History For the Wondering Wordsmith - It's wonderful for writers to know how to craft their prose, but it's useless if they don't have anything to write about. I'd like to talk in these posts about history facts that appeal to me in hopes that it will spark you all to research and come up with historical interests of your own.
Interesting Alternatives to Fiction - In Craft Talk, I talk about the formation of writing both prose and poetry. In Fiction Reading, Writing, and Thinking, I apply the lessons from Craft Talk to fiction writing. In Interesting Alternatives to Fiction, I attempt my hand at writing everything but fiction.
Let's start with the former. . . .
You Think You Have It Bad?
When something isn't going exactly as one wants it too, how many times have you told him something to the effect of; "You think you've got it bad? A hundred years ago they didn't even have (whatever it was)."I'm reading Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters, and reading some of the things Charles Dickens did for research made me feel like using the aforementioned sentence.
By January of 1838, Charles Dickens had created the bestselling Pickwick Papers, was editing Bently's Miscellany, and working on novels in his spare time. He had achieved fame like few authors had at this time. But the project he was working on at this time was somewhat different than his previous works.
Dickens had always been inspired by horror stories he had heard about boarding schools when he was growing up, and he decided to investigate one to get an idea of how they actually operated. So that January, Dickens and a man named Phiz--the illustrator who worked with the great writer--began to investigate the schools for boys in the Glasgow area, which were reported to be places where parents sent the children they didn't want around the house (I don't know why, but reading this put the Pleasure Island scene from Disney's Pinocchio in my head). The only reason the headmasters allowed their investigations, particularly one William Shaw who had apparently been brought to court for the poor conditions of his school, was that the two were disguised as representatives of a family wishing to send their son to the school. Among the more interesting horror stories that students gave Dickens was the tale that:
teachers, who to parents were all benevolence when they picked up the boys, seized the students' clothes once they arrived at school . . . gave them wooden clogs for shoes, and fed them black bread, water, and milk with only a daily ounce of often putrid meat . . . a boy who ran away was stripped naked, tied to the door, and brutally flogged in front of a whole dormitory, the process then being repeated in another dorm. (Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters, pg. 27)
Additionally, research taken at William Shaw's school turned up more interesting results:
Dickens and Phis visited a churchyard near Shaw's school where some twenty-nine boys who had died at the local boarding schools between 1810 and 1834 had been buried. A laconic entry in the Burial Register concerning the death of an eight-year-old--'supposed a native of Newcastle'--testified not atypically to the evident lack of family interest in the fate of one small victim. (Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters, pg. 27)
If that wasn't bad enough, the lawyer who had provided the two with a letter of introduction reportedly told them (in the privacy of their inn room, of course):
Dinnot let the weedur send her lattle boy to yan o' our school measthers, while ther's a harse to hoold in a' Lunnun, or a goother to lie asleep in . . . Ar wouldn't mak' ill words amang my neeburs, and ar speak tiv'ee, for weedur's sak', to keep the lattle boy from a' sike scondrels! (Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters, pg. 29)
Doesn't this make homeschooling, even modern public schooling, sound more agreeable?
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