After the fun of Christmas festivities, January can often seem like an anticlimax with Twelfth Night (January 5th) playing a particularly melancholy role in 21st-century minds, when we take down our Christmas decorations to avoid bad luck for the coming year. But in Georgian Britain, this date was actually a highlight of the winter season.

Twelfth Night is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘The evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking.’ Since the Middle Ages it represented the moment when the three kings were supposed to visit Jesus, and because of this, a custom of exchanging Epiphany gifts survived for centuries. In 1756, for example, The Gentleman’s Magazine reported that: ‘His Majesty, attended by the principal officers at Court … went to the Chapel Royal at St James’ and offered gold, myrrh and frankincense’.

Another custom, popular at parties during the 18th century, was to eat Twelfth Cake (the forerunner of today’s Christmas cake), which would contain a dried bean and a dried pea. Whoever found these in their slices of cake would become king and queen of the feast; those of high birth would become peasants and vice versa, with the Lord of Misrule (as the role reversal was called) ending at midnight when the ‘natural order’ would be restored. The custom of celebrating Twelfth Night with a special cake endured into the late 19th century, though by this time the bean/pea game had been forgotten, and the cake itself had taken centre stage thanks to intricate sugar frosting and gilded paper trimmings (it’s not to difficult to find recipes if you want to make one yourself).

Huge meat pies were also popular. In 1770, a Twelfth Night pie, baked for Sir Henry Grey, was said to be nine feet in circumference, 165 pounds in weight and contained (among other things) 4 geese, 2 rabbits, 2 woodcocks, 6 snipes, 4 partridges, 2 tongues, 6 pigeons and 7 blackbirds.

Stained glass window, 17 Gough Square

Although these traditions have largely been lost, Dr Johnson’s House in Gough Square, London, is giving us a chance of reviving them (albeit a day later) on January 6th 2011 (6pm to 9pm), when it will be evoking a riotous 1750s Twelfth Night, complete with wine, punch, generaly jollity and a pie. You can ‘listen to the fashionable music of the day, attend a read-through of the latest work by David Garrick and more’ and costumes are optional. Tickets are £15 each/£12 concessions (to include a glass of punch – cash bar thereafter) and proceeds go to supporting educational work with local children at Dr Johnson’s House. You can buy tickets online here until December 23rd.

LichVegas T-shirt featuring Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell

Here’s a shout out to my colleagues on our splendid hyperlocal news site, The Lichfield Blog, who have teamed up with satirical T-shirt co-operative Sabcat Printing to produce a host of tongue-in-cheek designs (all of them celebrating the city of Lichfield) under the moniker Viva LichVegas. We liked the Georgian flava of this one: Johnson trips along the street, arm-in-arm with Boswell, accompanied by the quote ‘He who aspires to be a hero / must drink brandy’ and the heading: LichVegas: The Landlocked Seaside Resort. As the makers point out, it’s the perfect accompaniment to ‘a night out in any of Lichfield’s fine watering holes’ and very much in the spirit of Johnsonian wit (after all, Johnson spoke fondly of a time ‘when all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of’). T-shirts are £10 each (including UK delivery) and half of the proceeds go towards sustaining The Lichfield Blog during the toughest climate for local news in many a long year.

Some of you might remember my abortive attempt to visit Sunderland Point, not far from Morecambe, in January last year. This former 18th-century sea port is a sombre, wind-whipped part of the British coastline, and if you make it down the perilous track across the salt marsh without being swamped or cut off by high tide, you’ll find a curious memorial to an unnamed black boy, since nicknamed ‘Sambo’, who, during the height of the slave trade, was cruelly abandoned by a ship’s captain and left to die alone.

Thanks to @RichardBratby for pointing out this interesting piece in yesterday’s Guardian about how the grave of this black boy has made Sunderland Point a tricky place to preserve; some feel the plant life of the salt marsh might benefit from regular flooding, but what about Sambo’s Grave? His burial spot was left unmarked for 60 years, and then a local clergyman, the Reverend James Watson, wrote a stirring poem, which helped to sway public opinion during the anti-slave-trade campaigns of the late 18th century. Sambo’s grave has become an unofficial memorial to a shameful part of British history, but one which must be preserved, even from the encroaching tide, which cuts Sunderland Point off from the mainland twice a day.

- From 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose.

