Encyclopaedia Victoriana

A bit more of a 'factual' post this time. I've been asked quite a lot recently about various facets of Victorian history and my methods for researching the stuff that I write about. Often, it boils down to questions like 'Where did you find the information on that village?' Or 'Was he a real person?' Or even 'So, if I was in Victorian London, how exactly would I send a telegram, and how much would it cost?

The secret is that I spend an awful lot of time in bookshops, and I own an awful lot of books (including many antique or out of print editions). This blog, then, is about reference material; I present to you my top 5 reference books on the 19th century. If I had to give up all my books but five, these are the ones I couldn't be without, as I use them almost every day!

1. Baedeker's Great Britain, 1890.
(reproduced by Old House Books, 2003)
The iconic travel guide to Britain in 1890, written with the English-speaking foreign traveller in mind, but now the ultimate guide for the time-traveller. This has a great introduction on British customs, etiquette and the prices of things, as well as a town-by-town guide to Britain itself. Best read alongside the Guide to London for probably the most exhaustive travel guide to Britain ever written.

2. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
(Daniel Pool; Touchstone 1993)
This is a lovely little book, focussing on everyday life in England from 1800 to around 1860. Full of facts and figures about everything from the hierarchy of English peers through to the social rules of the country house visit, and supported by quotes from period literature.

3. Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840-1870
(Liza Picard; W&N 2005)
Simply the most engaging, well-researched and well-written guide to life in Victorian London ever written. There, I said it. It's third on the list only because its scope is quite focussed, making its use limited to the Big Smoke in mid-Victorian times. Thankfully, that suits me down to the ground.

4. Enquire Within Upon Everything 1890
(reproduced by Old House Books, 2003)
First published by Houlston & Sons of Paternoster Square, this book is the essential guide to, well, everything in the Victorian era. It sold over a million copies, which was unprecedented for its time, and was added to annually to cover more and more diverse topics. The Victorian householder would use this little manual to learn the rules of backgammon, prepare tonics, operate a barometer, treat the bite of a viper, or observe the correct etiquette at a dinner party.

5. Bradshaw's Illustrated Handbook to London & Its Environs 1862
(George Bradshaw; reproduced by Conway Books, 2012)
This is the book recently made famous by Michael Portillo in his Great Railway Journeys TV series. As a result of the show's success, Old House have published two facsimile versions of the book - one a standard hardcover, and one a plush leatherbound edition. Both offer the determined rail traveller an unparalleled companion around Britain. Used in conjunction with the Baedeker, this book provides a fascinating insight into the development of late-Victorian Britain.

And the Runners Up...
As I own over a hundred books on the subject, I couldn't leave it at five... Books that narrowly missed the final cut include: Baedeker's London & Its Environs 1900 (reproduced by Old House Books); Telling Dildrams & Talking Whiff-whaff (Mr. Holloway, 1839; reproduced by Old House Books, 2012); Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (reprinted by BiblioBazaar, 2010); Life in Victorian Britain (Michael Paterson; Robinson 2008); A History of Everyday Things in England (Marjorie & CHB Quennell; out of print); The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (Philip Sugden; Robinson 1994); A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Eric Partridge, out of print).

For the Blood is the Life

There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; 
huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word:

DRACULA.

116 years ago today (May 26th), Bram Stoker unleashed his masterwork upon an unsuspecting Victorian society. Dracula is one of my all-time favourite books; a cliché perhaps, given my love of the nineteenth century and chilling tales, but it’s an unashamed pleasure. Like the critics back in 1897, I think Dracula is note-perfect in its execution, and a wonderful example of the late-Victorian novel.

It’s strange to think, from a modern perspective, that Dracula was itself homage to an earlier style of writing. Stoker took inspiration from writers such as Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764) and John Polidori (The Vampyre, 1819), to create a masterpiece of Gothic fiction. The pop culture part of my brain says it’s the Victorian equivalent of the movie Tombstone (the one with Kurt Russell), which takes probably all the best western archetypes and squashes them into something better than the sum of its parts. But I digress (again).

