Anybody out there writing about Victorian England?

I've got something on the back burner about Victorian Fleetwood and the shrimp fishing fleet there. The more I go into the history of the place, the more fascinating it gets - but like Dot in the Arthur Ransome books "at some point she had to take her characters to sea...." I kind of feel I need some practical experience of small boats before I take the plunge.

Really?

I didn't know they went fishing for shrimp in boats.
Fleetwood I remember for fishing smacks catching herring.

I watched the shrimpers at Brig and Filey but they waded and used huge scoop nets at the end of poles. I used to have a little one of the same shape to catch shrimp in the rock pools.

pdr said:

I didn't know they went fishing for shrimp in boats.
Fleetwood I remember for fishing smacks catching herring.

I watched the shrimpers at Brig and Filey but they waded and used huge scoop nets at the end of poles. I used to have a little one of the same shape to catch shrimp in the rock pools.

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Oh, definitely; the Morecambe Bay shrimper is a definite class of small boat. Typically, the boats used to come up river and land the shrimp at St George's Quay in Lancaster, and there was a stall on the market which was only open when the shrimp boats were in. IRRC, the boats typically had some sort of stove which allowed for the freshly caught shrimp to be boiled in seawater so that they came in cooked (though possibly unpicked) to the market straight from the boat.

There were about sixty shrimpers in Morecombe Bay in the late 19thC, and they used to race each other across the bay and back to the beach, boiling up the shrimps as they went, with a backdrop of some of the most stunning sunsets! There would be a train in the station waiting for them, to take the shrimps to Manchester, and the first up the beach got the best prices.
When I was at college at Lancaster, I used to go up to the top floor of the library in the evenings, just to enjoy those amazing sunsets.

*is craving potted shrimps at the moment*

It's a pleasure to...

learn something new. I must hunt up the praticalities of netting shrimp from a boat. They were hard enough to spot in a tiny rock pool!

Do you recommend any books or documents Sirius, Evain?

I have a couple of superb potted shrimp recipes which are Victorian, used to teach my Japanese friends how to pot them.They were horrified at the amount of butter used!

pdr said:

learn something new. I must hunt up the praticalities of netting shrimp from a boat. They were hard enough to spot in a tiny rock pool!

Do you recommend any books or documents Sirius, Evain?

I have a couple of superb potted shrimp recipes which are Victorian, used to teach my Japanese friends how to pot them.They were horrified at the amount of butter used!

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Well, the stuff about the market stall was something I remember from my childhood in Lancaster in the 1960s and early 1970s. I believe the name was Woodhouse and they still do potted shrimps, I think. But these are the people I'd direct enquiries to in the first instance: http://www.lancashire.gov.uk/acs/si...ritime/index.asp?siteid=3774&pageid=12954&e=e
It's the Lancaster Maritime Museum and iirc the boat in the photo is indeed a shrimper.

Fleetwood: A Pictorial History by Catherine Rothwell is a good little book on the subject, with lots of photos.
There's also a books called "I Bought a Prawner" (the boats were sometimes called prawners rather than shrimpers) where the author describes how he renovated one of the old boats for use as a pleasure yacht. It's at work, though, and I don't remember the author's name.

Sirius, I think I used to go to the same market stall you remember on Lancaster market, and get a quarter of shrimps to eat like sweets, when I was at college in the early 80s.

I'm currently writing a novel set between 1880 - 1886 - in England.

On an side note, I live in New Zealand and on my mother's side we (my ancestors) came out from England, not because of choice but because when my great, great, great ? grandfather was a young man, he disgraced the family name with his gambling debts. His father had to pay them out on the condition that he left the country. The young man was sent to New Zealand without a penny to his name which forced him to sell his title and take on a different name (he was a Lord - either a Duke or Earl) in order to survive. We have two crests on this side of the family. His diary talks about being chased by pirates from the Horn of Africa until Australia.

On my father's side, his ancestors came to New Zealand from Austria. They were Jews and were having trouble with persecution, even back in the 1860s. One brother came out first and wrote home telling his brothers and sisters that New Zealand was amazing and that they should join him. One other brother moved his family to NZ while two others moved their families to New York City and Australia. During WW2, the remaining Austrian families hid in wine cellars.
Now this is where it gets fascinating. About 24 years ago my dad ended up working in a vineyard for the son of the man who had hidden the Austrian Jews during WW2. Dad did not know about this story until he went to work one day and the owner of the vineyard interviewed him about his uncommon name and told him the story of how his family had looked after the ___ families and kept them safe.

Amazing huh? Maybe my next book should be about them.

debblen4 said:

Amazing huh? Maybe my next book should be about them.

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Definitely! I really want to know more about the ship being harassed by pirates all the way from Africa to Australia.

