Lord Mansfield’s famous decision in the 1772 Somersett case is generally considered to have essentially ended chattel slavery in England and Wales, although emancipation came gradually enough that advertisements for “runaway slaves” were still occasionally seen into the late 1780s. The decision did not apply to Scotland, where colliers and salters were still held in conditions of slavery until 1799. Although Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, slavery still flourished in its colonies, and there was little opprobrium attached to those—such as Sir Galen Knightly and Stanley Preston—who owned slaves. The wealthy family in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park owned plantations worked by slaves.
The number of works written about Jane Austen is staggering. For my portrayal of Austen, I have relied, among others, on Le Faye’s A Chronology of Jane Austen and Her Family; Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things; Honon’s Jane Austen: Her Life, and of course Austen’s own letters and novels. The biographical information given for Jane Austen’s brother Henry and her cousin and sister-in-law, Eliza, is largely taken from those works. Eliza Austen died of breast cancer on 25 April 1813.
There really was a Bloody Bridge that spanned the small rivulet running along Five Fields. There was an ancient tavern in the area called the Monster, a corruption of the Monastery, but it was not precisely where I have placed it. The Twentieth Light Hussars served in both Jamaica and the Peninsula, although not precisely in the years I have used here. Basil Thistlewood’s coffeehouse in Cheyne Walk is patterned on the very real curiosity shop in Chelsea owned by a man who called himself Don Salerno.
While today we tend to think of butter as a luxury item, the poor of London actually ate a great deal of bread and butter; the fat it provided was an important part of what kept them alive. Hero’s articles on the poor of London are inspired by a similar work carried out several decades later by Henry Mayhew, and Mayhew is the source for Hero’s interviews with the various costermongers.