Oi, now I feel like an idiot.

[kaigou]

I just read a romance review (mostly b/c I was already on the site for an SFF book review and started clicking random links), and spent a good ten minutes after the review thinking I had to be missing something. A puritan, and the Witchfinders, and the book's set during the Civil War. Oh, yeah, SURE the author did his/her homework, puritans weren't anywhere around by the Civil War! Obviously someone's been sniffing the historical glue. *nods firmly*

And then I realized: the setting is the English Civil War.

Oh. Right. In which case, puritans? Yeah. There would be puritans.

*heddesk*

Comments

[sharibet.livejournal.com]

I had a book reviewer take me to task on my first novel (which was set in 1919 and has a hero who is a WWI veteran) because I apparently neglected to mention Nazis. For the First World War.

(Of course, this reviewer also had no clue who or what the Kaiser was...sigh).

[kaigou]

If you're going to take someone to task for incorrect facts, it helps to make sure you do not, yourself, have incorrect facts. Or is this instead where I snark that those who can't write, critique? ...except that would be tarring myself with my own damn brush, I suppose.

[sharibet.livejournal.com]

Or is this instead where I snark that those who can't write, critique? ...except that would be tarring myself with my own damn brush, I suppose.

Oh, I don't know about that. I've read both your critiques and your fiction, and they're both very good.

I think people expect to see the stuff that they're culturally conditioned to see. An American sees a reference to the Civil War, and of course it's the American Civil War that springs to mind, and rightfully so. The English Civil War is only peripherally part of American history, and only because it was one of the events leading up to the Puritan exodus from England and the establishment of their colonies in the New World.

The World Wars are a bit trickier. The US fought in the First World War, though only in the last stages, but it somehow doesn't register on the public consciousness the same way that the Second World War does.

[autopope]

Not the "English Civil War".

The British Civil Wars (plural) -- there were about four of them, interspersed by the odd couple of months of not making stabby on each other, over a period of a decade, and the death toll was probably on the order of 10% of the population, and Scotland was in on the act both separately and jointly (on account of Charles 1 being King of Scotland as well as King of England and Wales, which were not -- at that time -- a United Kingdom).

[kaigou]

You're talking about the length of time generally covered by Cromwell, erm, right? Sorry, when I did my fascination-stage with British history, it was really simply to focus on Scottish history and anything British, Irish, or Welsh got noticed only by extension of where it showed up in Scottish history. (Mostly because after actually going to Scotland, I then spent the next several years learning about everything we'd seen, kinda after the fact, but still. We did do London and the Tower and I think the changing of the guards, but my younger self found that Incredibly Boring because my association with museums -- a la the Tower's stuff on display --- was with the Smithsonian, and the Tower just TOTALLY lost in comparison because it had NO DINOSAURS and it didn't even have a REALLY BIG ELEPHANT. It was completely uncool. Scotland won in the eight-year-old brain because it had DEAD PEOPLE in FIREPLACES, although looking back I do recall getting the impression that it wasn't really a castle unless you'd found at least one dead body shoved into some unexpected and too-tiny place, preferably in the main nursery or in the family chapel.)

Aaaaaaand all of that is beside the point. It was mostly that the "civil war" moniker didn't get an adjective, and the after-the-fact realization that not once had I noticed any Brit spellings going on -- colour, realise, that kind of thing -- to alert me as to the need for an adjective. Lacking those, I just immediately leapt to "Civil War" and then flailed about because sure, the US had puritans... like a hundred+ years before our Civil War. Not to mention the fact that the review didn't even address how the book dealt with race, which is obviously a huge part of the American Civil War, and not so much for anyone else's Civil War(s) that I know of.

I just found it partly amusing for seeing my own US-centrism pop up (though granted I may be more sensitive having lived within a stone's throw of battlefields for the majority of my life), but more for the realization (no s!) that it's spelling that I use to alert myself as to a writer's cultural grounding. Which means that if you're on the net and someone has really bad spelling, it's screwing up more than just my ability to read the person, but also potentially whacking my ability to gauge the person's origins/cultural-biases.

Okay, so I did try reading some history but I got the part about the Roundheads and you can probably guess what kind of bizarre visual that presented for a 10 year old living in Alabama. It didn't help that I was reading history books without pictures, so I was never able to actually confirm my suspicion that people with oval-shaped heads weren't allowed to participate. Or something. Man, I was such an idiot kid.