If I were to write a novel, it would definitely be set in the 19th century. Because, as I think we can all agree, the 19th century is the most hilarious century of them all.
Of course, I wasn’t the first person to figure this out; popular culture today is replete with references to this age. From The Onion to The Simpsons to comic artist Chris Ware, tons of publications and cultural products have gotten in on the act. I think that part of what makes the 19th century so funny is that, for the most part, people performed their daily routines without a hint of irony. If they were getting their own joke, modern historians have related the story of the 19th century so blandly and incompletely to us that we’re not allowed to think that people who lived in the same age as slavery and Victorianism ever could have stepped outside themselves for a good laugh. Because if they had, they would have realized their own contradictions and ignorance, and would have done something to put a stop to it. Well, I’m going to have to side with the bland historians on this one, because people in the 19th century did some outrageously stupid things. They’re the type of things that are so preposterous that you’d assume anybody with a shred of intuition would’ve been able to say, “Look, I know that this is what all of the unqualified and misguided pseudo-scientists are saying is the best way to treat cholera, but something about it stills seems really, really dumb.”
Actually, it probably would’ve sounded more like this: “Infamy! Certainly all properly educated men working in the realms of Science and Human knowledge have agreed, as they rarely do, so fraught is the field with the bickering and squabbling of great egos attached to tiny intellects, that there is one, and only one, efficacious treat-ment for the periodic out-breaks of yellow fever that so tax the minds of our citizens; However, Intuition seems to be whispering to me, speaking of things foreign and un-known, but urging through the haze that perhaps I oughtn’t act in such ways, that perhaps such action, viewed from that Heavenly perch upon which Providence reclines and sees all things objectively, might seem ? imprudent.”
And as that passage illustrates (to me, anyway), the ridiculous way people used language is foremost on the list of aspects of the 19th century that make it such a fun time to write about. (Once again, I have to cast a suspicious eye at the literature professors who have been suggesting to me for the past 21 years that every fishmonger and farmer in the 19th century spoke like Herman Melville, but the damage has been done.) First, there’s the wordiness. At 111 words, the quotation above is but a foothill to the mountain ranges of words writers of the 19th century have piled up to communicate ideas. And part of the craft is not just to use a lot of words to say something extremely simple, but to do that using the smallest possible number of sentences. “But how does one attach all these clauses?” you might ask. Easy. An extremely liberal use of punctuation: comma after comma after comma after semicolon after colon after comma ?
After wordiness and punctuation, unnecessary capitalizations and hyphenations might strike the reader as two more strange ways to mediate an idea. Nineteenth century writers were never content to just let compound words be. They always had to throw in that hyphen to let everybody know that it was a bastard-word, that the filthy prefix or suffix had no right to sully the beauty of the single word. Or, in the case of words made of two words that would have been perfectly legitimate on their own, writers saw instances of an unholy and unnatural bond. The hyphen was thrown in to ensure that, if these two words insisted on being together, at least they weren’t going to do anything gross in public. (tgigreek.com) The over-capitalization phenomenon has carried into the modern age in a reduced form, so that every personal pronoun describing God or one of God’s possessions gets the treatment (i.e., And the Lord took up His staff, and He did ? ). People must have been more religious back in the day, because they seemed to think that nearly every noun, whether it relates to God or not, deserves to be lifted above lowly verbs and adjectives.
The beautiful thing about this age is that, at some point, there probably was some fool who rationalized his culture’s language using this precise logic. This brings us away from language for a moment and into the hilarious world of Really Stupid Things People Did with a Straight Face in the 19th Century. And no aspects of 19th century life present more ripe fruit for this exploration than do the sciences. In spite of several important advances, for the most part they just didn’t know what they were doing. We all know about medicine shows, but these were usually instances of people knowingly deceiving other people. I’m more interested in those times when actual scientists sincerely thought they were making significant breakthroughs. Think phrenology, hollow-earth theories and blood letting. All came about at moments in history when, for some reason, you didn’t really have to offer any proof for a theory before people accepted it as incontrovertible fact. If, for example, you were a prominent teleologist living in Victorian London, and you woke up one morning with the idea that penguins could fly one day every 46 years, it probably wouldn’t be long before you were on a steamer bound for the Antarctic with all the resources of a well-respected financier at your disposal.
My novel will study the life of a clerk who performs office work (not even he really knows what he’s supposed to be doing) at some vaguely-described government office. He will eat cold meat that he keeps in a dark spot in his house underneath a piece of oilcloth. He will acquire goods and services without ever actually exchanging money; things will frequently be “sent for.” Overall, his will be the story of disaffected youth searching for meaning in a cold and unsympathetic world. He will misidentify love and will be slightly relieved when the object of his affection takes to bed after a nasty fall from a horse, and, after many weeks of suffering there, dies. He’ll feel guilty about his relief. He’ll go through it all with the most oblivious sense of self-importance, as if his woes were somewhere representative of some encompassing condition specific to the modern age, like malaise, ennui or one of those things. As I said, everything about the 19th century is hilarious.
J?rgen Cleemann is a senior in the College and a contributing editor of The Georgetown Voice. He is much like Romeo and Juliet, who, living in eternity, do not fear the reaper.
