Getting the date/location of my historical right

Hi guys,

I've never written a historical before, so I really need some help here.

I want the story set in England, in the past, because it's a riff on A Christmas Carol. However, it has to be set during a time when the MC's comfortable middle-class house would not have a telephone, but when it might be plausible for a robber to use a pistol in a home invasion. I also want the MC to be a banker. Would somewhere around the early 1800s sound reasonable to accommodate all these?

Also, could anyone suggest where the MC could live? The whole story takes place in his house (again, Christmas Carol), but at the same time, I'd like to have an idea of the house's location. It can't be in the center of London's financial district, partly because I imagine that would be prohibitively expensive and partly because it would be too easy for him to escape from what's happening in the house by just walking across the street.

I want him to be a bit isolated, and I've written an unusually heavy snowfall into the story for that reason, but at the same time I'd like it if the house itself was in the suburbs somewhere. Not expressing myself very well here, and I plan on doing more research, but I was just wondering if anyone had any suggestions on this. Thanks in advance!

ETA : I should mention, by the way, that I'm going to pitch this story/novella as a paranormal romance that happens to be set in the 1800s. So the history doesn't have to be rigidly accurate or to the level of a real historical, but at the same time I don't want to get anything obviously wrong either.

SJAB said:

I would say if you set your story before 1879, which is when telephones first began to appear, even as late as 1900 for the rich in rural areas. Maybe even prior to the 1914-18 war. I seem to remember from something I read that a telephone subscription cost about £20 round about then and the average earnings were £75 per year!

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Hmm. My MC would definitely want a telephone if he was able to get one, so it has to be set before 1879, then. I think I'd rather be closer to that date than to the Regency period, anyway.

It's not a make-or-break detail. Most of all, the story needs the MC to be isolated, unable to contact anyone else or get help easily, but I want the charm of the past as well - you know, like oranges in a stocking. Thanks for your help!

King Neptune said:

If you want the MC to have a revolver, then it would be after 1840, or so. So your best time slot would be from 1850 to 1880. Railroads came in the 1840's also, and a banker would have gotten a country house, if he could.

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1870 it is. Thanks!

So it would be realistic for my MC to have a country house and commute to work via the railroad? Because the country house would be ideal for both the setting and the plot.

The person with the revolver is actually the antagonist, who breaks in as part of a robbery/home invasion.

wendymarlowe said:

I may be reading more into this than you intended, but please don't make the mistake of assuming that just because something is sold as "romance" that it's not held to the same accuracy standards as any other genre.

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No, you're quite right. I should have expressed myself better. I just thought that in a paranormal romance, there would be less focus on the history than in an actual historical or a historical romance. IMO, there's simply less room for it in my (so far) short story which takes place over 2 -3 days in the same house.

Which does not, of course, mean that historical details can simply be gotten wrong with no consequence.

Unless you're self-publishing, you're going to have to impress an editor with this book - and any editor worth their salt can tell whether you've decided to half-@$$ your research or not. Pick a year (or a decade or an alternate universe), read up on it a bit, write your story, and run it by a beta reader who also has a working knowledge of that historical period. It makes a huge difference.

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Unfortunately I don't know any beta readers who are familiar with that period. I wish I did, because I have a ton more questions! But I did get a copy of What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew and am reading that.

Helix said:

Dunno if this'll be of any help, QoS, but under 'built environment' it mentions who tended to live where and how they commuted.

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Thanks, Helix, that did help.

waylander said:

By 1870 there was an extensive network of lines and stations in Surrey and Sussex. if your MC is seriously wealthy then he could have a fine gentleman's residence a carriage ride away from one of the rural stations which he returned to for weekends and holidays while he stayed up in town (at his club?) during the week.

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Thanks for the info! It won't be a very fine residence, but I'll set the story in Surrey.

The carriage ride part is worrying me, though. The story depends on there being a freak snowfall which strands the hero and heroine in his house. If he lives in the countryside, would it be implausible for him not to have a carriage of his own? I just wanted as few servants as possible around during the three days in which the story is set, because there's also a robbery and I didn't want to have to account for the servants (or have them be harmed, for that matter).

Sunflowerrei said:

That's a fun book, but make sure that what you need is specifically Victorian. I noticed that it tended to generalize everything into "nineteenth century England," although Regency is quite different from Victorian.

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I'll keep that in mind. The book is fun, as you said, but I might check the library for something else more specific to the 1870-1880 period, and preferably with more pictures too.

Sunflowerrei said:

Maybe it's a holiday and he gave the servants some leave?

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Oh yes. The whole story takes place over three days (Dec. 23, 24, 25) and he gave the servants time off for the holidays. The problem is that if there's a carriage, there need to be horses. So there would need to be a coachman or groom to take care of them. The MC is the kind of person who genuinely doesn't care if he has a slice of cold pie twice a day, but the horses can't be neglected (unless the coachman gets a holiday too and I have the MC going out to the stable to feed them, I guess).

Also, according to Wikipedia, there was a huge blizzard on January 17th & 19th in the southern part of England in 1881.

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I like that detail. At least freak snowfalls aren't completely unheard of over there.

ETA : Though maybe if the coachman slept in the carriage house, that would put him safely out of the way once the action starts, while simultaneously making sure the horses were all right...

waylander said:

Servants ill or recently fired?
Difficult to see how a wealthy man of that period would not have some in a country house.

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The story is a riff on A Christmas Carol, so I wrote him to be the kind of person who doesn't celebrate Christmas. On the other hand, his servants do, so he gives them all a few days off, figuring he can do the accounts, catch up with correspondence and more or less take care of himself until they're back.

Maybe I could have his house be within walking distance of the railway station, meaning there's no need to have a carriage, except the heavy snowfall means no one's walking anywhere.

Mr Flibble said:

If it's a riff on a Christmas Carol, he could very grudgingly give them unpaid time off (and then they can't get back because of snowstorm and he'll dock it out of their wages...until he sees the light)

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Well, it's a romantic riff on A Christmas Carol, so he's the hero. As a result, he's not a mean-spirited bully to his servants (they get time off with pay), but at the same time, he's an introvert whose worst fear is of poverty, because he was almost bankrupt once. So he works over Christmas, refuses to spend money on frivolity, etc.

Making the house in the country does complicate matters though (with the need for horses/grooms/maids etc). Can he not have a small cottage somewhere for solitude where he eschews the expense of servants? (Scrooge wouldn't hire anyone he didn't need to and would penny pinch to the extreme) I can't see a Scrooge having a flash house in the country and hiring lots of servants. That would be unnecessary expense. I can see him in a little cottage on his own and lonely, doing for himself.

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I was trying to strike a balance between the house being the kind which would require servants every day for maintenance and the house being so miserable that the heroine would be completely turned off. She arrives unable to do things like cooking, so if he's living on dry bread and gruel, it's not going to be easy to spin a romance out of this.

So I was going for a more lower-middle-class feel. Small parlor, dining-room, two bedrooms upstairs (because I need to put the heroine somewhere other than his bedroom at first), everything either utilitarian or shabby, all the nice stuff like silver plate or even china figurines long since sold off. Not totally unpleasant, but not many creature comforts either. Basically, the kind of place where he could manage for a few days without servants because he expects it to be a very low-maintenance holiday. But other than those few days, he does need some help in the house.

If it's possible to have his house within walking distance of the nearest station, though, I could dispense with horses. That just leaves a cook and maid, maybe a housekeeper as well, but they can all take off for a few days.