Introducing Rose Lerner, Historical Fiction Author!

It gives me the greatest of pleasure to introduce debut author Rose Lerner, whose first book, In For a Penny, will be hitting the shelves on February 23rd. Rose discovered Georgette Heyer when she was an impressionable young miss of thirteen and never looked back-- fortunately for all of us!

In the midst of book launch madness, Rose has graciously taken the time to stop by today to share with us some of the more fascinating bits of her research for In For a Penny.

Welcome, Rose!

When I started writing In for a Penny, about a rich brewer's daughter who marries an impoverished earl, I realized I was going to have to do some research to figure out how people in the Regency thought about class. I had general ideas, obviously, but if I was going to write about my heroine from the point of view of my antagonist, the snobby poacher-hating Tory Sir Jasper, or write about my heroine meeting the hero's newly-middle-class tenant farmers, I needed to understand more.

I quickly discovered that there were endless gradations, just as there are today:

1. A biography of Hannah More tells this story: the Duchess of Gloucester "desired one of her ladies to stop an orange-woman and ask her if she ever sold ballads. 'No indeed,' said the woman, 'I don't do anything so mean, I don't even sell apples!'"

2. Miss Bingley finds it ridiculous to imagine a portrait of Elizabeth's uncle, a lawyer, next to one of Mr. Darcy's "great-uncle, the judge." While Elizabeth says she and Mr. Darcy are in the same class--"he is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter"--the difference seems huge to Lady Catherine.

3. As far as "new money" went, bankers and brewers were less respected than gentlemen and peers, but more respected than factory-owners and men who made their fortunes in new, Industrial Revolution professions.

4. When I was reading the opera reviews Leigh Hunt did for his journal, the Examiner, I was surprised by how often ideas of "vulgarity" and "coarseness" came up--and not at all in the sense of dirty jokes or inappropriate content. The words were primarily used to describe lapses in taste (for example, affected, show-off-y singing). "Vulgar" and "elegant" seem clearly linked to "working class" and "upper class." Yet, Leigh Hunt was a member of a middle-class, politically radical group of poets and thinkers (including John Keats, son of an apothecary) who were nicknamed "the Cockney School" and constantly described as "vulgar" by their gently-born critics. "Vulgar," it became apparent while doing my research, was a buzz-word of the time. It seems to have been especially popular when someone wanted to insult someone else for being of a lower socioeconomic class, but didn't want to admit that's what they were doing.

The moral is that, like today, everybody was very interested in where they stood on the ladder. They were probably very aware of the rungs a few feet above and below, and the distances between them, while everything farther away blurred together.

The distance between the nouveau riche and old money was small enough that old money was very, very vividly aware of it--and very eager to maintain it. I was occasionally startled by the scorn heaped on lower- or middle-class people who "rose above their station" or were perceived as trying to do so. I read one quote in particular again and again when trying to get the right tone for my villain. It's from an open letter by Lord Byron to his publisher John Murray, attacking the Cockney School:

It is in their finery that the new under school are most vulgar, and they may be known by this at once; as what we called at Harrow "a Sunday blood" might be easily distinguished from a gentleman, although his clothes might be the better cut, and his boots the best blackened, of the two--probably because he made the one, or cleaned the other, with his own hands.

He clearly believes that he's said something incredibly scathing, but all he's actually said is that he and his fellow aristocratic students at Harrow used to laugh at people who wore their best clothes to church, simply because they looked different, and couldn't afford to pay someone else to make and care for all their clothes. (I do love Byron, by the way, but I also love using him for research because his contemporary prejudices are so very shameless.) It's that quote, and what it represents--the terrifying humiliation of trying and failing to look like a gentlewoman--that has shaped my heroine from childhood.

The other part of this, the part I had the most trouble wrapping my head around, was the way all of these distinctions were perceived as natural. The differences between rich and poor weren't differences of education or culture; they were in the blood. That type of thinking has fallen out of fashion (possibly because we know more about genetics nowadays), but to write this book I had to try to understand it. This quote, from The Methodists by James Haskins, was my touchstone for that. It knocked me flat the first time I read it:

"[The Methodists'] doctrines are most repulsive and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors," the Duchess of Buckingham had observed in the mid-18th century, "in perpetually endeavoring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions[...] It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth."

It's hard to imagine a world where it seems completely intuitive that being rich would make you less sinful. But as a historical romance author, it's my job to try.

Rose will be giving away a shiny new copy of In For A Penny to one person who comments on this blog....