Footnotes on Friday

by

Write what you know (and if you don’t know, find out)

 

Beginning writers soon hear the advice ‘write what you know’. Often, teachers of writing classes interpret this to mean ‘write about the places and activities, and base your characters on the people, in your own life’.

Which sucks for writers of historical fiction, fantasy, or sf.

Even leaving aside questions of time and space, a literal interpretation limits people to writing within their own race, class, age, gender, religion, and physical or mental condition. I totally agree with those who want fiction to be more representative of the glorious and diverse range of human kind. Tribalism is the scourge of civilisation, and those who tell stories have an obligation to show that the differences between people make them interesting, not scary; that difference does not mean wrong.

Know what you write

On the other hand, there’s a non-literal interpretation. Every writer I know mines their own life and their own feelings for the emotional energy that goes into a story. They study the people around them to give dimension to their own characters. They research so that the facts they portray are accurate.

I write historical romance, mostly set in places I’ve never been to and involving societies I’ve never lived in. I read historical research and primary sources. I watch documentaries and other videos set in the places my characters travel. (A bike tour gives almost a horse rider’s view of the countryside.) I talk to other people who are studying the same topics. I take classes. I read some more. I stop mid-sentence to check facts, such as the time from the onset of fever to the first appearance of the rash in smallpox.

And I check things out with experts. A battlefield medic and an emergency room nurse read my operation scene in A Raging Madness. I sent the draft of Paradise Regained to the Iranian wife of my cousin’s son. A kura (woman elder) of the people descended from the tribe at Te Wharoa agreed to look at Forged in Fire for me.  I’m not going to stop writing about diverse characters, but I’m also going to be careful that my unthinking assumptions don’t trap me into being offensive.

Life is rich, but we human beings have a habit of simplifying it to our own detriment. For example, there are thousands of edibles plant species in the world, and each of them comes in multiple types. We cultivate around 120 today. Three of those crops account for half of all food eaten on the planet.

We storytellers can (and some do) create a Regency society devoid of people of colour, LGBTQ characters, people with disabilities, poor people, people of different faiths. It sure isn’t true to history, and it’s also boring. Those who do write characters that represent such diversity often come from a community that has been marginalised, and they protest at being further marginalised by being blocked from publication and being shoved off into a corner if they are published. The assumption is that people want to read what they know.

I think — I hope — the assumption is wrong.

So let’s be brave

If you’re a reader, choose to read a novel that challenges your assumptions about your favourite historical era. And please, put your suggestions for novels to read into the comments so we all have a chance to try something new.

If you’re a writer, include diverse characters. Go out and learn so you know what you write. Present humankind in all its wonderful variety. Here’s a resource list, courtesy of Louisa Cornell, who says she got some of the list from Vanessa Riley (who writes great novels with black heroes and heroines).

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Equiano; or Gustavu Vassa, the African written by Himself

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 by David Livesay

Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Gerzina

Britain’s Black Past by Gretchen Gerzina  (3/31/20)

A South Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Subcontinent, Michael Fisher, Shompa Lahiri and Shinder Thandi. London: Greenwood Press, May 2007.

The Chinese in Britain – A History of Visitors and Settlers by Barclay Price (2019).

The Chinese in Britain, 1800 – present, Economy, Transnationalism by Benton Gomez and Gregor Edmund

Chinese Liverpudlians: A history of the Chinese Community in Liverpool, by Maria Lin Wong. Liver Press, 1989.

Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. by Christopher J. Hawes

The Infidel Within: The History of Muslims in Britain, 1800 to the Present. by  Humayun Ansari

(And here’s what 31 authors said about Write What You Know.)

 

by

The Greatest Killer

In some parts of England, people with communicable diseases such as smallpox were isolated in so called Pest Houses like this one in Findon.

“The smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the bighearted maiden objects of horror to the lover.”
T.B. Macaulay

For at least 3,000 and perhaps as much as 6,000 years, smallpox was one of the world’s deadliest diseases. In countries where it was endemic, it was a disease of childhood, killing up to 80% of children infected. A person fortunate to escape infection in childhood who then caught the virus as an adult, had a 30% chance of dying. Either way, those who survived the disease were left with lifelong scars but also with lifelong immunity, so they could neither catch the disease nor transmit it to others.

