So I have a problem. That problem is Regency romances and the fact that I'm now writing one. Spoiler: backstory it started, like nearly everything else, with spite. So - people send me recommendations for retellings of Pride and Prejudice. I have read a lot of them. Like . . . a lot. Anyway, the important thing is that I've read two Pride and Prejudice retellings with magic, and the worldbuilding in one pissed me off unbelievably, because it had magic as a thing for peasants. Magic which demonstrably can be destructive in-world. You . . . you can't do that. That's like saying that heavy armor or AK-47s are just for peasants. When you relegate something powerful to the less-powerful they do not stay in that social position. So, like, this would have had peasant rebellions that started with people getting turned into frogs and escalated from there. so I was angry about that and it influenced some of my worldbuilding. also i read a lot of this shit and have come to the conclusion that i can use all of the tropes and no one can stop me and i can still probably find a mainstream publisher, because fuck yeah. So, because my life frequently spirals wildly out of control, I've figured five books. There are six siblings, and one of them dies, so five books means all of them get married off at least once (look, Regencies have a thing, you need a Reason for people to have their grand romance at older than 18, killing people off works well for that). Mostly going to be noodling, would welcome questions and suggestions to help me noodle better. The family: Absentee father, Earl of Orford. Charming but not particularly warm mother, Countess of Orford. Irrelevant oldest brother who eventually dies, Viscount Adair. Ladies Genevieve & Charlotte Adair, twins. Lady Jillian Adair. Second brother, was a cavalry officer or something else dashing, will get a name at some point. Lady Matilda Adair, the youngest. The setting: Regency London, with differences in that magic is pervasive rather than anything else in particular. I can work with the geography of London, I don't think I could do my own city without losing my mind - but also losing a lot of the genre placement. The magic system: Okay so magic comes on vaguely at puberty. And then people spend the next few years learning to control it - for the rare commoners who have it (it's supposed to be a nobility thing, but bastards happen), they learn spells by rote. Spells, spells + gestures, and accidental magic discharges are how magic is performed. So in Regency England it was more fashionable to have a French modiste or maid or cook, so I figure it was also fashionable to have a magic modiste or maid or cook, and if you wanted the best wages in London you'd figure out a bad French accent to go with your two or three spells. Spell repertoires for the working classes would be small and grow slowly, because you need both the pronunciation and the intent exactly right, otherwise things go wrong. When things go wrong either nothing happens or you die and there's no way to predict which. Fun times! Spell repertoires for working class men in the military would be restricted to, like, stuff to make the magic cannons go. For the upper classes, though, there'd be a much wider range, because they'd get an education in Greek and Latin and spells are in Greek and Latin and, like, Etruscan or whatever. Literacy stuff would be a terrifyingly major social issue, so that'll be fun to address. If you have magic you go to wicked-intense finishing school if you're a girl, or have slightly more work at university if you're a boy. I haven't figured out what all magic can do, but I figure accomplished young ladies with magic do stuff like have magic flowers in their hair. Like playing the pianoforte or doing watercolors, there are set things that are largely useless except for social polish. Useful magic would be beneath them. Being useful in general is beneath them. Oh! And glamour. But nightshade strips away glamour, so many houses have it next to the door. In wealthy houses, they have it in pots next to the door so it can be moved away during a ball to allow ladies to look their best. Almack's, of course, as a profoundly boring bastion of respectability and marriage prospects, has nightshade at every door at all times.
Spoiler: Charlotte The first book is Charlotte's, and she's pursued by two men. One of them is a rake and only a baron and the other is a slightly more respectable rake by dint of being Earl of Warrington. Warrington has magic, but he's 30, and so, like all rakes, becoming somewhat dangerous. Because one of the quirks of the magic system is that after puberty magic ability just kind of . . . keeps growing. And it is too much for one person and people aren't meant to be alone or whatever, so one becomes more and more prone to dangerous accidents until one bonds with one's spouse. It's a sex thing or a blood thing. The bond is only broken when one person dies. Failure mode for that (because failure modes are important) is that you join the Church and become a Bride of Christ or Brother in Christ. Because being bonded for life is gr8 and I haven't decided whether or not werewolves are a thing in this but it 100% comes from my weakness for werewolf romances. Anyway the thing with Warrington is that he is deeply suspicious for a number of reasons but also his accidents are always dramatic and seem suspiciously well-timed when it's examined afterwards. Surprise, he is bonded to his boyfriend. He and his boyfriend are the ones courting Charlotte and the three of them are very happy together. I figure this one doesn't need too much of a separate plot because it'll be heavy on the worldbuilding and feature two separate romances that are only joined into a happy poly relationship somewhere in the last 25% of the book. There can be a plenitude of terribly romantic waltzes and also Charlotte's despair over Genevieve making a hideously unromantic and practical marriage to a man much older than her (I think they bond over her cheating at cards and then are vaguely amiable business partners more than spouses, but I haven't decided). Issues for this one: what even is plot? more research on espionage in 1815 Spoiler: Jillian Second book is Jillian. She has magic! A lot of magic. She actually ended up at finishing school a little longer because it's really kind of an excessive amount, so she didn't make her come-out until she was 19 and is on her second Season and she and her mother are both getting a little tense because she keeps accidentally lighting her bed on fire. Oops. So the Earl of Bradford (look, I don't know what keeps happening to these guys' fathers, probably Warrington isn't actually Warrington yet, just some kind of viscount), who is sort of an old family friend because his estate is next to Countess Orford's mother's dower house, so they ran into each other as kids and are vaguely familiar - idk how well this works and it's up for debate, asks Jillian to marry him. It's a very suitable match. Except for the bit where he'd been a soldier before his dad and older brother died of a fever and he was injured by magic at the Battle of Toulouse and he must be so uncomfortable with magic he will never love her. Thus: months of pining-while-married. Then there are smugglers and fire and terribly un-British displays of feeling and they live happily ever after. issues for this one: what is tension even?
