Historical Fiction Notes: The Beggar's Opera

Painting based on The Beggar's Opera, scene 5, William Hogarth, c. 1728, in the Tate Britain (source)

 "The Beggar's Opera premiered at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre on 29 January 1728 and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history up to that time. The work became Gay's greatest success and has been played ever since; it has been called "the most popular play of the eighteenth century." In 1920, The Beggar's Opera began an astonishing revival run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London, which was one of the longest runs in history for any piece of musical theatre at that time." (Wikipedia)

John Gay (1685-1732) "Gay was born in Barnstaple, England, and was educated at the town's grammar school. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a silk mercer in London, but being weary, according to Samuel Johnson, "of either the restraint or the servility of his occupation", he soon returned to Barnstaple, where he was educated by his uncle, the Rev. John Hanmer, the Nonconformist minister of the town. He then returned to London" (Wikipedia)

"The Scriblerus Club was an informal association of authors, based in London, that came together in the early 18th century. They were prominent figures in the Augustan Age of English letters. The nucleus of the club included the satirists Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Other members were John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Henry St. John and Thomas Parnell. The group was founded in 1714 and lasted until the death of the founders, finally ending in 1745.  Working collaboratively, the group created the persona of Martinus Scriblerus, through whose writings they accomplished their satirical aims. Very little of this material, however, was published until the 1740s. The club began as an effort to satirize the abuses of learning wherever they might be found, which led to The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus." (Wikipedia)

While I was in the area of 18th century comedic drama with Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, I decided it would worthwhile to make a brief detour back half a century to the Augustan era, and to read The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay.

This work, the most famous by the author, is considered the quintessential English ballad opera.  As such, there is no classical operatic recitative to expose the dialogue, and the musical works are original lyrics adapted to popular tunes of the day. It was intended a comedic satire of Italian operatic styles of the day, which had become popular in London in that era.

I wanted to read this work, even though it was a little before the time period of my interest, simply because it was by far the most popular stage production of that era. The actors in the lead roles became famous among Londoners, and the portrait of the leading lady was widely circulated, anticipating our modern fandom of 20th century Pop Culture.

But even though the play was very popular in its day, and even as a revival in the early 20th century in London, it is now largely eclipsed in reptutation by the 1928 adaptation, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), which was written by Bertolt Brecht, along with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill. This debuted right at the dawn of modern Pop Culture (the origin of which I often take somewhat arbitrarily to be 192 ). Even more familiar than the Brecht play itself is the song "The Ballad of Mack the Knife", made famous to Americans by recordings by Louis Armstrong and later by Bobby Darin.

Poster for Die Dreigroschenoper by Brecht.

Bobby Darin, show here in 1959. "Mack the Knife" was introduced to the United States hit parade by Louis Armstrong in 1956, but the song is most closely associated with Bobby Darin, who recorded his version at Fulton Studios on West 40th Street, New York City, on December 19, 1958.

Knowing that the play was very popular, it is probably not surprising to learn that it concerns the lives of miscreants, criminals, and corrupted public officials. The hero and most charming character, Captain Macheath, is a notorious and unrepentant thief.  His male and female companions are part of his extended criminal network, with the women portrayed mostly as having very easy virtue.  I can testify to the enduring popular of this last topic from personal experience, as my own blogs stats tell me that by far the most popular post I have ever made on this site is the one I wrote in the autumn of 2012 about being hassled by the prostitutes and pimps outside my motel in Fresno. From the title of that post, I can well guess what it is that brings folks from search engines to land on my blog.

In any case, the subject matter and style of The Beggar's Opera greatly overlaps the later chapters of Moll Flanders, which dates from around the same time period. Like parts of Defoe's novel, much of the action takes place inside Newgate Prison, and we learn of the treatment of prisoners and the corruption of the penal system of England, where money could buy everything, even perjured testimony to gain release of convicts who might otherwise be hanged or transported to the New World as slaves.

The takeaways here for my own research project were not in the way of things that struck me as being obvious information I needed for parts of the story. But that was fine by me. There was some juicy information about how the gaming houses of Marybone (Marylebone) worked, and also the how highwaymen operated in gangs. Details about the reputation of various London locales in that era are always welcome, for example when Macheath states that Drury Lane would be empty of pleasure women (enjoyed by all classes of men) were it not for criminals like himself, who furnished by far the most important demand for such services.

Also it was interesting satirical insight to learn that just as a man might marry for a woman's inherited fortune, a woman might marry purposely to become a widow and gain a man's money.

But most of this is just background side information at this point, perhaps to be useful at some point. Nevertheless as "the most popular play of the eighteenth century," The Beggar's Opera, its characters, and even actors, would have been very familiar to all the characters in my own story, especially ones familiar with the theater, so that makes it important on its own.

As a ribald comedy, the play necessarily has a Hollywood-like happy ending, even though the characters deserve execution, as stated plainly in the epilogue of the play. Comparing it to American cinema, it definitely has a pre-code feel, and its not surprising that its most famous modern adaptation came out of Weimar Germany. Captain Macheath---not only a notorious criminal, but a bigamist and cad----certainly deserves to go to the gallows, but he is just too lovable. He is too charming a rogue for condemnation, and the targets of his crimes (gentleman gamblers) make his robbery akin to that of  Robin Hood in a way. Like all roguish outlaws in fiction, he is an embodiment of the life force, a criminal in a society that elevates criminals to public office. As the audience, we want him to survive, so he must.

Historical Fiction Notes: She Stoops to Conquer

Scene from a 1905 product of She Stoops to Conquer (source)

The Vicar of Wakefield read so quickly and was so satisfying that I decided to proceed immediately to the other well-known work by Oliver Goldsmith, namely his comedic play She Stoops to Conquer.

The play was first performed in London in 1773,  seven years after the publication of The Vicar of Wakefield, and a year before Goldsmith's death at age 46. It is probably more well-known today than the novel, and from my personal observation it lingers on reading lists in high schools and colleges more so than his novel does. Walking through a college bookstore, one might easily find a stack of cpies of it on the shelves as assignment in a theater class.

One reason is that as a play, it is shorter and more accessible, and has a timeless romantic aspect that would be appealing to modern audiences. The preposterous conditions of the story are designed to create exactly the universal awkwardness of young courtship that nearly everyone has felt at one time or another, by the time they reached the age of sixteen.

Moreover, despite many similarities in style and content between the two works, the subject matter of the play is both lighter and tighter than the novel. It has the same comedic trajectory, but takes place over the course of one evening instead of over years (i.e. Aristotelian Unity of Time), and it does not include at all any of the philosophic discussions of the novel.

Instead it is mostly a ribald romp through among characters at a country inn, with only one other major location, which occurs in the first act (cf. Unity of Place).  One can easily why it would make for good classroom discussion among high school students learning drama.

As in the Vicar of Wakefield, the story of She Stoops to Conquer includes multiple episodes in which characters utterly misinterpret the motivations and even the identities of other people. Here it is played for purposes of romance, and in this it invokes no small amount of comparison with Shakespeare's deceptions in As You Like It.