Transmission was from person to person, including from droplets in the air from sneezing, coughing, or even breathing. Worse, body fluids on things like clothing or bedding could carry live viruses.

In countries where the disease was new, with no such protective pool of survivors, the infection rate was horrific and the death rate catastrophic. For example, in the Americas, it’s estimated that smallpox, measles and influenza killed 90% of the native population. Children and adults were affected alike.

Even in Europe, though, smallpox changed the fate of nations. In Britain, it played a part in the downfall of the royal house of the Stuarts. Smallpox put Charles II out of action for several weeks during a crucial time in the Civil War, and killed his brother Henry. Had this Protestant prince been alive when James II’s Catholicism caused the rift with the people, history might have been quite different. All of the new king’s sons died young, one of smallpox. He was succeeded by his daughter Mary and his son-in-law and nephew William of Orange.

Mary died of smallpox towards the end of 1694. Thomas Macaulay described her death as follows:

That disease, over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious and beneficient victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death. The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid; but the plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory; and the small pox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover. Towards the end of the year 1694, this pestilence was more than usually severe. At length the infection spread to the palace, and reached the young and blooming Queen. She received the intimation of her danger with true greatness of soul. She gave orders that every lady of her bedchamber, every maid of honour, nay, every menial servant, who had not had the small pox, should instantly leave Kensington House. She locked herself up during a short time in her closet, burned some papers, arranged others, and then calmly awaited her fate.

During two or three days there were many alternations of hope and fear. The physicians contradicted each other and themselves in a way which sufficiently indicates the state of medical science in that age. The disease was measles; it was scarlet fever; it was spotted fever; it was erysipelas. At one moment some symptoms, which in truth showed that the case was almost hopeless, were hailed as indications of returning health. At length all doubt was over. Radcliffe’s opinion proved to be right. It was plain that the Queen was sinking under small pox of the most malignant type.

All this time William remained night and day near her bedside. The little couch on which he slept when he was in camp was spread for him in the antechamber; but he scarcely lay down on it. The sight of his misery, the Dutch Envoy wrote, was enough to melt the hardest heart. Nothing seemed to be left of the man whose serene fortitude had been the wonder of old soldiers on the disastrous day of Landen, and of old sailors on that fearful night among the sheets of ice and banks of sand on the coast of Goree. The very domestics saw the tears running unchecked down that face, of which the stern composure had seldom been disturbed by any triumph or by any defeat. Several of the prelates were in attendance. The King drew Burnet aside, and gave way to an agony of grief. “There is no hope,” he cried. “I was the happiest man on earth; and I am the most miserable. She had no fault; none; you knew her well; but you could not know, nobody but myself could know, her goodness.” Tenison undertook to tell her that she was dying. He was afraid that such a communication, abruptly made, might agitate her violently, and began with much management. But she soon caught his meaning, and, with that gentle womanly courage which so often puts our bravery to shame, submitted herself to the will of God. She called for a small cabinet in which her most important papers were locked up, gave orders that, as soon as she was no more, it should be delivered to the King, and then dismissed worldly cares from her mind. She received the Eucharist, and repeated her part of the office with unimpaired memory and intelligence, though in a feeble voice. She observed that Tenison had been long standing at her bedside, and, with that sweet courtesy which was habitual to her, faltered out her commands that he would sit down, and repeated them till he obeyed. After she had received the sacrament she sank rapidly, and uttered only a few broken words. Twice she tried to take a last farewell of him whom she had loved so truly and entirely; but she was unable to speak. He had a succession of fits so alarming that his Privy Councillors, who were assembled in a neighbouring room, were apprehensive for his reason and his life. The Duke of Leeds, at the request of his colleagues, ventured to assume the friendly guardianship of which minds deranged by sorrow stand in need. A few minutes before the Queen expired, William was removed, almost insensible, from the sick room.

