#HistFicThursdays - Guest Post - Brenda W. Clough - Make it Believable: Slang in Historical Fiction

It is #HistFicThursdays once again, and today I'm delighted to be sharing a guest post from Brenda W. Clough, in which she explores the creation of believable speech and the power of slang!

My great power in historical fiction, the thing reviewers praise me for, is making my characters sound genuinely historical. You would never mistake the people in my novels for the folks in Bridgerton or Dakota Jackson movies. I make them think and talk and react like they were born in 1819, not 2009. 

The trick to this, as you might expect, is research. You can find out how people talked when Victoria was queen. The great charm of the 19th century for the novelist is that there is so much material! Newspaper archives, paintings, periodicals on line, books, massive memoirs and biographies of the main players of the period – you could research forever, and never come around to writing your novel.

But be careful to consult the right sources. Google, for example is unreliable. Those sites ‘Twelve Victorian Profanities We’d Like to See Come Back’ are, alas, worthless. We know about the new Hollywood trend to update classic novels with modern slang. Even other historical novels are suspect. Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances are addictive, but if you insist on borrowing, you should double-check all her catchy period slang. Some of it is genuine, and for some of it she exerted authorial privilege, and made it up out of whole cloth.

Instead I draw your attention to novels and nonfiction written during your period. If you’re working in any era of the past 300 years or so, there’s plenty of material: newspapers, magazines, letters, sermons, political satire. For my Victorian and Edwardian fiction I amass period phrases the way some people collect beads or yarn, a hoard of them.

Slang, particularly, is solid gold. It’s easy to find serious and boring prose, but slang has personality. The people that you listen to don’t talk like church deacons or politicians addressing a meeting. Their speech is snappy!

There are some good dictionaries of slang on line, like this: https://greensdictofslang.com/  Also pictured here are the three of Eric Partridge’s Dictionaries of Slang I've consulted over the years. Notice the lavish use of Post-It notes, to mark the especially good phrases. You can give yourself some elbow room with these kinds of resources, because the verbal use of a term probably precedes its recording on paper by many years. Partridge’s has the phrase ‘fuck an old rat’ listed as 1920s or so. But it was too vivid not to put into the mouth of my Edwardian science fiction hero Titus Oates, a historical man and a famously profane explorer who died with Robert Falcon Scott in Antarctica in 1912.

Dictionaries only carry you so far. You have the word, but how was it used in a sentence? Finding it in use is the way to go. Fortunately some of the masters of slang and dialogue were operating in my period. Charles Dickens is inimitable in more ways than one. Under the pen name ‘Boz’ he wrote extensively about London and its denizens, and from him I stole terms like ‘up to the time of day’ and ‘familiar with a move or two.’ i.e. not an innocent from the country. Dickens surely knew all the dirty words, but since he was writing for a magazine he was careful to use, or invent, bowdlerisms and catch phrases. His readers knew exactly what he meant when Dickens described a young woman as up to the time of day.

Then there are the words and terms that even Dickens could never write down: curse words, profane exclamations, invective, sexual terminology. People were far more conservative about this kind of thing when the writer knew the work would be read by many people. Even letters sent home from India or Antarctica were expected to be read aloud by the home fireside. Were you going to mention your adventures with Calcutta prostitutes if Aunt Lucinda and Granny were seeing that letter?

For X and R-rated terminology the author might scout out marriage manuals and ‘family’ books, written for conscientious mothers to hand to the bride or groom just before the wedding. For that sort of material I resort to LIGHT ON DARK CORNERS: A Complete Sexual Science. A Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood. Advice to Maiden, Wife and Mother, Love Courtship and Marriage. Is that a title or is that a title? Similar instructional works enjoyed a brisk sale in the days before you could learn all about sex on YouTube. My copy is battered and falling apart, clearly read and re-read. I got it as a present, but since it was published in 1900 it’s in the public domain and available for free on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23609

This book is so magnificently period that it’s nearly unreadable, formatted in numbered paragraphs so that you can cite the text by chapter and verse. It’s a ragbag of disorganized tips and advice. I estimate that a full third of the text is devoted to denunciations of masturbation. And there are startling treatments for diseases. Did you know that consumption can be cured with hot water? I wonder if it would work with Covid?

Nobody read this manuscript before it went to press, or if they did nobody cared enough to fix anything. The inconsistencies inherent in the work from page to page are neck-snappingly sharp. We all know, right? That beauty in woman is meaningless. It is her inner soul that should be lovely! Here are some complexion tips and ideas on how to improve your hair. No, a girl should only marry for love. Next up, a long numbered list of things she should consider when a fellow shows interest in her. These include his height, his income, how he treats his mother, his teeth, and the shape of his skull. (Flat heads, bad!) 

I could mine this book for vocabulary and ways of thought forever. Consider this magisterial assurance about prenuptial discussions, addressed to the young lady: “You can have no more certain assurance that you are to be victimized, your soul and body offered up, slain, on the altar of his sensualism, than his unwillingness to converse with you on subjects so vital to your happiness.”  I immediately lifted ‘slain on the altar of his sensualism’ and put it into my novel. How could anyone resist?