When You Wish Upon a Duke by Charis Michaels

As with many Regency romances, When You Wish Upon a Duke walks a fine line between history and creative license. The themes I hoped to tease from the tradition of Peter Pan, especially those related to Tinkerbell, included travel, pirates, and the poor choices we sometimes make in fanciful men. These themes, as well as the 1817 timetable established in Book 1 of this series, informed the history I would use—that is, the history I would manipulate—to bring a Tinkerbell-inspired heroine to life.

The founder of Britain’s first travel agency, Cox & Kings, got his start quartering English soldiers in India in the 1750s. In peacetime, Mr. Cox realized that the logistical experience he’d acquired while provisioning British troops could be useful to civilian travelers as well. Other travel agents followed and the business of packaging holidays, both domestically and abroad, began to crop up around London in the nineteenth century.

A shop like Hooke’s Everland Travel could have existed in Mayfair in 1817, but that is where history leaves off and my fanciful story takes flight. The practice of respectable English women vacationing alone in Europe was unheard of before 1850. When women did begin to travel alone, they were almost always working as missionaries or nurses or in a secretarial role in a scientific expedition.

Likewise, the notion of a female travel agent is entirely the work of my imagination. Nordic pirates fall also into this category. I’ll play the “fairy-tale card” for these and every fantastical detail in this series.

I can say that North’s heroics in the Peninsular War and the state of Iceland in 1817 should be closer to accurate.

By design, all of my books are a wild ride, but this one is particularly over-the-top. Perhaps that’s because it was written entirely in quarantine during the pandemic. I was isolated at home but sailed the North Sea to Iceland in my mind. Wherever you are when you read this book, I hope you have as much fun being swept away as I did.