Happy Friday and welcome to my tour stop on The White Swan Affair Blog Tour, hosted by Kismet Book Tours! I'm really excited to have romance author Elyse Mady on Romancing the Darkside today. Ms. Mady has a talent for writing historical romances that take you away to a time of balls, corsets and seduction. Today she's here to chat about the dark side of Regency life and her latest historical romance release, so sit back and take a journey back in time...oh and there's also a giveaway!
The Underbelly of Regency Life
By Elyse Mady
When was the last time you thought about the Regency period in London and thought: Brutality? Filth? Mass murder?
Probably very rarely, if at all because we’ve become accustomed to the polite society portrayed in the novels of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth and all the modern writers who recreate the period so charmingly, with their balls and their Mr. Darcy’s and the refined aura of polite society to charm us.
Sadly, the reality for a lot of people in the era, especially those caught up in the justice system, was very, very different.
I spent a lot of time while I was writing “The White Swan Affair” researching crime and criminality and punishment during the Regency. Since the book is based on a trial and convictions that really took place, I wanted to better understand the context in which the crimes that Robert Aspinall and the men found at the molly house would have endured.
On July 8, 1810, the Bow Street police raided a public house in the Clare Market – a small collection of streets a little east of Covent Gardens. They arrested a large number of men (the exact number is unknown) and ultimately incarcerated eight, who were brought to stand trial in September for the crime of sodomitical practices.
All of the men served between one and three years hard labour; seven were pilloried. Two others, arrested after the fact, were hung. Authorities didn’t take crime lightly in other words and death and banishement were real and apportioned with a liberality that shocks the modern reader. It was a system that is very far removed from our own system of today, that punished minor crimes with overwhelming brutality and hung children as young as seven and eight.
I spent a lot of time while I was writing “The White Swan Affair” researching crime and criminality and punishment during the Regency. Since the book is based on a trial and convictions that really took place, I wanted to better understand the context in which the crimes that Robert Aspinall and the men found at the molly house would have endured.