(In my book To Mend a Proper Lady, a girls school is caught up in a smallpox epidemic, causing my heroine Ruth Winderfield to flee with three girls for whom she is responsible plus two more she promises to deliver home on her way back to London. Of course, she becomes trapped at the home of the girls’ guardian, nursing them and others who fall ill.)

by

Making glass for windows

Until the early 20th century, all glass was hand-blown. This video shows how they made large sheets back in the day. Invented in the 17th century, it was expensive and didn’t become the common method until the early 19th century. Something to keep in mind when writing a scene in which someone is seen in a window is that such glass had ripples and faults. The view would have been distorted to some extent.

Even more so before that, for all those centuries when window glass was crown bullions, or bullseye glass, as shown below. This video also shows the cylinder method.

 

by

Religions and revival in Georgian England

Shakers worshipped in dance

I’ve been reading up about dissenters, pantheists, cults, and other non-traditional religionists in the 18th and early 19th century. In religion, as in society as a whole, it was a time of ferment. New ideas and new ways of doing things led to (and came out of) the industrial revolution, the French and American revolutions, revolutions in the approaches to scientific inquiry, artistic expression, fashion, farming, architecture, and all kinds of other aspects of human society. How people worshipped was part of, and in part fuelled, that change.

Some writers make the direct link. It was those driven from France into the Lowlands after the Edict of Nantes (Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, and members of other persecuted sects) that, thrown together in exile, began to question conventional social mores.

Their heretical opinions about orthodox Christianity led some of them into the extremes of Puritanism, and others to deny all labels. ” I am not Lutheran, Calvinist, Arminian, Socinian, Anabaptist, or Quaker,” says book factor, Prosper Marchand, one of the voices in that place and time. He avowed a Christianity with no organised church and no official doctrine, and this in 1712. From such radical thinking, itself fuelled by Renaissance humanism, came the Enlightenment, as well as Hellfire clubs, messianic cults, poetic pantheism, and the Great Awakening, with its new forms of established religion such as Methodism. These, in time, led to the reform of those institutions that had triggered the change.

Millenialism was a strong strain in the American Revolution. Victory over the British showed that God favoured America, and those with millenialist leanings became convinced that it was in the United States that Christ would reign for 1000 years. Even the French revolution had religious roots, with the diaspora mentioned above strongly shaping the politics of the revolutionaries. Some argue that the industrial revolution, likewise, was a consequence of religious thinking.

Religions influenced by dualistic philosophies view the material world with suspicion and hostility. The material world is considered evil, while the spiritual world is considered good and noble. Renouncing this world became the mark of holiness. Equally detrimental to the development of science were world views that did not have a concept of a supreme personal Creator God. Some of the ancient civilizations, for example, which did develop some mathematics and technologies, did not develop general scientific theories, because of the absence of a creationist perspective that gives confidence in the existence of rational laws in nature. This clearly explains the lack of interest on the part of these cultures in scientific research and technology. It also shows how the Reformation, with its return to Biblical Christianity, spurred a phenomenal interest in fundamental research and technology. The great scientific advances and the industrial revolution that followed bear this out. (Institute for Christian Research)

The abolition of slavery, wide-spread education, broadening of the suffrage, workers rights — all of these 19th century innovations were championed by those who inherited the Great Awakening; that is, by the intellectual and spiritual children of those religious exiles.

In my book The Darkness Within, my hero’s investigation into a disappearance leads him into a pantheist cult. 

by

Let’s hang out at the mall

The second royal exchange

Did you know that the first English mall was opened in 1571? Merchant Thomas Gresham, who lived in Antwerp, followed the Bourse shopping exchange in Antwerp as his model. The idea was an arcaded building housing small shops, surrounding a small courtyard for trading. With royal approval from Elizabeth 1, the mall soon became a magnet for merchants and shoppers. Idlers, too, much like the malls of today.