I'm not sure on the order of the last three - Matilda is flighty and Genevieve is proper except for liking math and what's-his-face is dashing. The oldest brother dies in a duel before Matilda's, and I think hers is first. Matilda feels vaguely guilty and traumatized about it - I think she witnessed it? Or it was over her honor or something. I'm not sure. Matilda has only very socially appropriate amounts of magic. Probably thematically deals with guilt and agency? Gen is a widow. Sad about her husband, but coming out of mourning at the start of hers and doesn't plan to marry - it would mean relinquishing control of the investments she's done a phenomenal job with. She gets kidnapped at some point, because no one else has. The brother - idefk, i have four books to figure it out. One of these three gets married by special license.
A suggestion (if you're taking them; if not, ignore me! I am like unto that bird at 4 am that won't shut up): knitting and weaving used to be seen as magical. If magic is possible (but uncommon) for working-class people, it would seem plausible to me that the ones who don't try to climb a bit and get hired as a magic-using whatever-their-niche-is would instead try and use their magic to be better at some tradeskill. And, well: everyone needs socks and gloves and hats. What if magic-knitted stockings let you dance more lightly, or relieved sore feet, or kept your feet dry? Gloves that won't get lost and don't get holes in them, hats and cloaks that shed rain and snow and keep the wearer warmer than just a regular version. And, of course, embroidery - for all that a young woman of social standing wasn't supposed to do anything genuinely useful, she was still expected to demonstrate basic competency with handicrafts like knitting and sewing and embroidery (along with painting and playing at least one instrument, plus having a decent knowledge of poetry and such to show that she was Educated). If she didn't make her family their own socks, that was a social status display; she'd still be knitting something, possibly still socks but for the Worthy Poor. (There was a tumblr post, but I don't recall where it's gotten to, about how even people of high standing would still make a show of presenting knitted or woven netted purses; it was a typical "you just became old enough to be expected to carry money and stuff, here's a handmade gift from me" type of thing. Knitting used to be a pretty common pastime among both genders, until around WW2 when most of the adult men were gone and the boy-kids of that generation grew up seeing only their moms and grandmas doing knitting, so it got associated as "that thing only women do"; prior to that and prior to ready-to-wear items becoming cheap enough for working-class people to afford a whole wardrobe of it, people made their own clothes, including socks and undergarments.) So it could be possible that young women are encouraged to use their magic in powering embroidered or painted glyphs and knitting patterns and such. Probably nothing with glamours (the nightshade would strip those away too, I'd imagine), but: shawls that keep you warmer, or which help keep you at a comfortable temperature in the warm dancing halls. Painted fans that cool the breeze more, or help attract the eye of a good candidate (or just help to show off that you've got a bit of magic and proper training). Stockings that keep your feet from aching too much after hours and hours of dancing and standing. Glyphs to ward off small troubles, ones to discourage spontaneous combustion (maybe Jillian's having to repaint glyphs on her bedstead every day because she's got so much magic it's burning them out faster than they're supposed to get used up! she and her mom might be having to hand-embroider the sheets and blankets, so that they won't go up too - and in the meantime, the maids are having to replace the bedding every morning), ones to attract a husband or to keep rakes at bay. And whether a glyph actually does what it says it does might be a matter of debate and experimentation - after all, I doubt a young lady is going to admit that the pattern on her shawl is meant to anything at all in the way of attracting attention beyond being flashy. (Would anything related to glamour-glyphs survive going through the nightshade? Possibly not! But it'd be a more noticeable sign that a girl didn't think her own self was enough. And glyphs to ward off attention, even if they don't survive the nightshade, would still be a note of "I don't want to dance, I don't want to be here, please leave me alone" that it might take an utter cad to ignore.) Also, if magic is possible-but-uncommon for working-class people, I suspect that there'd be some kind of teaching; it wouldn't be all "figure it out on your own and hope you don't blow yourself up in the process", anyone who'd survived would still be around for teaching. Working-class people weren't stupid, after all, they learned just as well as the upper-class kids; the main difference was that the working-class kids had to learn something useful. So there might be word-of-mouth schools - grandmas who've retired from working at a noblewoman's house as the cook, and now teach the local kiddies their letters and numbers (and, if they've got a touch of magic, enough at least to keep them out of trouble). Their studies would probably more be like recipes passed down from mother to daughter, though; rarely anything actually written down, pretty easily disrupted by someone dying with all the family secrets without having passed them on first, and more focused on practical stuff than the flashy nonsense that the finishing schools would teach. They might also be more focused on concealment: glyphs that discourage someone from paying attention to the wearer, socks that muffle their footsteps, hats that make it hard to remember your face. Probably protection, too - the nobility might only know about things like the glyphs for "don't set your bed on fire" and "keep your purse from getting stolen by pickpockets" or "ward off minor bad luck" from a maid teaching a young lady about them for the young lady's safety. And there might be regional variation in glyphs, too - I'd be surprised if there weren't cultural differences, after all. (How you paint the glyph for 'notice me please' ought to be different in Britain than it is in Japan, after all. And that might make America a horrifying polyglot of glyph-languages - Australia's probably worse, since it started out as a penal colony; I doubt there's anyone who knows High Noble Glyphs. ...hm. How similar to our world is the history of this one?) Again - if you're not taking suggestions, I'm sorry. I just got really interested in this and started thinking about "how would this work" too.
