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Posts Tagged ‘research’

further adventures in foul period language

My apologies for continuing to discuss profanity here, but it’s just funny.

New seventeenth-century insult for my vocabulary: “windfucker.” Which, bizarrely enough, was apparently a northern term for a kestrel. (They also called it a fuckwind.) And then it got borrowed as an insult. From which I conclude that the seventeenth-century mind? Really not so different from the twenty-first century mind.

This is why I should not be let within three miles of the OED historical thesaurus. It’s bad enough when I find these things by accident, looking stuff up in the ordinary OED; if I had the thesaurus to play with, I’d never get the book written.

Anyway, now I want to revise Ashes to put the term in there somewhere. Antony probably wouldn’t say it, but Jack totally would.

more researching

I’m about to go pick up a mess of books on Irish immigrants in Britain, and I’ve recalled a couple of Scotland Yard histories from Stanford’s auxiliary library facility, but in the meantime: does anybody have a specific recommendation for a history book that would talk about the Fenian bombings of the 1880s, and the early history of the Special Branch in investigating them?

things I have not been able to suss out

Hey, historians! Can anybody tell me when the north bank of the Thames was properly embanked/walled/whatever, east of the Victoria Embankment? That one formally ends at Blackfriars, and I’m trying to figure out what the riverbank would look like to someone standing a bit further east (between Blackfriars and Queenhithe) in 1884. As in, is it a mess of wharves and wooden pilings and what-have-you, or has someone built a nice tidy stone wall by then?

Why yes, I am obsessive about my details. How could you tell?

Anyway, my books don’t say, and I can’t get the Internet to help me. Possibly my fu is just not on tonight. And yeah, Peter Ackroyd has that whole book on the Thames, but it’s 11 p.m. and even Amazon Prime can’t teleport things to my desk. So I figured I’d ask and see if anybody can answer the question without me having to add to my research shelf.

Victorian Book Report: Strange and Secret Peoples, by Carole G. Silver

I first read this book just because I owned it. Then I re-read it three years ago, when I thought the Victorian book would be the next one I wrote in the Onyx Court series, before detouring through In Ashes Lie and A Star Shall Fall. Now I’m re-reading bits and pieces of it for reference, because this, ladies and gents, is the nineteenth-century answer to Katherine Briggs’ Pale Hecate’s Team. Briggs was analyzing fairy folkore and its literary expression in Shakespeare’s day; Silver is doing the same for the Victorians.

She breaks it down thematically: the origins of fairies, changelings and abductions, fairy brides, “racial myths and mythic races,” fairy cruelty, and flitting, the departure of fairies for their own lands (or sometimes Australia). Furthermore, she questions what these things meant to the Victorians, why these kinds of stories became popular; in the case of changelings, for example, she talks about disease (both physical and mental), and about social response to deviant behavior, and about the class-based and racial tensions within Victorian society, that strongly affected the way these stories were told and received, and who was doing the telling and receiving.

In other words, pretty much everything you’d want to write a Victorian fairy novel.

If I have one complaint, it’s that I want this book to be bigger. Only 234 pages, counting the endnotes; I’m sure there’s more to be said here, and I wish Silver had said it.

calling all occultists

I need references for books on the history of spiritualism, theosophy, the Golden Dawn, etc. Not modern New Age books on their ideas, but scholarly works on what those movements were doing in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, up to (you guessed it) 1884. Overview-type references would be a good place to start, though I’d also be interested in books that really delve into the nitty-gritty, so if I decide to make use of particular people or events I’ll be able to do it properly.

Any other occult movements of the period that I haven’t mentioned here are also welcome. This is a topic that especially needs sorting of wheat from chaff, so if this is a subject you know, please do point me at the reliable books.

Victorian Book Report: The Great Stink of London, by Stephen Halliday

The title of this book is a bit of a misnomer. While it does indeed report on the Great Stink of London — the summer of 1858, when the sanitary condition of the Thames got so bad that Parliament almost had to flee the stench — it’s more properly an overview of the great engineering works of Joseph Bazalgette. These include road improvements, bridge improvements, new parks, three river embankments, and (of course) the sewer system that saved London from cholera and is still in use today.

So, y’know. If for some reason you need to know about the history of London’s sewer arrangements, and the political squabbling that surrounded their replacement with a better system, then this is a useful book. But I imagine that audience is rather small. 🙂

As is the book — only 191 pages, some of them heavily taken up by illustrations. It’s an overview, not a hugely in-depth study. It also suffers a little bit from repetition, as certain details crop up again and again; Halliday has a particular tic that annoyed me, which is his tendency to put an epigraph at the beginning of the chapter, and then re-quote it in its entirety elsewhere in the chapter, rather than just referring back. In most cases this was not remotely necessary, and contributed to the feeling that he was on occasion hitting me over the head.