The title itself refers to a young woman, of wealthy middle class background and good manners, who attempts to evoke the more assertive side of a diffident young bachelor by pretending to be a bar maid. This allows him to drop his plaguing shyness around "nice" women and become the kind of man that she is actually attracted to (this motivation is stated really clearly by the young woman herself).

The resolution of the romance of course will see the synthesis of the two sides of the gentleman's character into a whole self with a healthy masculine balance of both deference and assertiveness.

For purposes of my research, the play was among the most fruitful in answering some burning questions I had formed regarding such issues as the process of acquiring lodging at roadside inns in Georgian England.

It's one thing to say "people stayed at inns." It's another thing entirely to recreate the process, step by step, in a way that is historically accurate. What did one do, after one walked into the door? What would one expect to find exactly?

It's the kind of thing one would want to know, say, in case one were a time traveler to that era, and wanted to blend in without giving oneself away. One would need a guidebook, exactly as if one were in a foreign country where the customs were strange.

In She Stoops to Conquer, Goldsmith furnishes the process of checking into a roadside inn in step-by-step daily through the dialog and action of the characters. From the way they interact, one gains a tremendous amount of insight into what guests and hosts expected of each other.  In this way, the play comes as close to being the time traveler guidebook I mentioned as anything one could want.

I read novels slowly, but I normally read plays in one day. Doing so is usually rather easy, and lets the entire action flow in one's mind without interruption (as it is meant to). At the end of the play, I was able to see a pattern in Goldsmith's comedies that is easy to describe: things start of merrily and the characters are all somewhat happy. Then a series of cascading misfortunes occur, partly driven by misapprehension among the characters (in The Vicar of Wakefield, there are actual villains causing evil, but in the play, there are not any).

Things get really bleak and all seems lost. The "black moment" arrives when it seems like tragic consequences will overwhelm the story and leave the characters all in sorrow. Then, by proactive actions of certain characters, and the revealing of the true motivations of various characters, the situation is rescued in dramatic fashion. Order and merriment are restored to the universe.

And they say Hollywood invented such endings! Pschaw!

Portrait of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) by the famous Georgian portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Wikipedia: "Goldsmith settled in London in 1756, where he briefly held various jobs, including an apothecary's assistant and an usher of a school. Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, Goldsmith produced a massive output as a hack writer for the publishers of London, but his few painstaking works earned him the company of Samuel Johnson, with whom he was a founding member of "The Club". There, through fellow Club member Edmund Burke, he made the acquaintance of Sir George Savile, who would later arrange a job for him at Thornhill Grammar School. The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the epithet inspired idiot. During this period he used the pseudonym "James Willington" (the name of a fellow student at Trinity) to publish his 1758 translation of the autobiography of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe."

Goldsmith was described by contemporaries as prone to envy, a congenial but impetuous and disorganised personality who once planned to emigrate to America but failed because he missed his ship. At some point around this time he worked at Thornhill Grammar School, later basing Squire Thornhill (in the Vicar of Wakefield) on his benefactor Sir George Savile and certainly spending time with eminent scientist Rev. John Mitchell, who he probably knew from London. Mitchell, sorely missed good company, which Goldsmith naturally provided in spades.Thomas De Quincey wrote of him 'All the motion of Goldsmith's nature moved in the direction of the true, the natural, the sweet, the gentle.

His premature death in 1774 may have been partly due to his own misdiagnosis of his kidney infection. Goldsmith was buried in Temple Church in London. The inscription reads; "HERE LIES/OLIVER GOLDSMITH". There is a monument to him in the centre of Ballymahon, also in Westminster Abbey with an epitaph written by Samuel Johnson."

Historical Fiction Notes: The Vicar of Wakefield

"Now the possessor of accumulated wealth, when furnished with the necessaries and pleasures of life, has no other method to employ the superfluity of his fortune but in purchasing power." (Chapter 19)

"Liberty, Sir, liberty is the Briton's boast, and by all the mines in Cornwall, I reverence its guardians."

The two volumes of the 1766 edition of The Vicar of Wakefield with title page inset. (source)

 

William Powell Frith: Measuring Heights, 1863 (A scene from Chapter 16: Olivia Primrose and Squire Thornhill standing back to back, so that Mrs. Primrose can determine who is taller.) (source)

Sense and Sensibility had been such a rich and rewarding read that I was tempted to proceed onward to Austen's second novel, and thus finally get my "Mr. Darcy lessons" down a tee. Such is the typical trajectory of a teenage girl who discovers Austen's works, and devours them one after another (in the old days before video games, when young men still read books, the male equivalent was probably Kurt Vonnegut).

So I delayed reading Pride and Prejudice for now and decided to jump back slightly in time to a earlier decade of the Georgian era, and to the most famous short novel written by author who was widely read throughout the 19th Century but who is not very well known today, namely Oliver Goldsmith.

The Vicar of Wakefield was written in 1761, the year that Frances Holmes was born, and published in 1766. Except for narrations of events by characters within story, it takes place mostly out in the English countryside. One can almost imagine the characters intersecting with the Holmes family of Hertfordshire on the roadways of that era.

The novel itself has a very interesting story of how it came to published, especially in how the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson came to Goldsmith's aid.  I highly recommend checking out the Wikipedia article on it.

The entire work is short and reads very quickly. The percentage indicator on my Kindle increased rapidly as I flipped the pages, I could have plowed through the book in several days but once I got into it, and recognized it as a work of great genius and literary art, I purposely slowed down, and read it generously over the course of a week.

This reminds me of something Vonnegut said, if I recall, when someone asked him if he would ever want to take a speed reading course. He replied that he wanted to learn to read slower, not faster (the source of this quote escapes me).

Since most modern folks haven't read this book, I'll give a little summary of the story. As the title suggests, the protagonist is a country clergyman, in middle age, with a large happy family and a comfortable modest living and a tidy savings after many years at the pulpit.  As a man of the cloth, he is an idealist, earnest but slightly pompous, and full of a comic self-importance about his influence over others, much like a man who writes a little blog and expect that anyone actually reads it.

The story opens with an hour of happiness at the impending marriage of one of his sons. Immediately in the story, and then over the course of time, almost everything goes wrong in his life.  He loses all his savings, his living, and eventually much more.  In this way, the story has the feel of the Book of Job. Just when you think things couldn't get worse for him, they do.

But this is a comedy, not a tragedy, and as we experience the calamities of the protagonist and his family one by one, we are guided through them by the vicar's unshakeable optimism and faith, despite his comic egoism. As a testimony of faith through difficulties, told in comedic perspective, it ironically feels a bit like Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, now that I think about.  The protagonist's philosophy of life can be summed up in his observation of "how much kinder heaven was to us, than we to each other." (cf. Jaques' "Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind" in As You Like It).

Likewise, it is always in the power of individual to persevere with the help of Providence. "Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them." (highlighted by 38 people in the Kindle edition).

Although Goldsmith can't compare to Austen when it comes to a feminine insight into the candid nuances of character motivation, he makes up for it with a masculine energy in weaving a compelling multi-stage narrative propelling the story through one episode to another over the course of years.

