Since debuting the cover of One Bed for the Bluestocking, I have received messages from curious readers wondering about the historical accuracy of my character Nathaniel, a Black man from Jamaica attending the University of Edinburgh. The short answer is that Black men absolutely did attend the University of Edinburgh during the Regency period, according to the fascinating research of historian Daniel Livesay.
I don’t know about you, but my mental picture of the Regency was formed by movies. As a high school student, I was obsessed with the 1996 production of Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow. I would stay up late on a Friday night and watch it after my family had gone to bed so that no one could complain or tease me about it (although my mom would have gladly watched it with me. Hi Mom! I know you’re reading this! Love you!) I loved it so much, sometimes I would watch it twice in a row. It was my gateway into the Regency. I’m sure that many of my readers had similar formative experiences with another period piece… perhaps the 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice?
One thing these productions that were made “in the nineteen-hundreds” (as the kids these days like to say) have in common is that they tend to feature a sea of white faces, not only for the principal characters, but the background characters as well. I don’t know about you, but without giving it too much thought, I internalized this and assumed it was historically accurate.
But as soon as I started researching the Regency in order to write my first book, I noticed that artwork produced during the Regency period looked a little different. We see Black people depicted out and about on the streets of London, playing in the band at Vauxhall, and serving in the Royal Navy. This is no coincidence. According to historian Gretchen Gerzina, in 1768, there were around 20,000 Black people living in London out of 676,250 people total—around 2 percent of the population.
Some people will acknowledge that there were Black people in England during the Regency but claim that they were all servants. Of course, many of them were. I would point out that statistically, far more white people were servants than noblemen, in spite of the thousands upon thousands of dukes portrayed by authors like me in Regency romance novels! (If we really want to talk things that are historically inaccurate, then I am sorry to inform you that there were no hot bachelor dukes during the Regency. Trust me. I have done this research!) But we do find examples of wealthy Black people moving in high society, such as Nathaniel Wells. And, of course, Jane Austen included a Black character in her unfinished novel, Sanditon, and she made Miss Lambe an heiress, not a servant.
But let us consider for a moment the historical record. Anyone who has internet stalked their Tinder date knows that these days, it is possible to uncover a stunning amount of information about most of us online.
But the historical record is more obtuse. It rarely gives us a tenth of the information that we could glean from a modern-day Instagram account. We often get a list, perhaps of names and dates of birth. These records often exist only in paper form and are stored in archives scattered around the world.
This is where I come back to historian Daniel Livesay. He happened to be researching just such an archive in Jamaica, of people who booked shipboard passage to Britain. By a great coincidence, a few months later, he happened to be in Scotland looking through a different archive containing lists of students enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. And he noticed that a lot of the same men appeared on both lists. He did some more digging and discovered that every year, a handful of mixed-race men from Jamaica enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, primarily in its medical school. Livesay states that around half of these men opted to remain in Britain after taking their degree and set up their medical practices there (as Nathaniel’s brother, Thomas, does in the book.)
It takes a bit of kismet to stumble across something like this, scattered across two continents. But Livesay isn’t the only historian to make such a discovery. William Dalrymple has uncovered Anglo-Indian students who attended Oxford and Harrow. Speaking of Anglo-Indians, did you know that Prince William and Prince Harry have Indian heritage? The historical record doesn’t tell us much about Eliza Kewark, but her descendants must have moved in fairly lofty circles, because one of them eventually married the 8th Earl Spencer.
My point is, when we look at old historical records and see a list of names, for many decades the assumption has been that those people must have been white. I have absolutely made this assumption, too!
But we are starting to learn that this wasn’t necessarily the case. Every year, we find more examples of people of color in all walks of life in Regency England. As more archival records are digitized and technology advances, I’m sure we will uncover many more of these connections in the coming years.
I have also received email from readers struggling to wrap their heads around the notion that a daughter of a gentleman, such as Kate, would be permitted to marry a Black man during the Regency era. I do feel that Kate and Nathaniel’s marriage is completely plausible according to the historical record, as I will explain.
Making general statements about historical attitudes toward people of color is challenging. There was absolutely racism during the Regency period, and you don’t have to dig very deeply into the historical record to come across examples.
At the same time, those attitudes were not universal. Think about a hot-button issue in your country today. If someone were to ask you what people in your country think about that issue, I’ll bet you’ll find that there isn’t a single answer you can give, other than to say that it’s extremely divisive and that people hold a wide range of opinions. That was also true of attitudes toward mixed-race marriages during the Regency era.
While we do find people with racist attitudes, we also find people of color who were considered to be very hot prospects on the Marriage Mart. These include Nathaniel Wells (a wealthy member of the gentry class whom I think of as the Black Mr. Darcy), Abu’l-Hasan (the Iranian Ambassador, who was considered to be a total heartthrob), and Kitty Kirkpatrick (an Anglo-Indian beauty and literary muse who had men begging for her hand).
It is also true that racist attitudes in Britain intensified during the Victorian era, a period when ancestors of color who had joined the family during the less restrictive Regency were sometimes erased from the family tree. But today, we have DNA testing, and the results do not lie! Remember how I said Prince William and Prince Harry have Indian heritage? Princess Diana’s aunt, Mary Roache, said of the genetic testing results, “I always assumed that I was part Armenian so I am delighted that I also have an Indian background.” Did some Victorian ancestor decide it “sounded better” to claim that their ancestor, Eliza Kewark, was Armenian, rather than Indian, in spite of the fact that she lived in the city of Surat? I honestly do not know, but I do find the quote from Ms. Roache fascinating.
So, we can partially blame the Victorians. Again, this is not to suggest that racism was not present during the Regency period. It absolutely was. But it was not at the level that people often assume.
Consider, for example, Benjamin Silliman, an American who visited Europe in the early 1800s. In his book, A Journal of Travels in England, Holland and Scotland 1805-1806, Silliman notes with surprise that Anglo-Indian children are, “received into society and take the rank of their fathers… It would seem that the prejudice against colour is less strong in England than in America.” He was startled to observe, “a well dressed white girl who was of a ruddy complexion, and even handsome, walking arm in arm, and conversing very sociably, with a negro man, who was as well dressed as she, and so black that his skin had a kind of ebony lustre. As there are no slaves in England, perhaps the English have not learned to regard negroes as a degraded class of men, as we do in the United States, where we have never seen them in any other condition.”
Considering that chattel slavery was still legal in the United States in 1805, this is something of a spectacularly low bar. Again, I am not trying to claim that there was no racism in Regency Britain. There absolutely was, and I can cite examples I have come across in the historical record that made me want to scrub my eyes with bleach. But the historical record also supports that those attitudes were not universal, and we find examples where people of color were welcomed into the upper echelons of Regency society, and were highly sought after as marriage partners.
As I hope you can see, I put a lot of thought and research into this story. While some of my choices may seem surprising, I do feel that they are historically plausible.
I hope you enjoyed Nathaniel and Kate’s story!