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Why the English took to Tea - Deborah Swift

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I would certainly not have been able to finish any of my books without my regular top-up of that quintessentrially English drink, tea. I have inherited a number of teapots from my mother much like these from Vintage Dorset , and tea drinking has always been a big part of my family life. Of course tea is not really English at all, it came first from China and later was introduced to India by the British as a way of suppliying the British Empire with a cheaper product . At the end of the 17th century almost nobody in England drank tea,  but by the end of the next century nearly everyone from King to commoner did. In 1699 six tons were imported, but by the turn of the eighteenth century eleven thousand tons were inported! The sudden enthusiasm for tea can be attributed to a number of factors - the first of which was the King's marriage to Catherine of Braganza. Her enormous dowry, suited to her position as daughter of King John IV of Portugal, included the trading posts of Tangier and...
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Of Midwives and Childbirth

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by Sam Thomas In a post from last month I made the case that – contrary to popular perception and two different groups of historians – midwives were not decrepit crones from the edges of society. But once we’ve established that, we still need to learn more about the work that midwives did in the delivery room. Given the limited medical tools at their disposal, what could they do? It is first important to note that in the pre-modern world midwifery was midwifery was not a science in the modern sense of the world. Rather, practitioners described their work as an “art” and, significantly, a “mystery.” The 1689 testimonial for the wife of James Phillips noted that she was “a Civill & discreet Matron & one well skilled & knowing in the Art & Mistery of Midwifery.” A few years later, Elizabeth Arrandell was described as “well skild in the Mystery of Midwifery…” In keeping with its status as an art, there was much room for variation in the delivery room, but a midwife would c...
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Oh Those Victorians

by Enid Shomer What does the phrase “Victorian Age” conjure for you? Hooped skirts and sexual repression? The industrial revolution? Darwin, Marx and Freud? Clearly it is a period rich in social change, and flavored with an air of moral supremacy that produced inevitable contradictions and hypocrisy. Because the era had such a profound impact on our own times, I have always found it fascinating. I thought I knew something about it before beginning my novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile , but nothing I had read prepared me for the cabinet of curiosities that I discovered. In my novel, Florence Nightingale (the “Lady with the Lamp” and heroine of the Crimean War) and Gustave Flaubert (the author, most famously, of Madame Bovary ) travel together through Egypt in 1850. In real life, they took separate, nearly-identical tours, sailing for months up and down the Nile, and visiting ancient monuments. We know that they were towed on the same boat and on the same day from Cairo to the na...
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