As such, he was even better than Austen at providing some of the meaty details of life in the countryside in Georgian England, in regard to my favorite topics: residences and lodging, food and meals, and (what is rapidly becoming my favorite bit of research) transportation by horse. I made many highlights in the Kindle whenever the protagonist stopped for the night at a inn. I loved finding the small details in these scenes, e.g "But the night was coming on, I put up by a little public-house by the roadside, and asked the landlord's company over a pint of wine."

I was especially deligthed to see some juicy scenes involving discussion of contemporary theater, and theater-going (see below). The most Austen had given me in that regard, besides an insight that Shakepear was popular reading, was a fleeting mention of two characters in London having encountered each other in the lobby of the Drury Lane Theatre.

Here are some of my specific takeovers for my own research purposes:

1. Do you know it was possible to rent a horse and ride it to another place, and leave it there? One simply dropped it off at the appropriate inn down the road. The stage inns were part of a system this way. This seemed rather odd to me until I realized it was pretty close to today's model of car rental. In any case, it is something that most middle and upper class people wouldn't have done, because they would have ridden in a post-chaise, which was the most common vehicle of that day. The most common way that it was driven was by a postillion.

WP: "The post-chaise was a fast carriage for traveling post in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It usually had a closed body on four wheels, sat two to four persons, and was drawn by two or four horses. The driver, especially when there was no coachman, rode postillion on the near horse of a pair or of one of the pairs attached to the post-chaise."

This crops up in Jane Austen as well. We also learn of a smaller vehicle, called the curicle, which like the sports car of its day.

2. People sold their horses at fairs,and sometimes got conned by con men.

3. Walking thirty miles a day for several days in a row was not out of the question for a middle aged man in that era. Again this would have only have been necessary if you couldn't afford any other means of transportation.

4. Traveling theater companies toured the countryside giving performances in barns. This is one way that someone out in the countryside might have seen a Shakespeare play without going into "town." There is a great description of such a "strolling company" in in the story, which carried their "scenes and other theatrical furniture" from village to village in a cart, "where they were to exhibit."

"By the time the equipage of the strolling company was arrived at the village, which, it seems had been apprised of our approach, and as come out to gaze at us; for my companion observed, that strollers always have more spectators without doors than within. I did not consider the impropriety of my being in such company till I saw a mob gather about me. I therefore took shelter, as fast as possible, in the first ale-house that offered, and being shown to the common room, was accosted by a well-drest gentleman, who demanded whether I was the real chaplain of the company, or whether it was only my masquerade character in the play."

5. Shakespeare was very popular in that era and well-known among all classes of people, with an enduring appeal despite being a century and half after the fact. Dryden is mentioned often as well, but considered a bit old fashioned.

"'Dryden and Row's manner, Sir, are quite out of fashion; our taste has gone back a whole century, Fletcher, Ben Johnson, and all the plays of Shakespear (sic), are the only things that go down."--'How', cried I, 'is it possible the present age can be pleased with that antiquated dialect, that obsolete humour, those overcharged characters, which abound in the works you mention?'---'Sir', returned my companion, 'the public think nothing about dialect, or humour, or character; for that is none of the business, they only go to be amused, and find themselves happy when they can enjoy a pantomime, under the sanction of Johnson's or Shakespear's name.'"

6. 'Squire was a common appellation given to someone with property.

7. People moved between the country and the town (London) a lot. Poor people of the countryside sometimes sent there children to work in town. "London was the mart where abilities of every kind were sure of meeting distinction and reward."  Being an usher at a boy's school was considered a terrible job. One could make a meager living being a writer who churned out prose on philosophical topics (like a paid blogger today) and sold booklets in the City near St. Paul's Cathedral. Young women of poor families were often sent to work in the City to look for husbands (cf. Austen).

"...a single winter in town would make her little Sophia quite another thing. My wife warmly assented...; adding that there was nothing she more ardently wished than to give her girls a single winter's polishing."

8. Money was a huge reason why people chose their marriage partners. A man might marry for love, without regard to the property or inheritance his wife might bring to him, but this was considered wildly romantic, and privilege of men who already possessed money themselves.

9. When people went to ale-houses, they typically had their own small roomlet that was open and within earshot of other people.

10. Butlers could pretend to be masters of the house and fool people.

11. Something the vicar does, which sheds light on the meal process: "As soon as dinner was over, according to my old custom, I requested that the table might be taken away, to have the pleasure of seeing all my family assembled once more by a cheerful fire."

12. Sitting for family portraits was common even among the lower classes.

13. Someone might attempt to learn to play the French horn as a hobby.

14. Over dinner, gentleman might engage in lengthy and contentious discussion of politics, based on what he read in newspapers. "Now, I read all the politics that come. The Daily, the Public, the Ledger, the Chronicle, the London Evening, the Whitehall Evening, the seventeen magazines, and though they hate each other, I love them all." Chapter 19 of the book is an especially good example of this, and provides a marvelous debate on the concept of liberty, culminating in a defense of the monarchy as a protection of the people against the powerful. Contemporary readers will find much in there that pertains to the present era of American politics, including such issues as Free Trade and its affect on the rich versus the poor.

15. The Dutch were as eager to learn English back then as they are now, and an English person in Holland might make a living giving lessons.

16. One could insult someone by calling them a "reptile."

17. Educated people could make a living buying paintings in Paris, and do so without much knowledge of art by adopting simple rules of criticism of paintings. "The whole secret consisted in a strict adherence to two rules: the one always to observe, that the picture might have been better if the painter had taken more pains; and the other, to praise the works of Pietro Perugino."

18. Even if you weren't a criminal sentenced by the court, if you were really hard up in England, you could essentially sell yourself into slavery into the New World. "In this office Mr Cripse kindly offers all his majesty's subjects a generous promise of 30 pounds a year, for which promise all they give in return is their liberty for life, and permission to let him transport them to America as slaves...Here I found a number of poor creatures, all in circumstances like myself..."

19. Rich people always had people asking them for favor and money, like paparazzi.  "As the doors of nobility are almost ever beset with beggars, all ready to thrust in some sly petition, I found it no easy to matter to gain admittance."

20. People often drank punch.

21. Playhouses were a place where people traded fashionable opinions, and trendy people scooped up conversational topics there in they way that people now share videos from their favorite television comedic pundits: "He could repeat all the observations that were retailed in the atmosphere of the playhouses, and had all the good things of the high wits by rote long before they made their into jest-books."

22. One could express contempt and disdain by the exclamation "FUDGE!"

23. Children played blind man's bluff.

24. Michaelmas was a much more important holiday in that era. "...we were invited to burn nuts and play tricks at neighbor Flamborough's."

25. Fortune-telling gypies toured the countryside, typically charging a shilling of silver.

26. Dancing was common among country folk. "...though the Miss Flamboroughs were reckoned the very best dancers in the parish, and understood the jig and the round-about to perfection."

27. The West Indies is mentioned a lot as a place where people made a lot of money. A respectable young man of modest means might, with the right recommendations, receive a commission in a regiment sent there.

Historical Fiction Notes: Sense and Sensibility

Title page from the original 1811 edition of Sense and Sensibility. Austen wrote the novel (her first completed work) around 1795, when she was only 19, but it was not published until years later.

