{"id":287,"date":"2011-11-15T12:59:36","date_gmt":"2011-11-15T12:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=287"},"modified":"2011-11-15T12:59:36","modified_gmt":"2011-11-15T12:59:36","slug":"chapter-nine-of-spyders-what-is-historically-correct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2011\/11\/15\/chapter-nine-of-spyders-what-is-historically-correct\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter nine of Spyders: what is historically correct?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a note about what is is historically correct in the North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem<\/em>:—<\/p>\n

The working-class outsider who inherits a great man’s fortune is one of the common ideas in Victorian novels. <\/p>\n

Molded earthenware teapots had indeed been a Burslem staple, and would continue to be. Twyford had indeed invented modern sanitary ware at his Bath Works at nearby Cobridge, and later developed them at his purpose-built model factory at nearby Cliffe Vale.<\/p>\n

Sissy Mint was a real chip-shop owner in Burslem, but he lived in the 1930s. He was one of the most well-known of the chip-shop men.<\/p>\n

Herbalism still existed at that time. The Bibliotheca Staffordiensis<\/em> (1894) talks of Culpers’s<\/em>, a book not yet excised from Staffordshire’s libraries despite the many accounts of the alleged “occult” properties of the plants it described…<\/p>\n

“Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, and English Physician<\/em>. Wherein several hundred herbs, with a display of their medicinal and occult properties”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See C.S. Burne’s fascinating 1896 article in Folk-Lore: A Quarterly Review<\/em>, “Staffordshire Folk and Their Lore<\/a>“, for more details of archaic survivals of herbal and other folk beliefs in the county. Sadly I didn’t see this article before I finished the novel, or I would borrowed a few names and phrases from it.<\/p>\n

1768 was indeed deemed a “bad year”, of many eclipses.<\/p>\n

There was indeed a Brewery in Zion Street, Burslem. Not mentioned in the novel is the fact that a young trainee manager there was once the Nottingham murderer and alcoholic William Horry. But by the time he was a killer, he had moved to Nottingham.<\/p>\n

The southerly facing illuminated clock dial of the Burslem Town Hall was indeed illuminated, presumably at that time by gas.<\/p>\n

The tradition of the “rat in the cider” is an old one, and I remember the BBC’s The Archers<\/em> once spun a week’s worth of episodes out of it.<\/p>\n

The ‘Green Man’ figure can still be seen in various places around Stoke. The artist Kate Lynch has done quite a bit of research on the topic, especially in Stoke old town.<\/p>\n

The old Victorian ceramic-tiled underground toilets existed in Burslem town centre until very recent times. I went down into them myself, in the early 2000s. They were destroyed by the Council sometime in the mid 2000s.<\/p>\n

Eugenics<\/a> was then a current theory, and academically acceptable until the 1940s.<\/p>\n

The ‘League of the Just\u2019 did exist, although at a later date. In its later and more German form in the middle of the 19th century it was the place in which modern terrorism was theorised…<\/p>\n

“Karl Heinzen was the first to provide a full-fledged doctrine of modern terrorism; most elements of latter-day terrorist thought can be found in the writings of this forgotten German radical democrat.” — Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism<\/em> (2009).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…thus the novel’s fictional conflation of the group with The Terror of the French Revolution is somewhat justified.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a note about what is is historically correct in the North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem:— The working-class outsider who inherits a great man’s fortune is one of the common ideas in Victorian novels. Molded earthenware teapots had indeed been a Burslem staple, and would continue to be. Twyford had indeed invented […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}