I am happy to take suggestions! And god wow yes I love fibercrafts. That'd be really interesting to work in, and actually gives a whole new dimension to it - I haven't thought up much beyond glamour and exploding stuff. Well, no - I have Jillian building up a fire and then floating coals over to it, and the idea that manners dictates that you utter a spell quietly or behind a fan. I haven't figured out what would be gentlemanly to do, because magic is supposed to be upper class, but so is leisure and being generally useless. I think a lot of men with magic would at least seal their letters with magic so only the intended recipient could open it. And possibly it would be a sign of power to light a room with magic instead of candles, though that would balance conspicuous consumption weirdly. I really should figure out how prevalent I want magic to be. Because I figure the Victorian era is when stuff starts to change, with wider-spread education and the cultural obsession with the arcane and the advent of more scientific instruments to measure crap. Because complicating the industrial revolution to hell and back is easier than complicating the renaissance. There would probably be guilds, maybe? But hm - okay, so, more alternate history going back. So, the Divine Right of Kings was a thing in both Western Europe and China (Mandate of Heaven being basically the same principle), but women have always been reviled when they're uncooperative. So the Inquisition. I think there'd be something of an idea that kings + nobility would derive their power from God, and insinuation that commoners got their power from deals with the Devil. Or at least insinuations that anyone who deviated from Church canon got their magic from the Devil. And TPTB would do their damnedest to reinforce this, because it shores up their power base. So I think there wouldn't be much of a culture of, like, at-home education? Because even in an Anglican context it'd be better to do stuff in a, like, socially approved way.
Hm - so that might end up with seeing kids being sent out of the house a lot sooner than what happened in our world, and getting taught somewhere else nearby. Which still leaves wiggle-room for "one of the grandmas teaches the kids how to do Useful Crafts and also learn their letters and numbers and how to avoid setting their beds on fire". Because even if it's only seen among the nobility - like you said, you've still got bastard children (who might well go on to have their own kids) and you've got things like where Genghis Khan is the great-grandaddy for most of modern China and probably a good chunk of Europe too. Plus, there'd be things like the druids and all (from when Britain was primarily Celts, and -- ooh lord, that's gonna make the Scottish and Irish rebellions More Complicated than they already were). Basically, I'm seeing a lot of ways for someone to come up having magic even if they don't have some sort of visible tie to the nobility. (This probably annoys the nobility A Lot! It is probably a bad idea to visibly use magic around the upperclass if you're not the kind of servant who's expected to be using magic. This is sorta why I suspect that working-class magic use trends towards "don't notice me" types of things and stuff that could be explained away as just being Really Good at the thing; if you're really good at fibercrafts and have magic, though, you might manage to get into a niche where you're making fancy shit for the nobility.) For gentlemanly stuff...hm. Glyphs to keep their clothes clean? "A true gentleman should be able to walk through a fen and come out looking like he took a stroll through a manicured park" type of stuff. Probably also more overt protection stuff, with combat-specific spells and glyphs being reserved for anyone who's in the actual military or training for it; women get 'don't look this way', men have flashy shields. As for balancing it with conspicuous consumption...what if it works better if you've got a focus? So, someone who's really really skilled or powerful could just wreathe the ceiling with heatless fire - but most people will just light a room full of candles with a snap of their fingers or make a chandelier full of glass spheres start glowing. And maybe that has the side-effect of people preferring to use a focus, because not using a focus becomes a Statement (usually read as "look at how strong I am!! don't mess with me!!" and considered rather edgelordy as a result in These Enlightened Times). Guilds makes sense - they started becoming a common thing during the renaissance, iirc. Maybe a bit before, even? And it'd be something people could join to get protection and such - "if you die, we'll take care of your widow and your children and make sure they don't get tossed into the streets and starve" sort of thing. For how prevalent magic is - considering this is the Victorian era, I think it's probably moderately prevalent if it's a subject at finishing schools? Those were mainly intended to teach young ladies the things Proper Society would expect them to know, and nothing at all useful. If it's not the sort of thing you'd reasonably expect to crop up, you wouldn't be sending a girl to a finishing school to learn magic; you'd be searching for a respectable tutor to teach her how to control it while she's at home. It could be, though, that it's a sort of recessive trait and the reason it's more common among the nobility than it is among the working class is because the nobility are more willing to go to weird lengths to ensure their families keep having magic users, even if it means