The Official Essex Sisters Companion Guide (11 page)

“Oh, Josie,” Annabel cried. “You’re going to make me cry all over again!”

But they ended up laughing.

by Franzeca Drouin

There’s a joke about Ginger Rogers, that she had to take every dance step that Fred Astaire did, but backward and wearing high heels. The same could be said of an early nineteenth-century female jockey who was challenged by male jockeys, but had to compete riding sidesaddle and wearing women’s clothes, including a corset. This is the enchanting story of Alicia Meynell, which I serendipitously ran across while I was researching horseracing for Eloisa James to use in the Essex Sisters series. I definitely wish someone would tell this story in a novel. But I suspect Miss Meynell, who published quite a bit of awful prose herself, would have preferred to write her own version.

My source for most of the information is the huge two-volume work,
History of the British Turf, from the Earliest Period to the Present Day
, by James Christie Whyte, published in 1840. It’s available in Google Books, though the second volume, which carries this episode, lists James Rice as the author. It is also the subject of an article published in
Sports Illustrated
in December 2, 1968, by Mary Evans, called “A Jockey Named Mrs. Thornton” (available online).

Alicia Meynell was the daughter of a well-known horse trainer in Georgian England. She was twenty-two years old and styled herself as “Mrs. Thornton,” claiming to be the wife of Colonel Thornton, her protector, though apparently she wasn’t the only one to make that claim. In 1804 she was out riding with her brother-in-law, Captain
William Flint. Following a heated discussion about whose horse was superior, they held an impromptu race, which Mrs. Thornton won. Captain Flint then challenged Mrs. Thornton to a proper race, with a prize of five hundred guineas for the winner.

The race was scheduled for August 25, 1804, the last day of the August Meetings (a series of horse races) at a racecourse at Knavesmire, near York, England. When the race was announced, bettors went wild, wagering not just on the outcome of the race, (which favored Mrs. Thornton), but also on Mrs. Thornton’s attire, and if she would ride sidesaddle. On the day of the contest, fifty thousand (the
York Herald
announced there were one hundred thousand) excited spectators were present, restrained by the mounted Sixth Light Dragoons. Mrs. Thornton’s attire was designed to resemble “a leopard,” and had blue sleeves and a blue cap. She rode her husband’s horse, Vingarillo, and Captain Flint rode Thornville.

Now, lots of folks had seen her practice gallop on Wednesday, at the end of which her saddle girths loosened and her saddle turned round, but she lost neither her composure nor her control. In fact, her “horsemanship” and “close-seated riding” astonished the bystanders, and changed the betting odds. More than two hundred thousand pounds in bets were placed on the race, a truly astronomical sum at the time.

The race was over a four-mile course. Mrs. Thornton led for three miles, at which time it became apparent that her horse lacked the stamina to finish the race. Five hundred feet from the finish line, she pulled up Vingarillo and conceded defeat. It was obvious to all horsey types that the weakness lay with the steed, not the rider. If Vingarillo had a longer stride, Mrs. Thornton would easily have won the contest. (Colonel Thornton never did pay the captain the fifteen hundred pounds that they bet. It ended up in court, and
Colonel Thornton was awarded five hundred guineas, based partly on the horsewhipping the captain had given him while trying to collect.)

Mrs. Thornton also disputed the outcome in the papers, claiming the captain had used unfair racing techniques, and challenged him to another race. He accepted the challenge, but wasn’t present when she raced again at the York August Meeting on August 25, 1805.

Mrs. Thornton’s much-admired attire that day consisted of a purple cap and waistcoat, and buff-colored skirts short enough to show her purple embroidered stockings and purple shoes. Her first race that day was against a friend, a Mr. Bronford. Mr. Bronford didn’t show up, so she trotted around the course, unchallenged, on a horse named Clausum Fregit, and collected the forfeit of six hundred guineas and four hogsheads of Côte Rôti.

Then, she crowned her victory the same day with a race against the famous jockey (he had won the Derby in 1802) Frank Buckle, who rode a horse named Allegro. Mrs. Thornton rode a mare, Louisa. She wrote a rather dreadful poem about it all. It seems Buckle was crowding her at the post, so she reached out and pushed him, and nearly knocked him out of the saddle. She led for most of the two-mile race until the distance, when he briefly took the lead. She summoned all her skills and her horse’s strength, and, whip clamped in her mouth, won by half a neck, and the six hundred guineas riding on the race.

An Irish lady, a Mrs. Duzley, was the only other woman who competed in a race in Britain until the twentieth century.

Fashion is most obviously important to the plot of
Pleasure for Pleasure
, given Josie’s corset and Mayne’s cross-dressing. But as I see it, fashionable attire is important to each of the books, because in taking four sisters from poverty to high society, Eloisa essentially wrote four
Cinderella
novels. Accordingly, she lavished attention on the sisters’ attire.

While researching the dresses Eloisa describes, I discovered that fashion is tremendously important when it comes to understanding a given time period: just think about bell-bottoms in the sixties, or leg warmers in the eighties. Houses stand for centuries, and a good steak has been in fashion since the Middle Ages. But fashion? It never stands still. In 1595, an elegantly dressed young lady might have worn a pink-tinted cartwheel ruff, perhaps as wide as twelve inches. But if she wore that ruff after the turn of the century, she would have been scorned for her passé adornment.

The Regency period was a time of huge innovation in fashion. Not only were new fabrics driving new styles, but the first fashion magazines were being printed, which allowed styles to change with dizzying speed. In London and Paris, a type of gown could be au courant one month and hopelessly outdated the next.

