A horse-drawn hansom is dusty and battered.
Smoke but no petrol fumes.
Bowlers and top hats.
Sooty navvies.
Long skirts.
Everard's grandparents are young couples, his parents unborn.
Grover Cleveland is President.
Victoria is Queen.
Kipling is writing.
The last American Indian uprisings are still to come.
Train not very different from 1954.
Sleepy village station.
Tended flower gardens.
A buggy to the Wyndham estate.
A tall, thin, hawk-faced private investigator.
His burly, moustached, limping amanuensis. (Of course they are there then.)
A guy who borrowed Guardians of Time said, "Sf writers usually just tell us that the characters are in 1894. Anderson shows us it."
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Also, Time Patrol milieu offices in late Victorian times would be wise to avoid being too avant garde in using the latest tech then available.
We all should know at once who was that tall, thin, hawkfaced investigator and his burly, slightly limping companion!
Ad astra! Sean
You are not only -shown- 1894, you smell and feel it as well as seeing it.
Incidentally, the first time I was in Britain was 1954! My parents and family visited there.
My father was stationed in Britain a bit earlier, and once told me and my brothers of an episode.
The RAF base he was at had a rule that they converted to "summer" at a fixed date; the windows in the mess were left open, everyone switched to summer uniforms and so forth.
It happened to be quite chilly on that date, and my father came down to breakfast in his overcoat.
The base CO, in equally chilly tones, informed him that in Britain, they switched to summer uniforms on that date.
My father politely replied that in Canada, when it was bloody cold they wore overcoats.
BTW, Britain was slow to switch to electric light compared to a number of other places.
Two reasons: first, Britain had pioneered gas lighting, and the adoption of the incandescent mantle for gaslights (which vastly increased their light output).
Second, when electricity came in, the structure of regulation imposed on electric generation companies was modeled on that for gas-production companies (the gas came from coal, heated in retorts).
This proved to be grossly inefficient because of the greater transmissibility of electricity and the far greater economies of scale from central generation, and it took decades to get the voltages and so forth made uniform.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Amusing, that story about your father! An example of how rigid the bureaucratic mentality can be. Summer begins on June 20, so everybody was supposed to switch to light summer uniforms, no matter how COLD it might be that day.
Incidentally, we've been having very hot weather this week, in MA--but it was miserably dreary and chilly on Saturday.
What you said about gas lighting and the difficulties the UK had moving from coal gas to electricity bears out the point I made elsewhere about how hard it can be changing from one type of technology to another.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: to be fair, there was no precedent for electricity and they had to feel their way. Edison got a lot wrong at first too, but we were lucky enough to have Westinghouse and Tesla.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That is true. And I saw some interesting TV shows about the early history of electric power ad lighting. Including Edison's mistakes. And Tesla's work was also discussed.
Ad astra! Sean
Tesla is living proof you can be a genius and a gobsmacked loon at the same time. His crotchets were numerous and... ranged from the amusing to the deeply deranged.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And Tesla could not handle the details of everyday life and business! What he needed was a manager who could take care of those things for him.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Westinghouse did that for a while. And with notable honesty, by the standards of the day.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that was good of Westinghouse!
Ad astra! Sean
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