To no one’s surprise, I like older books. Which are not always the same as historical fiction. I have a soft spot for books that were published a hundred or more years ago, and were considered ‘modern’ at the time. I find them an interesting source for details on daily life- not the details the book says are reflective of daily life, because the concept of selling a specific narrative is not new. I’m talking about situations, descriptions, reactions, and other details that sit in the background, unnoticed and usually unremarked.

But cultures change, and sometimes I come across a situation that would’ve been familiar to contemporary readers, and the characters’ reactions understandable, but takes a little extra thought to translate the situation into something that’s accessible to a modern reader or someone who’s unfamiliar with that culture.

The first example that came to mind is the Lydia/Wickham plot line in Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. So Lydia got married without her parents’ permission. Who cares? Wickham’s birth is respectable if not quite as high as Lydia’s (he has to work for a living) and he’s handsome and pleasant. It’s unfortunate that they’ll be poor, but her family has some money, and Wickham has a job; they won’t starve.

But there’s a telling line in the narrative, in which the malicious gossips secretly hope that ‘Miss Lydia had come upon the town’. That was slang for ‘became a prostitute’. Her family isn’t afraid that she’ll get lost and have to be found and brought back home, or that she’ll marry someone unsuitable- well, they are afraid of those outcomes, but their biggest fear is that she’ll be trafficked into prostitution, at a time in history when there were no police and no task forces to rescue her. A victim in that situation, no matter the era, has a very short life expectancy. Wickham’s predilection for young and inexperienced women in the form of Miss Darcy, who was lucky enough to escape, is not reassuring to Lydia’s sisters; they rightly see him as the kind of man who would abandon Lydia once he’s tired of her. And even though Lydia’s a pain in the neck, she doesn’t deserve that.

A less horrifying example can be found in one of Heyer’s mysteries, The Unfinished Clue, where one of the characters’ antics made me giggle and wince and think about how times have changed- or not. The son of the house, Geoffrey, gets engaged to a famous dancer, Miss de Silva, and brings her to meet his family, who are gentry, and horrified to think that they might have ‘one of those people’ in the family.

A modern audience might wonder, what’s so bad about that? So Geoffrey managed to get himself a beautiful celebrity, the lucky dog. No problem there.

But the book was written in 1935, when performers and entertainers were still considered low-class, not the sort of person that ‘decent people’ hung around with. Translated into modern sensibilities, Geoffrey’s entanglement with Miss de Silva is like a college-aged man or junior enlisted soldier bringing a stripper home to meet his parents. Even the most accepting people are going to struggle with that, and Geoffrey’s father is… not that kind of parent. You’d think a retired general of the British Empire wouldn’t be so squeamish, though on the other hand, he might be standoffish because of those experiences- he’s seen what happens when his men get entangled with unsuitable women. Miss de Silva’s boisterous personality doesn’t help, and the book gets much funnier if you can mentally translate it into ‘Thanksgiving dinner in an emotionally reserved upper-middle class family whose son brought home a stripper- who doesn’t see any reason not to tell the family how good she is at her job.’ Fortunately for readers, the narrator is a bit detached from the swirling currents of familial fury, and can laugh at it.

On that happy note, what are some of your favorite ‘translations’ of fictional cultural situations that belong to a particular time or place? Keep it light; I don’t want to come back from today’s errands to find that the blog’s exploded.