And the Pope knew then the Church was doomed...

The Vicky era (as I've decided to affectionately term 1800 - 1900, in every country in the world) was a time of great worry for the Christian clergy.  Everyone knows of Darwin now, but he wasn't the only threat.  Men like geologist Charles Lyell, the strongest opponent of the Diluvial position, argued strongly against the Church's statement of facts. 

Charles Lyell was born in Scotland, and moved to London to become a barrister.  He couldn't because of poor eyesight.  There is more information on him at Wikipedia: Charles Lyell.  Then there was the guy who published the Theory of Natural Selection.  No, it's not Charles Darwin. It was Alfred Russel Wallace, whose publication prompted Darwin to publish his own paper.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed in evolution.  He thought men came from orang-outangs.  William Buckland proved that Kirkdale Cave was a prehistoric Hyena den and found elephant and hippopotamus bones.  In Yorkshire. Buckland was also a member of the clergy.

So, with all this science abounding, its no wonder the clergy began to shake in its foundations, shakes which reverberated right up through the church.  And that's when the Pope knew the Church was doomed...

Or at least, that's modern theory.  In fact, 47% of Americans believe the world is no more than 10,000 years old and that sometime in those 10, 000 years, Man was created looking as he does now.  The Church wasn't that worried.  Indeed it had its own internal problems with Young Creationists and the Old Earth Theorists. 

Next History Post (Next Tuesday, I'm sticking to post planning) will look at Church attitudes to these theories at the time, with more information on Buckland - he's fascinating.

 And I'll use the desktop so I can include pictures, yay!

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, 150th Anniversary Edition is available at Amazon, for $6.95, if you're interested.  If not, I doubt the world will end.



Who's your favourite Victorian scientist?

1. Darwin
2. Lyell
3. Buckland
4. John Snow
5. Professor Challenger
6. Dr Moreau
7. Dr Jekyll
8. Dr Frankenstein
9. Lamarck
10. Huxley

Let me know...

I've decided not to do a post on airships

Mostly, because I found this awesome site.




This picture is taken from it. As are these random facts...

• Weight was of crucial importance in operating an airship so only lightweight materials were used, even the grand piano in the salon was made of aluminium rather than wood.
• Airships such as the Graf Zeppelin with a top speed of 129 km/h (80 mph) could easily compete with transatlantic liners.

It's a fantastic site, with lots of information. I might go into more depth on airships in a couple of days, or failing that I might move onto how they fly.

Back to writing advice soon. Coming next on writing advice is part 4 of Making Gunfights Exciting.

Click on the post title to go to the site, as always.

The World of the Steampunk Hero

A lot of people think of Victorian London when they think of steampunk. It is a fascinating city, with a fascinating history... particularly between 1850 and 1920. From the gruesome murders of http://www.casebook.org/ Jack the Ripper, to Dr John Snow's investigations into Cholera http://www.johnsnowsociety.org/johnsnow/facts.html, it was a twilight time of darkness and light. Darkness in that children as young as 8 were sent naked up chimneys to clean them, although a law aiming to stop this was passed in 1841. (For all the worst jobs of the day, see this Channel 4 link, http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/W/worstjobs/victorian.html). Light, in that it was a time of great scientific advancement, from trains to electric lights, from ships to jeans (first made in California in 1850). The Great Exhibition was set up to showcase these scientific advancements http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/speel/otherart/grtexhib.htm.

But there was far more to the world than just London...

The American civil war began in 1861 http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/, whilst China had the Taiping Revolution from 1850 - 1864 http://members.tripod.com/~enyi/index-4.html. Australia was still taking in criminals until 1868. That was 162,000 men and women on 806 ships in just eighty years http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/convicts/. There were also several goldrushes which tripled the countries polulation in twenty years http://www.patricktaylor.com/australian-gold-rush.

The world was a fascinating place in those days... infinitely smaller than it had been (although a work of fiction, Around the World in Eighty Days was very much based upon fact) and yet large enough to be filled with mystery. The wild west wasn't tamed, and although the slave trade had been outlawed by Britain (the world's superpower of the time) it was still happening. The British Navy fought against the slavers for over fifty years.

Africa's interior was still largely unknown and, although Dr Livingstone was investigating it, legends of monsters, like the mokele mbembe, persisted http://spookysdaddy.com/CongoDinosaur.html, whilst in South America the rubber barons were a law unto themselves http://www.mongabay.com/10rubber.htm.

There was body snatching in the earliest part of the century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body-snatching, which led to murder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Hare in Edinburgh.

With so many extremes, from extreme levels of civilisation (compare the civilised debauchery of Paris to the simple savagery of Amazonia) to extreme levels of behaviour (from the scientists who would save the world to the governments and madmen and money-seeking criminals who would seek to destroy it) there is no shortage of situations to inspire the modern novelist.

I will be going into each of these, and much more, in greater detail. Something for you to look forward to, then...