Having detoured a bit into contemporary fiction, and having danced around the historical time frame of my inquiry, I decided it was time to right for the jugular and read a classic English novel that was both written and set in exactly in the years I was interested in, namely the early 1790s.

For this, I decided, there could be no better choice that Sense and Sensibility, the first novel by Jane Austen.

To my abject discredit, I had never read Jane Austen before. A couple years back I had begun to read Pride and Prejudice (her follow-up novel). This was partly because at the time I was single and I had joined an online dating site, having just arrived in Portland. I noticed how many women in their profiles mentioned this book, and specifically that they were looking for "Mr. Darcy." It was almost a trope.

So, brazen as I was, before I even read the novel, I put in my own profile that I was "the original Mr. Darcy." Later when I met Red, through that dating site, I told her about this and it made her laugh. She said she thought most of the women were looking for Colin Firth, who had played that character in a miniseries adaptation in the 1990s.

This time around, however, my attempt to read Jane Austen was grounded in the deep foundation of intellectual curiosity and research, so I found it easy going to continue through the book. And my efforts were well rewarded, for I soon discovered what so many others have throughout the last two centuries, namely that Jane Austen is an artistic genius of the highest caliber, with an unparalleled insight into certain aspects of human behavior, especially in regard to women, but extending to both sexes to a magnificent degree of excellence.

She seems to have an x-ray vision for the nuances of character motivation coupled with the artistic courage to actually set forth this nuances in words that bring sympathy to the character, even when it is not the most flattering insight to the personage in question. The social interactions of characters have extra dimensions that were especially refreshing after having plunged into contemporary fiction, where the female characters seem buttressed by a fear of showing anything but the "awesomest" front of sisterhood in regard to the thinking of women in stories. I couldn't help chuckle at thinking at how much printer ink has been spilled in recent years in college gender studies departments describing how Austen's female characters, despite being so well written, nevertheless demonstrate unending variations and examples of the "oppression" of women that time period.  I picture legions of young folks across the gender spectrum parsing texts with the same alacrity that lab assistants once analyzed the tracks of scattered sub-atomic particles in bubble chamber photographs. I expect all of this to go down in history as today's equivalent of the advances in quantum physics of the last century.

In regard to my own research interest---namely the particulars of life in England in that era---Sense and Sensibility was a bonanza that lived up to all my hopes and expectations of the insights it might furnish. Each chapter provided new interesting details about such things as the houses people lived in, the rooms they occupied, the daily routines they followed, and the horse-drawn conveyances by which they traveled about.

At one point, my attention to details gave way to a relaxed seamless appreciation for the context, to the point where I begin could to imagine movements of the characters of my own story within that context, all the while knowing that in regard these general settings, I could achieve a high degree of historical accuracy even if the minute particulars of a scene and dialogue were necessarily fictionalized as they applied to individuals within my story. This is the stage at which historical re-animation goes from hard labor to having a joyful aspect of creation (not that any creation by writing ever comes easy, of course).

Perhaps the most rewarding part of my research was that while reading Austen, I began to achieve a multi-dimensional sense of the way people of that time moved between the town (i.e. London) and the countryside, and how life among the middle and upper classes especially was often a seasonal balance between these two settings. The London part of the story I found particularly fascinating, and I dutifully looked up the location of each street and square that was mentioned, so as to furnish myself with a knowledge of where people of that class moved about in that era.

This balance between "town and country" is extremely important in the Harriman saga, I realized since William Harriman (who resided in the heart of the City of London), somehow winds up meeting and marrying Frances Holmes, the daughter of a family who resided out in the countryside of Hertfordshire.  How did this happen? Sense and Sensibility gave me a broad context of understanding how this might have occurred, even if I did know the particulars of how it actually came about.

Of course, this also goes directly to the theme of As You Like It, which creates a strong duality between civilization and the wilderness (although the English countryside of Hertforshire was certainly not a wilderness by any means).

I realized that if I could find out nothing further about the relationship of William and Frances, at least I was probably capable of creating a plausible fictional scenario of their meeting, thanks in great part to Jane Austen.

But of course I wanted more. Ironically, the rich details of Austen's novels made me want to know the true details of the Harriman story. Sure, I could make up a scenario, but I have learned that the real life version is always more interesting.  

Austen had given me a list of locales in Westminster, the residences of the people who formed the social circle of the Dashwood sisters. Portman Square, Upper Berkeley Street, Conduit Street, Harley Street, Saville Row, Bond Street, St. James Street---all of these formed a relatively tight cluster of locales in the West End area in which the middle and upper classes made their homes, both permanently and seasonally, during the Georgian Era.

I could almost begin to see the Holmes family, headed by Edward, walking about Portman Square right past the characters in Sense and Sensibility. It seemed obvious that if they had come to London from the country, and made their seasonal home there, that it would have been right in that district, one of those streets.

My imagination in this regard was further stoked by the marvelous coincidence that during my most recent trip to London, which was for a few days over Christmas in 2014, I had chosen a hotel smack in this district, on Nottingham Street (which by another coincidence turned out to be within a block of where Dickens had written A Christmas Carol).  During my visit I had spent many hours walking around in these very areas, without much of an agenda, except to visit Grosvenor Square, which turns out to be an important part of the Harriman story in the 1930s.

It was all becoming vivid in my mind---the characters in my story. I wanted to put them somewhere exactly. I wanted an actual street street. Of course it was not incumbent upon me to name this actual address in the story, if I didn't know it from historical record, but in my mind I wanted to put them somewhere (although for obvious reasons I would have avoided placing the Holmes residence on Baker Street, which runs through the district and nearly defines it).

Moreover there was another important historical clue in Sense and Sensibility for me to chew on. Austen had placed the London residence of Lucy Steele, the scheming rival of the heroine Elinor Dashwood, in  Barlett's Buildings, which are apartments not in Westminster, but in the City of London not far from the Harriman residence on Upper Thames Street.

According to one source I found on the web about Austen's London geography, Barlett's Buildings were largely professional residences for lawyers and merchants in the City, and placing Lucy there was part of Austen's genius in showing how Lucy was a social climber who desired a rich husband so she could move to more fashionable quarters in Westminster, where the other characters lived.

So here I had a wonderful example of someone who lived in the City of London, at least part time, but who wanted to move out (and upward). This dovetailed nicely with my impression of William Harriman. He lived in the thick of the commercial district of the City of London, right along the river. He definitely wanted to move upward, if not out.

The Holmes, his in-laws, probably had a part-time town residence in fashionable Westminster. Somehow they met, and William married into the family.

William was desirous of advancing his place in life. Did he aspire to live in Westminster as well, or to have a place out in the country? He never achieved those things in England, even though his marriage to a family which had those things. Instead he left that world behind and moved to America, right in the year that Austen wrote Sense and Sensibility. 

Why?

If only I could find out how they actually did meet, or at least get some further clues...

Fiction Notes: Interference

After reading The Art Forger in just under two days on my new Kindle Paperwhite, I really felt on a reading roll. Suddenly I wanted to read everything.

