Category: History and research

A day in the life of a historical novelist often involves research showing you made a mistake. Or in this case, two.

I wanted a scene where my character meets a girl in a place of intellectual discovery. I chose the London Library. Ooops — entrance was by membership only, and he is too poor to be a member.

So instead, I envisioned the scene, set in 1882, taking place in the newly opened Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had a bit of trouble finding a floor plan, and I wanted my characters to walk through several galleries.

On this map, which I later discovered was made in 1905, I found a fish gallery and wrote the scene.

My character followed the girl from the Shells gallery, got lost because the Starfish gallery doesn’t go through, lost her while she went through Corals, and they both wound up in Fishes.

(Yes, this is a watermarked image from Alamy. Such companies make a lot of money copyrighting public domain images because they digitized them.)

At the display cases in the museum, my character looked at a stuffed pike, and the pike looked back. Trying to impress the girl, he inquired about dogfish, and they found one. He then expounded on how dissection of the dogfish, combined with rabbit and frog, provides all the biology student needs to know about vertebrates.

But once I discovered the map was 20th century, I needed an older map and began searching the usual places: Internet Archive, Google Books, DuckDuckGo. I found a floor plan for which the Museum wanted to charge me. Then I thought to look in my Baedekker guide book (1883). It had no floor plan, but rather a detailed description of the exhibits that ended with this:

Uh oh. So I went here, to British History Online, one of my favorite sources for London. It had a much better map.  And there I found out it’s true: the zoology exhibits wouldn’t have been there in the summer of 1882, or at least not yet open to the public:

“The building was handed over to the British Museum by the Office of Works in June 1880 and opened to the public in three of its four departments in April 1881: the last (zoological) gallery was opened in 1886.”

So now I must see if there’s a fossilized pike and dogfish, otherwise my clever scene won’t work.

Murder at Old St. Thomas’s is set in London in 1862, which was the year of an Exhibition. Although it was not as beloved as the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, the Great Exhibition of 1862 in London was extraordinary, as I noted in a previous post.

In addition to celebrating industrial and artistic achievement, the Exhibition also hosted meetings of several international groups. This included the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy. On June 13, the speaker was Sarah Parker Remond.

A free person of color born in Massachusetts, Remond was anti-slavery from an early age. It is reputed that she made her first speech against the practice when she was 16. Her parents were successful business people. They were active in anti-slavery societies, and made sure their children got a good education, despite the lack of good schools for non-white children.

Sarah was already known as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society (founded by William Lloyd Garrison) before she was asked to go to London in 1858. Her intention was to get a better education, and she enrolled at the Bedford College for Women while continuing to lecture. While she was there, the American Civil War began.

Her speech at the Exhibition in 1862 emphasized support for emancipation, and by implication the Union blockade against the Confederacy. Britain had declared itself neutral in the conflict, and British ships continued to bring in products to northern ports. She pointed out how the British cotton industry used the products of slaves, although Britain itself had outlawed slavery in 1824. The British Parliament had further passed the Slavery Trade Act of 1873 and were actively involved in confiscating slave ships, but were continuing to benefit from the manufacture of cotton grown by slaves in America. She said,

Let no diplomacy of statesmen, no intimidation of slaveholders, no scarcity of cotton, no fear of slave insurrections, prevent the people of Great Britain from maintaining their position as the friend of the oppressed negro, which they deservedly occupied previous to the disastrous civil war.

This was despite the fact that she recognized that:

Thousands among the commercial, manufacturing, and working classes, on both sides of the Atlantic, are dependent upon cotton for all material prosperity. . .

As the result of the efforts of Remond and others like her, Britain respected the Union blockade of the Southern states. But the result of the decline in raw cotton importation was mill closures and starvation in places like Lancashire. There it’s become known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine.

In 1862, as now, the problem was not just that economic strain had thrown people out of work. It was that there was not enough of a social safety net to provide for them when they lost their jobs. The British government engaged in some compensation experiments, including minor funds distributed directly (similar to today’s stimulus checks), but it was minimal and in many cases never reached the people who needed it. The new Poor Laws had funded workhouses rather than “outdoor” relief to help people at home. Ultimately, some relief occurred when the government provided money to local councils, who then created new opportunities for employment in public works. But that wasn’t until 1864. Before that any efforts were supported primarily by private charity (similar to today’s GoFundMe), partly out of a suspicion of increased government activity*.

In 1862 the issue was the moral culpability involved in profiting from slave labor. Now it is the moral culpability of forcing workers into plague conditions. Jobs that take place indoors have the greatest risk of infection, while those outdoors have the least. Safer jobs could include massive infrastructure repair on America’s roads, bridges, and parks. Designs could be implemented to move commercial, educational, and political enterprises into better ventilated conditions.

Perhaps public works, and a bit of advice from Miss Nightingale (see previous post), might be an answer beyond 1864.

____

* Hall, Rosalind. “A Poor Cotton Weyver: Poverty and the Cotton Famine in Clitheroe.” Social History 28, no. 2 (2003): 233.