But it is the book I needed it to be, namely, an orienting resource on one of the big upheavals that will have affected my characters prior to the beginning of the novel. Now I just need to find, or badger someone at Thames Water into giving me, a set of plans detailing the layout of all tunnels in the area of the City, and I’ll be more or less set.

bloody paywalls

I would have to pay nine dollars for one day of access to the archives of The Times.

So yeah, that plan I had, of looking up the remainder of an interesting quote that might even have provided me with a title? Not happening. Not for nine dollars and a dubious return on my investment.

The grin I had when I realized the newspaper’s archives were online has quite gone away.

Victorian Book Report: Cockney Past and Present, by William Matthews

This book is a freaking gold mine.

It would be worth the purchase just for Chapter VI, “Pronunciation and Grammar.” Because this chapter lays out, very efficiently, all the characteristic quirks of Cockney speech, both in terms of how the words sound and how they are used. Here you will get statements such as “The raised pronunciation of short a, which resembles the ordinary sound of short e, has always been a feature of the dialect” and “The Cockney […] inclines toward the accusative rather than the nominative form of personal pronouns.” Followed by illustrative examples, often drawn from representative texts. If you want to know how to write Cockney dialogue, memorize this chapter.

(And then ignore the first half of it. I’m a firm believer in the axiom that you’re better off mimicking the speech patterns of a dialect, i.e. its word choice and grammar, than phonetically representing its pronunciation. The latter is just too damn hard to read.)

Of course, there’s more to the book than just Chapter VI. It also has Chapter V! Which is entitled “Mannerisms and Slang.” I haven’t read this one in great detail yet, and really, if you want slang (even period slang) there are other books that will give it to you in greater depth. More to the point, Chapters, I-III are a history of the dialect, reconstructed (to the extent that it can be) from period documents. These are a bit dry to get through, because it’s a lot of Matthews saying “this play shows some of the characteristics of Cockney” and then quoting a brief scene at you. But it serves two important purposes: first, it helps in tracking what features were early or late, and second, it establishes the basis for the claims given later. It’s truly amazing what we can figure out from written texts, even (or rather, especially) through the thicket of auricular spelling — which is to say, spelling a word how it sounds to you. If a particular vowel replacement or such shows up frequently in London texts (like diaries and parish records), and also in similar texts from outside the city, then it’s probably a period thing rather than a dialect one; but if it’s found primarily in London, and not elsewhere, then you’ve started to catch a whisper from the Cockneys of the past.

Which is the other interesting thing this book provides. I had heard before, but not seen it demonstrated, just where Cockney pronunciation came from. In short, it seems to have been the dialect of London and environs — a regional thing, rather than a class one. But a shift happened a couple of centuries ago; I’ve heard it said, but not read Matthews thoroughly enough to know if it’s in here, that wealthy families from the midlands moved into the city, at least for part of the year, and brought their pronunciation with them. Anyway, certain phonetic characteristics went from being something you’d hear out of the mouth of the Lord Mayor in Elizabeth’s day, to something you’d sneer at a costermonger for in Victoria’s.

(So yes, I have contemplated the spectacle of making all the fine lords and ladies of the Onyx Court speak like Cockneys, because they’ve been there for hundreds of years. But I figure they would have handled changing standards of speech the same way they have standards of dress, which is to say they copy what they like. Only the lower-class fae are likely to drop their aitches.)

Anyway, I see why Jerry White’s London in the Nineteenth Century cited this book as being the best work on Cockney speech out there. I’m sure there are ways to improve on it, but seventy-two years on, it’s still exactly what I need. If you ever need to write a Cockney into a story, try to find a copy of this book.

London volunteer needed

Do you live in London, or close enough that you could make a day trip there without too much inconvenience?

Do you have an aversion to foul smells?

If your answers are respectively “yes” and “no,” then I have a psychotic request to make. One of the things I want to research in London is Bazalgette’s Victorian sewer system. Since his work is still in use, access is limited; my one shot, pretty much, is the “Sewer Week” visit (yes, really) that Thames Water hosts each year. Unfortunately, the tour is on May 18th, which is still inside my four-week physical therapy window after I get out of this boot. In other words, too early for me to go wandering around surface London, let alone its sewers.

So I can’t make it. But maybe you can.

I’m seeking one (1) volunteer who loves me and/or the Onyx Court books well enough to spend the evening of Tuesday, May 18th tramping around the West Ham trunk sewer, taking notes and photographs and questioning the guide on my behalf. If you’re able and willing, e-mail me (marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com), and one lucky winner will get to endure dreadful smells in the service of historically accurate writing.

