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| Grown in the rock or dead in the rock? |
When we write about the past, we're generally very careful to get the words in any dialogue right and the objects, fashions and behaviours right. We don't have kids in the 18th century saying 'Cool!' while looking at their smart phones and balancing their skateboards on the edge of the pavement. And we don't have them know things they obviously couldn't know. But it's hard to get inside the minds of people who didn't know certain things we take for granted to such a degree that we don't even consider them knowledge. Of course, they didn't know what they didn't know, just as we don't know what we don't know. Two hundred years from now, it will be hard for anyone to think themselves into our mindset, too.
It's easier where new knowledge replaces old. If you're writing a story set in the 17th century, you know that people thought disease was caused by an imbalance of the humours or bad air (miasma) rather than microscopic germs. But where new knowledge replaces ignorance or even no-concept-at-all it's trickier. Three hundred years ago no one knew dinosaurs had ever existed, or that any animal or plant had ever gone extinct. That might not come up in conversation very often, but it colours how you think of the world, knowing we are at the (current) end of a long line of things gone before us. You could still imagine the end of humanity, but it would be as a fate imposed by God and highly unusual. Now, it's a run-of-the-mill extinction, likely to be brought about by our own actions, either directly indirectly. If your 16th century character picks up a fossil, they won't know it's the tooth or bone of an extinct animal. If they know anything at all, they'll think it grew in the rock. If they find a maggot in their food, they will think it generated spontaneously from the mouldering food. Your 14th century character likely believed, if they knew any history, that Britain was originally populated by giants, who were defeated by Brutus (hence 'Britain'). It colours your entire view of life in ways that are hard to imagine and certainly hard to absorb fully when writing. Even Hilary Mantel stumbles, having one of her characters pondering eyes like 'alien moons'. There was no concept of any moon but our own in the time of Henry VIII — the telescope hadn't been invented and Galileo wouldn't see the moons of Jupiter for another 80 years.
Yet your historical characters probably had far greater knowledge than you of many things. They could have identified more plants and herbs (and known their uses), made their own medicines, identified the songs of more birds and the tracks of more animals. Some cave paintings show animals in such precise detail that biologists have used them to identify species. That shows a level of observation as well as artistic skill that is beyond most of us.
For all these differences in worldview, though, the characters we write about are fundamentally like us, their children like our children. They could learn to skateboard and enjoy it. You could learn to distinguish bird songs. When we write people of the past, we are also writing people of the present, and about the differences and similarities between people in all times and places. Seeing and celebrating the differences highlights the similarities.
Next time you write — or read — something set in the past, pause for a moment to think what the characters could never know. Electricity? Dinosaurs? Anaesthetics? White bread? The cause of earthquakes? That Earth goes around the Sun?
Out now:
The Dinosaur Book, Lonely Planet, 2021
5 comments:
Great post - thank you!
Reminds me of that famous quote by someone or other: "There are known knowns, the things we know we know; there are known unknowns, the things we know we don't know; and there are unknown unknowns - the things we don't know we don't know."
Sometimes I wonder how much we can fudge the issue, when writing historical characters. In that, 'what was known at the time' is itself a hazy area. There was the *official* line always, but how much else was known through folklore, custom and practice, or niche areas of knowledge, which never made it into the mainstream? A case in point is vaccination - the idea that catching cowpox would save you from smallpox was undoubtedly circulating for many years before Jenner picked up on it.
Similarly, there may have been countless 'wild beliefs' in the past that were scoffed at in scientific circles, which later proved to be (accidentally or otherwise) correct. It's always fun to read a historical novel where some character voices a theory that the modern reader knows to be correct, but those around them laugh and say, 'No, it could never fly!'
(Incidentally I think that Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell is deliberately anachronistic at times. At one point he has an idea for something that is obviously the internet. He's written as a man completely out of his time, with a modern sense of irony, almost as if he's reading his own story.)
Yes, Nick. Certainly people knew getting cowpox was protective, but not that you could artificially transfer the protection. Though Jenner wasn't the first to do that, just the first to do it extensively and publicly. Da Vinci is a case in point. He made lots of discoveries and publicised none of them. They lay hidden in his notebooks and had no impact on emerging science. Doubtless there were plenty of other people who had insights that never propogated outside their little domain. And wild beliefs aplenty. Though they could be dangerous. You could be burnt at the stake for thinking there might be alien life.
Interesting point about Thomas Cromwell, too :-)
(And it was Rumsfeld, I think, who said that about known and unknown unknowns.)
Brilliant post!
Thanks again, Anne.
Very interesting and thought provoking!
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