A Lady's Guide to Rakes

Welcome back to the Featherton sisters’ London!  This time we will visit several well known London locales featured in A Lady’s Guide to Rakes.

Balloon Ascents in Hyde Park

A Lady’s Guide to Rakes opens in Hyde Park near the Serpentine. 

Strolling or riding in Hyde Park was a fashionable pastime during the Regency period, but one of the most exciting spectacles was to observe a balloon ascension. 

This period print of the death of famed English balloonist Thomas Harris, from the Royal Aeronautical Society, was the inspiration for the opening scene of A Lady’s Guide to Rakes.  Of course, in my story, no one died.  Instead, my heroine, Miss Meredith Merriweather and London’s most notorious rake, Alexander Lamont, met for the first time in Hyde Park and began to fall in love. Sigh.

Much better, don’t you think?

Balloon Crash

Tattersall’s

Today, men love their cars, the faster the better, right?  During the Regency, it was much the same...except the definition of horsepower was a little different.

Regency gentlemen prided themselves on their horses.  If it was bloodstock you were after in London, which Miss Merriweather pretended to be, Tattersall’s near Hyde Park Corner was the place to go. 

The establishment offered the finest horseflesh around with stables and boxes, as well as a large enclosed ring to test horses before purchasing them.  In the center was a large cupola featuring the bust of Richard Tattersall’s friend, The Prince of Wales.  Auctions were run regularly at Tattersall’s and were well attended by London Society.   Women were not permitted in this male domain, but of course, that did not stop Miss Merriweather.

My scene set at Tattersall’s (above right), where Meredith dresses as a young gentleman to sneak inside the establishment, was inspired in part by this 1809 print by Ackermann.