twovictorianladies

It’s been interesting, writing about the mid-Victorian period. Historical accuracy is a bit difficult, since the era covered so many years, and the Industrial Revolution took place mid-stream. But once you stop to think about it, it really isn’t all that long ago.

Queen Victoria was still on the throne, with a decade left to reign, when my grandfather was born in 1891. I was in my last year of college when he died. He was twelve when the Wright Brothers flew the Kitty Hawk; at the time of Grandpa’s death, Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon was a decade in the past. Sometimes I think we all live on the point of a tesseract and if we only knew how, we could just fold up the fabric of time and move from place to place – or time to time.

Most of my characters were born in the 1820’s and 1830’s, and are in their late teens and early to mid twenties at the time I am writing about. But if they were real people and not fictional creations, I could easily be have been in the room with someone who, at one time, had been in the room with one of them. They could easily have lived until after my grandfather was born, for example, and I was certainly in the room with him often enough.  Author and former Librarian of Congress Charles Goodrum points out in one of his books that a man could have met both Thomas Jefferson and a very young Ronald Reagan.

But despite my awe at the swiftness at the passing of time, I’m still left with some frustrating research; in  1850s England would diapers have been referred to as nappies as they are now?  Did the term, “have a field day” have the same meaning, as in, The scandalmongers would have a field day with this”. If someone has been “pacing like a caged lion” – were there actually lions in cages at the time – when did zoos as we know them, start? I’ve found the answers to two of these questions, but still am searching for the third. And who knows what other questions will come up as I continue?