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A hundred years ago, I was a....

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Happy Dave Has Left

13:08 / 18.08.06

Inspired by this post I got to thinking about how radically the world has changed, at least for my part of the world, in the last hundred years. The post is a web designer, musing about what sort of thing he might have found himself up to had he been born a hundred years earlier. There's really two questions here:

a) What sort of person would you have been if you had been born and lived a hundred years ago? Would you have made different choices? Where do you think your life might have gone?

b) If you were dropped into 1906 with all of your current skills and knowledge (except knowledge of what's going to happen - no putting a bet on the Titanic sinking and living off the winnings), what do you think you would find yourself doing (assuming you wouldn't rush off and try to build a time machine to get back immediately to the delights of the 21st Century)?

Personally, as for a) I think I would probably be relatively similar, though I would almost certainly have never left Edinburgh. Maybe I'd have made the trek to the Big Smoke, but I fancy I wouldn't have had the means to get to University, and so might have taken up an apprenticeship in something fairly practical, like carpentry - I like building stuff.

b)-wise, I'd imagine I would try and get into the newspaper business - I've got a bit of a fantasy in my head about what it might be like to live and work in a pre-war Fleet Street.

Meta-theme - How much can we actually ever really know about the past?

miss wonderstarr

13:55 / 18.08.06

What an excellent thread ~ I have considered this sort of question before, but unfortunately the results tend to dismay me.

As my Father comes from working-class Southend stock and is (in our Earth-2006 timeline) the first generation of graduates from his family, in Earth-1906 (assuming he was born around 1845) he would probably have left school at 14 and continued to live and work locally, doing well I'm sure as he would be bright and ambitious, but he wouldn't have met my Mother, who would have been from a more middle-class background in South London.

I don't know if she would have been able to, or encouraged to, go to university herself (she would be aged 18 around 1865) ~ let's assume not, in which case she would have probably levelled off as a primary school teacher until she was married and gave up the job for motherhood, perhaps going back to work in the school when I was of a reasonable age. (Earth-2006, she returned to education and did a PhD in her 40s).

So I suppose I might have ended up the daughter of, say, a schoolmistress and a headmaster: I don't know if even I, in the 1890s, would be able to go to university. I expect I'd end up in 2006 as a wife and mother, respectable enough, married to my first serious sweetheart, tutoring in something like English, French or drawing to earn some of my own pin money, probably writing little short stories and poems in the evenings, and if I shared any kind of inherent identity with my current self, I would probably feel awfully frustrated and repressed in my creative ambitions.

13:59 / 18.08.06

Dairy/horse farmer, me thinks, or one of them crazy uppity Suffragettes or both.

yo, read about 1906 from this POV:

an enormous army of unqualified voters

miss wonderstarr

14:01 / 18.08.06

(b) I would try to publish fiction under a male name. I hear it was easier to get novels published back then, although I suppose I'd have to write in what to me would be a pastiche of 1906 style, or my sensibilities and approach would inevitably be kind of postmodernist ~ a bit much for that period I think.

lord nuneaton savage

14:04 / 18.08.06

I would have been off my face on laudanum, reclining on a chaise-long and toying with a gambling pistol.

Dressed beautifully, of course.

14:16 / 18.08.06

Oh to spin the tale.....

I'd be the youngest daughter of a gentlemen Irish farmer relocated to Maine. I'd have a good education but not afraid to handle the beasties.

My father, in pursuit of new breeding dairy stock, would have connections with a certain German dairy farm family in Pennsylvania. At some polite family business shindig I would have gotten into a heady intellectual discussion of women's rights with the young heir of the German Family sent up to confer with me ol' Da. We'd discover we both had anti establishment views and to the horror of our families fallen in love (Irish girl German boy, oh!).

After raising some hell we'd settle down on a biggish farm and he's write inflammatory articles and correspond with other firebrands while I looked after the daily life of the farm. We'd be active in the Women's Vote and get arrested together much to the annoyance of our families. My temper would be famous for 50 miles as would our generousity in feeding the poor and doing charitble works. They'd call me Black Kate.

miss wonderstarr

14:18 / 18.08.06

Wow maybe we would all be in some kind of letter-writing network so we could send notes to each other and wait 6 weeks for them to arrive. Ooh or run a sort of pamphlet fanzine.

