It was something of a revelation when I first discovered eighteenth-century almanacs; pocket-sized booklets combining calendars, astronomical observations, general knowledge and predictions. Contemporary records show they were indispensable references: for planning parties on nights when a full moon would ease travel, as guides in sowing crops and to carry out trade at local fairs. They offer tantalizing insights into the daily life of our ancestors: care of livestock, herbal remedies, weather lore, reckoning of money, and even lucky and unlucky times to travel or cut one’s hair.
There was an almanac for almost every taste and town; during the seventeenth century over two thousand different almanacs were published. The predictions on subjects from daily weather to world affairs attracted a vast number of readers. By the mid-eighteenth century, the leading almanac by far was the original ‘Old Moore’s’, Vox Stellarum (‘The Voice of the Stars’). In 1768 it sold 107,000 copies, reaching its peak in the nineteenth century, in spite of astrologer Francis Moore having died in 1714 – a drawback blithely ignored to this day.
Almanacs were generally bought from street hawkers, at a cost of twopence to sixpence depending on their quality, and it is said that at times their sales in England exceeded the Bible. Such was their profitability that unlicensed editions, such as De Angelo’s fictional production in this novel, were produced in great numbers by hack writers and charlatan astrologers.
Predictions were typically cryptic and ambiguous. So, for example, Wing’s Almanack predicted the death of a great man in August 1658 and later claimed this foretold the demise of Oliver Cromwell on 3 September. Moore’s Almanack cited the 1755 Lisbon earthquake as the beginning of the fall of the Antichrist, and claimed to unveil Bonnie Prince Charlie as the horn of the beast of Daniel. Much like today’s tabloid newspapers, the enemy was generally any foreigner, particularly from the Catholic mainland of Europe, with special vitriol reserved for the French.
At the same time almanacs were evolving to meet a largely middle-class desire for amusement and instruction. The Ladies’ Diary, founded in 1704, successfully featured essays on famous women, a short story, recipes and ferociously difficult mathematical problems. At the heart of its success, however, were the rhyming riddles or ‘enigmas’. Folk riddles had long featured in penny chapbooks but soon ‘riddlemania’ gripped British readers. Unlike cryptic crosswords or sudoku, riddling was often a communal activity, as we see in Jane Austen’s Emma, where the Hartfield party is invited to contribute ‘any really good enigmas, charades or conundrums’ to form a written collection.
The better sort of almanacs ran contests to compose and solve erudite riddles. Readers were left puzzling for a year before learning the solutions or winning a prize comprising both the kudos of getting one’s name in print, plus a free copy of the next Almanack. Such puzzles give an insight into the lofty intellectual levels in the Georgian era.
Certainly, in comparison to the present editions of Old Moore’s Almanack, with its celebrity horoscopes and lucky bingo dates, we can only be impressed – if not shamed – by the mental dexterity of our ancestors.
A great many books, articles, and experiences helped me in writing this book but the following deserve a special mention:
Mark Bryant, Dictionary of Riddles (Routledge 1990)
Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500-1800 (Faber and Faber, 1979)
David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 1997)
Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300-1800 (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Tristan Gooley, The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs (Experiment, 2014)
Herbert Green, Village Life in the Eighteenth Century (Longman, 1976)
Charles Kightley, The Perpetual Almanack of Folklore (Thames and Hudson, 1994)
Robert Poole, Time’s Alteration: Calendar reform in early modern England (UCL Press, 1998)
Laura J. Rosenthal (editor), Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century (Broadview Press, 2008)
Aaron Skirboll, The Thief-Taker Hangings: How Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Wild, and Jack Sheppard Captivated London and Created the Celebrity Criminal (Lyons Press, 2014)
David Vaisey (editor), The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754-1765 (Oxford University Press, 1984)
In the early days of my research I anticipated long hours studying archives of almanacs in libraries, but instead found the best collections online. Google Play provided some of my favourites, including sight of the 1752 calendar change almanacs in ‘A Collection of English Almanacs for the Years 1702-1835’.
A daily delight was following nature’s changes through the seasons from my writing window. At night, I loved following the moon and stars using the app Sky Map.
As ever, while I have tried to capture some of the spirit of the Georgian age, I have played with certain facts to write this fiction. For example, the village of Netherlea is entirely fictional and its location is imaginary.
I would like to thank the many generous people who helped and inspired me:
My writer friends, Alison Layland and Elaine Walker, who continued to give invaluable feedback and guidance on my work in progress. Dr Derek Nuttall MBE, and his wife Ruth, also kindly read the early manuscript and offered valuable advice.
My friends in The Prime Writers, a group of hugely supportive writers who all had their fiction debuts commercially published at the age of forty or more.
The Society of Authors for part-funding an unforgettable spell as Artist-in-Residence at Hawkwood College, Stroud.
The staff at Acton Scott Historic Working Farm (the location of the BBC’s Victorian Farm), where I loved spending ‘A Day in the Life of a Farmer’s Wife’.
Chester Archives for a place on their ‘Horrible Handwriting’ course where I learned to read old parish records.
For their encouragement and belief in the novel, many thanks to agents Charlotte Seymour and Sarah Nundy at Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Imogen Russell Williams again provided invaluable assistance.
A special thank you to Kate Lyall Grant and Sara Porter at Severn House Publishers, for their crucial enthusiasm and commitment to the book.
And finally, thanks to my son Chris and my husband Martin, both ever ready with their encouragement and suggestions.