Writing Characters With a Historical Perspective

One unique thing about writing characters in historical fiction: they don’t know they’re from a long time ago. That sounds simple, but it can be hard to remember. The Victorians, the people I write about, didn’t know that huge crinolines would seem funny, a hundred fifty years later, or that gaslight and horse-drawn cabs would seem romantic and old-fashioned. The railroad and the telegram weren’t quaint old technologies to them but the newest thing in the world, equal parts thrilling and terrifying. It was all happening right that minute.

The balance between their perspective and ours can be hard to strike. I always try to err on the side of theirs.

In my newest Charles Lenox novel, for instance, The Hidden City, I wanted to show the book’s lead character, an upper-class amateur detective, participating in one of the fads that swept the city in the 1870s and 1880s. It was a newfangled innovation called the gymnasium.

We take exercise for granted, and of course, there has never been a generation of human beings born that didn’t know, whether intuitively or scientifically, that exercise changes the body for the better. But its formal history is fairly recent. In the 1820s and 1830s, British educators began to promote the idea of gymnastics for youth and members of the military to increase strength and flexibility. Then, in 1865 (fifteen years before the action of The Hidden City), a continental entrepreneur opened the “German Gymnasium” in King’s Cross, the first institution of its kind in Britain. It caught on immediately, and indeed, in 1866, it hosted the Wenlock Olympian Games, a precursor to the modern Olympics so significant that one of the two mascots of the 2012 Olympics in London was named “Wenlock.”

But the German Gymnasium isn’t where Lenox goes. I had a tonier destination in mind for him, and it was not much later that a Swedish system pioneered by Jonas Gustav Wilhelm Zander (“the Zander System”) caught on like wildfire among the upper class. It involved the first example of what we would now recognize as exercise machines—complex wooden objects, quaintly old-fashioned to our modern eyes but wonderfully novel to theirs, made of pulleys and weights, in a communal setting. The “gymnastiksal” had been born.

In all the books of the Lenox series, the main character is part of fashionable London, and it was important to me that his particular gym reflect his place in society. It has broad windows, a piste for fencing, a massage room, fancy up-to-date concoctions of cucumber water and lemon juice in the lounge, and, of course, an area for boxing, that most immensely popular sport across every class at the time, from the lowest gin mill on the East End to the halls of Eton and Harrow, all competing under rules designed by the Marquess of Queensberry.

The social element of the gymnastiksal is important in the book. It is here that Lenox meets an antagonist, a newspaper baron, and here as well that he has a swift encounter that eventually leads him to a solution of the book’s murder, the death of a crooked apothecary.

In other words, I wanted to present the gym not as a cute detail of Victorian life but as the same thing it is now, a place of exercise, gossip, and of course, annoyingly fit people. I wanted to see it both with the irony of we future-dwellers and the enthusiasm of its contemporaries. We can never fully recover what it would have felt like to be a Londoner in 1881, of course. But by studying the trends, the innovations of the time, we can glimpse the secrets, the pleasures, the mysteries of daily life in that hidden city.