I will be brief this time, because I didn’t actually write notes for most of the day, and indeed had very little that needed note-taking. Because today, it was not so much with the hard work.
Which I probably needed.
Unless I can pretend being punted on the Cam is hard work . . . .
Last night Irrith handed me the question I need to ask about her. She didn’t hand me the answer, mind you, but that’s okay. I’ll pry that out of her soon enough.
On less of a cheerful note, last night featured a different set of idiot roommates, in this case ones who apparently don’t grasp the concept that the last one to bed should turn off the lights. I woke up at 4 a.m. to find them all still blazing away, and me in the top bunk (of three), unwilling to risk my sleepy neck just to turn them off. So less than perfect sleep, and it’s a chilly grey morning when I get up. I’m happy to enjoy the comforts of the cabin this time as I head downriver again.
Today, in order to keep myself off my feet as much as possible and avoid the self-detrimental stupidity I might otherwise indulge in, I do something completely alien to me, as least where these research trips are concerned:
I sleep in.
Because I can only stay out of trouble by staying unconscious.
Last night’s bedtime wasn’t quite as early as I intended, owing to the sudden brainstorm I had while getting ready for bed, regarding how I could fix some of the problems with Part One of the comet book. I should have known better than to think I was going to accomplish anything on that front before 10 p.m. . . .
But it was a good night’s sleep nonetheless, and thus fortified, I follow the plan and head out to Westminster.
I’m not going to type up all of my St. Paul’s notes, or any of my Geffrye notes; they’re just not that interesting. But here’s the narrative bits.
I don’t know if Mercury’s in retrograde or I spat in the Cheerios of the travel faeries or what, but every step of this trip so far has been plagued with problems: delayed flights, car rental difficulties, wrong turns, and so on. The only saving grace is that so far, none of them have reached the level of “detained for two hours by Israeli airport security.” <knocks on wood> But the unanticipated closure of Blackfriars station, coupled with my ill-considered decision to come in late on a Sunday night, left me stranded only partway to my hostel, with a rather expensive cab ride my only option for getting the rest of the way there.
Oh, and as of writing these notes, I have no money. Figuring out what’s wrong with my ATM card has been added to today’s schedule.
One of the blurbs on the back of this book ends by saying, “Serious history is rarely this fun.” I submit that Ms. Foreman of The Times needs more fun in her life.
Don’t get me wrong; this book wasn’t all that bad. But it was not the most fun history book I’ve ever read, even of a scholarly sort. Especially the first chapter — I almost didn’t make it through that one, and if I hadn’t been carrying this book with me on a trip (ergo it was my only reading material), I don’t know if I would have gone on. The first chapter is dry as all hell, as it painstakingly details for the reader how many letters its subjects wrote to family members, how many to families of their own social class, how many to their social inferiors, etc, and it’s a good thing the book picked up after that, or I would not have finished it.
But it does improve, and I appreciated its subject matter, which is the lives of gentry-class women in Georgian England. Its focus is on the broader social community of Lancashire and west Yorkshire, hence different in some important ways from the kind of metropolitan life I’m writing about, but a lot of the topics (such as marriage and childbearing) don’t vary too much with geography. And it’s always good to get a history that digs into the diaries and letters and household account books, i.e. the stuff that usually gets overlooked. In fact, I was struck by a comparison between this and Roy Porter’s book, whose revised edition predates this work by eight years; Porter stated, early in his book, that “compared with men, we know little about what women felt, thought and did.” Lest you condemn him for accepting that limitation too easily, though, I should also mention that the front cover of Vickery’s book has a quote from Porter, calling it “The most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years.” Vickery is filling in one of the gaps he acknowledged in his own work.
If you find yourself with a sudden yen to research the period, my recommendation is this: skim the first chapter, paying only enough attention to get a sense of who the women are that Vickery will be talking about all book, then move onto the next chapter posthaste. There’s good stuff in here, but you have to get past the dry statistics to find it.
This book makes a good pairing with Picard, since Porter takes a broader view, showing societal trends rather than details of the moment. The flip side is that he’s not quite as readable; it’s harder to make generalized statements about the effects of enclosure on rural tenants as entertaining as anecdotes about Fleet weddings. But it’s far from the worst piece of analytical writing I’ve ever had to tackle — far, far from it — even though Porter’s writing from something of a Marxist perspective, which all too often would bore me to tears. He doesn’t come across as having an ideological axe to grind, and that probably makes a big difference. But he does look at societal trends through the lens of changing economic conditions, and I can take that in moderated doses.
The one place he really does shine, in terms of readability, is in the opening chapter “Contrasts,” when he does a swift-moving overview of English behavior and national character during the century. To quote a good passage:
Englishmen excused their vices as virtues and indulged them with brio. They liked being thought bloody-minded roughnecks. ‘Anything that looks like a fight,’ observed the Frenchman Henri Misson, ‘is delicious to an Englishman’ — something even a lord could confirm. ‘I love a mob,’ explained the Duke of Newcastle; ‘I headed one once myself.’ Duelling remained common among top people. […] In 1798 none other than Prime Minister William Pitt and George Tierney, a leading Whig, exchanged shots. Violence was endemic. In 1770, following a pupil rebellion, the Riot Act had to be read at Winchester School. At Rugby, the young gentlemen mined the head’s study with gunpowder. [!]
