Victorian chaos

For 1867, I have looked only at the ‘discovery’ of diamonds in South Africa but there was much going on elsewhere. The American Civil War had just finished, The Crimean War and the charge of the Light Brigade were hardly things of the past and the British army had launched a rescue mission to Ethiopia. In Australia, gold had been found and the last shipload of convicts was on its way. In Europe, Germany was suffering the pains of national birth under Bismark. History teaches these in isolation but for someone living in that era they were interlinked. Soldiers, unsettled from the various wars were looking for adventure. The younger sons of Britain’s aristocracy were being hived off to avoid paternity suites. We are inclined to imagine the reign of Queen Victoria as a time of settled peace but, in reality, it was a time of flux yet I have trouble seeing how to turn that into story lines without it being a poor man’s history book. Maybe, as I did with A Land Fit for Heroes but instead of a teacher struggling to teach during the years following WW1, a newspaperman is trying to get stories before a rival, would work. I’d see it as the man has married money and his father-in-law is financing the paper. The man has an affair and the F-i-L threatens to pull out making it essential that the paper gets the stories first. The man’s morality is at odds with the mood of the country and the kind of news people would pay to read. This is one of those stories that is either a total flop or a best seller, nothing in between. Is it a risk worth taking? I’d need to think it over but the hook would be the present problem of false news. Well, maybe…