This week I was very nearly trapped in obsessive research. If this sounds like an a Addicts Anonymous Affirmation, that’s because it jolly well is.
Those of us who live by giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name need an anchor. There has to be something to stop us floating away from the shore, ever onward into The Next Thing.
Shakespeare had his fellow actors to keep his feet on the ground and the quill pen in his hand. Not to mention the need to keep up the supply of stories in a form to fit the two hours traffic of his stage. Three at the most.
Basically he had a highly critical audience demanding stuff they would pay for in the face of serious competition, like his main rival, Christopher Marlowe, in combination with actor Edward Alleyn and backer Philip Henslowe.
Reasons for Research
I’ve always suspected that Shakespeare loved his research as much as I do. (Well, on a good day.) For instance, he seems to have read widely on the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487).
There would still have been plenty of oral memories around too, when he was young lad in Stratford, born less than 80 years after Henry VII’s triumph at the Battle of Bosworth. And that last battle was almost only 40 miles away, too.
Compare today’s children being told about the new Coventry Cathedral beside the ruin, a coronation on black and white television which everyone watched, including the procession in pouring rain, the witchhunts of the McCarthy years in the USA…
Impossible to imagine that people weren’t still talking about where they’d been and what they’d done when the Big Stuff happened. Always being careful to navigate diplomatically round Tudor sensitivities, of course.
So I imagine that Shakespeare was comparing his embedded recollections with third party accounts for all sorts of reasons. But, listening to the Chorus from Henry V, “Oh for a Muse of Fire”, I’d put money on a big slug of it being sheer delight in digging for the digging’s (and the discovery’s) sake.
In my own way, I did something similar when writing a story partly inspired by my mother’s time working at the BBC during the War. My childhood memories of what she said about her velvet-curtained office – in what had been until then, and is now, the Langham Hotel – were vivid. But I needed other perspectives. lndeed, following that experience, I’ve already blogged on Libertà Books about the risks and rewards of research .
But I Need It…
I still stand by every word of that blog. But that was the result of sober assessment, recollected in tranquility. Today’s blog is instead inspired by Unexpected Episode of Obsessive Research.
Suddenly I need to write a ghost story set in Victorian times. Now, I know a bit about Charles Dickens and his books; more about Robert Browning and his poetry. And I did A level history from the Congress of Vienna, 1815, to the end of World War 2.
It should have been OK. But somehow it wasn’t. Dickens’ view of the world is so utterly his own, that I couldn’t hijack it.
And Browning was a bit of an odd duck even in his own day. He definitely marched to his own drum and frequently wrestled normal syntax into strange contortions. Reading his first poem Sordello, contemporary critic Thomas Carlyle said that the only bits he understood were the first line (Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told) and the last (Who would has heard Sordello’s story told). And both were untrue. Many agreed with Carlyle, then and now.
And congresses, revolutions and the Charge of the Light Brigade, don’t tell you a lot about how people actually lived, day to day. I wanted letters; diaries; I wanted gossip. At the very least I wanted a Victorian journalist talking about The Way They Lived THEN. (And no, Anthony Trollope wouldn’t do either. Too political, too worldly, too involved in the status quo.)
Research Route to Obsession
So I went on one of those Internet long distance rambles, starting with Browning and, in particular, his poem Mr Sludge the Medium, in which he tears to pieces a phony pyschic.
The psychic concerned was real, Daniel Home (pronounced to rhyme with fume.) And Elizabeth Barrett Browning believed in him and his mediumship.
Browning hated him. Husband and wife seem to have argued over it ferociously. Elizabeth died in Italy in June 1861. Mr Sludge was published in London in 1864 as part of his poetry collection titled Dramatis Personæ. Browning himself returned to London permanently and became a bit of a literary lion. His convoluted grammar and occasionally obscure vocabulary was more than outweighed by his romantic history and on-going devotion to his late wife.
So my route started with drawing rooms and letters. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Browning genuinely liked and felt at easy with intelligent women. His correspondents handed me onto others. Pretty soon I found myself in company with a bunch of proto-feminists who met in Langham Place. Moving sideways, I traced the activities of Daniel Dunglas Home, found names for some of his supporters, and thence to men of science who tried to investigate the paranormal from a place of disinterested enquiry.
New Victorian Clubs of Significance
And thence I came to the founding of assorted clubs:
- the Langham Place group, a meeting place for women to meet and disccuss projects to promote social change and educating women to earn their own living. It was founded in 1858 and funded by two wealthy and unconventional women, Helena Comtesse de Noailles and Theodosia Blacker, Baroness Monson
- the X Club, basically the home of Darwinians, a nine-member dining club founded by Thomas Henry Huxley, with invited speakers. They met on the first Thursday of the month and were prominent in setting up the now internationally respected publication Nature in 1869. Previous experience had taught them the importance of a dedicated editor and they employed, initially part time, Norman Lockyer who served from 1869 until 1919, a year before his death.
