History in the Slow Lane

I’m all happy right now because I just discovered that the Royal Mail from Bath to Bristol in the late eighteenth century took roughly two hours.

It might sound like an odd reason for jubilation (not like I have any letters in that mailbag!)but my plot depends on my heroine being able to reasonably take a day-trip from Bristol to Bath without it being a big, multiple day on the road, let’s-stay-overnight-at-an-inn-and-why-don’t-we-get-you-out-of-those-wet-clothes kind of thing.

Back in my youth, I found geography inconceivably boring. I couldn’t understand why they made us go to the trouble of memorizing those cities and rivers, coloring those boundaries, reciting those counties. History was enthralling, but geography? Blegh. When my former historian father told me that geography was crucial to history, I thought he was crazy. To me, history was personalities. It was kings and queens and scheming courtiers. Geography was lines on a map. Booooring.

Okay, Dad, you were right. I was wrong. History is geography and geography drives history.

As a writer of historical fiction, I find myself aware of and constrained by geography in ways I never would have imagined twenty years ago, when I was confidently telling my father that geography was boooring. In our current era, we’ve grown accustomed to a mind-boggling degree of mobility; in an early nineteenth century novel, travel and information are constrained by the speed of one’s horse and the quality of the road. A trip we dismiss as taking a few minutes might take a few hours. For example, that Bristol/Bath jaunt, which on today’s A4 would take roughly half an hour (discounting traffic) would have been a minimum of two hours for a speedy mail coach in 1785, while the full run from Bristol to London took sixteen hours.

Once we leave the roads, we’re talking even larger distances. Someone recently asked whether I could have the American heroine of my ninth book go back and forth between New York and Paris, since it would be kind of fun to see both places in the book—- to which my answer was that we wouldn’t see much of either, but we’d see a lot of time on board ship. No Jet Blue, no Concorde. The heroine of that book has been living in Paris for a few years and has only the vaguest idea of what life has been like back home in the Hudson Valley; letters that reach her are always already several months out of date. Even farther away, I shipped a bunch of characters off to India for my sixth book. That meant five months at sea, assuming the voyage was accomplished in a timely manner. It also means that any information going in either direction is delayed by five to six months. No email, no phone, no Twitter.

From a plotting standpoint, this means having to think very carefully about where you set your novel and where you take your characters, especially when young ladies are involved. I can get away with sending my heroine on a two hour drive with my hero to Bristol; a multiple day journey with an overnight would have been much harder to explain away. If there is going to be a journey, that journey has to be part of the story or carefully evaded by dispensing with it via ellipses or sticking it in between two chapters (aka “After three days on the road…”). For the purposes of characterization, it provides a salutary reminder of the limitations of our characters’ worlds—where they would have been able to go, what they would have been able to see, in a world before railroads, steamboats, air travel, and the internet.