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

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

The North South divide as we know it goes back to the Danelaw. Seriously. That's why the Northern acents are different to the other accents, a lot of the old local dialects are based on Norse, there's a much greater preponderance of Scandiwegian genes.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Half of Geordie is really Scandiwegian, both vocab and pronunciation.

[irishkate.livejournal.com]

My brother lived in Aberdeen for a while and listened to one of the local languages and said it was like listening to the Swedish chef speaking Irish.