Beat up and thoroughly researched

Well I’m home from Philadelphia and feeling beat up, thanks! I don’t mind because I also feel pretty damn accomplished. Three days is nowhere near enough time to dig through the vaults of historical goodness there, but I ran my ass off trying.

I don’t know how many people who see this blog are interested in writing historicals, but I know one or two of you have done it already, and several others have more than a passing interest in the subject. So I figured I’d put up the story of my research for The Resurrectionists, my first novel-length historical (historical-paranormal-romance-medical… somethingorother?) and see if y’all wanted to compare notes or give suggestions. And hell, it’s about the most interesting thing I’ll ever have to talk about here anyhow, so why not?

Brief background on this plot: boys go to medical school, girls have their scholarly reading circle. Ambitious boys entangle girls in dubious experiments (not to mention dubious lifestyle choices), clever girls complicate said experiments with their own concerns (and some dubious lifestyle choices of their own). Experiment ends in gaping face wounds, insanity, suicide, terrifying medical breakthrough, and severe guilt complexes for all. Also some broken hearts, though by that time it seems incidental.

I knew this much when I started prep reading. My research shelf at GoodReads gives some indication of just what I was looking at, but there are also a lot of articles and documentaries I dug up on the relevant subjects. I also read a lot of historical fiction to the same end, but there are two problems with that:

1. Fiction involving early modern medical types is generally Victorian, whether British or Colonial, which makes it too late to be useful; what doctors talked about then would not be what my doctors should be talking about. Also, fiction involving grave-robbers and resurrection men is almost always British, in spite of the fact that we imported the trend, not to mention a few actual grave robbers, late in the 18th c. Alas, fictional period grave robbery seems to be the province of the country that gave us the very real Burke and Hare*. Admittedly, this was part of the impetus for writing about some American resurrectionists, so at least I saw that one coming.

2. American historical fiction usually clusters around the Revolutionary or Civil War eras– and I’m landing squarely between those. (War of 1812? What was that? Yeah, we hate talking about wars wherein American ass got kicked, don’t we? None of it happened but the Battle of New Orleans!) So that means a lot of Brit-centric Regency fiction, which is of course my favorite historical sub-genre, but worried me in terms of day-to-day life and how people spoke.

So then I did my first Philadelphia trip to learn the lay of the land, choose an appropriate neighborhood, and just get a general education on How Things Worked. By the time that was accomplished these characters were bouncing around in my head like mad, and I thought well, I’m comfortable enough with this whole concept to at least hammer out a rough draft.

Those of you who are long-time sufferers of this blog will recall a series of WIP Wednesday posts involving pistol duels, grave robberies, medical experiments, ladies’ charitable societies, Madeira wine, early feminism, and of course, cravats. Naturally the whole thing was about 20k too long when I was done, but so’s everything I write.

Then and only then did I know precisely when the action in the book took place. I had chosen a year that seemed interesting (1826) and decided the seasons (spring-summer) based wholly on what sort of weather and activities the plot required. Ah, I realized, now comes the time for the real research. I started a new round of reading (also on the GoodReads shelf) and wondered how the hell I was going to get my hands on:

• First-hand sources like letters and journals, from which I could glean both language information– despite reassurances that Philadelphians sounded very like their cosmopolitan English cousins, there are obvious turns of expression that were different– and a general look at the concerns of the class of people on which I was focusing.
• Newspapers! American men were infamous for their attachment to newspapers, in all walks and classes of life, in everything I read about them. American woman not much less. Obviously, the papers had the pulse of the people, and I needed to know how it was flowing during the months in question. What were they doing on May 23, what criminal activity or stock prices were they discussing on street corners, and what was running at the New Theater on Chestnut?
• What went on at UPENN’s medical school on a day-to-day basis. This one was the hardest for me to fathom. There are plenty of excellent medical history books out there, America-centric ones abound, but specifics like this are neglected. Even just finding a listing of the faculty at this time is difficult, let alone finding out what they said in their lectures.

And that takes me to this week. But I’ll come back to that in a day or two, as this is already longwinded even for me.

ETA: Just got the okay to post this image I took this week. Eeee! Cravat Stiffeners!

From "The Philadelphia Directory and Annual Advertiser", 1825, courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia

*Oh my god, Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are playing them in a movie this year?! Tim Curry. Christopher Lee. Tom Wilkinson?! How did I not know about this?!

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