In the Inquest Book of Cornhill Ward, 1574 (says Mr. Burgon), there is a presentment against the Exchange, because on Sundays and holidays great numbers of boys, children, and “young rogues,” meet there, and shout and holloa, so that honest citizens cannot quietly walk there for their recreation, and the parishioners of St. Bartholomew could not hear the sermon. In 1590 we find certain women prosecuted for selling apples and oranges at the Exchange gate in Cornhill, and “amusing themselves in cursing and swearing, to the great annoyance and grief of the inhabitants and passers-by.” In 1592 a tavern-keeper, who had vaults under the Exchange, was fined for allowing tippling, and for broiling herrings, sprats, and bacon, to the vexation of worshipful merchants resorting to the Exchange. In 1602 we find that oranges and lemons were allowed to be sold at the gates and passages of the Exchange. In 1622 complaint was made of the rat-catchers, and sellers of dogs, birds, plants, &c., who hung about the south gate of the Bourse, especially at exchange time. It was also seriously complained of that the bear-wards, Shakespeare’s noisy neighbours in Southwark, before special bull or bear baitings, used to parade before the Exchange, generally in business hours, and there make proclamation of their entertainments, which caused tumult, and drew together mobs. It was usual on these occasions to have a monkey riding on the bear’s back, and several discordant minstrels fiddling, to give additional publicity to the coming festival. (https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol1/pp494-513)

The Royal Exchange is still on the same site today, though the buildings have twice been destroyed by fire and rebuilt.

After the Great Fire of London, the place was built in nearly a rectangular quadrangle. The philosopher Joseph Addison says:

“There is no place in the town,” says that rambling philosopher, Addison, “which I so much love to frequent as the Royal Exchange. It gives me a secret satisfaction, and in some measure gratifies my vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so rich an assembly of countrymen and foreigners consulting together upon the private business of mankind, and making this metropolis a kind of emporium for the whole earth. I must confess I look upon High ‘Change to be a great council in which all considerable nations have their representatives. Factors in the trading world are what ambassadors are in the politic world; they negociate affairs, conclude treaties, and maintain a good correspondence between those wealthy societies of men that are divided from one another by seas and oceans, or live on the different extremities of a continent. I have often been pleased to hear disputes adjusted between an inhabitant of Japan and an alderman of London; or to see a subject of the great Mogul entering into a league with one of the Czar of Muscovy. I am infinitely delighted in mixing with these several ministers of commerce, as they are distinguished by their different walks and different languages. Sometimes I am jostled among a body of Armenians; sometimes I am lost in a crowd of Jews; and sometimes make one in a group of Dutchmen. I am a Dane, Swede, or Frenchman at different times; or rather, fancy myself like the old philosopher, who, upon being asked what countryman he was, replied that he was a citizen of the world.”

This was the Royal Exchange of the Regency. The outside shops were lottery offices, newspaper offices, watchmakers, notaries, stock-brokers, and so on. The shops in the galleries were superseded by the Royal Exchange Assurance Offices, Lloyd’s Coffee-house, the Merchant Seamen’s Offices, the Gresham Lecture Room, and the Lord Mayor’s Court Offic, with its row of offices, divided by glazed partitions, the name of each attorney on a projecting board. The vaults were let to bankers, and to the East India Company. They stored pepper there.

This building burned down in 1838. Today’s building has the layout of the original — a trapezoid-shaped building , with rooms all around the outside on the ground floor that let on to a wide internal corridor open to a central courtyard. The upper level is also given over to rooms and corridors.

The Royal Exchange today

by

Vimy Ridge: Canada’s coming-of-age

Guest post from Caroline Warfield.


Last April, I posted about the 102nd anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge on History Imagined. It was a well planned, brilliantly executed operation in which all four divisions of the Canadian Corps, fighting together for the first time, successfully dislodged Germans from the top of a high ridge, a feat the French and English had failed to accomplish earlier in the war. It cost 3,595 Canadian deaths and approximately 7,000 wounded.

I will repeat most of that post here. Vimy Ridge in many ways represents to Canada, what Gallipoli does to Australia and New Zealand. Brigadier-General Arthur Edward Ross has been quoted as saying, “in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation.” As Gallipoli defines the moment in which Australian and New Zealand came of age as independent countries, so Vimy Ridge took on mythological importance to Canadians. They came out from the shadow of Britain.

Weeks of training and nighttime drilling made use of models and mock-ups to prepare the troops for the attack. Unlike tactics employed at the Somme the year before, effort was made to empower leadership down to the squad level so every man knew that if officers fell, the assault would continue. Units were given as much information as possible, to decentralize command and to encourage initiative.