[…] The English — so foreigners saw them — ate to excess, drank like lords, and swore like troopers (among ‘cunning women’ cursing was still a fine art). Henry Herbert, ninth Earl of Pembroke, was ‘so blasphemous at tennis that the [bishop] of Ireland was forced to leave off playing with him.’ Dr Johnson ‘could not bear anything like swearing’, yet he was in a minority, since in his day even fashionable ladies habitually made the air blue. A traveller arriving in London, quipped the German pastor Karl Moritz, might jump to the conclusion that everyone was called ‘Damme’.
It isn’t all quite so engaging, but that gave me enough of a good start that I was willing to stick with it even when things took a drier (but still informative) turn.
I’ve been doing research for this novel for a little while, so I’m going to try to play catch-up with the book reports. How much success I’ll have is anybody’s guess.
As usual, I started with Liza Picard, whom I adore. She continues to be a delightfully readable source of random factoids on the daily life of London. She isn’t a perfectly objective source — despite drawing heavily on Johnson and Boswell for information, she has no compunctions about saying she deplores Johnson’s manners and Boswell’s style — but she pays attention to the details of lived experience, and particularly of women’s experience (interior decorating is as interesting of a topic to her as crime). For a starting point, she can’t be beat.
I really don’t know what I would do without this woman. Her books land precisely in the time-periods I’m writing about, and she’s got one for each novel I’ve written or contracted for. It will be a sad, sad day if I go on to write a Blitz book and have no Picard to start the ball rolling.
Stay tuned for more reports on daily-life-type books, before I move onto more specific topics.
SF author Jim MacDonald has put another one of his excellent medical posts up at Making Light, this one on Why We Immunize.
He talks about the individual diseases there: their symptoms, their mortality rate in the past, and the development of their vaccines. That last detail coincides with some of the alchemy reading I’ve been doing — which you wouldn’t think, except that the eighteenth century was when chemistry finally started to pull itself free of its predecessor, as a part of a more generalized medical and scientific revolution that also included the development of the smallpox vaccine.
Here’s the thing that’s been striking me, in that reading: how frustrating it is to see the scientists of the past come so close to figuring something out, and then missing. The easier one to bear is Boyle and Hooke and their pals, who almost sorted out the combustion thing . . . but they didn’t yet have a means of handling gases (“means” = both tools and theory), so chemistry charged off down the bonny (and idiotic) path of phlogiston for another fifty years before getting back on track.
But it’s a lot harder to bear when the thing thisclose to being right is medicine. Paracelsus comes along in the early sixteenth century, says hey, this Galenic theory of humours is a load of bunk, I think diseases come from outside, and we should be treating them with chemical cures. From my seat here in a modern house with a cabinet full of chemical medicines not ten feet away, I’m cheering him on! . . . but then the iatrochemists (aka chymical physicians) get on a roll and start dosing people with, oh, antimony sulphide, mercury, and other things pretty well guaranteed to poison the patient, often fatally. Not that the Galenics were any better, mind you — their medicines were equally poisonous, just on the theory that they would help balance the humours — but I read about that, and I want to yell at the book, as if I could somehow reach back in time and make them get it right.
Eventually we figured it out. Even before we really knew what was up with germs, we figured out how to protect people from smallpox — where by “we” I mean that China and the Islamic world worked it out a couple centuries before Europe did, and India possibly even earlier than that, so let’s give credit where credit is due. Europe: not always smart. But I wonder what the history of Europe would look like if Paracelsus’ iatrochemistry had taken a more accurate angle, or foreign inoculations been recognized and adopted sooner.
It’s a good thing no one will ever hand me a time travel machine, or I’d pack up a giant case of modern medicines and zap around feeding them to people, destroying the time stream and probably getting myself burned as a witch.
Before I get to this question, I should clarify one thing: unless I specify otherwise, when I post here for research help, I’m not asking people just to provide me with relevant-looking titles. That would be lazy of me in the extreme, since I’m usually capable of finding relevant-looking titles on my own, and I don’t want to be lazy. What I can’t do on my own is tell which ones are worth my time. So — not to thumb my nose at recommendations in general, because I do appreciate them, but what I’m really looking for are books you’ve read, or know someone who’s read, or otherwise have heard good things about. Some way to cull the list of all possible sources down to a smaller list of pre-vetted works. (And — the flip side — please do tell me if you know of any utter crap I should stay far, far away from.)
With that in mind: alchemy.
I really want to be able to use alchemy in fiction. I do not yet understand it well enough to do so. I need, not just old-school sources deliberately written to be as obscure as possible so that they won’t share your secrets with the uninitiated, but more modern secondary works that can help me unlock those old-school things, since otherwise I tend to skip off the top of them. But there’s a lot of vaporous New Age crap about alchemy out there, so if you know of any worthwhile books in a more scholarly/historical vein, please pass along titles. I’m already planning on giving Eliade a shot, and I’ve gamed Amazon into making a lot of recommendations, but it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
yhlee got me thinking about this one by linking to Harry Harlow — if I needed to read up on the social and emotional development of children, what names should I be looking for?
