Last week I wrote about the making of quills into pens, but quill pens are not much use without ink. Therefore, this week I will explain how ink was made, the materials that were used to make it as well as how it was sold. Ink had been in use since ancient times, but the formulas by which it was made had been constantly improved over the centuries so that the ink of the Regency was a much more complex fluid than the simple solutions of water and lamp-black or charcoal of ancient times.

There were several types of inks available during the Regency. Here I will focus on writing ink, the kind of ink which would have been used during the Regency along with a quill pen to write letters, diary entries, deeds, wills, military dispatches, or any other document created using a pen. I will only briefly touch on specialty inks as well as the inks used for drawing and printing during the Regency.

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Despite the use of steel pens in some Regency novels I have read, the only type pen available to writers during that decade was the quill. A Mr. Wise did invent a steel pen in 1803, but they were extremely expensive, temperamental, and he sold very few of them over a very short period. Steel pens were not on the market during the Regency. It was not until 1830 that steel pens became readily available, when a Mr. Perry took out a patent for an affordable pen. In the years that followed, several other inventors took out patents for their own version of the steel pen. Over the course of the following decades, the quill pen was slowly supplanted by that of steel. But all that happened long after the Regency.

Though it is not certain when the feathers of birds first began to be used to make writing implements, they were the only source of pen-making materials during the middle ages and right through the Regency. In fact, it is from the feather that we have acquired our word "pen." It comes from the Latin penna, which means "feather." Now, how a feather becomes a pen ...

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