FOOTNOTE: I absolutely love old dictionaries. If, like me, you spend hours looking up words like Mopsie and Bumfodder (or even Grumbletonians) you might want to check out The First English Dictionary of Slang 1699 which has just been published by the Bodleian Library, having been out of print for 300 years. Thanks to @ShireHistories for posting this on Twitter yesterday.

I couldn’t leave the subject of Bath with just a note about The Pump Room, which is naturally near the top of the list when visiting the city (in fact it gets over one million visitors a year). We went for lunch in the the restaurant – just to soak up the atmosphere in what was the beating heart of Bath in the Regency period. It’s a very fine building – built from the characteristically yellow Bath stone (the construction was started by Thomas Baldwin in 1789 and completed by John Palmer in 1799) and it overlooks the part of the Roman Baths known as The King’s Bath.

The neoclassical salon still has a rather grand feel about it; I feared it might be a bit of a tourist trap, but the food in the restaurant was surprisingly good. An absolute must, though, is a visit to the Pump Room fountain (above), where you can sample the spa water at 50p per glass. I have to say, the warm, slightly salty taste (presumably from the natural mineral salts) was absolutely disgusting, but this is perhaps the closest you can get to a genuine taste of history. And the good news is… the scrofula patients haven’t bathed in it first.

Enjoying an elegant lunch in The Pump Room. © Annette Rubery.

Let’s catch up again soon.

Although not exactly ‘the season’ Mr Woffington and I decided it was high time for a holiday last week, and we chose Bath, not least because we had some vouchers for Thermae Bath Spa and also because one of my readers had told me about a very interesting Georgian museum which I was itching to visit. We were generally unlucky with the weather, apart from a few hours of brightness one morning, but that allowed for a walk through Royal Victoria Park (which you can see, above left, with The Royal Crescent just peeping through the trees). As its name suggests, the park was not a feature of Regency Bath, having been opened in 1830 by the 11-year-old Princess Victoria, but I’d urge you to take a stroll through it, especially during the Autumn when all the trees look stunning.

The Royal Crescent itself is obviously worth a look (see right for a view of it with the Ha-ha in the foreground). Designed by John Wood the Younger and built between 1767 and 1774, it’s a masterpiece of Georgian architecture – from the front at least. One of my top tips (which a man kindly gave me as I walked past the Jane Austen Centre with my camera in my hand) is to go and have coffee at The Royal Crescent Hotel, which has a ‘secret’ garden at the back leading to what would have been the coach houses. As long as you can afford the ruinously expensive coffee (around £10 for two people) you can get a good look at the back of The Crescent from here, and what’s really interesting is that the design of each building is completely different (some might even say it looks a bit of a mess). It seems that the well-to-do had whatever design they wanted, and Wood simply built a grand facade covering them all from the front. Talk about diplomacy!

The other big-hitting piece of Georgian architecture is The Circus (left) which was designed by John Wood the Elder, who sadly died just three months after the first stone was laid. A grand homage to the Roman Colosseum, the scheme was completed by his son (the same man who built The Royal Crescent) in 1768, at which time it was known as the King’s Circus (‘circus’ being the Latin word for a ring or oval). To my mind, it’s an even greater piece of work than The Royal Crescent – a vision of Palladian harmony which curves inwards, rather than outwards, and has 525 pictorial emblems in a frieze above the doors (all of them different, from what we could see).

But back to The Royal Crescent because I wanted to mention an excellent museum at No.1 The Royal Crescent that’s well worth a visit. This Georgian town house has been beautifully restored by the Bath Preservation Trust. It was the first house to be built in The Crescent and provided luxury accommodation for the aristocracy (who would presumably just rent it for the season). The Duke of York stayed there at one time, and you can see that he would have not been without his customary elegance and comfort. The entrance hall, for example, is decorated with marbled paper (which was very fashionable in the late 18th century, as it was too costly to import real marble) and still has its original intricate plasterwork on the archway. I learnt some interesting facts from the guide in the gentleman’s study, too, who told me that in Bath’s heyday, wealthy visitors engaged servants from the neighbourhood on arrival, but as they didn’t know them, they paid them in tokens rather than cash (you can see an example of the tokens in the study).

Thanks to my reader Leah Marie Brown for recommending the museum, and also for drawing my attention to the turnspit in the kitchen, which was powered by a dog in a wheel! People were certainly less sentimental about animals in those days, though we did learn that Lichfield was one of the few places where the use of a turnspit dog was never recorded!