marrying a second cousin. (Ooh - what if one of the legal requirements for inheriting the throne is being a magic user?) ...hm, if it's a recessive trait, there's got to be a reason for it existing to begin with. What if it's a maternal-linked trait, which tends to make it easier to survive childbirth? Female magic users are hardier and heal faster, can often heal themselves instinctively under stress, that sort of thing. This might actually turn it into a dominant or pseudo-dominant trait, since it'd result in women with the trait being more likely to successfully pass their genes on; I'm not the greatest with figuring out genetics, I admit. One thing I just thought of, though: women have always been reviled in our world when they're uncooperative, yes. Is it necessary to the plot that this be so in this world? If so, why are women considered inferior to men when they're probably equally as capable of setting someone on fire if they're sufficiently angry? (Also, I can see the Divine Right of Kings still being a thing, yes - even more so with magic in play and the nobility capable of using it! But I'm not entirely sure that religion is going to look quite the same in this world, if the druids could've used magic to fight back with, and if Christianity didn't become the powerhouse it needed to be in order for the Church of England to come into existence, then things might be a lot more different.) Possibilities: women's magic is socially encouraged to be channeled into craftwork - knitting, weaving, sewing, painting - and tends to manifest in more benign ways (i.e., women are usually healers (how would this change medicine?), or their magic is inclined towards protections or illusions). This would make Jillian's setting her bed on fire unusual, but it could be argued that her magic trends towards hearth-tending. Alternately, the playing field between men and women is a lot more equal - it's probably not perfect, since there's no guarantee that any specific person will have magic, but it's more noticeably equal in the nobility where it's much more likely that the women will be magic users. I'm just tossing ideas out here, at this point, it's almost 2 in the morning.
Oh, wow, I love the idea about relying primarily on power and control being Edgelordy. That actually really helps with one character - a noted rake, he would conspicuously not have any candles in his library and just make there be floating fire when he wanted to see because he's socially expected to be outrageous and terrible. 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know.' And one of the legal requirements for inheriting is definitely being a magic user. The Monstruous Regiment Of Women would be even more monstrous if their claims to the throne couldn't be contested because they had undeniable magic. I haven't thought of an evolutionary reason for it to exist, but one of the caps on population I think would be the tendency to explode when under stress/insufficiently educated by whoever was around with sufficient knowledge. And so if it went unrecognized/hidden/denied, it'd be more likely to be a problem. Mostly I want to have the social setup such that history can continue not much altered until the Industrial Revolution except for having cool stuff. Because one of the major problems in a world with magic is that rebellions really would be more interesting and fraught. So both the magic and the magic users need to have some kind of cap until you can throw science at it. Like, what would the European landscape look like if Caterina Sforza's alchemical experiments had been successful or she'd literally been able to rain fire on her enemies and she'd fought off the French and Cesare Borgia? I don't think I have the reach to do that kind of worldbuilding, as cool as it would be. I think henotheism would still work much the same, which would account for most things up to about 300 CE. Because, like, if there are lots of gods but you're just sworn to one, that's fine and there's no real clash. It's the move to monolatry and monotheism that would cause problems, but that's what happened anyway? So if we assume armies stay evenly matched if you add in a magic dimension, I think we get really similar histories? And, like, there's no real reason in our world for women to be considered inferior. It's mostly made up shit. But nevertheless it persists. I don't think magic would necessarily change it? Or, rather, my worldbuilding doesn't require it for coherence, I don't think. Because, like, there was the persistent idea that women couldn't actually be friends that lasted until . . . the mid 19th century? In the face of all evidence. And everything about Lilith and demonology was invented out of whole cloth by some monk who needed to do fewer drugs, and I think it wouldn't necessarily have changed in the presence of magic, but rather been given an extra dimension. Actually given all the bullshit western society is prone to, I imagine that it might have been deeply questionable for any woman to admit to having magic until - again - the Monstruous Regiment of Women. Like, particularly Elizabeth? Mary ended up controversial not just because of the murder but also the Catholicism, but Elizabeth was an admired monarch for like forever, so her having magic would have legitimized it more for women of the upper classes. Like, it would probably have made it acceptable to admit that women had magic that was even the same kind of thing that men had, and made it a matter of manners rather than not being executed as a witch to have women's magic treated differently.
