Not all knowledge is contained outside LJ

[desperance]

Whoops. I have been cheerfully reading Adam Hart-Davis' What the Victorians Did for Us as a piece of casual research (for the steampunky stories about the barber-surgeon-spy who shaved Half-Emperor Cyrrhenius): the book is a coffee-table tie-in to a TV series, so deep it isn't. But superficial can also be instructive, especially if you can treat it as reliable; one thing for sure, Hart-Davis knows more than I do. In and of himself, he does, and I'm sure he has researchers also turning up book-suitable facts.

Three chapters in, I hit what is almost the first fact that I know independently - and it's wrong.

"Cholera was especially frightening, because it was a new disease. The first case, apparently brought from India, appeared in Newcastle in 1831..."

Sunderland, damn it! Sunderland!

(For a rather wonderful novel about the outbreak, see Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger. Written by an American who had never been to Sunderland, but that's okay, we ain't proud...)

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Trouble is, that's going to sow a seed of doubt about the rest of the book, isn't it?

(Is that incident mentioned in Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland?)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

That is exactly the problem. Not that it matters, technically, to me: if I find a neat idea I'll run with it anyway, and call it a part of the fantasy. But from a non-research angle it does rather take the gloss off.

(And rather bizarrely, given how often I've read that text [I was proofreader-emeritus], I can't remember whether Bryan used it - tho' I find it hard to imagine that he didn't...)