I spent a lot of time trying to find illustrations from the Regency period that approximate the clothes Eloisa describes—a task made a bit easier because Eloisa told me that she often finds the perfect gown in the
Vogue
of the day,
La Belle Assemblée
. Another fashion magazine during this time was
Ackermann’s Repository of Arts
. Although Eloisa primarily uses
La Belle Assemblée
, I threw in some Ackermann etchings for fun.

One way Eloisa uses fashion is simply to give an accurate sense of what a lady’s day might have been like. One crucial aspect of fashion in the period is its domination of aristocratic women’s time.

Here’s Miss Gillian Pythian-Adams in
The Taming of the Duke
telling the clueless Gabe what it’s like to be a lady.

                       
“Haven’t you ever noticed how difficult it is for a woman to be properly dressed?” And, when he shook his head, she continued, “As a man, you wear simple yet comfortable attire at all times, occasionally changing in the evening. Ladies must change their dress for every period of the day: morning gowns, riding costumes, evening gowns, opera gowns, ball gowns—even the greatest folly of all, presentation gowns sewn with pearls and other fripperies, and worn with hoops!”

                            
“I thought women liked changing clothes,” Gabe said. His mother certainly had.

                            
Miss Pythian-Adams sighed. “Some indubitably do. And there are times when I quite relish it. But it’s a sad way to spend one’s life.”

The Taming of the Duke

Gillian actually skimps on her list; I found lists of “necessary” clothing in
Ackermann’s Repository of Arts
that included carriage costumes, promenade dresses, sea-beach dresses, walking dresses, evening full dresses, evening half dresses, plain half dresses, dinner dresses, riding habits, concert costumes, court dress, cottage dresses, and dancing dresses. Given all these costume changes, women must have spent a great deal of time in their private chambers, allowing themselves to be shuffled from one garment to another. It sounds as if a lady could spend her whole day simply throwing on one dress after another!

Eloisa has to ignore many of these changes: she can’t possibly depict her heroines changing into all the categories and subcategories of dress worn by “real” ladies and have anything left for the plot. In fact, she pays by far the most attention to evening gowns (a touch of
Cinderella
!). Here she describes a gown from the beginning of
Much Ado About You
, when the sisters dine with Lady Maitland at Holbrook Court. She’s using the dress to characterize Lady Clarice, although I didn’t understand that at first; once I began looking closely at clothing in the series, it became obvious that Eloisa uses fashion in all sorts of ways to complicate and support the stories.

                       
Lady Clarice was wearing a dress more gorgeous than any garment Imogen had ever seen. It was fashioned of twilled sarsenet in a rich crimson with three rows of rib-band trimming shaped into small wreaths along the hem.

Much Ado About You

Much Ado About You
is the first book in the series, and it begins in September 1816. I started looking around in fashion magazines of the time. I couldn’t find an illustration of the precise gown Lady Clarice was wearing, but I did find pictures with accompanying descriptions that identified “sarsenet” (a fine soft silk fabric with a diagonal weave) and “rib-band” (alternate spelling of ribbon).

In the May 1816 issue of
La Belle Assemblée
, I found a ball gown (above) with rib-band and a dress trimmed with flowers.
La Belle Assemblée
describes this ball dress as including “bunches of rib-band, and finished by an elegant festoon wreath of roses.” Festoon, by the way, is another word for garland. I would love to view this dress in person because the “wreath of roses”
looks strange to me but in reality it was probably gorgeous.

Another illustration (above) of an evening gown in the September 1816 issue of
Ackermann’s Repository of Arts
includes tiered trimming on the hem, along with the ring of flowers.

Ackermann’s
describes this evening dress as a “British net dress over a white sarsenet slip; the dress is trimmed round the bottom with a deep double flounce of lace, surmounted by a wreath of roses. This trimming is uncommonly tasteful and striking.”

When I asked Eloisa if she knew what the “wreaths” might look like, she sent me this fashion plate of a French ball costume dated 1814. Now remember that Lady Clarice’s gown had
three
rows of wreaths around the hem? We can start to see that her gown is ridiculously over-trimmed, even for the decorative fashion of the time. Eloisa is playing with fashion to give a sense of the lady’s character.

Mind you, I did find a lot of multiple rows of trimming, including wide borders fashioned from artificial flowers. They were very popular at the time, and were used in the hair, in festoons on the skirts, and on the hems of trains. Here’s another gown with
deep trimming around the hem, shown in
Ackermann’s
in November 1816. Just look at all the ruffles on her hat!

The secret behind making gowns that weren’t so heavy at the bottom that they dragged down the bodice was “net.” The bobbet-net machine had just been patented by John Heathcoat in 1808. Even the Empress Josephine began wearing machine-net gowns rather than net made by hand. Mind you, the net was rarely left plain; it was hand-embroidered with spangles and trimmings of all sorts.

One more note about this picture: not only is the lady much be-ruffled, but she holds a parrot on her shoulder. In
Much Ado About You
, Tess writes a letter to her sisters telling them of the parrot her husband, Lucius, gave her.

                       
Lucius (perhaps I should refer to him as Mr. Felton, but he most dislikes that) is all that could be termed generous. He very much enjoys bestowing gifts on me. Yesterday he brought me a parrot with bright yellow feathers and a purplish beak. She is quite young and so cannot say a word, but apparently she will learn to speak if I apply myself.

Much Ado About You

The above etching was published in
Ackermann’s
during that time in the book—perhaps this illustration gave Eloisa the inspiration for the parrot!