I got to thinking about The Countess of
Vintage's (From the Aether Guild of Writers on Steampunk Empire) comment about vocabulary. At first, I wasn't sure if she was talking
about vocabulary in the usual sense or in the broader sense of 'memes'. Anyway,
thinking at the moment of words, and bearing in mind that everything I suggest
is only what I think works for my writing and need not necessarily for anyone
else's, here are some thoughts.
First, people in the era in which I write -
the Edwardian – talked much the same as we do. There are as many (or as few)
differences as there are in British regional speech today. I try not to let
words get in the way of the story. From time to time I might use a word (say
'golly' or 'gosh' that raises an eyebrow when I read at the Richmond Writers'
Circle. For these though, even when I am right (both words could have been used
in 1904), I have to consider making a change because, if the RWC are distracted
from the story by a word, then everyone else might be too. It is possible perhaps
to use a strange word with a footnote explaining it. George MacDonald Fraser
does this quite often, especially with foreign words such as Indian words used
frequently by British soldiers. In G MacD F's case, this is more justifiable,
as he purports, in the story, to be the editor rather than author. (To digress
a bit, nearly half the American reviewers of the book thought it was a genuine
autobiography.) So I try to only use
unusual words where the reader can easily guess their meaning or if the meaning
is known but the word rarely used. For example, my grandmother, born in that
era, would use 'hark' more often than ‘listen’. Another example, again G MacD F,
is his use of the term 'the earlies' to refer to the period around 1830. This
is a rare term but, in context, easy to make sense of without breaking
rhythm. At one stage, I was thinking of
using, for fun, some of the slang used by the upper reaches of British society
in the late Victorian era. This was more or less a childhood invented language
of the Wyndham sisters that spread, as they married into various families. It
would have required footnotes on every page so I ditched the idea. A more difficult case is that of words such
as 'intrigue'. This was raised at a
recent presentation by Lynn Shepherd, D.E.Meredith and Essie
Fox. They are published authors of Victorian thriller / crime novels. Apparently, Intrigue in the sense of conspire
was used in 1904 but not in the sense of 'create interest in'. I should never
have known this and assume that there must be many other examples where I shall
put my foot in it. These three
intelligent and articulate women were pretty clear that such mistakes are to be
avoided. In similar way, one of them noted that if an author gets the hansom
cab fare for a journey wrong, some reader somewhere will know this and write to
them. I am not quite sure how much consternation this should cause me. I think I would spend all my limited time
researching rather than writing. I should be interested in what others think.
Returning to writing authentic speech for the fin de siècle, I think it is more
in tone than language itself. There is a touch more formality than we use
today. This can be taken too far though.
As examples of the era where first party narrators chat to the reader in
lively tones, much as we would now, consider: Allan Quatermain in the first few
pages of King Solomon’s Mines, J in Three Men in a Boat or Rassendyll in The
Prisoner of Zenda. From memory, there are no words used in these that are not
common today.
