{"id":2940,"date":"2016-10-02T23:05:57","date_gmt":"2016-10-02T23:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/?p=2940"},"modified":"2016-10-02T23:05:57","modified_gmt":"2016-10-02T23:05:57","slug":"edwardian-arcane-part-one-1893","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/edwardian-arcane-part-one-1893\/","title":{"rendered":"Edwardian Arcane Part One: 1893"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome, dear listener, to Autumn on greydogtales<\/em>. Or Fall, if you happen to be a colonial with balance problems. We have a new theme through October\/November \u2013 Edwardian Arcane<\/strong><\/span>. It’s going to be fantastical, phantasmagorical, and even ‘all right if you like that sort of thing’. We’re restarting our interviewing for another year, with schedules flying out over the next two weeks. And we’re going to return to Lurchers for Beginners<\/em>.\u00a0 What is this nonsense? We’ll explain\u2026<\/p>\n

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A year ago we were all William Hope Hodgson<\/strong>, and so we’re picking that up again, but in a wider way. The world, the secrets (that’s the Arcane<\/strong> bit) and the weird fiction of the period. Supernatural tales and what used to be called scientific romance, detective tales, and a bit of occultism.<\/p>\n

We’ll be discussing classic ghost stories, and covering some of the latest pastiches and tributes in the Hodgsonian Revival, as old WHH begins to get the credit he deserves. There will be games (Legal notice: There may not be any games)<\/em><\/strong>, scares and frolics aplenty. And we should be having some guest posts, as we did last year.<\/p>\n

Because we had to have some sort of boundaries, we’ve picked the twenty five year period from 1893 to 1918<\/strong>. It’s a fair choice, because the Edwardian era proper sat in the middle of it, and it opens up the changes seen in transition from Victorian times to what we might call the modern world. Our own Last Edwardian<\/em> series also kicks off right in the middle of this twenty five year stretch, although we cunningly only realised that afterwards.<\/p>\n

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william hope hodgson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let’s start with a very British perception of the Edwardian world:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world of 1906…was a stable and a civilized world in which the greatness and authority of Britain and her Empire seemed unassailable and invulnerably secure. In spite of our reverses in the Boer War it was assumed unquestioningly that we should always emerge “victorious, happy and glorious” from any conflict. There were no doubts about the permanence of our “dominion over palm and pine”, or of our title to it. Powerful, prosperous, peace-loving, with the seas all round us and the Royal Navy on the seas, the social, economic, international order seemed to our unseeing eyes as firmly fixed on earth as the signs of the Zodiac in the sky.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait<\/em><\/p>\n

A view not actually shared by some Brits of the time, especially those with little money and in crippling jobs, or by a lot of the many peoples shoved into the British Empire without being sent a questionnaire first.<\/p>\n

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PLEASE TICK ALL OF THE FOLLOWING:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n