Photographs © Memoirs of the Celebrated Mrs Woffington.

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It’s the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in Staffordshire, and that means one thing: the Lichfield Literature festival is underway. There’s a range of literary treats between now and Sunday, including a handful of creative writing workshops (I have my eye on Catherine Fox’s Do You Have A Novel In You? on Sunday) plus visits from the likes of Jo Brand (promoting her second volume of memoirs, Can’t Stand Up For Sitting Down) and Suzanne Fagence-Cooper, who comes to talk about her book on John Ruskin’s wife Effie Gray. For those fans of the so-called ‘bonnet drama’ there’s a major treat on Saturday, when Sue Birtwistle and Susie Conklin – the writers behind the BBC adaptation of Cranford – give us a talk on Elizabeth Gaskell’s world and the lengths to which the BBC production team have gone to recreate the eponymous 1840s town. For those mildly surprised to see that Mrs Gaskell had obliged the nation with a two-part Christmas special last year, now’s your time to meet the actual authors behind it and to find out how they went about emulating Gaskell’s timeless style. (Saturday, The George Hotel, Bird Street, Lichfield, 5.15pm to 6.15pm, £5. Tel: 01543 306270).

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I can’t believe it’s taken over a week to get around to telling you about this, but the life of an 18th-century multimedia actress is sometimes a busy one. Still, there’s been plenty of nice outings to places such as London and Liverpool of late and one of the best events that Mr Woffington and I attended recently was the launch of Dr Johnson’s brand new Dictionary of Modern Life: a glittering affair at his home in Gough Square.

For those unaware of Dr Johnson’s recent activities (though I’ve mentioned them a few times), in 2009 he reemerged on Twitter and began publishing an entertaining stream of definitions on the parlous state of the modern world (a recent example: “Bestival (n.) Island Prison to which London does exile its many Fops for an annual Trial by RAIN-FALL”). Needless to say, these are now available in book form, published by the charming people at Square Peg (an imprint of Random House).

Anticipation was high when we arrived in the Great Cham’s hallway and deposited our coats in the gift shop; sadly nobody had chanced full 18th-century dress, but we were led to believe that many personalities from the Twittersphere (@Discombobul8er, @CherylKerl, @SirAlanChaffing etc.) were there – though it was tricky getting to know who was who. Both wine and canapes flowed, though, and the author gave an entertaining speech. We also enjoyed a chat with the Chairman of the Johnson Society of London and the gentlemen of The Quietus, who are currently publishing excerpts of the book.

As the evening progressed, wine flowed freely and you must forgive me for not remembering a great deal more (there were some sore heads the next morning)… except to say that it was a rare pleasure to meet some digital counterparts in the real world. I believe that @Discombobul8er has also published an account of the evening here.

There’s something else I wanted to recommend at the National Maritime Museum; on the ground floor they have an extraordinary object: the original barge built for George II’s eldest son, Prince Frederick (left), in 1732. It’s not a reproduction! This amazingly rich, gilded boat is one of the museum’s largest objects at around 19.m in length, and now very delicate. It was designed by the architect William Kent and built by John Hall on the south bank of the Thames, opposite Whitehall. There’s some very elaborate carving on the front done by James Richards, who succeeded Grinling Gibbons as master carver to the Crown in 1721. It features scallop shells, urns and acanthus leaves and everything is gilded in 24-carat gold leaf.

On the very first day it was afloat, the Prince used the barge to take his mother, Queen Caroline, and his five sisters, from Chelsea to Someset House to inspect the cleaning of the royal collection of paintings. On another occasion it attended a regatta at Woolwich decorated in the fashionable style of chinoiserie (which used fanciful Chinese imagery) with the footman and 21 oarsmen dressed in Chinese costume. It was to make its final appearance long after the Prince’s death, in 1849, when Prince Albert was rowed to the opening of the Coal Exchange.

Amazingly, what we’re seeing now was reconstructed from three pieces (the barge having been sawn up and stored in the Royal Barge House at Windsor Great Park for over 100 years). You can walk right alongside it and see the rather worn green velvet seats where the royal bottom would have been planted, while the ceiling is painted with a design representing the royal coat of arms. Given the crowded state of the London streets, this was probably a highly convenient – not to mention pleasant – way to travel!