As far as Regency romances go, I recently bounced off of one by a very well known author because people were addressing a duke's unmarried daughter as a duchess. I thought, at first, that she must be the widow of a duke in addition to being the daughter of a duke, but she wasn't.
I'm not even willing to call that research fail because I know better just through cultural osmosis. How on earth did that make it into print? The book was commercially published, and the author had previously written other Regencies, also commercially published.
That's worse than I normally see. With the exception of Diana Gabaldon, I haven't found an American author writing about British nobility anywhere who's aware that the word "Lord" isn't a free-floater. They don't have the slightest idea that there's a difference between calling a character Lord Walderhurst and calling him Lord James Walderhurst (to cite an FH Burnett adaptation that's actually by a British screenwriter, and one from a family of nobility yet, so she really ought to have known better).
Alas, he was not. A full-fledged marquess. But Lord Walderhust is what he's usually, and correctly, called. The Lord James occurred once, in a reading of a newspaper clipping, but a newspaper of that era (Victorian) would not have made such an error.
No, it would not have. He would have been referred to as The Most Honourable Marquess of Waldenhurst, if that was his title and not his family name. (Or if it was a gossip sheet, the M-- of X--)
I picked up a good bit, actually, from Dorothy Sayers, but mostly what it told me was that it was complicated and that, if I ever was going to deal with aristocracy in a formal setting, I'd want to do research first.
There was also some sort of SF/fantasy book I read that had people falling through from one world to another. There was a character who had a title and who corrected someone when they called her 'Lady Lastname' and specified that she was 'Lady Firstname' and asked if they had that distinction locally to find out if she needed to explain it. I don't recall if she did need to explain it which makes me suspect that she didn't.
Sayers taught me a lot, so did Trollope, even Shakespeare. They all get it right. (Sayers did make one tiny, exceedingly obscure error, and when it was pointed out to her, she made a slightly bigger error to account for it.) I don't know where there's a complete manual, but it gets exceedingly complicated when you try to figure out who had (pre-1999 reforms) the right to sit in the House of Lords or not, for which any rule has exceptions compounding exceptions.
I'm not even willing to call that research fail because I know better just through cultural osmosis. How on earth did that make it into print? The book was commercially published, and the author had previously written other Regencies, also commercially published.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
There was also some sort of SF/fantasy book I read that had people falling through from one world to another. There was a character who had a title and who corrected someone when they called her 'Lady Lastname' and specified that she was 'Lady Firstname' and asked if they had that distinction locally to find out if she needed to explain it. I don't recall if she did need to explain it which makes me suspect that she didn't.
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment