I can’t believe I haven’t written about this before, but if I have, it was lost to the mists of time. In any case, there’s a museum not too far from where I live, dedicated to a steamboat that sank in the 1850s and was recovered in the late 1980s. Most of the goods it was carrying were destined for pioneers living in the upper Plains region, and they’re a cool mixture of practical things like tools and hardware, and pretty things like painted dishware. Most of these artifacts were very familiar to me; I’d used them in my childhood home growing up, or seen them in my grandparents’ home. When I took my dad there last year, he looked at the 150-year-old woodworking tools and pointed out a few that he’d used the previous week. Not just the type of tool- the actual item, made by the same manufacturer, in approximately the same year.

This is mildly interesting family history, but its value to you, dear reader, is that it made me think about historical fiction and world-building. When doing research on historical aesthetics, it’s easy to find fashion plates and magazines, paintings, sketches, and all manner of material purporting to show ‘how people lived’- or dressed; those are also common. And its easy to fall into the trap of thinking that’s what everyone looked like, and all their houses were decorated in up-to-date style.

This is not the case, of course. The vast majority of people, past and present, don’t have the time, money, or inclination to update their entire aesthetic every year. And in the past, even minor unnecessary alterations were confined to people who had spare money- a much smaller cohort than we tend to think. Recall that there were about twenty English dukes during the Regency, not the zillions that populate the fiction of that genre. Redecorating one’s drawing room was an extravagance, and people expected the silk on the walls, the carpets, the wood floors, and the furniture in those rooms to last for years if not decades. Depending on the era, a lot of people may have wanted to be as modern and up to date as possible- our modern liking for antiques is a fairly new phenomenon- but there simply wasn’t the money to buy a whole new wardrobe every year in the centuries before mass-produced clothing, or new furniture when the most sophisticated wood working tools were hand planes and foot-powered lathes. Fashions also changed more slowly because of the slow rate of production, so there was somewhat less urgency to update one’s look.

Most people used the items they had, until those items wore out or broke. Then they were repurposed into something else. The Victorian family who greatly prized a broken plate is a good example- it was the perfect size and shape for mashing potatoes, and they weren’t going to throw out such a useful object because it had devolved from its original condition.

Things are different in fiction. For one thing, readers expect a certain degree of historical accuracy, to ground them in the world of the story. A character casually walking around in a crinoline will make most people think ‘Victorian Era’ and if the story is actually set in World War II, you need to have a good explanation and it needs to be in-text early on, before the reader can get it in their head that the setting is Victorian.

Temporal historical accuracy is also a useful characterization tool. If your character is very up-to-date, he or she is probably wealthy and cares about fashion- with all the knock-on effects that come with being one of the in-crowd, or trying to be. Back in the day, fashion, especially in clothing, was a way to show that the person was paying attention to the people around them, and was worthy of notice- and therefore, social or political advancement. Having the newest dress or the fanciest drawing room wasn’t precisely a matter of life or death, but it could mean the difference between arranging a good marriage for your child, or one that was merely respectable.

On the flip side, there are some reasons to eschew historical accuracy. A character who’s not interested in fashion can appeal to modern readers because we value antiques more and we sympathize with characters who do the same, or they can be the subject of ridicule in universe. Or both. It all depends on how you portray the person. A woman who dresses out of fashion can be dowdy, poor, or merely eccentric. Those descriptors all had negative connotations back in the day, but our culture values eccentricity- in fiction. Real life is, of course, a whole different ball game.

Now and in the past, wealthy eccentrics are more acceptable to society than poor ones. Fifty Shades of Grey would have been a horror story if the main character had lived in a trailer park instead of a penthouse. Your Regency-era middling class main character doesn’t have to be a pattern-card of respectability, but if you’re writing a realistic and believable story, their eccentricity should have effects on their life, or the lives of their family. See how the Bennet family of Pride & Prejudice is nearly ruined because of Mr. Bennet’s refusal to participate on society on behalf of his daughters.

Another thing to keep in mind is that fashion, technology, and ideas don’t spread instantly or equally. The further you go back in history, the more true this is, because of the limitations of technology, but it extends into modern times, too. The Aran Islands of Ireland didn’t have electricity from the mainland until the 1990s, more than a century after the technology became viable. There simply weren’t enough people living on the islands to make running an undersea cable an economical choice (and presumably, some people had generators; I don’t think the entire community was completely without power). So, if you set a book on the Aran Islands in the 1980s, there are two sets of people who’d have electricity in their homes: the wealthiest people in the community, which was a low bar at the time; and a shopkeeper catering to tourists, if he happened to live adjacent to his shop. This simple difference in technology can and should affect the plot and characters, as it affected the lives of the people who lived with it.

As with most things related to writing, no matter what you write, someone will love it and someone will hate it. Do your best but don’t drive yourself crazy over minutiae.