They built roads and railways, shored up the French trenches, made use of existing underground caverns called souterrains dug into the chalky soil, and built an additional 6km of subways to transport troops as close to the front as possible while protected from German Fire.

More important than any other innovation and preparation, however, were the overwhelming amount of artillery brought up to support the attack and improvements that enabled artillery shells to explode on contact so few simply burrowed into the mud. Steady bombardment began March 20 and lasted twenty days, raining death and destruction onto the top of the ridge. On April 3 it intensified, and Germans called it “the week of suffering.”

Coincidentally that week was holy week; Good Friday must have been hellish for men on both sides. My own interest is rarely about strategy and planning, but primarily about the men themselves, the lives of the common soldier, hiding in tunnels, trenches, and caves waiting. When the time came the stories of individual heroism at Vimy Ridge abounded. The names of Ellis Sifton, William Milne, and Jeremiah Jones, stand out as examples. Ordered to take Vimy Ridge, take it they did.

Shortly after dawn on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, 15,000 Canadian troops, joined by a British division in their right flank, began their assault uphill in driving sleet, supported by still more artillery fire in a “creeping barrage” designed to protect them, and keep the Germans in their trenches. By the end of April 9 Canadians held the entire ridge with the exception of one hill; they pushed the Germans back 5Km, the greatest one-day advance in the war to that point. The artillery had been less effectively employed against Hill 145 (aka “the Pimple”). Defenders cut the Fourth Canadian Division to pieces in the initial assault. Renewed bombardment and a second infantry assault took the hill on April 12.

In the grand scheme of the Great War, Vimy Ridge could be defined as a mere tactical victory, its importance overshadowed by the British Army’s failure to make significant progress in the overall Battle of Arras of which it was a part, and the failure of the French action at Aisne, which it was designed to support. In the quagmire that was the war in northern France, Vimy cost the Germans an important vantage point, but only a few kilometers of ground.

Strategically vital? No. Defining? Emphatically yes. Though joined by a British division, and other the overall command of Sir Julian Byng, architect of the meticulous planning, at the end of the day Canadian soldiers accomplished the thing. Men from every part of Canada charged up Vimy Ridge, functioning as a single unit. They had good reason to be proud of their daring, initiative, and success.

They were not finished. There were battles of greater strategic importance, and more bloodshed still to come—Amiens, Cambrai, Passchendaele, and Ypres. Yet it is Vimy that is remembered as the corps’ defining moment. It is therefore fitting that Canada’s main monument to the Great War in France is the Vimy Memorial, which sits atop Hill 145.

Caroline Warfield, award winning author of historical romance usually set in the Regency and Victorian eras, reckons she is on at least her third act, happily working in an office surrounded by windows where she lets her characters lead her to adventures. She nudges them to explore the riskiest territory of all, the human heart, believing love is worth the risk.

Her most recent release is Christmas Hope, set in France during World War I, it includes scenes at Vimy Ridge.

After two years at war Harry ran out of metaphors for death, synonyms for brown, and images of darkness. When he encounters the floating islands of Amiens and life in the form a widow and her little son, hope ensnares him.  When the Great War is over, will their love be enough?

Full blurb and excerpt

 

 

by

The history of bunting and how to make it.

I’ve been writing about the use of bunting in patriotic colours to decorate a fundraising event at Haverford House, home of my Duchess of Haverford. Just to make sure I wasn’t handing my readers an anachronism, I did a bit of research.

Sure enough, bunting — in the sense of long lines of flags put up to celebrate an event — goes back to at least the early seventeenth century. The term seems to have started as the name of the material used to make the flags. Buntine was a lightweight wool fabric used for flags on naval ships. Rows of small flags are, even today, used to signal from ship to ship. One source I found said the sailor whose job it is to raise the flags is still referred to as a bunt, but I can’t find any verification of that.

Bunting has traditionally been used for street parties, patriotic processions, and the like. No reason why I can’t have it in my ballroom for an event to raise money for the widows and children of soldiers and sailors.

Just for something different, here’s how to make it, with the occasional snippet of knowledge about how the Victorians used it.