Murder at Old St. Thomas’s is set in 1862, so I did quite a bit of research. For me, this was stepping back 25 years from my usual research area, so I found a lot of surprises, in addition to this novel technique for social distancing:

The first thing to do after putting on my crinoline was to find good maps of London, big maps where you can see street names and even buildings:

• Mapco’s Cross’s New Plan of London 1861
• VictorianLondon.org: Pictorial map 1854
• David Rumsey Map Collection: Colton’s 1865 Map
• David Rumsey Map Collection: Sanford’s 1877 Map
• Harvard Library’s Supplement to the Illustrated London News Map Guide to the International Exhibition of 1862

Guide to the what? The International Exhibition of 1862. Although the Great Exhibition of 1851, with its Crystal Palace, is more famous, this one was supposed to be even bigger. You can see the catalogue here. It took place in South Kensington, on Cromwell Road, where the Natural History Museum would be later.

The Victorianist blog has some good information, and points out that the death of Prince Albert in December 1861 put a damper on the whole proceedings from the start. And it says the building, above, cost £300,000 but the cost was covered by the profits from the Great Exhibition of 1851. My studies of Victorian science education claim that the entire system of British science education was basically financed by the same pool. Which makes me think that the money from the Great Exhibition of 1851 is like pieces of the cross. There is no possible way that they made enough profit in 1851 to fund everything that’s been claimed.

Another page with information is here.

And look, they even had cameras then:

The Exhibition caused a lot of traffic snarls, especially in west London. And it really was international, with exhibitors and visitors coming from all over the globe. More in my next post…

While she was not writing about people quarantined in their homes, Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing (1859) were about caring for people in their homes, and doing it well.

Nightingale is known, of course, for her service during the Crimean War and her active reform of nursing and hospital hygiene in the mid-Victorian era. She’s the one who realized that many deaths in military hospitals were unnecessary, caused by unhygenic conditions rather than wounds or injury. And she came to this conclusion when aneasthetics were in early days, and antiseptics as yet unknown (Joseph Lister would start his famous work after the war).

Contrary to her “lady with the lamp” image, Nightingale was a no-nonsense, if not actually abrasive, person. She was once even cussed out by a doctor who might have been the first woman to get a medical degree in Britain, except that s/he identified as a man (more on this person in a future post).

I have had a copy of Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing for awhile. I don’t even recall why I bought it. I assumed it was a book for teaching nurses, since Nightingale founded her school of nursing at St. Thomas’s Hospital. But it’s a book about nursing, not just in hospitals, but in the home. And her emphasis, not surprisingly, in on creating healthy conditions.

It is also not surprising that this was considered a job for women, and in my opinion this book should reside on a shelf alongside Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published in series at the same time, and printed as a book only two years later. Most people know that Ms. Nightingale was a big advocate of fresh air. In fact, the odd configuration of the new St. Thomas’s Hospital, opened in 1867, was the result of her promotion of cross-ventilation.

Have you ever opened a window for fresh air, and it became so chilly you wished you could leave the heat on? Nightingale recommends this, or at least keeping the fire going with a window open, so that an ill person can have fresh air. She points out that you can keep the patient warm with blankets, and safely allow fresh cold air into the room.

Her book also notes that opening doors and windows is to no avail if the air that comes in isn’t fresh. If your room opens onto a utility closet, or you leave your chamber pot open under the bed (oh those master bathrooms!), or your window overlooks a refuse heap, you are not doing any good with air. Ill people really should be taken out into the garden to get a little sun and air, which I see done all too seldom. I’ve been in elder nursing homes where the windows don’t open and the only outside is a little paving of cement in a courtyard. Nightingale was not a fan of courtyards — the air isn’t fresh enough, going round and round.

All of her advice was based not only on her experience, but on research and statistics. Her faith in scientific endeavor was firm. In the early 1860s, when the plot was being hatched for passing the Contagious Diseases Act, she argued against it based on statistics. The idea was that preliminary arrest and examination of prostitutes would prevent venereal disease in the military. The act would give the police power to arrest any woman they suspected of being a prostitute. Many who were against the idea argued on the basis of feminine modesty, or the inappropriateness of making a private disease a public issue, or the likely abuses by the police. Nightingale argued on facts: everywhere that harsh measures arresting and examining prostitutes had been enforced by a state, the V.D. numbers had actually increased rather than decreased.

Her household nursing advice seems so common-sense, and yet is often ignored, then and now. She had to recommend that damp towels be spread out to dry, that one not chit-chat inanely with someone who wasn’t feeling well, and that one should always sit beside the sickbed rather than hovering over it, forcing the ill person to crane their neck. And here’s more:

• Reading the patient the funny bits of a book you’re reading (update: bits and memes off the internet) is extremely annoying to the ill person.
• Quiet is important, because when someone is ill certain sounds can be distressing or even intolerable.
• A bedroom, where one sleeps, is not the same as a sickroom. A person in bed because they are ill needs not only air but light, and should be able to see out an open window.
• The bed needs to be aired daily — in fact Nightingale suggests two different beds so the sheets of one can always be aired. Not doing this, or using too much bedding and thick mattresses, leaves the patient essentially in their own waste of sweat and their own breathed air. (The current metal hospital bed is likely based on the iron ones she recommended.)
• Cleaning must be thorough. Damp cloths, not dusters that just raise the dust into the air. Carpets are horrible even if lifted and beaten 3 times a year (I can just imagine what she’d think of wall-to-wall carpeting). Bad smells indicate organic matter is stuck to things, and it shouldn’t be.

See why I want this filed next to Mrs. Beeton? It’s far less about medical nursing than about good housekeeping. The medical advice reminded me of Hippocrates, especially when it came to diet (“The diet which will keep the well man healthy may kill the sick one”). But at this time, when there is more than the usual concern about people being ill at home, it’s still good advice.