Having dipped into contemporary fiction, I decided to keep the momentum with that line of literature. Moreover I decided to momentary forgo any thought of doing research historical fiction on the Harriman project for the moment, but to read whatever might occur to me, no matter what the subject, so long as it wasn't a 50 Shades rip-off like Alpha Billionaire or Filthy Boss. My test is generally: can I say the title outloud in a straight face without adopting a lurid accent?

It turns out that the Kindle device is always ready with suggestions, and I had signed up for a month's free trial of Kindle Unlimited, which allows one to "borrow" books for a set monthly price, I decided to go with the flow and grab whatever was at the top of the list, in pot luck fashion.

The book that Kindle thought I would like was Interference by Amélie Antoine. It turns out that it's a translation from the French.

As I mentioned, there no history here. It is completely contemporary in setting and subject. Nevertheless it was a good read, and rewarding in many ways.

The story is ostensibly about three characters, a man and two women. Almost the entire book revolves around them. Each chapter alternates in following each of them, or being narrated by one of the two women.

The narrative begins with a young French couple living on the coast of Brittany. At the beginning of the story, the wife goes swimming. She narrates her own drowning. Then we follow her husband as he discovers that she is dead. We also continue with narration from the wife as she sees her husband grieving in the home. In this way, it sort of feels like the movie The Sixth Sense, and other "beyond the grave" type of stories.

Soon we meet a second young woman (the third character of the story). Initially she is single and lives in Paris, but she quickly relocates to the village in Brittany. It is obvious from the start that she and the husband of the drowned woman will meet. We follow their slow progression in finding each other, all under the creepy observation and narration of the drowned wife, who watches her husband fall in love with new woman over time, even as he mourns for his wife.

For much of the story, the book feels like a thoughtful elaboration of grief and recovery from loss of a loved one, mingled with a imagined ghost story. We are left with the mystery of why we are hearing the dead woman's observations? Are they being imagined by the husband in his grief, for example?

Now here's the kicker. I'll try to avoid spoilers, but I have to mention that before I began  eading the story, I had read the top-rated review on Amazon which stated, with a warning, that there is a "huge plot twist" in the story that completely changes the way one feels about the characters. The review did not reveal what the twist was.

But  knowing this, I read through most of the book wondering when this plot twist would occur and how it would change how I felt about the three characters. When the plot twist finally came, it was obvious. Kindle tells you exactly how far you are through the book, percentage wise, and it turns out the plot twist is revealed at exactly the 66% mark, or in other words, at precisely 2/3 of the way through the story.

Indeed the plot twist utterly changes almost everything about the story and how one feels about two of the three main characters. I didn't see it coming at all and got a laugh out of it when it was revealed. At first I was a bit irked by it, and felt it might well ruin the book altogether, but soon I thought it was a good plot twist and enjoyed the drastic switch in the theme of the story.

At once, after the twist, the story took on a new dimension of social commentary about our time, and the defects of contemporary society and Pop Culture. Moreover we experience the pervasiveness of the American version of it (the characters are constantly referencing something American, even before the twist). It's hard to say more about this without revealing what the plot twist is.

Moreover, I should add that I found both of the female characters to be utterly refreshing compared to the vacuous heroines of contemporary American chick-lit. Both of them were three-dimensional women, with character flaws and emotions that allowed a traction of interest in them, even if they were not exactly sympathetic as "good people" at all times.

It plays into the idea that the French are more sophisticated than Americans in understanding male-female relationships, and the female psyche in general. From my experience, they see no need to play into the childish American "you-go-girl-ism" that is so pervasive here, especially in our Pop Culture, by which everything a woman/heroine does must be some cast as a form of validation and empowerment of women in general (or proof of repression by men).

In short, there seemed no way that Interference could have been written by most American authors, male or female. The examination of women is too complex, even for a book that wasn't itself particularly deep, and which read very quickly.

As it happened, I devoured the book in less than twenty-four hours, but without skimming at all. I had a smile on my face at the end, and would consider reading more by the same author. It felt like a triumph to "return" it to the Kindle Unlimited library.

Historical Fiction Notes: The Art Forger

Suggested alternate title: The Selfie Painter. A decent story that unintentionally sheds much light into the narcissistic trends of contemporary American women.

Shakespeare had been a marvelous beginning to my new Kindle reading experience, and I was eager to read more for my research.

For my next book, however, I decided to go a completely different route, and try something contemporary. After all, I intend to be a contemporary writer, since I can be no other kind, and it behooves me to some degree to keep abreast of certain trends and fashions, if not to imitate them, but at lest be aware of them.

As it happens, the Kindle provides one with plenty of suggestions for current fiction by means of the splash page when the device is inactive. Moreover it is always handy with "suggestions for you" when you are on your own library page.

When I saw The Art Forger, a recent work of fiction by B.A. Shapiro,  listed among the suggestions for me, I knew immediately that this was the next book I wanted to read.

It happens that I had actually seen the author speak, three and half years ago as part of the Tucson Book Festival while I was visiting my aunt and uncle in March 2013. My Aunt Marie suggested I would enjoy the festival, which takes place annually on the University of Arizona campus, and I readily accepted the suggestion, driving over there one day while I was in town. I wrote a blog post about it at the time.

The author, B.A. Shapiro, was speaking in three-woman panel of authors on the subject of the writing of historical fiction. Her novel takes place in the present day, which it has flashbacks to a hundred years in the past in the world of the French community of artists associated with Degas. For this and other reasons, Shapiro was compelled to do much historical research for the book, and in the talk I saw, she was giving pointers to other people.

Given the irony that I was now living in Arizona, and was in the midst of pursuing my own historical fiction project, it seemed like the perfect thing to do, to pay homage to that original roundabout inspiration, and that chapter of my life, by reading Shapiro's book.

The book is an imaginative and entirely fictional story based on the real-life unsolved art theft at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston in 1990.

The protagonist is a young woman, a talented artist, who is secretly hired to make a reproduction of one of the stolen paintings. The painting she is hired to reproduce is a fictional work of Edward Degas.

The story has the feel of a page-turner, detective story. It does not purport to offer a solution to actual theft. Instead it explores a fictional relationship (via fictional letters and journals) between the real Isabella Stewart Gardner and Edward Degas, to explain the origin of the fictional Degas work.

Thus in considering the story as historical fiction, we have truly fictional historical fiction. By this I mean that the history within the story entirely outside of reality. There is no grounds to suppose that any relationship existed between Isabella Stewart Gardner and Edward Degas. It is all imagined. Pretty much the only thing that is real is the theft.

I make this distinction between the project I am undertaking is definitely not of this kind of historical fiction. Instead it is intended to be the kind of historical fiction that hews as closely as possible to known fact, and which fictionalizes only when necessary to (1) bring color to the narrative of characters by actions, thoughts and dialogues; and more significance, (2) explain by conjecture the motives and relationships between characters

Shaprio wanted to write a compelling page turner. I have a completely different objective, which is to bring to life personages of history such as to shed light on history itself, so as to bring a new and fresh interpretation to known people and events. I am not historian, but a storyteller. So I must fictionalize.

