Lord Brougham’s speech in the House of Commons is adapted from a speech he gave on June 16, 1812. He and James Stephen were both in the Commons on the afternoon Prime Minister Perceval walked from Downing Street and was ambushed by Bellingham in the lobby.
Journalists could be imprisoned for libel and sedition in Regency times. Lord Delingpole warns William Gibson with the example of Peter Finnerty, an Irish journalist imprisoned for libelling Lord Castlereagh. Shelley (him again!) wrote an anti-war poem, titled “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things,” as a fundraiser for Finnerty. This poem was thought to be lost, until one copy surfaced in a private collection in 2005. http://poeticalessay.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Fanny received a settlement from Henry Crawford in the amount of three thousand pounds. Invested at five percent, this would give her an annual income of 150 pounds—hardly enough to be married on and maintain the life of a gentlewoman. The Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor probably pays her about twenty pounds a year, but pays three times that much to Mr. Edifice, for much less work! She and Mr. Gibson would want at least four to five hundred pounds a year, before being able to live simply but comfortably on the outskirts of London, and couldn’t afford a carriage or more than a few servants.
The legacy of chattel slavery in North America is currently a very fraught topic. A wider historical perspective reminds us that slavery was not exclusively practised by Europeans and Americans upon black Africans, it occurred everywhere for millennia and was thought to be a natural condition of mankind, until it was opposed by a small group of British evangelicals and politicians. For information about the sacrifices made by the men of the West African Squadron, I relied upon: Opposing the Slavers: The Royal Navy’s Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade. By Peter Grindal. Mr. Grindal writes, “[P]osterity should conclude that there have been few episodes in the illustrious history of the Royal Navy which have been more deserving of true glory.”
Life in Sierra Leone and the hardships of the West African Squadron are also vividly recounted in Sweet Water & Bitter, by Siân Rees. Rees tells how the officers of the British Navy struggled with lack of resources and a deadly climate while patrolling vast areas of the African coast to rescue captured Africans from slavery.
I took some of the details of the battle for the Portuguese slave ship, Volcano, and the death of Midshipman Castle, from Rees’ history. Sadly, in real-life, the Portuguese crew succeeded in re-capturing the ship, and they killed the English prize crew, an incident which occurred in October 1819.
Commodore Edward Columbine, Captain Frederick Irby, Lieutenant Lumley, and the vice-admiral’s daughter are all real people, and the exploits of the crews of the HMS Crocodile, Kangaroo and Protector mostly occurred as depicted, except that both of Columbine’s wives were named Anne, so to avoid confusion, I changed the name of his second wife to Jane. There was no Lieutenant William Price aboard, of course. The marital tragedies of Commodore Columbine and the Kangaroo’s captain are also taken from the historical record. I have surmised how Edward Columbine felt about his first and second marriages and their outcome.
In an earlier edition of this book I promoted William Price from lieutenant to captain; I subsequently learned that there is an intermediate rank, that of commander, so I amended the story accordingly. As a commander, William would be put in charge of smaller vessels.
Andrew and Rachel Knowles’s RegencyHistory.net was a vital source of information about the streets and parks of Regency London, as was Louise Allen’s Walks Through Regency London and a map of London online at http://mapco.net/darton1817/darton02b.htm.
Mr. Edifice, Mr. Nathaniel Meriwether, Mrs. Butters, Lord and Lady Delingpole and their son James, Viscount Lynnon, are invented characters. Mrs. Butters’ relatives and the writer William Gibson are also the products of my imagination. Fanny’s old employers, the Smallridges near Bristol, later attempted to hire Miss Jane Fairfax, in Emma. Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who encounter William Price in Gibraltar, are characters from Jane Austen’s novel, Persuasion.
Edmund Bertram quotes from William Cowper’s poem The Task—Jane Austen surely had that portion of the poem in mind when she wrote the Wilderness scenes in Mansfield Park. Fanny Price quotes from the poem as well in Mansfield Park and William Gibson quotes from it in A Contrary Wind. The Task was a favourite poem of Jane Austen’s.
Mr. Frederick Edifice courts Fanny with a quote from a poem by Thomas Wilkinson written in memory of a devout and learned young lady, Miss Elizabeth Smith (1776-1806). He reads to the young pupils of the sewing academy from the Elegant Extracts. His address of welcome to Mrs. Perceval is adapted from several dedications in 18th century books. The contributors to the address of welcome are Eliza Kirkham Matthews (1802), John Stevenson, (1815), Thomas Gibbons (1750).
The reference to the sea as being the “bounding Main” predates the song, “The Walloping Window Blind.” It appears in a poem dated from 1763:
Fam’d Albion’s Sons, whose Rock encircling Coast,
Emblem of Virtues in your noble Race,
Repels each boisterous Billow of the Deep,
And stands triumphant o’er the bounding Main.
Vitamin C was not discovered until the 1930s. William Price might have intuited, but didn’t know, that the rose hip tea he drank every day while in Africa helped preserved his health and bring him back home alive to marry Julia. And of course, it was not
