Dick Turpin and Highwayman Heroes

On this day in 1739 Dick Turpin, one of the most famous highwaymen in England, was hanged at York for stealing a horse. The historical Dick Turpin was, of course, very different from the romanticised image of the highwayman that sometimes appears in historical fiction. Turpin was a thief and a murderer. In his own times he was not the most famous of highwaymen and after his death he was forgotten for a hundred years.

It’s interesting how outlaws can become heroes, both in historical fiction and in the heritage industry. Some of my favourite fictional heroes are pirates or smugglers or highwaymen. In Georgette Heyer’s books I have a particular fondness for Nick Beauvallet, the pirate hero of Beauvallet, and for Ludovic Lavenham in The Talisman Ring. Jane Aiken Hodge's book Watch the Wall, My Darling was one of the first historical romances I read and I loved the free trading hero. My very first book had a highwayman as hero. It was never published but I have retained a fondness for highwaymen and have written pirates and smugglers as well.

So how and why did outlaws, from Robin Hood to Dick Turpin, become heroes? Why is the highwayman sometimes a romantic and glamorous figure? He is usually portrayed as a dashing miscreant or likeable rogue.  He is a hero in the public imagination whereas in reality, he (or she) is a criminal. There is a suggestion that the outlaw personifies some of the aspirations that lie deep in many of us to be a devil-may-care individualist and go our own way. In addition, it takes courage and confidence to hold up carriages; it requires strength of personality as well as force of arms, superb horsemanship, stamina and patience. The highwayman of myth embodies gallantry and courtesy, and faces death with a swagger. Horses were expensive and were therefore usually ridden by a “gentleman” unless, of course, the highwayman was also a horse thief.

Highway robbery flourished at a time when the hold of government and of law and order was incomplete or when forces of government were unpopular or illegitimate. There is usually the implication that the outlaw is a wronged character, either personally or by powerful and corrupt government forces.

It was the Victorian novelist W Harrison Ainsworth who started Dick Turpin’s cult of celebrity when he

made him a character in his first novel, Rookwood. Ainsworth invented Turpin’s famous horse, Black Bess, and attributed to him the famous ride from London to York, which was actually made by a completely different highwayman. Turpin’s fame and hold on the popular imagination grew from there. I vividly remember the 1970s TV series Dick Turpin which was one of the many costume dramas I loved as a child. It did a great deal to instill a romantic love of history in me!

Do you enjoy books with outlaw heroes, whether they are highwaymen, pirates or free traders? Do you have any favourites? And why do you think they are popular?

A new lease of life

These past three weeks have been some of the busiest of my writing life. The good news was that Accent Press accepted five of my backlist titles - historical adventure romances - for release as ebooks.  The not-so-good news was the realisation that three of these were written before I bought my present desktop, and were not saved on floppy discs (that's how old my previous PC was)  All I had were print copies.  I tried scanning them with both a flat-bed and hand-held scanner.  That didn't work because each page was saved as a jpeg image impossible to convert to Word.

Lateral thinking was called for. This involved a Stanley knife, a chopping board, and deconstruction of a print copy of each title.   Then a good friend (who earned himself extra sparkles on his halo) spent two days photographing every page as I placed them on a white backing sheet. He then ran through OCR software, put each page into a chapter folder and emailed them to me. I then reinstated all the formatting and took the opportunity to do some editing as well.  At last all three were complete.
The next job was to find images that would help with cover design, and prepare an info page which included brief character descriptions, a blurb
and any reviews.

Those three titles: Dangerous Waters, A Place of Birds, and The Iron Road are now available on Amazon Kindle.

So too are Eye of the Wind, shortlisted for the Parker Romantic Novel of the Year Award, and available free from 19th - 23rd September, and Tide of Fortune.   The Chain Garden will follow shortly.   I'm delighted that books which I so enjoyed writing are getting a new lease of life and the opportunity to reach a new readership.

Jane Jackson.  www.janejackson.net.  

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eye-Wind-historical-romance-ebook/dp/B00972XLF8

Coincidence - or Fate?

