1850s, but still a mark of of an intention to make this room somehow special.

"Nineteenth century pattern books," as Bryson tells us, "offered homeowners an almost infinite array of shapely, esoterically named notifs -- ovolos, ogees, quirks, crockets, scotias, cavettos, dentils, evolute spirals, even a 'Lesbian cymatium,' and at least two hundred more ways" to individualize a room's walls and ceiling. "Mr. Marsham chose liberally," Bryson continues, "opting for bubble-like beading around the doorcase, fluted columns at the windows, ribbony swags fluttering across the fireplace breast, and a stately show of repeating demi-hemispheres in a style known as egg-and-dart around the ceiling trim."

Why here? For what purpose? There never was a Mrs. Marsham, but might there have been a time when Mr. Marsham thought there was going to be? The rector was in his late twenties when he came into his living and built this substantial house. Perhaps there was a broken engagement. Or -- I've blogged elsewhere about the prevalence of illness (particuarly consumption) during this period -- perhaps there was a more fatal end for the high hopes that seem to have gone into designing this room. Bryson speculates delicately about Mr. Marsham's domestic life, or lack of one (all that's known for certain is that his housekeeper, Miss Elizabeth Worm, stayed with him for over fifty years -- and tantalizingly, that their bedrooms were in some proximity). While I have to admit that, in my capacity as writer of erotic romance, I've indulged in some rather less delicate speculations.

But the house, even in the plum room, doesn't yield up more than speculations.

Still, I find myself wondering about the story that might be hidden in the plum room or in the arrangement of bedrooms upstairs...

Do you?

(And do check out At Home).

At Home in the World

The worst part of being a historical writer has got to be the anachronisms that creep into your fiction, the ones that bite you about the ankles because you never even thought to check them -- because at the time you wrote them it seemed so entirely obvious that this or that phrase or product simply had to have been around back then.

The product currently at issue being boot polish, tins of which I blithely envisioned neatly stacked on the shelf of every Regency gentleman's dressing room, in readiness for his valet to put a sexy shine on all those hot high Hessians. Boot polish plays a minor but rather important role in my first published romance, Almost a Gentleman, in the form of a made-up commodity of inferior quality called Drumblestone's Bargain Blacking.

I probably cooked up the name in half-conscious reference to David Copperfield and Oliver Twist's tormentors, and once the stuff had a little Dickensian spit (or spite) affixed to it, I never thought to question it.

Which is rather too bad, as I learned some number of years later -- or in fact was just a day or two ago, when I read that boot polish actually wasn't commercially sold until the 1890s.

Authors, don't you hate that when it happens?

Still, I'd hate it a lot more if I wasn't otherwise taking enormous pleasure in having my ignorance revealed, so enthralled (and appalled) have I been to learn that besides all their other drudgeries, eighteenth and nineteenth century English servants were charged with by distilling, brewing, or otherwise concocting "inks, weedkillers, soap, toothpaste, candles, waxes, vinegars and pickles, cold creams and cosmetics, rat poisons, flea powders, shampoos...." (And if I weren't already charmed by the substance and variety of these artifacts, I'd have kept on reading for the vivacity with which the words tumble onto the page.)

Which is to say (as I'm sure some of you have already guessed), that I've been spending the last few days reading Bill Bryson -- more specifically, his recent book called At Home: A Short History of Private Life, a wonderfully entertaining, inquisitive and informed account of the house he and his family live in, "a former Church of England rectory in a village of tranquil anonymity in Norfolk, in the easternmost part of England."

The original concept for the book, Bryson says, was "to wander from room to room and consider how each has figured in the evolution of private life." Writing about what's "neatly bounded and cozily finite," this was to be "a book I could do in carpet slippers." But as you'd expect from the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, there's very little that remains obediently on its proper side of the invisible circle separating home and whatever happens outside of home.

"Houses aren't refuges from history," is how Bryson puts it. "They are where history ends up."

As does historical romance, at least in the novels I've tried to write, which almost always end up with a hero and heroine finding their home -- and in my most recent, The Edge of Impropriety, (just out, I'm just saying, in mass-market paperback), also finding their family. For me it's one of the great pleasures of historical romance when the period setting becomes something more than costume and furniture, or housework done by the invisible elfin hands of unnamed servants. At best, I love historical fiction, especially about men and women finding each other and finding home, as the venue wherein (again, in Bryson's words), "whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over -- eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house."

Or in this case, his house, as he takes us through the hall, kitchen, scullery and larder, to the fuse box (with a fine, concise history of the lighting of houses and cities from candlelight through whale oil, kerosene, gas, and electricity), the drawing room (architects, architecture, Chippendale and a lovely bit about the best wood that was ever used for furniture). I'm in the dining room now, learning about the long struggle to discover and invent the vitamin.

Bryson wears his astonishing erudition as lightly, comfortably, and modestly... as, well, a pair of carpet slippers. He tells you stuff you didn't suspect; stuff that makes stuff you sort of knew but never understood finally make sense; and stuff you never thought to ask but should have. And he seems to know how much is enough to make you feel comfortably full and not enough to sate your sense of wonderment. Though if you want more that this 450pages of richness, there are always the 114 pages of source notes that didn't make it between the covers of his book but can be found online at http://www.booksattransworld.co.uk/billbryson/downloads/athome_source_notes.pdf.

But according to the table of contents I've still got the cellar, the passage, the study, the garden, the plum room (??!!), the stairs, the bedroom, the bathroom, the dressing room, the nursery, and the attic, deliciously to go, in this book that I can't imagine how I've done without up until now, and that I overwhelmingly recommend to history hoydens everywhere.

The plum room? I'll be sure to let you know.