All my "history" must be fact, as solidly as possible. I feel at liberty to fill in gaps, but I don't want to pave over fact with fiction. If something is unknown, then I can make a conjecture in that gap. But I must know that it is not known. I must determine as much where fact and history leave off, so that I can cantilever fact into a hypothetical situation that brings light into the dark and unknown places in a way that is plausible.

For example, before I knew the address of William Harriman's business at 95 Thames Street, I was formulated possible fictional locations, because I didn't know that in fact it was known. Once I did find out this fact, it was incumbent upon me to hew to this fact in the story. This is not a burden but a joy since it turns out that reality furnishes far more interesting twists and turns that my imagination could conjure. But this requires diligent research to find out where fact ends and the blankness of the unknown begins. Only at that edge can I begin to fill in the gap with conjecture.

I consider myself in this way to have the same kind of task as a prosecutor at a trial, who must furnish a hypothetical scenario of a crime based on known evidence. In this case, we expect the prosecutor to fill in the gaps of motive by conjecture if necessary, to build a case. But the evidence itself must be fact, and we must know when we are in the realm of conjecture.

All of this is extremely important for me, for reasons I cannot explain at the moment, not the least of which is to furnish something as near to history as possible.

All historical movies are historical fiction in this way. We never know "exactly what happened." A movie about Abraham Lincoln, for example, cannot duplicate his exact words and his exact movements. It must necessarily fictionalize (Lincoln will be a character in the Harriman story, most certainly).

As for Shapiro's novel itself, like I said, it was a good page-turner. But reading it reminded me of how little reward I find in reading most contemporary fiction. Among other things, the heroine was completely empty and unsympathetic to me. Despite the interesting plot, I really didn't care what happened to the protagonist. I didn't buy at all that she was a real person, let alone a real artist.

"It's the same woman in every book," I told Red, in reference to the trends of contemporary fiction that I had exposed myself to over the last few years.

"She's always young, pretty, smart, talented more intelligent than all the men around her. She's hip and self-aware about it in everything she does. And completely self-absorbed. She begins the story by swearing off relationships altogether, but in the end, she has fantastic sex. She is worldly and well traveled. She inspires jealously in other women. She hangs around with cool people and does cool things. The world is her oyster. Men are at her feet. Everything she does is meant to elucidate the response---aren't I so awesome? She has no true frailties or weaknesses that give one traction to see her a s real person. She's the perfect model for the narcissistic and vacuous young young women of the Facebook generation trolling for likes with her selfies."

Red unfortunately knew exactly what I meant, even though she couldn't remember details of the book from when she read it a couple years back.

Even in the subject matter of the book---a fictional painting of nude woman in a bath, we get a hint towards the selfie obsession of modern young women. In the end, the world revolves around me. In that way  the novel is a more informative about our times without a meta awareness of this importance. But isn't literature always that way?

That's what sells right now I guess. At least it makes for an easy read. It took three weeks to read Moll Flanders. I didn't want to go any faster than that. I got through The Art Forger in two days. Like I said, a good page turner. Shapiro can tell a good story, and as a creative mind to make up history out of whole cloth. I did not regret reading it, and I would read another of her books, but my time is so freaking precious.

Historical Fiction Notes: As You Like It

Walter Deverell, The Mock Marriage of Orlando and Rosalind, 1853

Before I proceeded any further into my Harriman research, I decided that it was absolutely necessary to read the Shakespeare play that is so critical to the Harriman family saga, namely As You Like It.

To wit, I had done much research about the play itself, but hadn't bothered yet to read it end-to-end!

I knew I could download a version on Kindle for free, and could thus read it on my iPhone 5S, but that didn't seem appropriate. It was around that time, after having finished the paperback of Moll Flanders, that I decided it was worth while to acquire a new Kindle device--a new step for me. I did a bit of research, and discovered the model I wanted: the Kindle Paperwhite. Having made up mind, and ruminated a bit to make sure, I went on Amazon.com and within a few moments, I had purchased the device with one-click and received an email that it was on its way.

At the time I was absorbed with much work with my job, and when the package arrived from Amazon a few days later, laid on the front door step of our house here in Fountain Hills, I didn't even open it fully, but put the handsome box on my bookshelf, to be retrieved and opened as some kind of present to myself when I had enough free time to savor its existence.

Once I was ready to start using, and had configured it via the Wi-Fi network to link my Amazon account, the first thing I purchased and downloaded was a copy of the Shakespeare play. It seemed like an auspicious way to start.

To be specific, I was not reading the play for the purpose of acquiring direct historical background for the story, as it had none to offer. Nor was I reading it as an example of historical fiction, since it is a whimsical tale with no direct historical context. The necessary historical research about the play itself had already been done, most importantly in discovering that it had been performed regularly at the Drury Lane Theatre in London during the time frame of the story.

But the play itself was certainly important. How could it not be?

But what could it offer? Answering this question would be part of the pure fun of reading it.

Summary of the story: a benevolent duke is overthrown and exiled to the forest by the new duke, his cruel brother. The overthrown duke's daughter is eventually exiled to the forest as well. Out in the forest, a community of exiles and misfits forms, as a refuge from persecution. There is deception of identity and gender, as well as much whimsy. Multiple couples wind up falling in love, and after much wooing and humor, all the couples are married in a mass ceremony at the end. The former duke is restored.

Of course part of the importance of the play for the Harriman saga is that here we find the origin of the name Orlando (and later, by extension, Roland).

But perhaps the most important element of the play that relates the story at large is the forest itself, namely Arden. Of course this is going to be the name of the Harriman estate in the Catskills. The name is taken directly from the forest of the play. A little web research about the play tells me that the name Arden in Shakespeare possibly refers to the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg, which was the theater of many critical battles in the Second World War, among other things.

What stuck out most in reading the story was the direct contrast between civilization and the wilderness. The narrative of the play is direct progression from the former to the latter. The civilized world is corrupt. Justice and love are thwarted. As the story moves to the wilderness, both justice and love are restored and allowed to flourish.

This contrast---the city versus the forest---is extremely important to Edward Harriman. He was the great railroad baron who was also the close friend and patron of John Muir. Likewise one has the contrast between the city Harriman life of the 20th century and the simultaneous private seclusion of the Arden retreat in the Catskills. There was certainly an alteration and combination of the two realms, and it goes to a prominent and significant theme of "embodying the duality" and the rule of Always be on both sides. Or perhaps more appropriately here, Have a foot in both worlds.

It is fascinating that all of this was set down so literally in the Georgian era of the late 19th century. Edward Harriman built Arden around the turn of the 20th century, over a century after Rosamund Holmes urged her sister to name her son after the character Orlando. The play and its themes obviously had an important conscious legacy within the family itself, one that stretched over two centuries.

The city vs. wilderness theme is not intended to be the main theme of the Harriman saga, but it can obviously be a canvas on which to cast the other themes of the story, even from the earliest days. How this all plays out, I haven't yet figured. I'm not sure I'll know until I begin the actual writing, or even until after it's done.