What I love about this book (aside from the fact that it’s still pretty creepy, and has one of the best baddies ever, and is everything that Twilight isn’t, thank Christ), is that it truly is a product of its age. The narrative hearkens back to an earlier style, but the story couldn’t be set before the late-Victorian period. Telegrams are integral to the plot in a way that the diary entries and letters of early epistolary writing could never be, lending urgency to a second-hand piece of information. The book features up-to-date (for 1897) medical procedures and psychiatric knowledge. It features social commentary from a perspective of ‘progressive’ Victorian morals (Lucy is punished for being so wanton and silly; her father is never around because he’s forever taking late night walks into town… ahem; and Mina is the true object of love for Harker and Dracula, because she’s a modern woman, a thinking woman, and a model of what Stoker saw as the future). It has subtle references to sexuality and secret desires (and the consequences thereof if you take the blood disease readings of the book to their obvious conclusion).

The rather lovely Barnes & Noble

leatherbound classic edition.

But for all of these subtexts, I think Dracula stands the test of time because it’s a genuinely good read. Sure, it shows its age in the language and characterisation, but nowhere near as much as early Victorian fiction like Dickens and Wilkie Collins. This book was written near the close of the Victorian age, and as such features modern language and, more importantly, modern ideas that might surprise today's reader. As the anniversary of its publication draws near, that lovely leatherbound edition is calling to me, like a wolf on the shore of a Whitby beach. The weather might be warming up outside, but the book never fails to transport me to a stormy winter’s night in 1897, when the doomed ship Demeter washes ashore, bringing with it a hellish cargo…

If you’ve never read Dracula, you’re missing out!

The Gender Agenda

Just lately I've decided to embrace social media a little more. Partly, I've known for ages that the only way to really make friends and influence people any more is through this Internet-thingy, and partly, my dear lady wife has bullied me into it. “Stop being so Victorian,” she said. “Embrace 2013,” she said. A stranded time traveller such as myself can barely get to grips with wireless telephones and ovens powered by electricity, so you’d think she’d go easy on me.

Anyway, the real reason for blogging today is that I have decided to begin my second novel. (Yes, I know the first one isn't out yet, and I'm aware I'm being uncharacteristically optimistic; but I'm confident. And the second one is going to be even better than the first. Hash tag Ego, as the kids might say).

I made some firm decisions about the imaginatively titled Book Two a long time ago. The first was that the lead character was going to be [gasp] a woman. The second was that she was going to be an exceptional woman in the Victorian era – so exceptional, in fact, that she would have to be labelled as ‘the Other’ by those of a philosophical bent (Yes, I've read a lot of Angela Carter, and yes, it has inspired me considerably in the writing of Book Two). The third was that she would have to go through some pretty extreme ordeals in order to realise that there’s more to life than just being accepted in a man’s world, even in the 1870s. Now, this is going to be a sci-fi/horror mash-up, so I can pull some unconventional levers to make my point, but that doesn't take away from one simple fact: what I'm doing is a bit unusual, especially for a man.

I'm not saying it hasn't been done before (It has). I'm not even saying that I'm treating the subject with an entirely original bent. It’s probably even been done in the same genre for all I know. But when you look at all the [ugh!] genre fiction out there in the world, it’s amazing how much of it is focused on male-centric stories. Now, as you may be aware, I travelled to this time from 1888, and women there had a rum time of it, I can tell you. But it seems that, in the stories circulating today, we haven’t moved on terribly much. Even women writers often write about male characters if they want to break into niche genres (Harry Potter, anyone? And that horrid Twilight thingy – the one with the anonymous girl living vicariously through the eyes of an ageing sexual predator… I mean, vampire – god, I wish vampires were scary again. Ahem). I might just be writing Jane Eyre with added ultraviolence, rather than high art, but it’s still not going to be terribly ‘mainstream’ in its themes and characters. I'm not exactly a champion of feminism, but I do find that curious.