- The Metaphysical Society, to encourage rapprochement between religion and science. Membership reflected this and was by invitation only. Men only, of course.
1869 the Woman’s year
After all this research I was strongly attracted to set my story in 1869. Quite apart from the founding of Nature, it was a fabulous year of change for women.
On May 15th “the London Nine”, who had been admitted to London University the previous year, took the first General examination of Women at Somerset House. It consisted of having to pass a minimum of six papers from “Latin, English Language, English History, Geography, Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, two from Greek, French, German and Italian, and either Chemistry or Botany”. Six passed. They got a Certificate of Proficiency, not a degree. But it was a start.
In October, the Edinburgh Seven, led by Sophia Jex-Blake, were admitted to lectures at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, the first women in the UK to do so. Again, no degree in prospect.
And in Hitchin on 16th October, the forerunner of Girton College Cambridge was set up by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon. It took five women students.
Barbara Bodichon
Which brings me to the jewel of my mad research obsession. I had even never heard of her before, but Barbara Bodichon was a true child of changing times and left her mark on the century.
To begin with, her parents did not marry because her father disapproved of the principle of a woman’s legal identity being absorbed into her husband’s on marriage. As she had no legal personhood, she could not own property or even a wage which was not regarded as her husband’s. The wealthy found ways round this by setting up trusts for their married daughters. Barbara’s father, a member of the landed gentry, was quite prosperous enough to do so. But he was Ben Leigh-Smith, a Radical Whig politician (son of the Radical William Leigh Smith) and refused to do so.
They sound a wonderful family. One of her brothers became an Arctic explorer. All 5 children went to the local school to learn alongside working-class children, instead of the boys going to a public school, as was the case with most of the gentry. Ben Leigh Smith gave all the children, male and female, an income of £300 per annum from the age of majority.
Married Women’s Property
Barbara, one of the founders of the Ladies of Langham Place, founded the Married Women’s Property Committee (MWPC) in 1855 and drafted a petition which was circulated nationally with a request for signatures to support a Married Women’s Property Bill. Elizabeth Barret Browning’s name appeared a the head of the petition along with Mrs Gaskell and other respected women. Over 26,000 signatures were gathered in just a few months and it was presented in parliament in March 1856. The result, eventually, was the Married Woman’s Property Act 1870.
Barbara also set up the English Women’s Journal, was a close friend of George Eliot and in 1865 helped raise the idea of parliamentary reform to allow women to vote.
When the Researching had to Stop
You will see that either my obsessive research would have to embrace Barbara and the whole Leigh Smith family or I had to stop right there. So I did. With a heavy heart. I’m out of the mire now and ready to go forward with the ghost story and so much more.
It has been a wild ride. And apart from getting the year 1869 for my story, I don’t think I can use any of my research findings.
BUT I must just leave you with one snippet that made me laugh, as well as realise how greatly society has changed in the last 100 plus years.
Ben Leigh Smith had a sister, Fanny, who became the mother of Florence Nightingale. Clearly the latter shared qualities and talents with her cousin Barbara. But the young Nightingales were never allowed to mix with the Leigh Smith children. Why? Because Barbara and her siblings were illegitimate.
Now there’s a story, waiting to be told!
What a wonderful deep dive! It doesn’t matter one jot if you can’t use any of the research in the current story, the fact that you have done it, and revelled in it, means that you are soaked to the skin in the period and writing from within it. Lovely stuff.
Thank you Jan. You comfort me.
I do so recognise this syndrome since I suffer from it in exactly the same way. But it’s one of the great joys of writing, so I’m not knocking it at all. Enjoy it. That’s what I do 😉
Well, I’m certainly glad to have met all these people. You’re completly right about that, Joanna.
On the other hand I’m sort of ashamed that I didn’t at least know about Barbara Bodichon or EBB’s support of the married women’s property movement before. And there’s so much more that I really WANT to know about all of them, including Barbara’s family and the psychical investigator scientists. Surely some of them must have engaged with Charles Dickens, for instance….
Sitting on my hands here, not to go back into it and write* the damn story instead.
*Or dictate, I suppose, given the start of that sentence.
I can understand your fascination, Sophie. Such interesting times and such interesting women. I’ve been in deep diving mode, too, but thankfully have the answers I need and there are no rabbit holes for me to fall down. Time to get writing. Probably.
Interesting.
Will dive again tomorrow.
best to all
I can so relate to that problem, Sophie – but I find it’s inspiring, it adds joy and even depth to the writing, even if not one word of the research ever reaches the page! The problem is knowing when to stop, of course, but my goodness, as an addiction goes, it ain’t a bad one! Thank you for sharing this, and making many of us feel better about our own research rabbit holes!