14:32 / 18.08.06

"I say... wouldn't it be marvellous if I could circulate my diary around my friends and acquaintences... perhaps have them add their own comments beneath my entries. It would almost a living journal..."

14:34 / 18.08.06

I've thought about this as well.

I suppose I could still be a writer—if anything, my discursive style would've been more popular in 1906 than today—but oddly enough, it's only since I've started getting handy in the kitchen that I've had any real hopes for my survival if a freak wormhole were to drop me back in the past.

The village baker always makes a decent living; I don't mind working nights, I can knead for hours. I can keep a kitchen garden and whip up a meal out of next to nothing.

So yeah, I think I could do all right in the rural food-service industry of 1906. In fact, some days I think I'd prefer it.

14:46 / 18.08.06

I like to think I'd be a reporter for a lurid scandal-sheet but given the socio-economic background of my family I'd probably be something big in dirt.

14:48 / 18.08.06

To continue:

My grandfather (born, in this timeline, in 1797) would probably have never left Ireland, and probably would've died in the famine of 1847—but not before siring my father in 1824. My old man, like so many other young Irishmen, might have emigrated to America—but there's a very real chance he would have taken holy orders (as he nearly did in this timeline, until World War II interrupted his education), so I might not have ever been born.

Assuming he did emigrate, my da probably would've been too old to fight in the Civil War—in his late 30s, with a bad back. I probably would have grown up more urban than I did—in a ghetto tenement in Boston or New York City. Even assuming I was not ground down by my environment, my prospects for an eduaction would have been grim.

Would I have chucked it all and headed west in the 1893 Oklahoma Land Rush? I think I might have.

You know.
Just like Tom Cruise.

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

15:06 / 18.08.06

I have no doubt that I may have come off the worst of that time period. Being half-Mexican and half-white, I feel this may have made things a little harder. I probably would have ended up with a purely Catholic education, with the best chance of having a good life by becoming a nun. If this meant I could learn to read and write and gain some knowledge, however sheltered, I probably would have not joined the nunnery--breaking my mother's heart--and used my rudimentary skills to become a secretary in the city.

15:12 / 18.08.06

I think in 1906 most of the secretaries were still men though? Maybe a teacher?

paranoidwriter waves hello

15:14 / 18.08.06

My Dad would have been employed for life in exactly the same job as he was fifteen years before he retired (in RL), my Mum (if she was lucky) might have been working in a small pharmacy, behind the till, but more likely in some noisy factory. Because of working class poverty and technology, sadly none of their kids would have survived long after birth, and so I wouldn't be here now.

However, if by some miracle I'd survived and been blessed with access to sources of information, I'd probably be some kind of Marxist, anonymous, unemployed, unpublished children's short story writer and revolutionary; writing under a deliberately ambiguous pseudonym and occasionally having self-delusional paranoid flights of horrific grandeur, because of odd synchronicities experienced almost daily and a little understanding of how shit the world is.

Ironically, the likelihood is I'd probably be known (as a joke) by some authorities because of some of my associates and friends, and in small part because of my limited and very tame activities. In my local area I'd be known as that well meaning but "odd, daft, almost pathetic bloke, who drinks down the pub sometimes... You know? The 'writer'The one who easily gets wound up about the world, and who hardly ever seems to go out anymore?"

In 1914 I'd lose people I love to the First World War and be imprisoned for being a vocal conscientious objector. Do to age, ill health and injury, after being released from prison I'd have practiced loads and got really good on the guitar, but (thankfully) I wouldn't survive to see the horror of World War 2.

I never had any children and I was forgotten within two generations.

Top thread. Very revealing, and a great writing exercise. Also, it makes me want to do a family tree and annoy my family with even more questions...

miss wonderstarr

17:20 / 18.08.06

OK so most of us are going to have been big in dirt, I think, and most of the women are going to end up as teachers...

17:26 / 18.08.06

Since my great-grandparents were immigrants from two different countries less than one hundred years ago, it's a bit hard to trace any "family business" back in a straight line... but realistically speaking I'd probably be married and caring for my children and household.

