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

Off-topic

[kazdreamer.livejournal.com]

Spotted some copies of Daniel Fox's new book in FP today. Took a pic that can be downloaded from my phone tonight, if needed. ;)

I bought one for myself - it looks tres cool!

Re: Off-topic

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Saint. Angel. Goddess. Supreme Being...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

There is a perpetual confusion amongst Some People about anywhere north of Watford... Southerners!
(I, it should be observed, hail originally from Coventry.)

[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]

Do you indeed? I thought you were Welsh. But you're (almost) all southerners anyway, from where I sit. Either southerners or Scottish; there is precious little margin in between...

[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...)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I'm Welsh on my mother's side and on parts of my father's side.
Am not a Southerner. Am Midlander!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

"Bin gar keine Russin. Echt Deutsch!"

And yet, it's all south from here. As I gleefully point out to the Yorkshirepersons of my acquaintance. (Or in another mood I will gently, kindly suggest that Sheffield is in the Midlands really. They don't like that either.)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

And the last (I've been told) typhoid epidemic in England started right here in 1932 when cousins of a local family, on a visit from India, (and carrying typhoid, obviously) swam in the Square Wood reservoir at High Flatts which served Denby Dale, causing an outbreak of Typhoid in Denby Dale, but not here in the village.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

I think it's like the way that when talking about a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy the North and South Poles are in essentially the same place. For Londoners places like Newcastle and Sunderland are all at that one point where parallel lines meet.

They'll regret it when the sandmen come for them and they have to Run outside the city ...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's where you are! I've been there. Big pies...

And hee. I didn't know that. Thank you!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup. When my first novel was published (which is very explicitly set in Newcastle), the US publishers used the same text and the same cover but rewrote the cover copy. "Fear haunts the night-darkened streets of London..."

I wrote to point out the error. Paperback edition? Rewritten copy, still talking about London. To sheep, other sheep no doubt seem different...

[pennski.livejournal.com]

I tend to tell foreigners that we live about an hour away from London. That they can place.

[ellarien]

I've had foreigners (Americans, mostly) ask me where my native Sheffield is in relation to London. I tend to flail a bit at that -- in my mind, it might as well be on a different planet -- but I can just about bring myself to volunteer that it's forty miles east of Manchester, though I tend to want to qualify that. The Pennines loom large in my worldview, even though I live in the shadow of much more substantial mountains now.

(sorry, deleted from the main thread and reposted in the proper place.)

[ellarien]

As a Sheffielder I don't think of myself as from the Midlands, though I can see it as a point of view. (Did the habit of making coffee from instant powder in a cup of hot milk penetrate as far north as your parts? I seem to have that in common with some Midlanders I've met.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

We do not do that up here. On the other hand, I knew a lot of people in Oxford who did that, 'way back when. Lawks; I had forgotten. If I had thought about it at all, I might have assumed that it was because the instant coffee of those days was so awful it needed more disguising than a splash of milk and sugar; hadn't thought of it as a regional thing. As I say, though, not known in these parts. Or at least not observed, any time these last 25 years. You may be right...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Yes bloody big pies. The last one was 12 tons. I'm in (surprise) Birdsedge, which is about 2 miles from Denby Dale.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Sheesh. Send for Desperate Dan. I b'lieve Daniel Fox likes pies, but possibly not quite on that scale. Do they get eaten? And if so, um, how, and by whom? What heroes...?

[ellarien]

It was a thing we did at home in my childhood -- between 35 and 25 years ago, or so -- that I had begun to think was a family idiosyncrasy until I learned that a colleague who grew up in the Nottingham area used to do the same thing. (I don't do it myself; I prefer my coffee black these days, and boiling milk is among the many things that scare me.)

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

We have a confusion about things north of the Watford Gap, which is 70 miles north of Watford. 70 miles is a good distance to be from Watford, as anyone who's been there would no doubt agree. But this strange fact might also explain why some of us are confused.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

"Geographically, not that far from London. Conceptually and culturally, you could travel for a lifetime but not reach it".

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hah! If you'd ever had the nerve to penetrate further, you might have found Scotch Gap. Which is, um, a long way south of Scotland.

Happily, all our confusion slides away downhill, and pools in the Great Declivity. Which is what we call London.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

I'm OK up to and including North Yorkshire, but then it all gets hazy until you hit Scotland. And anything west of the Pennines is a closed book to me.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

A sort of Proto-caffe-latte!

(I was once accused of being a soft southern ponce by a colleague who was from Bristol. Which proves that regionalism is a state of mind rather than anything to do with the reality-based community).

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

De-civility, if you ever have to travel by tube.