At Home in London With Jane Austen

The main tourist season is over, the schools are back and London is rather less hectic - so I thought it might be a good time to suggest a walk through Jane Austen's London.
When I researched Walking Jane Austen's London I planned eight routes, each including places that Jane knew, places that appear in her books and a sprinkling of other interesting places from her times.
It is little known that her banker brother Henry had five homes in London and that four of those survive, although he would have trouble recognising two of them!
A shopping expedition to Knightsbridge and a brisk walk in Hyde Park and Kensington Palace Gardens can be combined with a visit to the two most transformed homes, both of them refaced and with extra floors added in the late Victorian period.

 (The Illustration shows a lady in "Parade Dress in Hyde Park 1808)
Close to the corner of Hans Street and Sloane Street is 64, Sloane Street, which was home to Henry and his wife Eliza between 1809 and Eliza's death in May 1813. It has been refaced and an extra attic floor added, but inside it is the same house that Jane stayed in while she was correcting the proofs of Sense and Sensibility in 1811. She and Eliza "walked into London" to shop from here, a reminder that this was a separate village at the time and that London did not begin until the Hyde Park Corner turnpike gates.
It was a convenient base for walks in Kensington Palace gardens, a very fashionable location and one she wrote about visiting in letters home. In Sense and Sensibility Mrs Jennings and Elinor met Miss Steele there, "...but Marianne, who knew that the Willoughbys were again in town and had a continual dread of meeting them, chose rather to stay at home, than venture into so public a place."
Henry and Eliza lived rather a fashionable life, throwing parties that were mentioned in the Morning Post and maintaining a carriage. Jane wrote of one outing, "The driving about, the Carriage being open, was very pleasant. I liked my solitary elegance very much, & was ready to laugh all the time, at my being where I was...I could not but feel that I had naturally small right to be parading about London in a Barouche."

Henry left the Sloane Street house when Eliza died and went to live over a branch of his bank in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden for a while, but he returned to Hans Place, just around the corner. Jane stayed there for the first time in 1814 and liked it very much. It is the most changed of all Henry's surviving London homes and the Blue Plaque refers to a "house on this site" as being his.  However the inside is the original, refaced, with an added floor, the front door moved and the garden, which Jane described as "quite a love" lost to the street behind.
It was at this house that Jane was staying when she transferred her business to publisher John Murray. Her room was on what is now the side, over the Blue Plaque and the sitting room where she wrote letters and corrected proofs, is at the back.
(Kensington Gardens walking dresses for 1808)

 Henry's banking business became bankrupt and he left London in 1816 for a new career as a country parson, ending Jane's visits to London.
Henry's  London house 1801-4 remains, now a small hotel, at 24, Upper Berkeley Street and the Covent Garden house (with a Rohan shop where the bank used to be) is also easy to find.

Walking Jane Austen's London is available as a paperback  and on Kindle. It has eight walks with detailed maps and over seventy colour illustrations.
Discover more about Jane Austen's London at http://janeaustenslondon.com



Louise Allen

A Bumper Month

I can hardly catch my breath this month with three books out!
The seventh in the Regency Silk & Scandal continuity, and my second contribution to the series, is The Officer and the Proper Lady. My hero, Hal Carlow, is a cavalry oficer in Brussels just before the battle of Waterloo and his heroine, Miss Julia Tresilian, a most respectable young lady, is there too, in search of a husband.

Instead of an eligible gentleman, Julia falls for Hal, the worst rake in the cavalry. For once in his life Hal is set on doing the right thing, but when he is left for dead on the battlefield he finds he has underestimated well-behaved Julia, who will do anything to save the man she loves. The story can be read alone but it also brings the series to the point where the old scandal has become lethally dangerous. All will be revealed next month!


Also out in December is the third in the The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters trilogy. Innocent Courtesan to Adventurer's Bride is the story of youngest sister Celina. She has taken refuge from her bullying father in her aunt's brothel but an accusation of theft sends innocent Lina fleeing to the depths of the Norfolk countryside. She thinks she is taking refuge with one of her aunt's elderly ex-clients, but the arrival of his heir, the adventurer and scholar Quinn Ashley, a man with his own demons to fight, plunges her into more danger - and into love.



The third book is a complete departure for me - non-fiction. I love walking in London to locate places and people, often long gone, sometimes, surprisingly, still to be found. When I looked at my notes I realised that I had the makings of a walks book that would allow me to share this pleasure with enthusiasts for the period and so Walks Through Regency London was conceived.

There are ten walks - I had to stop somewhere! - taking in the St James's area; Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens; Mayfair North; Piccadilly and South Mayfair; Soho North; Soho South to Somerset House; British Museum to Covent Garden; Trafalgar Square to Westminster; The City from Bridewell to Bank and Southwark and the South Bank.

I used illustrations from my collection of Regency prints to illustrate the book in full colour - some fashion prints, some sporting, but mainly views of London from Ackermann's iconic Repository. Along the way I found places and objects I never expected - a startlingly lifelike waxwork of Nelson in Westminster Abbey; the location of Warwick House where Princess Charlotte escaped from her father to run away to Princess Caroline; Napoleon's "nose" and the surviving columns from Carlton House. I have drunk beer in Tom Cribb's own pub and in the only galleried coaching inn left in London; seen the scales that Byron and Nelson were weighed on; looked at a cell door from Newgate and admired the first public male nude statue in London.

The cover illustration is St George's Hanover Square in 1812.
For more information and how to get a copy see http://www.louiseallenregency.co.uk/ or email me at louiseallen.regency@tiscali.co.uk

A very happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year to everyone!

Louise