17:33 / 18.08.06

it is a bit crazy to think I'd be a grandparent at 32 or 34 or so when I have no children now.

17:37 / 18.08.06

I guess I'd be an opium-smoking, absinthe-drinking, anarchist militant who drove around by night in a black zepellin, kicking rich bankers' asses.

And ten years later I'd die from Spanish flu...

miss wonderstarr

17:48 / 18.08.06

Maybe I was thinking within the wrong... historical paradigm above. I should perhaps have turned to the archives of DC ELSEWORDS comics, which tell us that people's ancestors are basically the same as their descendants, just with a bit of fancy lettering, posher dialogue and a slight variation on the name. So, you know, Mister Anthony Stark is a 19th century London industrialist who impresses Lord Byron and Ada Lovelace with a Robot-Man. Miss Selina Kyle is a society dame-turned-jewel thief who's double-crossing both the mysterious gangster Mister Jay and Sgt John Gordon of the Chicago police force.

History is just a parallel universe. I wouldn't even have to change my name.

18:11 / 18.08.06

In Fact, here's a steam-punk version of me:

Those of you who dig giant robots in the early 20th century can see some cool designs here (I specially like Starscream):

Transformer's Heart of Steel

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

18:30 / 18.08.06

I suppose everyone is right. It's either a nun or a teacher for me in those days.

But perhaps I escaped the confines of what was expected of me and lost myself in a large city, succumbing to a life of vice, perhaps even becoming some artist's muse.

Until I ruined him.

Happy Dave Has Left

18:38 / 18.08.06

Okay, so here's a question. If you took scenario b), whereby you're dropped into 1906 with all of your current instincts and experience intact - how would you act to change the lot given you by early 20th century society?

paranoidwriter waves hello

18:43 / 18.08.06

I'd do everything I'm doing now, only better.

18:43 / 18.08.06

Kill Hitler. Kill Stalin. Kill Mao. Kill Henry Ford. Invent antibiotics.

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

18:48 / 18.08.06

That's a lot of traveling there, DM.

18:50 / 18.08.06

It's part of the fun, Kali: Meet the world, save the world!

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

18:56 / 18.08.06

In other words, I think DM wants to be a Time Lord.

paranoidwriter waves hello

19:01 / 18.08.06

For the record: my last post was teh joke; but you knew that, right? I was going to use %'s, but thought it was drier without them. I shouldn't even be explaining this, should I?...

miss wonderstarr

19:58 / 18.08.06

Dress as a man.

Whisky Priestess

20:08 / 18.08.06

Depressingly, being unmarried at my advanced age, I'd either have to be a gin-soaked prostitute or a governess. Or a writer, I suppose. Under a male name.

20:11 / 18.08.06

I would have made a good valet. Or maybe a butler. To some aristocratic family, nursing my resentment at my lot in my life, seething with my nascent socialist yearnings.

I'd probably have been an illiterate sailor, or ploughman, or shale miner like my ancestors. I might have managed to cross the class barrier due to my hot young gay boyness as a teenager though, had I been brave enough to escape the rural lumpenproleness. Might have sashayed my way into the financially remunerative heart of some useless but pretty Lordling.

20:40 / 18.08.06

My choices, given my current skillset, would either be working within the printing industry, likely as a typesetter (as did my grandfather and uncle before me) or as a musician. I think I'd rather the life of a musician, especially during that era. The birth of jazz! I could make the pilgrimage to New Orleans (again) to play with the greats, or perhaps join a traveling Vaudville show. And, to those who insist that a woman's choices were too limited, well, you could always choose to be a social agitator. Emma Goldman was a friend of my step-grandfather's. I like to think we would sit at a café and discuss society and how to better the plight of the worker.

20:48 / 18.08.06

and how to better the plight of the worker

Hmm, ambiguity alert!

21:23 / 18.08.06

Gah! Curse you and your word-parsing! I meant how to better the lives of the worker.

Yes.

It has nothing at all to do with world domination through time travel. Nothing at all.

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

21:42 / 18.08.06

Hmm. Methinks there is something amiss in this, lekvar....

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