Not all knowledge is contained outside LJ
Jan. 28th, 2009 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceWhoops. 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...)
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...)
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Date: 2009-01-29 11:30 am (UTC)