Black Hours Diary Entry No.1: Research and Damnation

I find myself buried. Buried in pages. No… words. Yes, that’s it. Buried in words, and the images that come from them. My workplace was once a simple affair, yet now I’ve commenced the mammoth task of researching The Black Hours, it looks more like the tower of Babel – a mess of a study with books spewed about, lying open on their spines (I know, a shameful way to treat books) while others have pieces of ripped-up paper inserted between pages appearing as though the tops of the books have gone through a shredder. It’s all for a good cause, I tell myself. I can live with a little chaos, if there’s some order at the end…

Did you know that an average person living in London in the 1890’s needed 22 galleons of water a day?*

The Black Hours was always going to be a big project. I kept kidding myself thinking that a shorter book will mean less work, and you know, it worked for a while. It worked until I started looking for research material and instead of mining that "little" landscape expecting to find a steady stream, I found a sea bursting over me. In fact I wasn’t quite prepared for the volume of research material out there just for the period of history I was looking for: the 1890’s. Now that I’m floating, not drowning in research books, I’m trying to find the best way of navigating through the waves of words from everything on politics to society to culture. I know much of it bears little relevancy to what I’ll be writing, but Victorian England was just so damned impressive. A golden age of hope and innovation. Of culture and civilisation. Not to mention depravity. Yep, there was plenty of that still, and barely buried under the veneer of peeling red paint…

Did you know that the British Army in Victoria’s empire cost on average £19,000,000 to run per year in the 1890’s?*

So here I am, research book in one hand, typing away with the other. I’m quite aware that I may be fishing in the wrong waters, that some of the words I read might be discredited (the risk you take by casting your ‘net wide), but then I’m not bothered about utter accuracy. I’m not Tom Clancy. I’m not going to write about technical aspects of the age to the nth degree. I don’t believe you should flatter yourself or baffle the reader with fancy details that take a page or more of explaining, yet are superfluous to the overall plot. I subscribe to the notion that the story is God while writing a book. Everything else is secondary…

Did you know that painted walls in Victorian houses contained high concentrations of lead, yet if you opted to wall-paper your house instead, you could be slowly poisoned by arsenic? But then arsenic was also in your clothes…*

Nor am I a cheat. I’m not going to plaster over the gaps of my knowledge or write them off with a dismissive sleight of hand or use, to quote Shakespeare’s Beatrice, "a jade’s trick."
In about six weeks time I’ll be sitting down to write these words: "Chapter One: ‘the Dark Malady has returned…’" with a sense of excitement and trepidation. If I can strike the balance between plot and setting, and build a believable world for the reader from those words onwards - a believable Victorian world, that is - then seeing this world collapse under the weight of paranoia, epidemic, fire and damnation, might seem all that bit scarier, even to a 21st century audience.
That alone is worth a little research-purgatory.

(*These facts are gathered courtesy of Whitaker’s Almanac and the books of Judith Flanders. Very handy books, actually, but they’re taking an age to wade through...)