That's reasonable, yeah - I hadn't actually thought my way through to that point, but...yeah. If you're not putting some kind of cap on things, you end up with a world similar to that of Girl Genius except with magic instead of mad science. Assuming armies stay relatively evenly matched once you add in a magic dimension would mean for a roughly similar history. You might see some differences in some things, though; there might well be more politically recognized Scottish and Irish nobility, for one, with Britain hoping that this would help keep them from kicking off extremely expensive rebellions. (I imagine the druids' magic trended more towards, well, dnd druid stuff: manipulate the plants and the earth, possibly send animals into frenzies. Prrrrobably not much in the way of shapechanging, unless you really want that in. But being able to drop your enemies into a sinkhole or beef up the defenses around your castles would make laying siege more difficult, and being able to pull food and water out of the ground would multiply that difficulty.) Scotland and Ireland might not be subject kingdoms of Britain at all, but proper allies. (I'm sorry, I'm way too fascinated with how magic might've changed the political landscape there. Assuming Britain, Scotland, and Ireland are all ruled by the same monarch, though, you could explain that away by saying there was a system of marriages that ended up with one royal family holding the titles for all three kingdoms and designated governors for Scotland and Ireland. It's still probably a pretty touchy situation all around, and Scotland and Ireland would rather have separate monarchs, but no one can afford the sort of rebellion it'd take for that. You might want to open the question of whether the potato famine happened, though.) ...I'll admit that I am now wondering about, like, the monarch being magically tied to the land. But that's more of a "that would be really interesting" than it seeming like anything truly necessary for worldbuilding would hang off of that. "It's mostly made-up shit" and worldbuilding not requiring it for coherence is reasonable. It's possible that the sort of magic women did admit to, prior to Elizabeth, was very, very benign stuff: protective wards, healing, growing plants, etc. Nothing at all that'd be considered threatening by male magic users. If I'm remembering right, too, a lot of the "this is witchcraft" stuff happened because the Church was trying to stamp out women having the freedom to look after their own health in ways that weren't "pray and make atonement for your sins" (specifically stuff like making choices about whether they were having kids or not, and how much pain they had to deal with during childbirth and menstruation; the Church was very much on the side of "you earned that pain because of Eve's Sin, you get to sit there and live with it"). Whether that happened the exact same way in your world is debatable; there might actually have been less of "this is Eve's Sin" and more "women's magic should stay confined to the hearth where it belongs", maybe? Elizabeth would almost definitely have been the one to force society to start acknowledging that women have magic that's even similar to men's magic, I agree. Especially since she probably would've been making a show of "look, I am stronger than everyone here, do you really want to push me on whether my magic is Acceptable" in those first few years. Do you think she married, in this world? (Or did she bond her magic with one of her ladies-in-waiting?) I imagine it would've been even more scandalous and anxiety-inducing for people if she kept refusing to marry - and if I understand right, she would've needed to bond with another magic user for her powers to settle safely.
. . . welp, you have given me a way to have Scottish laird werewolves. Given that opportunity, I have a friend who'll never forgive me if I don't take it. That means either Matilda or Genevieve marries a Scottish Wolflord (of no relation to the book I've seen spoofed). And it's super great that you're into the political landscape! Going through it is super helpful in terms of working out worldbuilding and refining the necessary limits of magic in order to keep things functional. And that's actually basically what happened with Scotland and England - James I & VI. Thankfully I don't need to think about the potato famine until after I've written these and my life has gone completely off the rails and I'm writing more books in the universe. Yeah, the Church was super fucked up. And there was a sort of doubling down during the Reformation where everything was even more fucked up and that's why we can't have nice things. Less Eve's Sin would actually be nice - I think I'll do that. Oh! And with glamours, women wouldn't go into 'confinement' as soon as they started to show, they'd just . . . choose not to show. So being visibly pregnant would still be Scandalous, but going into confinement before you were, like, expecting to pop any day, would be somehow indicative of poor breeding, since it meant neither you nor your husband had enough magic to keep you looking fit for society. Not another magic user, just another person. And I think the official story would either be ladies-in-waiting or that she had such an indomitable will that she contained all of it herself? (she bonded to Robert Dudley) And there'd have been really filthy gossip about it.
"Indomitable will" would make her sound more badass, so I suspect that'd be the official story. And yeah, there'd absolutely have been filthy gossip about who she's bonded to - real-world, there was filthy gossip about how much time she spent with various men. The more polite suspicion would be that she'd bonded to one of her ladies-in-waiting (or possibly all of them, all at once). Ooh. And I just remembered about brewing - women used to be the ones solely responsible for brewing beer! There was actually a law on the books in Ireland which prohibited men from brewing beer. Up until, of course, the Church decided they didn't like how much power this gave women (because anyone who brewed more beer than her household really needed could easily sell the excess, and this meant there was an easily-accessible way for women to have control of their own finances and support themselves without needing to depend on a man). Which is actually where the whole "witches wear pointed hats and carry brooms" thing came from; the brewers who were at market to sell extra beer wore pointed caps and carried brooms to make it easier to spot who you wanted to go to for that. (The Church interfering is also why beer is traditionally made with hops, these days; some monks added hops on purpose, under the premise of "it'll reduce sexual urges".) Figuring out what's up with the rest of Britain's colonies would be a thing to do, because with magic added - how did things in India go? What happened with the Opium Wars? What about North America, and the native tribes there? How do magic users from different cultures get treated? (Probably with the usual snobbery expected of Victorian Britain, tbh; "yes, that's quaint, but our way is Better".) But most of it can wait until whenever you're doing something in that region, because unless you're actually writing anything set in India or with people from India, you kinda...don't need to go too in-depth on what's going on there just yet. (It's entirely possible that India's got some sort of treaty with Britain, since I seem to recall one of the arguments for "we need to colonize this area" was usually "because otherwise one of the other European nations will have dibs"; maybe officially India's considered under British protection? idk - looking too much at it is gonna result in me going off track for stuff that's actually useful for the books you're considering right now.) As far as glamours and confinement - hm. It makes sense! Probably around the second or third trimester, there'd be a social expectation of you going out and being on your feet a little less, and having a lot more at-home visits from friends. I suspect that glamours would only be able to do so much about the physical strain that pregnancy puts on the body, after all.