Specifically, the story situation I’m working with involves children raised from birth in what amounts to an orphanage: professional caretakers (well-meaning ones, not Dickensian sadists), but no parents as such, and the children have to depend on each other for affection. I’d like to know what effects that would generally have on their behavior, and also what kinds of practices the Powers That Be might institute to keep the kids from growing up too warped. (Would it help if they slept in dormitory arrangements, at least until a certain age? Etc.)
I’ll be asking my psych-major husband, too, but until he gets home from work, you guys are it. 🙂
Edited to add: I’ve read enough to come across Bowlby and Ainsworth, but I’m a) looking for more recent models and b) trying to work out the behavior of an adult character raised in such a situation; the specific behavior of toddlers is of less interest to me.
I’m trying (again) for the one-story-a-month thing, which means I’m gearing up for February. This one is going to be a bigger project, and involves at least one piece of directed research. So:
Can anyone recommend to me a good biography of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham? I’m particularly interested in the last five years or so of his life; I could care less what he got up to in childhood.
(Oddly, this is completely unrelated to me reading The Three Musketeers. THAT book, I picked up because I’m trying to figure out what “The Three Hackbutters” should be about, other than its title.)
I know that properly doing this would require reading more than one book, but I’m trying not to fall down the research well, here.
If I were to read only one book to get a sense of the life a pretty and popular young woman (age circa 18-21) would have lived in late 1940s post-war London, what book should that be?
For my purposes, fiction would likely suffice as well as nonfiction. I’m looking for a sense of culture and society here, rather than specific facts.
Can anyone tell me how to make the Biblical Hebrew noun rwkb — transliterated in my source as “b@kowr” — into a plural? (Alternatively, tell me if Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have plurals.)
Edited to add: Okay, I suspect this word is more often transliterated as bekhor, which makes the plural either bekhorot (the form generally used when talking about the Passover slaughter) or bekhorim (if we’re talking classical Hebrew, which apparently flings around masculine and feminine plurals without much concern for the gender of the original noun). Interesting. This is what happens when it’s two a.m. the night before Thanksgiving: I wander off on impromptu lessons in Hebrew grammar.
Now I need a way to turn the feminine noun chereb into something that could pass for a man’s name.
The short story is going better, but by “better” I mean I now have pliers to pull the teeth with, rather than just my bare fingers. So I’ve decided, screw it, I’m going back to polishing the novel while I wait for my edit letter.
To that end: are any of my readers here familiar with parliamentary procedure for the House of Commons? Things like, what phrases do they use to summon the Commons up to meet with the Lords (assuming that still happens), and how do they announce a division?
(The nice thing about the UK Parliament is, I can with reasonable certainty assume these details haven’t really changed in three hundred and fifty years . . . I mean, they still drag the Speaker to his chair, and a Speaker hasn’t been murdered or executed in centuries.)
So, yeah. If you’re enough of a British political geek to answer those kinds of questions, let me know, and I’ll give you the list.
I don’t suppose any of you out there happen to know the kinds of phrases used in the seventeenth century when one was about to chug an alcoholic beverage? “Bottoms up,” which is the phrase I wanted to use, is very twentieth-century, and “cheers” is also way more recent.
I need recommendations for a movie with a really epic fight scene in it. But the fight has to be of a specific variety: something in the “two-handed broadsword” or “double-headed axe” family. Y’know, the sort of fight where a guy plants his feet and starts whaling away at something at least twice his size with a weapon that’s at least half his size. As much as I loves me some rapier duels, or dexterous hand-to-hand throwdowns, I’m not after that kind of thing right now (and I’ve got plenty of it on my shelves anyway). We’re looking for mighty-thewed, stamina-of-an-aurochs kind of combat here, or at least as close as I can get to it.
Suggestions?
(N.B. — I would like suggestions of such scenes done well. Bonus points if the movie containing said fight doesn’t suck. I’d rather not watch crap, thanks.)
I finished revising Part Two last night (in a marathon session made possible by the fact that it’s been revised once already), but here’s the real landmark:
I’ve killed a pen.
Yes, dear readers, I have taken so many notes for this novel that they have single-handedly killed a pen. The thing was new when I took it to London. But in the midst of scribbling down some details about how the wells and conduits in the City were running dry in the Fire, I noticed my ink doing the same thing. So we just took a break to walk to the store and buy a new one.
(Because I couldn’t just go to the ammo box and pick out another. Why? Because our stuff isn’t here yet. But the latest forecast is that it should be arriving tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed.)
I’m just hoping I don’t run out of notebook before I’m done. That would be very inconvenient.
Historical serendipity strikes again. I chose Antony’s ward more or less at random; basically I decided to put him on Lombard Street, which meant either Langbourn or Candlewick, and I chose the former. Turns out — if I’m correctly translating from a modern map of ward boundaries; King William Street wasn’t there back then — the first City plague death in 1665 was in Antony’s ward.
I should double-check this in Stow, but not tonight.