There is plenty more Shakespeare I intend to read even as part of this project, a including most, if not all of his histories. After all, who is a better role model at fictionalizing history into pleasing artistic narrative than the Bard himself? I read Milton and Chaucer, and loved them, but my direct knowledge of Shakespeare is frighteningly small. Wouldn't it be cool to say I read all of Shakespeare's plays on Kindle?

As for the Kindle device itself, I absolutely love it. No more reading off my little iPhone. With my new device, I've already ripped through half a dozen other books in the last few weeks, which surpasses my reading over the entire last year.

One tweak to my routine that has helped is that I have adopted the habit of taking out my contact lenses earlier in the evening than bedtime. This allows me to forgo the use of reading glasses, which have put a strain on my eyes---one of the main reasons that reading books ceased to be a pleasure.

Back in Portland, moreover, in our little apartment hovering above the traffic of East Burnside, I had a difficult time feeling relaxed enough to read at leisure. I never even had a proper chair, and rarely felt in the mood to sit and absorb myself in a book.

Here in our new home in Fountain Hills, reading has become my primary leisure evening activity. We live up away from the city, in a quiet desert neighborhood behind a mountain range that separates our community from the lights and sprawl of Scottsdale and the Phoenix Valley. There are no streetlights up here, and at night, on our back patio, one can sit under the unbroken canopy of stars and moonlight, with the mountains silhouetted against the horizon.

Lately t has become nightly delight to go outside after sunset and sit beside the pool in my zero gravity chair, with the little LED-lit rectangle of the Kindle cradled in my lap, and the magnificent black dome of the stars overhead.


It feels as if an entire part of my soul, long neglected, has sprung back to life. I have never ceased devouring news off the web----that every-refreshing newspaper. But now I feel literate again.

Historical Fiction Notes: Moll Flanders

Flanders edging made at Kantcentrum in Bruges, Belgium. (source)

Reading Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities as background for the Harriman project was a nice start, if nothing else for the inspiration of exposing myself to a master storyteller.

But as I mentioned, Dickens was writing quite anachronistically to Georgian London, and so for my next book, I wanted to tackle something that wasn't written long after the time period, but perhaps could give me a more direct account of how people lived in the Eighteenth Century.

I could have gone directly for something written in the 1770s-1790s, but for reasons I will elaborate, I decided instead to tackle the reading of Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. This book, rather being written long after the Georgian era, was written well before it, in the early Eighteenth Century (during the so-called Augustan era), and was set over many decades in the Seventeenth Century, in rural England, London, and colonial America.

It seemed like a good balance to leap backwards before the era I was concerned with. Moreover, I already had an old paperback copy of Moll Flanders. It is among my few books that have traveled with me over the last four years, even while I was driving around the country in the Bimmer. I have been intending to read it all this time., and there is something quite satisfying in finally getting around to reading a book that has been in your possession and on your list for such a long time.

The copy I possess, a Signet classics edition, bears the attached price label of Sven and Ole's Bookshop in New Ulm, Minnesota, which is where I acquired it for a paltry dollar or two in the second week of July 2012.

It was brutally hot day. An enormous heat wave had engulfed the Middle West for the last ten days. I had just driven from New York to Omaha to attend the wedding of my friends Greg and Caitlin at th end of June. The heat wave had struck right as left my friend Adam and Marie's place in Brooklyn, and I wound up blowing my radiator in the Bronx and being laid up for three days in New Jersey getting it fixed. As it was I had to make a mad dash across the country just to reach Nebraska in time. The heat was so intense that when I stopped in Iowa City to tour the campus there, as is my habit, I went from the refuge of one air conditioned building to another, as if island hopping. I pulled up at the restaurant in Omaha right in time for the end of the rehearsal dinner, and devoured the remnants of the meal that my host had set aside for me.

After the wedding in Omaha, I was released from the pleasant social obligation and had leisure again. I had decided to enjoy the height of summer by meandering slowly north up into the lake country of South Dakota and into Minnesota. The heat gave an extra vibrancy to the trip, especially without air conditioning in the Bimmer. Everywhere I went in daylight hours, I had to make sure to park in a shaded area so that my steering wheel would not be too hot to touch when I returned.

That day in New Ulm, which is a nice little town with a charming main street, I found sheltered parking and made a tour of the downtown. I was happy to find the air conditioned bookshop as a chance to duck in from the heat.

At the time, I was in the midst of finishing reading Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which I had come to greatly enjoy, to say the least, It had been slow going reading it at first, making my way through his antiquated prose, but somehow towards the middle of the book I became engrossed it and could barely put it down. At night in my various campsites, when the dishes of the meal would cleaned and JetBoil stove put away, I would look forward to the nightly ritual of taking out my contact lenses, settling down into my cheap green Wal-Mart folding chair, and reading a chapter or two until the light grew too dark.

Of course the well-known subject matter of the story greatly resonated with me, as I was in the midst of a long era of years of wandering around the country on my own, and feeling a bit like a castaway at times while I was camping. I even wound up going off onto my own wilderness island, with a camping excursion on Isle Royale in the middle of Lake Superior, completed isolated from civilization for several days and sitting alone a deserted rocky beach.

As I approached the end of the book, I had gotten used to the style of prose and, hooked on the story, my reading pace quickened drastically. I began to mourn the approaching end, as one days, even the story grew more compelling during Crusoe's return to England. I remember turning the last page while seated in that chair at my campsite at the state park next to Lake Bemidji, near the source of the Mississippi River, and feeling a sense of ecstasy of the moment, in both time and place.

It was all so beautiful, and one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life.  Thus I had eagerly sought Moll Flanders in that bookstore in Minnesota with the intention of picking up with Defoe's other famous work. Eager to keep my momentum, I had begun reading it right away after finishing Robinson Crusoe, 

I got about fifty pages into the story, and was enjoying it, but circumstances of my own voyage at the time interrupted my reading, and with the momentum broken, the book wound up languishing in my possessions, even as I traveled further around the country in my car, to Burning Man, sthen pending a winter in California, and going up to Oregon again, where I wound up staying.

When we moved into the apartment on East Burnside in early 2015, it found a place in the growing stack of my books there as well, almost taunting me in my failed attempt to read it, as books do. Then just last month, when we moved out of that apartment, it got packed up again, this time sealed with tape in cardboard box, and put into the ReloCube with our other possessions, bound for a new destination a thousand miles away.

The next week, after I got back from my family vacation in Colorado, it got unpacked in our near home down here in Arizona, our house in the hills overlooking the Verde River valley. Here at least, there was finally a proper bookcase to put it on, and it found a temporary resting place next to my other accumulated paperbacks on the top shelf of the plywood set that was left in the garage of her house.

But it didn't stay there for long, Even as I was finishing A Tale of Two Cities, I knew what my next book would be, and I marched right over to the shelf in the corner of my office room and pulled down the copy I bought in New Ulm in 2012. I knew approximately where in the story I had left off, with the protagonist still a teenage girl in the country home where she was raised, being wooed by two brothers simultaneously. But I chose to start from the fresh beginning.

As in the case with Robinson Crusoe, it was slow going at first, as I took time getting used to Defoe's Augustan prose. Among other things, there are no chapters in his books. The story is told without formal breaks in one long narrative.

