Welcome, dear listener, to Autumn on greydogtales. Or Fall, if you happen to be a colonial with balance problems. We have a new theme through October/November – Edwardian Arcane. 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.  What is this nonsense? We’ll explain…

A year ago we were all William Hope Hodgson, and so we’re picking that up again, but in a wider way. The world, the secrets (that’s the Arcane 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.

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), scares and frolics aplenty. And we should be having some guest posts, as we did last year.

Because we had to have some sort of boundaries, we’ve picked the twenty five year period from 1893 to 1918. 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 series also kicks off right in the middle of this twenty five year stretch, although we cunningly only realised that afterwards.

Let’s start with a very British perception of the Edwardian world:

“The 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.”

Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait

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.

PLEASE TICK ALL OF THE FOLLOWING:

• I WOULD LIKE MY TRIBAL OR OTHER BORDERS ALTERED DRAMATICALLY WITHOUT DISCUSSION
  
• YOU ARE WELCOME TO MY NATURAL RESOURCES, ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE REALLY VALUABLE
• I WOULD RATHER HAVE A KING/QUEEN THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY THAN A LOCAL CHOSEN LEADER
• I AM A DIFFERENT COLOUR TO YOU

Not that we’re making much of a political statement. Many peoples did many bad things in the period we’re covering, and not all of them were British. But we wouldn’t want you to think that we’ve gone Empire-mad. It’s actually the scary fiction in this timespan that we’re interested in, amongst other things.

THE 1893 SHOW

As we’re starting in 1893, here are a few key supernatural and scientific romance writers, and what they were up to back then:

Clark Ashton Smith was born in 1893, so didn’t write a lot that year, only some free-form verse.

H P Lovecraft was 3 years old.

Marjorie Bowen was 8.

William Hope Hodgson was 16. After gaining his father’s permission to be apprenticed as a cabin boy, he had begun a four-year apprenticeship in 1891. Hodgson’s father died shortly after, leaving the family impoverished; while William was away, the family subsisted largely on charity. His apprenticeship ended in 1895, but he stayed at sea for some years.

Alasteir Crowley was 18 years old, and busy catching gonorrhea and doing chemistry experiments. Odd chap.

H G Wells was 23. His first published work was a Text-book of Biology in two volumes – 1893.

Algernon Blackwood was 24, and had not yet started writing supernatural stories.

Arthur Machen was 30 years old. In 1893 he would be putting the finishing touches to The Great God Pan, which came out the year after.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was 33. She had written The Yellow Wallpaper in 1890 at her home of Pasadena, and it was printed a year and a half later in the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine.

Arthur Conan Doyle was 34. His character Sherlock Holmes had become widely known with the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891.

Bram Stoker was 46, and had been to Whitby three years before.

Lettice Galbraith is hard to track down, and was of an unknown age, but in 1893, New Ghost Stories was published by Ward Lock and Bowden as a ‘Popular Sixpenny’ paperback. It was one of the most popular ghost story collections of the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society (relevant later on our series) was also 46 years old. Her mentor Madame Blavatsky had died of influenza in 1891.

Elsewhere in 1893, to add more context on the world of the writers we’re covering:

• Rudolf Diesel received his patent for the diesel engine.
• The Duryea Motor Wagon Company arguably became the first American automobile firm. In 1893, the Duryea brothers tested their first gasoline-powered automobile model.
• New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote.
• The first students entered St Hilda’s College, Oxford, England, founded for women by Dorothea Beale.
• It was the year of the First Matabele War, and the first wartime use of a Maxim gun by Britain. In rough terrain, the gun was of limited value as a killing machine, but the psychological impact of its rapid spray of bullets was enormous.
• The Kinetoscope, an early motion picture exhibition device invented by Thomas Edison and developed by William Kennedy Dickson, was launched at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in May. The first film publicly shown on the system was Blacksmith Scene
• New religious movements of the time, such as Spiritualism and Christian Science, were represented at the first meeting of the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Annie Besant (see above) represented the Theosophical Society.
• The Panic of 1893 was a serious economic depression in the United States.

Note: We would have liked to have stolen a proper term for the period in question, but nobody’s terminology matches. The 1890s were sometimes referred to in retrospect as the Mauve Decade, because of the characteristic popularity of the subtle color among progressive “artistic” types, both in Europe and the US. The term Gilded Age is used, but with different connotations in the US and the UK. In the former, Gilded Age refers to the last decades of the Victorian period. The French term ‘Belle Epoque’ might have worked, but they stopped at 1914 when everything went horribly wrong.

We’re also gearing up for the October Frights Bloghop, which starts in a week’s time. More scary stuff, and a chance to win five copies of old greydog’s novella A Study in Grey.

We’ll be back in a day or so with weird fiction, including an odd book Hartmann the Anarchist from…. yes, 1893.