Researching Regency London
by | Posted in Booklust, Wanderlust No Comments »With eager anticipation I have been researching places to go and things to do during my upcoming pilgrimage to the holy land of the Regency Romance genre.
The Travel Book Search
Frustratingly, there seem to be London guidebooks for most other literary genres, but not romance. There are numerous books on London through the eyes of Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wild, Sherlock Holmes, and Charles Dickens, and one genre travel guide to the Mystery Reader’s Walking Guide: London. There are half a dozen books on literary guides to London written during the late 19th and early 20th centuries – much good would they do guiding a reader through the much-changed 21st. At least a Dickens’ guide would help me identify locations in Lisa Kleypas’ Victorian-era novels, but where is London for Georgette Heyer Lovers? Stephanie Laurens’ London: Mayfair and Beyond? The Traveler’s Companion to the London of Julia Quinn? The closest I have come are travel guides to Jane Austin’s England and Bath, but not, specifically, London.
Which leads us back to writing our own.
Walking Tours of Regency-Related London
London Walks is a company that has approximately ten walking tours a day for only 6 pounds each that all look fabulous and have been enthusiastically recommended to me. A few of them relate to our topic:
- Old Mayfair – The Best Address in London!: During the 19th century, anyone who was anyone had a town home in Mayfair for the Season, including all our monied and titled heroes and heroines.
- The London Walk: Westminster and the West End: “Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the Changing of the Guard, our loveliest Royal Park, 500-year-old St. James’s Palace, clubland, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square, Admiralty Arch…” All the sights our characters witnessed.
- The Literary London Pub Walk: “Shades of Dickens and Thackeray; Oscar Wilde and G. B. Shaw; Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Circle (who lived in Squares and loved in triangles); George Orwell, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot – how they were flesh and blood men and women who lived, loved, laughed, caroused, quarrelled and spun ‘words so nimble, so full of subtle flame…’.”
I will be there over October 31st, most likely sampling the Apparitions, Alleyways & Ale: the Halloween Ghostwalk Tour!!!
Map Me Baby
A recent find: an online map of London from 1827.