Visit my Website for all the blurbs, excerpts and news!!

Visit my Website for all the blurbs, excerpts and news!!
Visit my Website for all the blurbs, excerpts and news!!

Thursday 28 March 2019

**NSFW** - What I have learnt while researching my book - #evernighties



I have been missing many #evernighties posts, due to personal reasons, but, back then, I had began to put this post together. It was the prompt for two weeks ago or, so, but it's a fun (and very inappropriate) post, so I'll put it up today anyway. Scroll at your own risk, nudity, yada yada.

What I have learnt while researching my book?

I always learn loads of stuff whenever I write any book, because I am a little (lot) obsessive in my research. The most research intensive was certainly A Muse to Live For. Writing historical romance or fiction is not the faint of heart.

Muse (as it is affectionately called in the family) is set mostly in Victorian London, a place I thought I knew fairly well from reading lots of Dickens novels, and all of Sherlock Holmes Adventures, and many other books written and/or set in the same period. But the truth is that when you start writing you realize how many details you missed in the books  and you have to start digging on your own. In any case, these are some of the things I found most curious and enjoyable during my Victorian explorations.

Although the Victorians are always considered prudish and repressed, just under the powdered, betasselled surface of their respectable facade they actually got up to all manners of delightfully dirty stuff. Sex was had. In plenty. Although respectable women were supposed to scorn sex, that was not stopping respctable men from satisfying their urges one way or another.

 There was a lot of pornography passing hands in discreet ways.




Some of it was deliciously queer too.



And the favorite place in London where to obtain your smutty books and pics was Holywell Street.
This place was "variously described as “a foul sink of iniquity”, “a place where dirt and darkness meet and make mortal compact” and, in the words of the Times, “the most vile street in the civilized world”.
It was, in other words, a tremendously interesting concentration of independent publishers specialized in erotica, and the centre of London's booming pornography trade.



The sex trade in London was seriously massive. So, so many lower class women were concentrated in this fast growing town, and they often lacked the means to make ends meet in any other way. One estimate suggests that Victorian London may have have had as many as 80,000 prostitutes. Many of them would have been employed in regular jobs and only sold sex as a side business. Even so, that's a lot of "fallen women".

And there were male prostitutes too. Variously called Mary Anns, or Telegraph Boys, or various other names, their trade was slightly more dangerous than that of their female counterparts, given that homosexual intercourse was a serious crime. However, they were considered "better off" than the women in the same trade, because a man always had more agency at the time than a woman, and it was easier for them to extricate themselves from poverty and from the sex trade and get into regular employment. They mostly worked under the radar, as can be expected, but occasionally scandals did happen.

Much prostitution and crime were concentrated in the East End of London, which was a rather unsavory part of town. Spitalfields and Whitechapel had been affluent quarters that had fallen in poverty and disrepair and housed (more or less) one of the largest concentrations of the poorer classes in town. These were a mixture of the unemployed, those who had a job but still could not make a decent living, sailors, gaol birds, petty criminals, fallen women, the old and invalid... it was a pretty horrific underworld. It was also alien territory for the richer upper classes. However it became bizarrely fashionable to visit these poor quarters sometimes for philanthropic reasons, but sometimes just for the frisson of the dangerous and the unknown, and sometimes for a finding taboo sex opportunities.
One of the most famous streets in the area was Petticoat Lane, base of an unlicensed Sunday market where much fencing of stolen goods took place. Ironically, the name was considered too smutty (because a petticoat was a piece of underwear, you know?), so it was changed to... Middlesex Street. You can't make this shit up!

These were the haunts of the infamous Jack the Ripper. Definitely a dangerous place where to live.

Not all prostitution happened in the dreary slums of the East End, or involved poor and deprived women, and not all homosexual trysts ended in imprisonment as Oscar Wylde's famously did. Some wonderfully queer characters made their way into fashionable society, dodging scandals and legal entanglements (although not without collateral damage). Ernest/Stella Boulton  is certainly one of the most colorful and interesting character that ever shocked Victorian London. An accomplished cross-dresser he/she was part prostitute, part mistress, part music-hall star and wholly unstoppable.



The best way to "walk" the streets of Victorian London are the Charles Booth's Poverty Maps. These were compiled in order to locate the problematic areas of the town, and each road was colored according to a code that placed the area on a spectrum from the worst poverty to most respectable and well off. It's much more than a map. It paints whole social picures. It' amazing how often very poor streets sat back to back with very rich ones!


So, London has certainly changed a lot since then. The smutty shops in Holywell street were demolished to enlarge the Strand, Whitechapel and Spitalfields are fashionable districts, and pornography is somewhat more cynical and less fun.





Tuesday 12 March 2019

Victorian research - The Bustle Dress - with illustrations by Nicole Rubio


When I wrote A Muse to Live For, I spent more time doing historical research than actually writing. It is normal with historical fiction especially if it is your first! I became quite fascinated with Victorian clothes, and I am delighted to have discovered the beautiful art of Nicole Rubio, and to have her permission to use it on my blog as I ramble on a little about the Victorians and their apparel. I hope this post stirs your interest not just in my book, and Victorian fashion, but also in this artist's amazing talent and her deeply moving journey.

"When I could see my work I was too much of a perfectionist and severely blocked. It was only when it became real that it was now or never that I was willing to try. Somehow it felt like I had less to lose if I was starting with a handicap." 