Possibly the point of the blog, other than just being food for thought and rambling musings, is that I'm already finding it really difficult. Understanding the theory behind female character development doesn't mean I understand how to write a ‘real’ woman. Anyone got any tips? Because, to be honest, I can’t imagine a trickier thing to write than an entire novel from the point of view of a nonconformist female, kicking ass and taking names, and not even bothering to be all masculine in the process.

Coming full circle, I was inspired to write this blog by an article I found doing the rounds on Twitter. It’s about the rather patriarchal viewpoint offered by geek culture tropes in the media. It’s a lot more succinct than my offerings, but I'm a product of my time. It even made me slap my forehead and exclaim ‘Ripley! Of course!’ (I'm calling that a Ripley Moment from now on). I heartily recommend you check it out. Unless you think a woman’s place is in the kitchen, of course, in which case you probably shouldn't.

http://www.pornokitsch.com/2013/05/super-8-and-the-big-but.html

A Warning to the Curious Editor

It may come as some surprise that my favourite writer of chilling tales did not produce his most famous works in the Victorian period at all, but rather in the Edwardian era. Montague Rhodes James was certainly a Victorian, however, and his tales encapsulate the greatest motifs of his age, and spin them into something extraordinary, which to my mind gave birth to the 'modern' ghost story.

I will revisit M. R. James' work in future blog posts, but for now I want to talk about a new-ish edition of his collected works that I recently acquired. This book is called Curious Warnings, the 150th anniversary edition of James' collected tales.

This is a beautiful book; a real treasure. Chunky, leather bound, with black flocked page edges, nice paper and binding; everything, in fact, that a print nerd like me loves. The editor, Stephen Jones, has taken two unusual steps when compiling this book, which really brings me to my point.

The first thing he's done, and the most welcome, is to make the prose easier to read by the judicious use of typesetting. James' work notoriously includes lengthy extracts of poems, journals, letters, newspaper articles, religious tracts and so on, which can be quite confusing when they're presented as continuous blocks of run-on text. It seems like such an obvious thing to do, that it's surprising no-one's thought of it before. Simply by indenting the extracts and choosing a nice typeface, it suddenly becomes easier for the brain to follow the story (the exception is the story 'Martin's Close', which uses a horrible typewriter font for several pages, but that's just personal taste).

But now comes the nub. Stephen Jones has also edited the language of the book – no cutting of words nor re-ordering of the manuscript – but he has re-punctuated throughout, so that old-fashioned spellings of words like 'to-day' are corrected. In his foreword, he's quite unclear as to exactly how far he's gone. Indeed, without reading two editions side by side, I doubt the layman would notice. (So far I've spotted a considerable number of new paragraph breaks, and some dodgy dialogue punctuation). But for me, loving the past as much as I do, I can't help but think that the work has lost something in translation, a certain charm of its time. The editor says it was purely to make the work 'more accessible to a modern audience', but I don't get that. You'd be no more or less likely to buy this handsome book because you knew there was old-fashioned punctuation within, would you? If you find the language impenetrable, then a few hyphens won't help.

No; as an editor, I accept that language is constantly evolving, but I also believe that words as painted by the masters are sacrosanct. Removing hyphens from M. R. James is only a slightly smaller crime than modernising Shakespeare (it's been done, a lot, but I believe it only serves to create a curio rather than a work of art, as the beats and flow are replaced by another's efforts). I think the language that you choose to write in, even if it's just an older form of our own, should stay as the author intended it. If anyone picked up something of mine to read in 150 years time (I can dream, right), I think I'd be posthumously offended if an editor had taken the red pen to it whilst I lay spinning in my grave (hey, it's 150 years in the future, it'll probably be all txt-speak and that. Dope.)

But still, after all that, I'm glad I own it. It's one of the nicest books in my collection, and the stories within are still my favourite ghost stories ever written. If you've never read M. R. James, then I seriously recommend them in any form. For the traditionalists, try this one (lovely little hardback). Those less fearful of the hidden dangers of toying with ancient manuscripts should give Stephen Jones' edited version a go...

FUR/FLA/FLE/BIS