It's Regency, I'm just well aware that I have a problem and it'll likely end up stretching into several stories after the ones I have planned. First one is 1815, second is 1818, then 1819, 1821, and 1822.
Okay, so - pulling up a timeline for RL British history....in 1815, Britain defeated Napoleon (ending an on-and-off war that'd been going for the past 20 years) and brokered a peace in Vienna. This was a very fragile peace, though, and there were a lot of worries that things were going to fall back into conflict at any moment. This was also the point where Britain was properly recognized as one of the Great Powers in Europe, and they'd dominated the oceans since about 1805 after their victory at Trafalgar. Things were tense, both internationally and domestically; Ireland had only recently become part of the British Union, and all the islands were still culturally very different. Britain's colonies at this point included British North America (the Canadas and the maritime provinces (this whole region would later become consolidated as Canada, but at this point Britain didn't have claim to anything further east than maybe Saskatchewan)), which had just gone through the War of 1812 unscathed; South Africa (very recently reclaimed from the Dutch); Australia (just starting to overcome the unsavoury reputation its origins as a penal colony had given it); a handful of Indian states (Bengal, Calcutta, Madras, Orissa, Ceylon and Bombay appear on the map of 'ceded and conquered provinces'); and a bunch of islands in the Caribbean (including Jamaica, the Bahamas, Belize, and Barbados). The timeline (from the BBC's "British History in Depth") implies that the Asian and Caribbean conquests were relatively new as of 1815, since it states that some historians see the state of things circa 1815 to be Great Britain to be trying to replace the American colonies (followed by "but it totes wasn't, because the western parts of the Empire totally overshadowed the Asian section up until the 1840s"). Other things of note: King George III wasn't popular during his time (actually hardly any of the royal family was well-liked at this time) - he was a peacemaker, faithful to his wife, and more fond of living as modest and quiet a life as he possibly could, all of which made for an incredibly boring court; he didn't ever visit anywhere outside of England, and he showed extremely little interest in even the north and midlands of England - he had utterly no interest in Scotland, Ireland, or Wales. He also had repeated issues with some kind of mental health problems, which is what eventually led to the Regency; the fact that these problems also made him blind and deaf before he died results in speculation that it wasn't purely mental (popular theory is that it was porphyria), but there's no way of knowing for sure at this distance. The Regency (acto Wikipedia) started about a year after his Golden Jubilee, when it became clear that the king wasn't going to get better again this time, and Prince George immediately started trying to performatively rebel against his dad by being ostentatiously useless - he wasn't allowed to participate in politics or military strategy, and the Wikipedia article suggests that he was well aware of the fact that he was basically just being used as a placeholder till his dad either got better again or died, and his response was "heck with all of you, I'm going to throw epic parties and buy myself awesome toys, and do all the stuff my dad wouldn't let me do while he was in charge". This did result in a lot of technological innovation during this period - 1814 saw the Times upgrading to a steam press, which let them print over a thousand pages per hour (as opposed to the 200 they'd been able to do before that) and also allowed for "fashionable novels" (basically the tell-all books of the day) to really take off. Gas lamps were also installed in the streets of London that year. The Prince-Regent was really unpopular, however, since he was spending a lot of money at a time when Napoleon was still fucking around, and his need to pay off his debts meant that taxes got increased on the common folk. 1816 saw (among the things likely to also happen in this world) 'the year without a summer' as a result of volcanic eruption (the primary suspect is an 1815 eruption in Indonesia, but there'd been several other volcanic events from 1809 to 1814 which meant that there was enough dust in the air that the 1815 eruption was just the tipping point); this resulted in a lot of famine that year, since the Little Ice Age had already strained things and this made it worse - cool temperatures during the normal growing season, combined with heavy rains, meant that the harvest was unusually poor or failed entirely in a lot of Europe. No one else was doing much better (there were crop failures in America and Canada too, as well as China), which meant that there wasn't any food to import, which led to refugees from Wales and bread riots (phrased as "riots, looting, and arson in many European cities", with further mention that Great Britain had food riots and the granaries were looted). This had knock-on effects which meant that 1817 was also chillier than usual and the weather didn't really return to normal until 1818. Knock-on effects: typhus epidemic (caused by famine) in Ireland that lasted until 1819; the never-ending rain was the reason for Mary Shelley and friends holing up in the Swiss villa they were vacationing at, leading to the "write the scariest story you can come up with" competition they had (Frankenstein was published in 1816); flooding of the major rivers (the Rhine is mentioned, it's likely that a lot of rivers in the British Isles flooded too); "the August frost" (sounds self-explanatory); drastically increased prices in all the staple foods, leading to the food riots and a lot of people trying to immigrate anywhere that might have better weather and soil. 1817 saw the death of Princess Charlotte (daughter of the Prince-Regent) due to complications during childbirth and her grandmother, Queen Charlotte followed the next year (Wikipedia doesn't specify what of, but it does state that she died while sitting with the Prince-Regent at a family retreat, so presumably natural causes; it does state that the king's illness put considerable strain on her, and that the French Revolution stressed her further - she'd been good friends with Marie Antoinette, and had even prepared apartments for the French royals to live in at the palace, under the assumption that they'd be able to flee to Britain, and Marie's death was a massive shock to her). The king is, by 1818, so far gone in his illness that it's