Interview - An Enthusist's Perspecitve

Finally, for our last interview, I have an interview ith Sarah Zinn, college student and reader of historical fiction. And through her reading, she's gained a lot of knowledge of the time periods in question.

KR:	So, to start off, who are you and what do you do?
SZ:	My name is Sarah Zinn, and I’m a senior English major in college.
KR:	Generally speaking, what time period do you tend to be most interested in?
SZ:	Mostly 19th-century literature, but I also enjoy a lot of writing from the early 1900s. That’s probably the historical period I’m most interested in, though I prefer slightly earlier literature, on the whole.
KR:	Have you read a lot of historical fiction from and about that time period?
SZ:	From the 19th century? Yes, I would say so. The Bronte sisters, the Shelleys, Oscar Wilde, the Rossettis, Ruskin, Keats/Byron/the literary circle of Leigh Hunt, Austen, H. Rider Haggard, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists (sounds like a good band name, doesn’t it?), Blake, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hawthorne, James, Kipling, Melville, Poe, Stevenson, Stowe, Thackeray, Wordsworth…
KR:	From what you've read, have you been able to learn some things about what life was like in those periods?
SZ:	Boy, I sure hope so! I’ve taken a lot of English classes that have focused on gender relations during that century, and I think it’s a fascinating topic. Victorian social norms (and much of the stereotypes we assign to them) were in full swing for much of the period, but the seeds of women’s rights were just starting to sprout a little by the end of the century. A lot of that was influenced by advances in technology, medicine, and healthcare. Speaking of which, industrialization first hit England in the beginning of the century, and that was a HUGE element that many writers responded to in their work. I would venture to say that the prevailing cultural aversion to topics of sex helped bring about gothic novels and poetry that dealt with unconscious desires, loss of innocence, and the more “animalistic” impulses within human nature – stuff Freud would go on to famously analyze in the next century.
KR:	Are there any little fun facts about daily life from that period?
SZ:	Well, not many people know that John Keats, the famous Romantic poet, was first trained to be a surgeon (which wasn’t a glorious profession at all, in fact – it pretty much meant he was the “amputation boy,” and he didn’t get paid well for it, either). Tuberculosis was all the rage, which means that a good majority of your female characters will die tragically of “consumption” in many books. It was the period most famous for women’s corsets and remarkably constricting clothing. Pollution (which was a new thing) made life in big cities pretty miserable for the urban poor, and “temperance” (anti-alcohol) movements became big in England and America. Europe was still recovering from the French Revolution, for the most part, during the first half of the century, but the second half saw the outbreaks of many minor revolutions that became politically significant later on. The Civil War broke out in America, and common notions of slavery were completely transformed by the end of the century. British imperialism gave birth to the stereotypical image of the handle-bar-mustached Briton wearing a safari outfit and pith helmet, journeying through jungles and savannahs in search of “natives” and big game. It’s also kind of funny to think about how widespread the fear of being buried alive in Victorian times was (going back to the gothic novel thing) – people were buried with little pull-strings connected to bells so that they could alert the graveyard attendant (get it? he took the graveyard shift?) if they weren’t quite dead enough yet. Frighteningly enough, that actually ended up saving a lot of lives….
KR:	If someone were to write from this time period, what's something they should keep in mind to make sure they stay historically accurate?
SZ:	I think a lot of modern-day writers are fascinated by the class and gender elements of (especially English) 19th-century culture, and while, in retrospect, those issues seem hugely important, I don’t think it’s what many people woke up in the morning thinking about. Of course, if you read literature from the period, you’ll find commentary on those issues, but by and large writers are philosophers more than anything else. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep in mind (while writing historical fiction) that people’s day-to-day lives felt as normal to them as going to the grocery store nowadays feels to you. I think we tend to either romanticize the period or paint it as exotic in some way (steampunk culture, anyone?), and it’s difficult to portray it as “normal” in its own way.

And there you have it. Special thanks to Sarah Zinn for taking the time to answer these questions! 

Zinn, S. (2012, May 02). Interview by K. Robinson [Personal Interview].