Turning point what turning point
I liked this in a piece in today's Guardian Saturday Review: Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace presented their paper on the theory of evolution to the Linnean Society in 1858, but in the society’s annual summing-up, it announced that nothing very interesting had happened that year.
Which is pretty much up there with Louis XVI writing in his diary on the day the Bastille fell 'no hunting today' (or is that apocryphal?).
And is that thing I tend to bang on about in people writing historical fictional narratives that the people in them are far more aware of what we now think is important than what people then would have been bothered about ('Archduke shot in the Balkans, yawn. How about that test-match, eh?'.) (Not that I haven't found non-fictional works supposing that pencillin was a clinically-viable treatment well before it was...)
Even when one knows that something was a popular phenomenon, was it something that those people in the narrative would have noticed or have been talking about (e.g. in 1928, are they the kind of people who would have been reading Orlando or Point Counterpoint, or following the fate of The Well of Loneliness?).
And, in counterfactual history, or, as we may call it, batshit woowoo: I can prove that 'William Shakespeare' is buried in Westminster Abbey - scholar: Alexander Waugh says secret clues confirm that author of world-famous plays was Edward de Vere, who lies in Poets’ Corner. Really, these days, anyone can term themselves 'scholar', she harrumphs.
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