Welcome!

I'm Sadie, your hostess for the moment. Feel free to browse awhile.

Oh, you wish to know about me?

I'm a writer who has surpassed the age of 29 and has thereby been advised to claim that as my age forevermore. I'm also an aspiring authoress and amateur historian. Although born in America, I've long loved the history of the UK and I dream of visiting one day. While what I write varies, most of it is either historical fiction or modern romance. Sometimes both, if I can get away with it. I dabble in many eras, but the Regency remains my favorite.

The first Duke of Wellington is, as this site likes to term it, my blorbo. He's integral to several of my current WIPs, the focus of a significant portion of my Thriftbooks wishlist, and the subject of numerous books I already own. My wish to know everything about him fights with the fact that I hate reading about him being an idiot, and he could definitely be an idiot.

I love to learn. I also love to debate, so long as you do so in good faith and bring sources. I welcome genuine interaction. If I come on your post asking for sources on Wellington or any other topic it's because I have keep notes on Wellington and the Regency, and I want to add your fact to them.

Hopefully, running this blog helps me finish something I can one day publish.

If you'd like to look at the full series of weekly posts exploring Smith's Costumes of the Army of the British Empire, search the tag #CABE Project 2026.

I've made a goodreads! We'll see how good I am at maintaining it, but I've set it up and started leaving reviews. So far I've edited down my Bridgerton reviews and posted them there, as well as a few others.

I finished Phillip Guedalla's The Duke.

The book is broken into ten parts, and each part has subchapters. The overall length is 470 pages, about the same length as Hibbert. It's a bit more manageable than the two-parters, though that does mean it sacrifices some detail. The organization manages to cover Wellington's later life without bouncing around too much; it stays largely chronological, although there are a few detours. It also has indicators of time or age on every page, which makes keeping track of when things are happening so much easier.

One of the more interesting inclusions is an in depth look at the books Wellington took with him to India and their implications, plus a comparison between that list, and a packing list from a few years later that shows which he held onto and which had clearly been set aside. There's some useful information on Wellington's grandparents, father, and Dangan, what it was like before the family's money troubles and the musicality of the family. He can be funny in his turn, though not as often as Longford.

My main issue with it is that Guedalla quotes large chunks of French without translation or even summarization; he just expects you to know French. Actually, I think he also expects you to know Spanish at one point, but I had to try reading entire paragraphs of French and I cannot do that. I do think it a little useful to show Wellington's facility of the language, but as I do not share it, it was mainly a frustration. Other than that I do occasionally find him a bit dry. He gets a little... Victorianishly verbose with some of his descriptions, especially early on when he's describing Ireland and India.

Comparatively, I would place Guedalla below Longford, but above Hibbert. Longford maybe longer, but she's always interesting and her prose is simply more readable. Guedalla is more directly comparable to Hibbert, because they're both one-volume biographies. While Hibbert's prose might be a bit easier, Guedalla's organization is significantly better. You don't get lost in time the way you can with Hibbert. Admittedly, I did get déjà vu at times while reading Guedalla because of passages that are almost certainly paraphrased from him from both of the other two, who cite back to him.

All-in-all, it was a good read and I look forward to drawing from it for future posts and my notes.

I got a new book! I probably won't start reading it for a couple weeks, but I have high hopes for interesting new information.

Used books are always interesting for the stories they tell of those who came before and this one is no different. The previous owner (or one of them) loved Georgette Heyer novels... and who ever wrote the note wrote "Heyerals." Then there's the name of the person bestowing this gift. The first letter is clearly an M, then a 'u' --you can see the similarity with the beginning of 'much'-- but what comes next? Is it an 'm' and an 'f' for Mumf? Or an 'n' 'i' 'f' for Munif? That at least is a name...

Not as much information as the Weller book i bought where I was able to find the previous owner's obituary, but an interesting story just the same.

Smith's Costumes: Week Thirty-Three

Welcome back to our exploration of Charles Hamilton Smith's Costumes of the Army of the British Empire, in which we'll be looking at a different print every week of the year.

This week we're looking at "a Private of the 18th Light Dragoons (Hussars)."

The 18th Light Dragoons have a less consistent history than some of the regiments we've covered and have fun keeping track of them, because they have changed their name a truly ridiculous number of times.

I redid the citations in my main Regency Era notes document to go from everything having a full cite to using word's in-built citation manager and having short cites with a bibliography at the end. It lost 34 pages and something like 17,000 words and is now a good deal more readable.

Now I can actually take the notes I was going to take a week ago.