And the story is thick. The narrative follows the title character's life from her earliest memories up to the point of her "writing the story" when she is well advanced in age, at least sixty years old. The book was actually published as being the real memoirs of a notorious woman under a pseudonym.

Characters come and go rather quickly. Just when you get used to a particular locale, you are whisked elsewhere, and all the troubles and pleasures of one era of her life fade into memory. Among them are many husbands and even children, most of which she loses track of. The modern reader would be struck by how little importance is given the account of offspring in that era. Then I had a couple children by by husband. One died, etc.

Of course I was reading the book not only for the pure experience, but with research in mind about the time period. Specifically I became fascinated in several issues, among them were descriptions of:

1. the houses she was in (result: they weren't a lot of details at all)
2. the clothes people wore (result: very few details here as well)
3. what people ate (result: very few details here as well)
4. how people traveled about (here the story yielded some fruit, in the manner of describing certain conveyances).

Overall, as in the case with Dickens, I found it amazing how little of certain details were furnished by the author, and how much that it doesn't really matter, since so much is actually created and filled in by the imagination of the reader based soley on the narrative of the characters. 

This was especially true in the early part of the story, but curiously in the latter part of the book, when the title character, having advanced beyond her prime marrying years, and having no husband, is reduced to becoming a petty criminal in London. Here we begin to find more elaborate descriptions of specific locales, with street names. As in Dickens, we get a description of Old Bailey, which will definitely be of the locales in the Harriman narrative (given that we have William Harriman's actual words of testimony spoken there).

We learn that gentlemen carried periwigs, snuffboxes, and swords (and might be robbed of them). We learn how much they cost. We learn that pocket watches were very common among people of all classes at the time.

We learn that the Mall in St. James Park was, like a now, a place people strolled on Sunday.  We learn that it was possible for people to hire carriages for a week long tour of the country, and we even learn how much it cost.

The information about how much things cost, and what amounted to a good income, and good savings, was highly valuable. Of course the story takes place a century before the Harriman narrative picks up, but unlike our era of paper fiat money, prices back then were extremely stable over the course of time.

We learn about the process of transportation of criminals to the New World, a sentence that bestowed on one of the men who stole property from William Harriman. A little further research on the web while I was reading the book revealed that the sentence of "transportation" was very common. It was mostly to Virginia and Maryland (and sometimes to other colonies such as Pennsylvania and the Carolinas). It was continued right up to the Revolution. One source I found on the web discussed it as one of the great overlooked features of American history, greatly underplayed in magnitude, even at the time, out of shame, by writers such as Jefferson. Most Americans now associate this historical phenomenon with Australia, but this is historically inaccurate, overall. A lot of forgotten history in there, but in Defoe it is front and center in importance.

I found myself looking up many specific terms to get background to the story, for example,  Flemish lace (highly prized contraband during the Dutch wars of the Seventeenth Century).  Towards the latter part of the book, the gold mine of such little random details seemed to get richer and richer, right as I found myself accelerating my pace of reading, just as I had with Robinson Crusoe. I was devouring details of research while absorbing the story for pleasure. Can there be a richer experience of reading literature than this?

I made a point of reading some of the last few pages of the book while sitting in the same green folding chair that I used while camping across the country. As I write this, the chair is sitting out on the back patio by our pool, and affords a splendid view out towards Mount McDowell. After many years of wandering, I feel like I am finally at rest. And the copy of Moll Flanders is back on the bookshelf in my office, but now it has the place of honor that a finished classic piece of literature has in my mind, when I see the spine.

Defoe, by the way, was fascinating individual. He was highly involved in politics of his time, and was a supporter of the Glorious Revolution, among other things. He didn't really start writing until his Fifties. Now that's information I can really use!

Historical Fiction Notes: A Tale of Two Cities

Temple Bar in 1870, approximately a decade after Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities. (source)

The first work that I decided to read, as part of my general strategy of background research to the time period of my own work, was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I'd actually never read this before all the way through, although I knew the overall story and part of plot from screen adaptations.

The idea came to me as "aha" inspiration one afternoon when I was vacationing with my family at the YMCA camp near Estes Park last month, and within ten minutes I had purchased a version for Kindle and had downloaded to my iPhone. I spent the the next two days pleasantly launching through it while sitting on the porch of the lodge, swiping through the pages.

It seemed a rather obvious choice, since the time frame of the story (1775 to 1793) covers nearly exactly the London years of the Harriman story. Also Dickens is well known for his detailed descriptions. I figured I would be richly inspired in how to portray details of London life at the time.

This, however, was not the case, as I soon realized. First of all, Dickens did not live in that time. He began writing novels in the 1830s, and he wrote A Tale of Two Cities in the late 1850s, as one of his last works. So he was writing about a London that was almost eight decades in the past.

In many ways this was a great gift to realize this, since that put little ol' me in the same company as the master, since we were both writing about a historical London that we didn't have direct access to. It would be interesting to see how he handled the same situation.

As it happens, he mostly didn't handle it at all. I read in a preface that critics said the book should really be called "A Tale of One and Half Cities," since Dickens didn't know Paris much at all, and his descriptions of Parisian geography are rather scant. But the same is true of his London in that story.  One will search in vain in the story for details of everyday life in London---things such as what people ate, what they wore, what their dwellings looked like, etc. He simply doesn't furnish much of that at all.

Instead, not surprisingly, his stories are character-driven to an extreme. This itself was a great realization, since it shows that one doesn't really need to furnish a great deal of minute detail, so long as the story and character are compelling enough.Even the London of that era is left to one's imagination, to create in one's mind.

In motion picture terms, however, this puts a great burden on the art director, costumer, et, c., to make things "accurate." It was always the intention of Thor and I to do as much of this work ourselves as possible. So Dickens didn't give me much to go on, but at least it confirmed that story and character are always supreme. One needn't supply too much detail unless it pertains directly to the story itself.

The one exception where Dickens truly goes into minute descriptive detail regarding a London locale is in the case of Tellson's Bank. Here Dickens elaborates in his more usual fashion regarding the old banking house where Jarvis Lorry works.

Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business. Tellson’s (they said) wanted no elbow-room, Tellson’s wanted no light, Tellson’s wanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks Brothers’ might; but Tellson’s, thank Heaven!—

I suspect Dickens himself felt constrained by the necessity of composing anachronistic description of his own city. But in the case of Tellson's bank, the idea was that it hadn't changed in many years. Constancy over generations used to be one of the hallmarks of good banking establishments, o so one could suppose that he could simply describe a bank of his own era, and it would serve pretty accurately as one from eighty years in the past.

Banks and bankers are very important in the Harriman story, as it turns out. So the descriptions he furnishes here turned out to be worth reading the story by itself.

But aside from this example,  probably the best result of reading this classic novel was simply the experience of indulging in a masterpiece of storytelling. It didn't hit me until the middle of Book the Third (the last act, so to speak), when I realized how much of the story had been prefigured and set-up through earlier actions which seemed disconnected at the time I read them. I can't overestimate the inspiration this had on me, and made me extremely satisfied and grateful that I had started my side-research with this book. There could be no better example to follow in this regard.

A tough act to follow, but a nice burden to have!