I love the whole era. I'm truly fascinated with 16th -19th century England. My story hovers 1550. My main character wears a corset of deep red. And that took research. I discovered the difference between a bodice and a corset and what was considered stature and what was considered offensive. In my head, it was a beautiful time in fashion (and the norm). Now, I better enjoy my writing of the time period. So I may not be writing 1800's but I'm right on your trail.

Alas, my time period is Victorian but not English. My current WIP is set in Antebellum America. I love the time period, though, no matter which side of the Atlantic we're talking about.

I'm in the Victorian era too, but while my characters are subjects of Queen Victoria, they're not in England but in the vast and varied Indian subcontinent.

I have a story set in about 1840-1860 floating around in my head. It was born when I came across parish records for the West Country village I live in. Some of the people and their apparent situations intrigued me and thus a partial story and many characters were born. Not written more than a couple of thousand words as of now because my writing head is stuck in the medieval period at the moment.

Sarah x

My latest is set in the mid-19th century, in England. I originally set it in the 1880s, but then did a little more research and discovered that a technology I thought wouldn't have been available at that time, actually probably was. I'm a bit of a geek for that era. Also, I don't know any man who wouldn't love to wear a frock coat and pocket watch and so forth. I don't know why the look doesn't come back in fashion for guys.

I thought I was stuck in the Tudor era for a long time... now it appears I'm being called repeatedly to the mid- to late 1800s. 'Before I Forget September' was set in England, but 'This Lesser Earth' got me wrapped up in the US. I'm working on a series of novellas set in and around Ruby Valley, Nevada, in the 1860s at the moment.

There's a great book published a few years back that might help anyone writing about 19th century England. It's called "What Jane Austen ate and Charles Dickens Knew," by Daniel Pool. It basically covers the facts of daily life.

Although I don't write in that time period, my 'alt' and avatar make it obvious which time period I'm most drawn to in literature as a reader...

I find the era fascinating because it's associated with people hiding depravity and perversion under a veneer of respectability. And yet people discuss that era as though the exact same thing doesn't happen now...

Yet it was also an era of great strides in things that were sincerely for the greater good, such as labour laws, public gathering places, education...

Along with fabulous style and craftsmanship.

Wilde_at_heart said:

Although I don't write in that time period, my 'alt' and avatar make it obvious which time period I'm most drawn to in literature as a reader...

I find the era fascinating because it's associated with people hiding depravity and perversion under a veneer of respectability. And yet people discuss that era as though the exact same thing doesn't happen now...

Yet it was also an era of great strides in things that were sincerely for the greater good, such as labour laws, public gathering places, education...

Along with fabulous style and craftsmanship.

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I've always thought of the last few decades as a kind of second Gilded Age as far as attitudes, outlooks, politics, and social conditions.

ETA: Obviously, the two eras don't conflate exactly, but there are parallels.

Lady MacBeth said:

There's a great book published a few years back that might help anyone writing about 19th century England. It's called "What Jane Austen ate and Charles Dickens Knew," by Daniel Pool. It basically covers the facts of daily life.

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That book looks soooo cool, thank you!

Lady MacBeth said:

There's a great book published a few years back that might help anyone writing about 19th century England. It's called "What Jane Austen ate and Charles Dickens Knew," by Daniel Pool. It basically covers the facts of daily life.

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I'd advise this to be used sparingly. It is a great starting point for getting a feel for British history between about 1800-1870, but Pool doesn't really differentiate between the late Georgian-Regency-early/mid Victorian settings very well, and a great majority of the book's contents deal with the early Victorian era.

I've found the following to be very solid intros to the Victorian era (and the changes that occured over the course of the 19th century):

The Pageant of Early Victorian England, 1837-1861 by Elizabeth Burton

A Hundred Wonderful Years: Social and Domestic Life of a Century, 1820-1920 by Mrs. C.S. Peel

I'd like to second what Evangeline said. Victoria was queen from 1837 to 1901 and there were enormous changes in those years—social, economic, political, you name it.

For those who are writing Victorian, I put up a post on how to search for Victorian fashion prints in Collection Maciet, which is an awesome resource but requires working knowledge of French (unless, of course, you use my guide):

http://victorianexplorer.blogspot.se/2013/04/fashion-plates-galore.html

Victorians

My favorite era too, in all parts of the world.
I've just finished a novel about a gay New England gentleman who lived in the late 19th century and am now working on a story about a female trance-lecturer who traveled the circuit in the northeast US plying her trade.

Hello, this is my first post on AW, and it's a pleasure to meet you all.

Yes, my first novel, just begun recently, is a tragedy set in Victorian London.

I have some concerns about the story getting lost in the setting, but it must be set in the 1890s due to scientific breakthroughs of the time as well as cultural movements associated with the decade. On the plus side, I've lived in London and studied decorative arts there, have visited many of the sites I will be describing, and I have a full library of books on Victorian interiors, so mood and setting should be relatively easy.

This is hard work, y'all!