Living in two centuries
Published by on October 9th, 2007
Table Rappers, the series of stories I am currently writing, was never intended to be a detailed, historically accurate representation of Edwardian England. Nevertheless, some colour is essential in creating a level of believability in the world and society in which my characters go about their lives.
This all means a lot of reading and absorbing as much as possible about the early part of the 20th Century. In the process I’ve found a few surprises that my previously general and scant knowledge was unaware of, likely formed by movies and TV dramas anyway.
The London tube network was growing, and quite well established by 1906/8 (when my initial stories are currently set, deliberately a little vague). It was interesting to learn that even then there were tube worker strikes leading to massive overcrowding on London buses - there were many other strikes too, a fair bit of industrial unrest. Communications were carried out by telephone extensively, and this was still a period of transition from horse-drawn transport, to the use of combustion engine. London’s Metropolitan Police and its Scotland Yard headquarters had been established well into the previous century, and police officers had adopted the distinctive tall helmets still seen today.
Thankfully there is no end of information about that age; there seems to be something of an Edwardian revival going around in recent months - good timing for the story release, perhaps..? The focus of my information, apart from web searches of course, consists of two books. The first (mentioned here ) is Lost Voices of the Edwardians, joined more recently by After the Victorians . That book covers much of the 20th Century, but the detail about the Edwardian period is quite something, offering a taste of the bigger picture compared to the minutiae of everyday life captured in Lost Voices. Photographs are extremely useful of course, so these two will shortly be joined by books on Edwardian architecture and interiors, and an out of print book of period Photographs of London. All of this information adds true colour to the palette to bring this 100 year old world to life and give my characters a tangible space in which to play out their adventures.
For no particular reason, here is a caption from a photograph of a cigar wielding portly chap, taken from After the Victorians:
Alfred Charles Harmsworth, the first Viscount Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail, proprietor of The Times and effectual inventor of modern journalism. He died on a rooftop in Mayfair, having tried to telephone through to his office the sensational scoops that he was going mad, and that God was homosexual.
Here is the very chap at his home in Surrey in 1903. Boy, they really knew how to go crazy in them days!
