Friday, May 4, 2012

Guest Post with author Jess Faraday



By way of talking about my book, I'd like to recommend someone else's. 

Setting The Affair of the Porcelain Dog on the back streets of late Victorian London involved more than putting everyone in frock coats and bonnets. Creating an accurate setting required a deep, multisensory understanding of the city and its occupants. Toward this end, Victorian London Street Life in Historic Photographs by John Thomson, was an invaluable resource.

Originally published in 1877 (and reprinted by Dover Publications in 1994), this is a collection of original photographs by one of the world's first documentary photographers, with accompanying explanatory text by the photographer and writer Adolphe Smith. Having access to the images of people as they actually appeared, and text written by people as they actually spoke, gave me as close to an authentic time-travel experience as I believe is possible at this point.

Perhaps because I'm part of a generation raised more on images than on text, I found the photographs to be essential for immersing myself in the time and place. Seeing the clothing, the dirt, the conveyances, I could feel them. Feeling them, I could write about them as if I had experienced them. The accompanying texts were also helpful. Not only did I learn what people of the time thought about, but how they thought about them, and how they expressed those thoughts.

But even more fascinating as the atmosphere the authors call to life are the essential parts of the culture of the time that not only no longer exist, but which, because of cultural and technological shifts, we would never imagine existed in the first place. By way of example, I give you:

The Public Disinfectors: How did one stop the spread of infectious disease without antibiotics or modern antibacterials? This was the job of the Public Disinfector. Courting not only disease and death, these brave men had to be clever enough to find out which homes harbored disease--the shame of it keeping many homeowners from admitting to disease under their roofs--and incorruptible enough to eschew bribes from homeowners desperate to avoid stigma. True heroes in the fight against epidemics.

The Old Clothes of St. Giles: Follow the path of a garment as it makes its way through a succession of owners, clobberers--who clean and doctor used clothes to look like new; and translators--who convert garments into other garments, until eventually these are broken down and re-woven into new cloth and made into brand-new garments--and are eventually reduced to a sort of dust and used as fertilizer. No doubt about it, when it came to recycling, the Victorians make modern people look like amateurs.

The Crawlers: A study of the poorest of the poor--those who "beg from beggars", how they came to be there, what their lives were like, and how circumstances conspired to keep them there--as well as the niche in society that they carved out for themselves.

Even if you're not writing the next Greatest Victorian Mystery Ever, this thin book makes for fascinating reading. And if you are, it's a treasure trove of plot-starters and interesting ideas.


About the Author

Jess Faraday is the author of one novel, three book translations, a handful of short stories, and numerous nonfiction articles.

She is a graduate of the University of Arizona (B.A.) and UCLA (M.A.). Since then, she has earned her daily bread in a number of questionable ways, including translation, lexicography, copyediting, teaching high school Russian, and hawking shoes to the overprivileged offspring of Los Angeles-area B-listers.

She enjoys martial arts, the outdoors, strong coffee and a robust Pinot Noir.

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