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This past weekend, I attended my first in-person Historical Novel Society conference. I served on a panel called “Historical Fiction Revolving Around Real-Life Crimes” with Nancy Bilyeau, Mariah Fredericks, and Weina Dai Randel (right to left). All of us began with a “true crime” incident – but it got me to reflect and go a bit “meta” about how I use that juicy morsel of history once I find it. How do I know it has the heft to be the core of a book? Or – more precisely – how do I give it that heft?

Step 1: Finding the nugget. My first step in using historical facts is to pay attention when something snags at me, pulls me up short during research, makes me do that Chandler Bing double-take — “Wait, what?” Someone said to me once, if a fact surprises and intrigues you, it probably will intrigue others. I find that surprise is especially valuable here, as a gauge for what to pursue. The energy that surrounds genuine surprise can light a fire in my brain and inspire me for 2 to 3 chapters, which is enough to get the ball rolling.

An example: As I was researching for Down a Dark River, I was reading a rather dry article about the minutiae of maritime law, and I came across a sentence that went something like this — “In the wake of the worst maritime disaster London ever saw, the loosely upheld traditions and conventions governing traffic were codified into law in the 1880s…”

That tidbit in the prepositional phrase stopped me dead. Wait, what disaster? I googled and found the story about the Princess Alice, which was one in a fleet of small wooden pleasure steamers on the Thames in the 1870s. On September 3, 1878, it was coming upstream by moonlight and was rammed by a 900-ton iron-hulled coal carrier, the Bywell Castle. This is somewhat akin to a railway engine slamming into a baby carriage. The Princess Alice broke into three pieces and sank almost immediately, throwing 650 passengers in the water. Most drowned — and in a cruel twist, because it was a pleasure steamer, akin to our hop-on-hop-off buses, no one knew who was on the boat. It threw London into a panic for days as desperate families and friends searched for survivors and then the bodies, which were scattered over miles of riverbank.

This was certainly a horrible but highly valuable nugget of history. But how could I give it big stakes? How could I best use it as an element in my book, beyond its sensation value?

Step 2: Find the extended meanings. I began to identify a few aspects of the world of 1878 London that give this event higher and more particular cultural meaning.

For Under a Veiled Moon, I came up with these:
(1) the collision between a huge metal boat and a small wooden ship suggested the clash between two different modes of production — namely, between mechanization and agriculture and between industrialization and cottage industries that had existed earlier in the 19th century.
(2) there were Irish crew members and Irish men and women on both boats; I thought I might tie this into anti-Irish prejudice that I’d been reading about (rabid and rampant in some quarters).
(3) there was still suspicion of Scotland Yard after a corruption and bribery scandal and public trial put four Yard inspectors in jail the year before, in 1877.
(4) the lack of passenger manifest, and no way knowing who was on the boat, suggests the depersonalization and anonymity felt by many individuals in the lower and middle classes in the enormous city of London; and the vanishing of the individual in large impersonal bureaucracies and cities (typical of modernity).

This is just my personal example, but I think one way to add depth to a novel is to identify the historical elements that add symbolic resonance and can potentially establish big stakes for a novel.

Step 3: Ask the “what if” question. Don’t be afraid to bring in another historical aspect to be the warp to your weft. For Under a Veiled Moon, I brought in the hundreds of London newspapers that printed rumors and misrepresentations in the aftermath. This allowed me to talk about Victorian (social) media. I departed from the truth in saying that London papers were all accusing the Irish Republican Brotherhood of sabotage. And I use my Author’s Note (Acknowledgments) as my get-out-of-jail-free card, explaining where been historically accurate and where I’ve taken liberties.

True history tells us that the Princess Alice/Bywell Castle collision was the fault of both ships: the Princess Alice was in the wrong place, the Bywell Castle was going too fast. But what if it wasn’t an accident? What if it was sabotage? Who would do such a thing and why? That’s the question that helps me discover my characters – the villains, the victims, the innocent bystanders, the protagonist, and the forces allied against him.

How do you use your historical nuggets? What are some that you’ve used? Or decided not to use?

(Such a cool word that I was never sure how to pronounce: duh-GARE-uh-type)

On this day (January 9) in 1839, the daguerreotype, which many consider the first viable photographic process, was publicly announced at the French Academy of Science. It was also announced in the London periodical The Athenaeum the same month and stirred great interest in England.  

As with many inventions, photography emerged as the result of several inventors working individually and in collaboration. In 1826, what some consider the first photograph was taken by the Frenchman Joseph-Nicephore Niepce. It was of a barn. However, it required an 8-hour exposure time. This was not particularly viable in many cases – portraits, for example.

The first daguerreotype, which required less than half an hour, was taken in 1838, when Daguerre captured the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, including a shoe-shiner and his customer in the lower left-hand quadrant (near the curb).

The daguerreotype quickly became popular and was recognized as a major step forward in modes of representation. Edgar Allen Poe called it “the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science,” and the artist, critic, and author John Ruskin claimed, “Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote: the daguerreotype” (1845).

What’s the backstory?

Louis Jacques Daguerre was born November 18, 1787 in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, France (died 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London). Daguerre’s early professional life included being an artist and an assistant set designer for stage plays. He strove to dazzle his audience with realistic scenes that represented day turning to night and good weather to bad, and created the impression of motion. He later called them “dioramas,” or “dramas of light.” His illusions depended on representing objects realistically, which he accomplished with the help of a camera obscura.

The “camera obscura” – a light-proof box, with a lens, through which an image passed – had long been used by artists as a tool to increase the accuracy of representing three-dimensional objects in two dimensions. With an object’s image projected on paper or canvas, the artist could then more accurately sketch his or her representation of the object.

Daguerre became interested in finding a way to fix the image on a surface or plate without the artist’s intervention. Building on the work of Niepce, he sought a special material that might capture an image inside the camera obscura and then stop capturing anything more, so the image was rendered permanent.

Daguerre eventually hit upon using silver-plated copper sheets, which he treated with iodine to make them sensitive to light. After projecting the image onto them in the presence of light, he exposed the plates to warm mercury vapor, which combined with the silver to fix the image. A saline wash prevented further exposure.

The daguerreotype was popular into the mid-1850s, when new technologies including glass negatives and paper prints, which had the advantage of being reproducible, evolved.