Reward is a signed advance copy of A Star Shall Fall, which I will hand-deliver during the dinner I buy you when I come to London in (probably) June. Or else mail to you, if dinner doesn’t work out.

Feel free to pass this request along to friends who might be able to help, if you yourself can’t (or don’t want to!) do it.

How much of a geek am I?

I suspect the answer lies in the way I’m grinning over my latest acquisition, a book called Cockney Past and Present, which was written in 1938 and apparently remains one of the best histories of cockney speech.

next research question: Irish in London

I’m reading the relevant chapter of Robert Winder’s Bloody Foreigners now, but I’d love to have a book that looks more specifically at the circumstances of the Irish in London during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Any suggestions?

research request: the Great Exhibition

Does anybody know of a good book about the Great Exhibition of 1851, and/or the Crystal Palace? (That’s almost twenty years before this novel will take place, but I think I’d like to make use of it in the backstory.)

Victorian Book Report: Victorian People and Ideas, Richard D. Altick

The subtitle of this book is, “A companion for the modern reader of Victorian Literature.” If it were either a work of literary criticism, or a work of historical analysis, I’d be more concerned about the fact that it was published in 1973; but as it turns out, it’s instead the sort of work that doesn’t become dated very badly at all — and precisely the sort of work I needed to be reading right now.

Because it is, in essence, a simple overview of historical events and movements in the Victorian period, as selected under the rubric of “what things were major Victorian poets and novelists inspired by and/or arguing with?” So it tells you about the Reform Bills and the Chartist movement and Utilitarianism and a whole bunch of other things that I’d encountered in passing while reading other books, and then it provides examples of characters or events or whatever in Dickens or Tennyson or whoever that seem connected to those things. Occasionally the result is dry, and it’s entirely possible some of the finer points have been changed or complicated since Altick wrote this book, but on the whole I found it extraordinarily useful for my purposes.

And I definitely picked the perfect time to read it. I now feel much better-grounded in certain issues of the period, and therefore better prepared to tackle some of the other books on my list.

Victorian Book Report: The Essential Handbook of Victorian Etiquette

Point in this book’s favor: it’s a reprint compliation of material dating to 1873-1890. Ergo, genuine Victorian-period advice on how to behave.

Point against this book’s favor: it’s American advice, which I was not able to tell when I ordered it.

Still, I find it helpful; Hill, the original writer, describes certain scenarios in ways that jibe with my impressions for the other side of the pond, while fleshing them out such that I can better understand the proper (or improper) behavior. So I feel I can use it, with caution.

Much to my surprise, he even gets a few random proto-feminist brownie points. I was highly entertained that “Professor Hill’s Guide to Love and Marriage” begins with a few paragraphs reassuring the reader that there’s nothing wrong in these modern days with being an “old maid” — indeed, women’s opportunities nowadays are so diverse that there’s really no reason to get married unless you actually find someone suitable that you like. (Professor Hill’s Guide to Love and Marriage: don’t do it!) He also claims that when the financial failure of a marriage is blamed on the wife’s imprudent spending, it’s usually because the husband never told the wife they were in monetary straits; properly informed wives, he (rather optimistically) says, will always keep within the family’s means. I frowned a bit when he advised wives that some nights their husbands may come home from a hard day at the office and carry on in the same autocratic manner they use with their employees, and it’s just best to suck it up — but then he went on to advise husbands that sometimes their wives’ “variable condition of health” may put her in a bad mood, and then it’s just best to overlook it and carry on. The sauce which is good for the goose is, indeed, also good for the gander, and that pleases me.

(In fact, the only place I caught him being noticeably one-sided, he did so in favor of women: husbands should, he recommends, keep their wives well-informed as to their business affairs, and take their prudent advice — but stay the hell out of affairs of household management.)

It’s a small book, half taken up with illustrations, but some of those go with the text: a dinner scene, for example, illustrating a bunch of examples of What Not To Do, with helpful annotations. Not a hugely informative resource, but entertaining and quick to read.

Victorian Book Report: Liza Picard, Victorian London

As usual, I don’t have much to say about this one; it’s Liza Picard, and she’s awesome. Information on daily life in London, this time in the middle Victorian period. (I don’t know what I’ll do if I continue on with a Blitz and/or modern book; for the first time since beginning the Onyx Court series, I won’t have Liza Picard to light my way.)

This might be my least favorite of her four works, not through any fault of hers. It’s just that by the Victorian period, London had gotten so huge, and so diverse — in the senses of class, ethnicity, religion, and everything else — that the resulting book inevitably feels less personal than the Elizabethan one did. She still has a wealth of excellent detail, but more and more it feels like impressionism, a scattering of data points from which to imagine the whole.