Nicole Rubio



Bustle 8
"Delicate Presence"
Pastel Drawing on Paper
ⒸNicole Rubio 

"What bothers me most is losing color, which I can still see some, but not with the subtlety I could before. I am legally blind, due to a degenerative retinal disease." 

Nicole Rubio


One of the things I had to figure out for this story, where Gabriel/le, my main character does quite a lot of dress-making, dressing up and, ahem, undressing, is how on earth these cmplex outfit were put together, and worn. 
Man outfits of the time were not so very different from modern suits, but Victorian women clothes are… well, there was such a bloody lot of them, to begin with! There is no doubt that getting dressed was a bit of a hassle, although much less than one would think. It would take about fifteen minutes to get ready to go out, from drawers to hat-and-parasol, with a bustle dress of the kind worn by the middle-class woman (or the better dressed lower class, too) in the 1880s. I did choose this decade because bustle dresses are definitely more attractive (at least to me) than the cumbrous bell-shaped crinoline gowns that preceded them, and they seemed to fit my main character’s style much better.
So how would you wear one of these? They look so incredibly complex, that it’s difficult to understand how one can get in or out of them. So I ventured into a journey of discovery, and tried to understand each element of these complicated outfits.
First, a chemise, to go under the corset, and drawers, if you were so inclined. My MC does not believe in drawers, much, and it must be said that a knee-length ruffled, flouncy things lacks a certain sex-appeal to the modern eye. Victorian drawers were not completely boring though. They were crotchless, to begin with, for ease of uh… chamber pot use. That might explain why the can-can was considered such a scandalous dance. Try throwing your leg and skirts far up in the air with a pair of crotchless panties… well, you get the picture. But, if you thought that the love-slit was a modern kinky twist on lingerie, think again…
Then stockings and boots. What? They wore their boots before getting dressed? Why, yes. Before the invention of the zipper, boots were fiddly. Lots of laces and/or tiny buttons. Not easy to work those while wearing a stiff corset that makes it impossible to bend forward with any ease. But you can see that this opens quite some doors to the fetish-inclined mind. Because after the boots one would put on the corset (which contrary to common opinion, a moderately limber woman could well tie by herself, at least after the invention of the hook and eye fastening for the front), and there you have a very pretty image, of a stockinged, booted wo/man in a tight corset… well, mind out of the gutter, Wyvern.  


Bustle 1
Pastel and Ink on Paper
Ⓒ Nicole Rubio


"As I have gotten older and my eyesight worse, my work is less about seduction and increasingly about the fear and vulnerability, I feel in facing new situations." 

Nicole Rubio



Add a bustle. The bustle is of course the crucial point of the bustle dress, and the signature element of the fashion of the time. The cheaper ones were basically horse-hair-stuffed pillows one tied over one’s butt to give the skirts a lift behind, and that typical high-rear profile, but the expensive ones were complicated bits of work, including hoops and tabs, and tapes, and complex cages with springs, and even musical boxes, sometimes. I kid you not. All these strange contraptions had to be fastened to one’s waist, and shaped the back of the skirts when one was walking, and folded like a concertina when one was sitting. I am not sure how easy it was to go about one’s business with such a complicated apparatus hanging from one’s ass. But it was certainly easier that the far more enormous gowns worn in former decades.
Over the bustle, a petticoat (underskirt), and a blouse. And then a skirt, and an apron overskirt (the ruffly, draped, upper part of those complex multi-layered skirts).  Over these a taille (basically a tight jacket, matching the skirt), and then all the necessary accessories (collar, gloves, shawl, or a coat, if one could afford it, muff, reticule, parasol/umbrella, bonnet/hat).
It was a lot, and new clothes were expensive. Those were the days when much work was still hand-made and time-consuming. Sewing machines did exist (since about 1846), but they were still slow and they could do little more than “plain work” (straight simple seams), and although the labor force (read: lower classes) were plentiful and paid barely enough to survive (if at all), the complex, highly embellished garments of Victorian fashion were expensive. The middle and upper classes could afford new clothes, but the poorer people most often bought second hand, adapting and fixing them as best they could. Darning is a lost art now, but very much an endless chore at the time. The interesting part of this is that a handy lower-class girl could very well wear very pretty clothes, if a bit faded. Even boots were sold and worn again until each owner found them too disreputable, and resold them to someone less picky or more desperate. 


 Bustle 15 
“Tuffet in the Rain”
Pastel and Graphite Pencil on Paper
Ⓒ Nicole Rubio 


“For an artist capturing the outer world, what matters most is the light. For an artist capturing the inner world, what matters most is honesty.”

Nicole Rubio



And when clothes became really unwearable? There was still a lot that could be done with them. Even the poorest rag was valued and could be bought and sold and put to use. Sometimes in fascinating ways. For example the front of a gentleman’s vest, with all those time-consuming button-holes (if you have ever hand-sewn a button-hole, you will know that those are represent real value) could be reused to fashion the top of buttoned boots. At the very least old fabric could always be taken apart for making new yarn, which in turn was used to make a new fabric called “shoddy”.


Please visit Nicole's website to see more of her magnificent bustle drawings, and find out much much more about her art and writings.

You can also follow Nicole on Instagram

@nicolerrubio

Special thanks go also to my Instagram friend @mauveink, who generously shared her knowledge and expertise when I was researching obscure dressmaking details for my story.