believed he isn't able to understand that his wife is dead. King George III dies in 1820, and the Prince-Regent becomes King George IV; his behaviour doesn't significantly change. (Other things of note: Queen Charlotte had a lot of kids, and most of them actually made it to adulthood. The boys were notoriously wild (the Prince-Regent was an exemplar), and their father had to spend a lot of money bailing them out of various problems: Prince George lost a set of love-letters to an actress (Perdita Robinson) and the king had to pay 5,000 pounds to get them back; Prince George then got married to a "Mrs Fitzherbert" four years later, which would've made him ineligible for the throne if it'd been made public - I have to assume that this marriage was annulled or at least declared illegitimate, since he got married to Princess Caroline about ten years later (apparently as a result of being in debt). His brothers followed his example, and Prince William actually settled down with an actress and had a whole family with her (the Fitzclarences). Prince Augustus tried it too, but his secret marriage was disallowed. As a result of their brothers' wild behaviour, the queen kept her daughters under very close watch - none of them married until quite late, and only one IRL had a legitimate child. Reading Princess Charlotte's article, she was basically a tomboy and regarded as scandalous in a lot of ways (her parents did not get along and kept using her as a pawn in their arguments, which meant that there was a lot of contradiction about how she was supposed to be raised during her formative years - her mother had no say in Charlotte's upbringing and it seems like her father only really remembered about Charlotte when he was trying to make Caroline miserable; by the time the king started sending her tutors, she'd gotten to the point where she was only learning what she wanted to and saw no reason to behave the way society wanted her to). Her parents' feud meant that she was their only legitimate child and if she'd outlived her father, she would've been the next reigning monarch. If you want to create a major historical change, having Charlotte survive childbirth would do it; she was apparently adored by the country (notable in that she was the only royal of the time who was well-liked at all), and no one really liked how her father treated her. Possible consequences to Charlotte living: Victoria's parents getting married and having her was a direct result of Charlotte's death; Charlotte surviving would likely mean that Victoria would be born later, if at all. This could be avoided by having Charlotte nearly die, making it considered a pressing matter for there to be someone to be next in the line of succession after her.) Thoughts raised by this: what does King George's madness look like in this world, when he's also got magic? (IRL, he was housed in one of the royal family's manors, in increasing seclusion after 1811; Queen Charlotte's last known visit to him was in 1812; in this world, is he kept somewhere warded to prevent his magic from harming people?) How precisely did the French Revolution go down? (Presumably it did still happen, but with magic and nobility being socially linked here, did anyone with a touch of magic have to suddenly flee France?) What are the consequences of Queen Charlotte keeping her daughters cloistered? However, the Summerless Year, followed by the only well-liked royal dying/nearly dying, followed by the queen dying, does make for drama and angst if you need more of that. There's a year of food riots and flooding (plus a tide of refugees out begging for food). And then the entire country went into mourning for Princess Charlotte, to such an extent that people who made and sold ribbons and other fancy stuff were begging the government to shorten the mourning period so that they didn't go bankrupt (no indication that the period was shortened at all, however). And then, the queen dies and everyone has to go right back into mourning (if they'd even come out of it yet; there's nothing I can find on how long people were expected to stay in mourning for the nobility before they could respectably return to normal life, and it seems to have been heavily dependent on how well-liked that particular noble was). If you don't have Princess Charlotte die, there's still room for a lot of worry that she will die or that her health won't recover; either of those would put a damper on society's mood. Also, dear lord, this ended up a lot longer than I expected it would.
Suggestions because I am a bad man: - Fibercrafts as a way for women and spies to secretly "write down" magical spells - as opposed to the usual style, in books or writing. - And by that I mean Lady Magic, by which I mean, there are totally going to be birth control spells and abortion spells and 'don't get childbed fever' spells and 'keep this creep from groping me' spells, and they're Improper enough that they'd be transmitted in ways men would ignore or not see, right? - And that dovetails nicely into New World Magicz, because like, a math- or language-inclined lady would be in the perfect position to realize that Incan quipu ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu ) are actually grimoires. On the Divine Right of Kings - that derives ultimately from the Tetrarchy of Diocletian, because while there was sort of a worship of the dead-emperor-made-divine dating back to Augustus, Diocletian was the one who really instituted "no, while I'm ALIVE I'm the representative of the god", and started doing stuff like "it takes ceremony and a really good reason to see the emperor, he doesn't have time for you lesser people" that framed the living emperor as "above" the citizenry. So, uh. That might be relevant to your interests to poke at, for the purpose of "how divine right of kings might differ slightly in this universe"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrarchy For alternate history stuff, might also be interesting to poke at the spells transmitted by the landing of the Spanish Armada, and by Viking raids, and perhaps "these spells are super useful but they're also Foreign and imply you have Foreign Blood, so they are really not something to show publicly"? Also, fancy Chinese magic, perhaps expensive Chinese magic tutors, along the lines of Chinese porcelain and silks being fashionable in roughly that period? Which would be an interesting excuse for non-white people in Europe in significant roles, and also "welp that sure is an asian bastard child, we can all tell who fathered THAT one"? Alternate history effects of Mongol magic, as the Mongols moved across Europe? Effects on the Islamic Empire?
