Lewd and lascivious filled with avarice, venality, and vice – these words well describe an age that was also paradoxically affluent, elegant and refined, an age that provide ample fodder for a lover of both history and romance! In the words of cartoonist Adrian Teal:
“Many of us think of the ill-behaved celebrity and the tabloid splash as inventions of the modern world, but the antics of Premiership footballers and C-list soap stars are as nothing when set alongside the peccadilloes and hell-raising of 18th-century celebs…The first flowering of the great age of newspapers and caricature gave us boozy Prime Ministers and party leaders who settled their political differences with duels in Hyde Park (when they weren’t gambling, or writing essays about farting); peers of the realm who sat the unburied corpses of their cherished mistresses at their dinner tables; entertainers who rode horses standing upright in the saddle, while wearing a mask of bees; and celebrity courtesans who ate 1,000-guinea banknotes stuffed into sandwiches, simply to make a point. Before it was dashed from their lips by the Victorian party-poopers, our Georgian forebears drank deep from the cup of life.” – Adrian Teal on the inspiration behind The Gin Lane Gazettehttp://www.unbound.co.uk/books/22
In The Secret History Of Georgian London: How The Wages Of Sin Shaped The Capital,
Dan Cruickshank says:
“For although Georgian London evokes images of elegant buildings and fine art, it was, in fact, the Sodom of the modern age…Teeming with prostitutes – from lowly street walkers offering a ‘ threepenny upright’ to high-class courtesans retained by dukes – Georgian London was a city built on the sex trade.”
In my forthcoming Georgian romp, A WILD NIGHT’S BRIDE (book one in the Devil DeVere series), I have endeavored to capture all the naughty bawdiness in a racy, rollicking tale that takes the reader from the lascivious antics of Charlotte Hayes‘ famed Otaheitian Feast of Venus at her notorious King’s Place Brothel to join young Prince George’s coterie in his newly acquired Carlton House, and then through a madcap wager to the State Bedchamber at St. James Palace. In this erotic historical romantic comedy, I promise a racy, rollicking, good time in the true spirit of the Georgian age!