Despite that, she is and always will be the first author I recommend when someone wants to know about London daily life in the past. There are topics she doesn’t cover — for those, I have other books — but she’s a pretty excellent place to start.

next query up to bat: Hindu sources

Continuing my Victorian research trawl, the next thing on the agenda is Hindu folklore and mythology1.

I’m looking for information on the closest analogues to European faeries: rakshasas, apsaras, yakshas, gandharvas, other things in that vein. (Not positive yet which of these is most appropriate to focus on, and there might well be other possibilities I’m not aware of.) I have a certain amount of familiarity with major primary texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata; at this point what I’d really like to read is a good secondary source that discusses these things directly. Are there books out there which will talk about their origins, nature, appearance, habits, narrative or theological role, etc? Someone who’s done for Hindu material what Katharine Briggs did for British. Bonus points if your recommended source talks about the role of these ideas in daily life, outside the context of the epics.

Unfortunately, I’ll only be able to read sources in English, which I know will limit my field sharply. (Especially since English sources, especially of the older variety, are likely to be heavily tinged by the colonial lens.) But any pointers in a useful direction would be appreciated.

Edited to add: Heh. Sometimes, i r not so brite. I posted this, then got up to fetch from the shelf what books I already have on Hinduism . . . then remembered why I have them. Because I took a course on Hinduism from Diana Eck while I was at Harvard. She was even one of my House Masters! So I’ve e-mailed her, too, to see if she can help a former Lowellian out.

1 – For the record, while some people have gotten into the habit of using these words as a form of dismissal, that is never what I mean. I’m interested in the cultural material (lore) of a particular group of people (folk), and a “myth” is not a lie, but rather a specific kind of sacred narrative. (Yes, I do in fact use the phrase “Christian mythology.”) I bring this up because I spent a minute or so trying to find other words to use that would say what I mean without the baggage, before deciding I’m damned if I’ll surrender the technical terminology of my field without a fight.

In related news, “gender” is not just a polite term for “sex” and AUUUUUUUGGGGGH I hate it when useful specificity gets obliterated by careless daily speech. But we’ve already spent too long on this tangent, so back to the query we go.

allowance for period

It is not fair of me to want to punch the author of English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century in the throat. After all, one must remember, it was 1937 when he wrote:

The distinctive feature of a woman’s shape is the disproportionate width of the hip-line, producing an inward slope to the legs, so that in the erect posture the outline of the body is wide at the middle and tapering toward the extremities. Such a shape imparts to the eye a sense of unbalance. Indeed, if the bias of sex-attraction could be set aside, such a shape would be unpleasing, because we have an instinctive dislike of objects that look top-heavy. Instinctively woman is conscious of this, and from the earliest times has attempted to conceal her hip-line. We are told that her first effort was by an apron of fig leaves, applied, no doubt, for that reason. Since then the main function of woman’s dress has been to conceal the bad proportions of her body. (emphasis added)

That’s right, ladies — you know, deep down, by instinct alone, that your body is Shaped Wrong. Your hips are disproportionate, because of course the right proportion is that of a man. Eve knew that in the Garden, without the benefit a mirror to look in! (Maybe Adam told her she had a fat ass.) And human beings hate top-heavy things, which is why, of course, we find it so unattractive when a man has well-muscled shoulders, right?

It is also not fair of me to want to punch him in the throat for the brief mention, in passing, that all the line drawings of hats and hairstyles, and all the notations for them, were done by his wife — who doesn’t get her name on or in the book, nosirree. He’s the only one who did any real work, after all.

1937. This was written in 1937. I have to bear that in mind. <breathes>

there’s always more you don’t know

These two threads on Making Light?

Are why I have my “help me o internets” posts.

Because some of the bad books can be spotted a mile off — but not all. Some of them you’ve got to look at to identify. Some of them have to be read through. And some of them you can read through and still not know they’re untrustworthy resources, because you don’t know that field well enough to spot where the facts are wrong or there’s evidence being overlooked or whatever.

And at that point, you have two choices. You can either read a lot about the topic, so you become well-informed enough to spot the bad stuff on your own; or you can ask around and get the benefit of other people’s wisdom.

Since I have this terrible habit of being interested in lots of different things, rather than sticking with one and making it my stomping ground, I’m dependent on the assistance of others. So thank you all for your suggestions, and stay tuned for more cries for help. For this next book, I’m going to need to research topics ranging from the history of the London Underground to Chinese folklore, and many other things besides.

I really am deranged.

I’ve composed many an odd research query for the Onyx Court books, but the one I just sent off takes the cake.

No, you don’t get to know what it is. Not yet. (Aside from the fact that has to do with the Victorian period — duh.) I’ll let you know once it succeeds or fails, either way.