Oh, also: In the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church was one of the main bastions of literacy and libraries, right? That sounds really important in a world like this, and might be affecting perceptions of the church into the Regency.
... Also, foreign fibercrafts were very much in vogue in various periods of English history. You might find the evolution of lace particularly interesting. Drawnwork has existed since antiquity but became particularly in vogue in the 15th century, iirc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawn_thread_work It evolved in Italy into reticella, and was fashionable in England by the Tudor period, having spread from Italy by way of France. iirc it's also known as Italian lace. Those fancy Tudor ruffs were reticella. http://www.bayrose.org/AandS/handouts/reticella_rev.pdf That ended up being eclipsed by and evolving into bobbin lace, by way of passementerie, also from Italy, and produced in Flanders and Normandy a bunch. It was a lot cheaper to make, but labor-intensive, so you started having basically everybody making lace in cottage industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passementerie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin_lace And then the Regency period is when machine-made lace first started existing, eclipsing the cottage industry bobbin lace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lace_machine Also, have you considered the merits of Manchester, since in the Regency period that was like, the biggest textile-manufacturing hub and cotton-processing hub in the region, and the Austere Moorland is a fun trope? [/spam spam lovely spam]
Ha! I already have Austere Moorland covered by bits in Yorkshire. You can't tempt me into . . . I mean. Huh. Textiles are excellent. But marrying into trade is . . . I would have to really thoroughly ruin the family's finances in order for that to function in the Regency books, because I'm not interested in thoroughly subverting the conventions of the time - which will end up really similar to our own conventions if not the same. The comedy-of-manners aspect of the genre that's really appealing becomes less so the less people are bound by it. But why must you tempt me with textiles. Dove - wow, that is a lot that you typed up. It'd be really interesting to do more with avoiding some of the dangers of childbirth. Because that's, like, one of the more important protections a woman could have and would go in search for. I think the Hymen's War Terrific could have potentially gotten very, very weird if showing off magic would have been considered an appropriate way to advertise that one was a good candidate to marry a royal duke.
Because it's funny? :3 Another item of potential interest - Britain had a VERY different climate in Roman times, closer to France than modern Britain, which was a big part of why it was valuable. It was wine country. It gradually got colder after that.
Hm - well, was there anything preventing them from doing favour-trading? "I'll make you one of those lovely lace shawls of mine that you keep coveting, if you show me how to do this specific spell" sort of thing. (Plus, maybe the girls are dabbling in trade? Slightly scandalous, if they're caught, but possibly easily laughed off as "oh, they're just playing at it, they're not really making money". I admit that I don't quite know the conventions of the time sufficiently to be sure of whether the family could, say, own a dress-shop or something that they employ other people to run - how much of a distance do they need to be at, in order to still be respectable?) It would be interesting to show off some of what could be done to avoid the dangers of childbirth, yeah. Princess Charlotte was, from what I can tell, very self-confident and very self-determined - and with how adored she was, I can see a lot of women trying to send her info on how to do specific spells to keep herself safe. (Heck, one of her governesses might've taught her!) ...it'd also be plausible for her to have at least tried hexing some of her suitors; the Prince-Regent kept trying to arrange marriages for her, and she kept being thoroughly unimpressed by the would-be beau and going "nope, not marrying him, you can't make me" and one of her primary objections was usually that they'd require her to leave the country which she had no intention of doing if she was going to be Queen of England (and at the time, it seemed like she would be). She did come up with a couple eligible men that she liked enough to try and argue that her father should allow her to marry them; the one who succeeded was a Coburg prince, Leopold, and the marriage contract was carefully arranged so that the two kingdoms would remain separate - her first son would've inherited the English throne (if he'd lived) and the second one would've inherited the Coburgian throne. She adored her husband, and he seemed to have a very calming influence on her; she became much more steady after their marriage, and he was seen publicly encouraging her to chill a little (and succeeding at it). The Hymen's War Terrific would definitely have gotten weird if showing off magic was an appropriate way to advertise that one was a good candidate. (On the other hand, all three of the dukes involved had massive debts and were known to be devoted to their mistresses. Their main draw was the hope that any legitimate kid they had would become heir to the throne of England - so there might've been the opposite effect, with women trying to discourage interest in themselves.)
I need to start caring about Charlotte's story more, because I keep getting distracted. And at some point I need to write up how magic works vs how it's understood to work during the Regency. Because I think they'd be very different. I think charms etc. can last for some time free-floating but last longer and better and more stably when tied to an object, and even better when the magicuser made the item. So that'd add an interesting component to the textile industry, because machines would be replacing a lot of stuff, but hand-made meant it could have more magic in it. And, like, at the very basic level, magic works by people believing absolutely and all the way to their bones, that it will. So it's doubt that kills people rather than saying something wrong or making the wrong gesture, but, like, I don't think the thought would even occur to people until the late Victorian era when paranormal crap was super fashionable. And progress is slow, even on important things: scurvy was first proposed to be prevented by citrus in 1753, but Scott still almost died in his 1904-1907 expedition. So successful magic users end up kind of arrogant just as a necessity for survival.
