Research Links
General Research Sites for All Eras:
What was a groat? How much could you expect to purchase with a ha' penny? What was a butler likely to earn? At The Current Value of Old Money you can find out.
Yes, she finally eradicated the annoying Active X song banging away in the background, making Titles of Nobility in Britain the go-to source for information on the peerage. You, too, need never again worry about how to address the widowed wife of a second son of a duke.
HyperHistory will tease you with small orts of information about humankind and give a fairly decent comparative chronology of what's happening where at the same time in history on a variety of topics such as religion, people, events, science.
Deep in your heart, you've always yearned to know where the hell haggis came from (the word, we already know about the bladder---don't we?) Well, at The Food Timeline, you can discover the answer to that questions as well as get 2000 year old recipes for any manner of things or recreate a Barbary pirate's feast. And, by the way, did you know that ancient Mesopotians are credited with being the first people to write down recipes?
Every story owes something to myth, religion, or folklore. Inform your decisions about archetypes by studying the original deals at Encyclopedia Mythica.
Web Links to Regency Sites:
The Regency Costume Site is a portal to a vast number of regency related websites, despite the title, not being limited to dress but including language, customs, money, titles, professions, and anecdotal material.
Scroll to the bottom of The Regency Collection to find another portal to all things regency, including coaching recourses, wars and military conflicts, servants, recipes and life in town. This is an older site so I cannot verify all the links still work but everyone I tested today did.
Ever wonder what the weather was really like during the regency period? Look no further than Prints George. This small website tells you rainfall and temperatures broken down month by month from 1804-1810. Even better, this site offers tons of first person anecdotal material on everything from "the miseries of town life" to street maps of London.
The Regency Lady has been in development for over ten years. It's kind of a kick for me to see how much polish the place has acquired since I first stumbled onto it. It's often updated, well-balanced, and easy to navigate. In a cyberspace filled with sites too often devoted solely to fashion, it's a much welcome stand-out.
Speaking of fashion, Jessamyn's Regency Costume Companion has a nifty page devoted to men's fashions with descriptions and pictures--including Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.
Weblinks to Victorian Sites:
The Time Traveller's Guide to Victorian Britain is a primer, a good starting point to get your bearings in Victorian Britain. It's easy to navigate and offers some food for thought--aka "inspiration."
WARNING! Enter The Victorian Dictionary at your own risk! Once you start wandering around this extremely thorough, fascinating peek into the Victorian world it's hard to leave. You can find information on charities set up for dogs, discover slang, peruse maps from different decades, read excerpts from news pages...the list goes on and on.
Legal Milestones for Women is a concise page documenting, year by year, the legal situation of women in Britain during the Victorian era. A good place to look for plot lines.(!)
You may not be allowed to access some of the resources listed on the Victorian Literary Studies Archives, but this portal is really thorough and , better yet, kept religiously up to date.