When I came to plan the family tree of my Ravenhurst clan for the Those Scandalous Ravenhursts series the heroine of the sixth book, the Piratical Miss Ravenhurst, seemed a long way away. I couldn’t “see” her yet or find a name for her.

For some reason I called her father Clement. Then I thought that as my skinny heroine would run away and find herself as a cabin boy on a pirate ship the feminine form of his name, Clemence, which would shorten to Clem, seemed a good choice for her.
When I started to get to know her it seemed to suit her well. And when my hero, Nathan Stanier, meets her he likes the name too -

Clemence. He said the name in his mind, savouring the sound of it, a sort of fruity sweet tang of a name. Tart and challenging, yet mellow too.

I was half way through writing the book when I found myself in my favourite places, a country auction room on Viewing Saturday. There was a pot of odds and ends in a cabinet and poking out of them, the unmistakeable handle of an 18th or early 19thc fan. I collect fans so I took a quick look, saw it was covered in verses in French and put it back amongst the rubbish before anyone else saw me looking at it.
I was in luck - no-one seemed to have spotted it for what it was and the only other bidder when I came back for the auction appeared to be after the Victorian pot the fan was in and certainly wasn’t prepared to battle it out with me!
So I bore off my spoils in triumph and had a good look at what I had bought. I couldn’t read the French verses but the picture seemed to be a scene of six young women and four cupids drawing lots from a revolving drum and handing them out. Then I saw the name - Clémence. The frustration of only being able to make out half the complex old French was acute! What did the verses say?
Luckily I remembered that fellow M&B Historical author Joanna Maitland is an accomplished linguist and she gallantly tackled the archaic French for me.

It was a lottery as I had guessed - a lottery for love. Each young woman was given a verse that described her lover and the virtues he would have -

Here is Love, putting the charms
Of all these beauties to the test.
The prizes, he has promised, will be
The true qualities of men…
A constant friend, a faithful husband,
Are both a lottery.

Poor Isis has no luck at all - and no lover. She is the girl in pink with her head in her hands. Aglaé will have a man with only one virtue, Aglaure, one with two. And so it goes on until -

And finally, there remains but one.
It is for the lovely Clémence.
Her destiny is wonderful, but rare.
It surpasses all her hopes.
A stout heart, a quick mind,
Virtue, courage and a handsome form.
Her lover is blessed with them all.
She has won the fivefold prize.

I could not believe it - the Clémence of the fan (the figure on the right in purple) is promised a hero with all the virtues of my Clemence’s love.

Of course I had to use the fan in the book - but you will have to read it to find out how! The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst is out this month with Mills & Boon Historical and Harlequin Historical.

Louise Allen

Retail therapy

It constantly surprises me, walking around London today, how many relics of the retail world of the Regency still survive and strolling down Haymarket you can find two within minutes of each other.

At the northern end of the street is the oldest surviving shop-front in London dating from 1751. Until the 1970s it was the premises of Fribourg & Treyer, tobacconists, and inside, behind the counter are the original shelves.

Cross the road and walk down to Charles II Street and turn immediately left into The Royal Opera Arcade and you are in the oldest shopping arcade in Britain, built between 1816-18 and pre-dating the much more famous Burlington Arcade by a year. It takes little imagination to fill the windows with bonnets and reticules, waistcoats and walking sticks and imagine the delight of shoppers able to browse in this elegant row.

No-one who was anyone paid cash, of course, and the unfortunate shopkeepers often had to wait years for settlement of their accounts. Perhaps that was why so many of them had striking illustrated billheads so their final demand stood out from everyone else's. I have started collecting them and thought this one, from an Edinburgh linen draper, was particularly attractive. Mr Henderson was lucky - the receipt on the back shows his bill for table linen worth £29 was paid by return.

I satisfy my own need for retail therapy by taking my characters shopping. Virtually the first thing that Clemence Ravenhurst (The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst. September) does when she arrives back in England after a long sea voyage is to hit the shops of Weymouth - just what one needs after being on board a pirate vessel where one cannot obtain a good pair of stays for love nor money.

Louise Allen