World building is a familiar concept to writers and many readers of science fiction and fantasy. Writers from C.J. Cherryh to Marion Zimmer Bradley have written about the importance of pulling your readers into the world of a book, and the works of Tolkien are a primer for building an alternate world.
Historical romance is not in the business of building completely new worlds (that would be for the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal members of the Romance Writers of America), but historical romance writers still have to draw our readers in, so that they can feel themselves inside the story, wearing crinolines or a hoop skirt or a toga, traveling the high seas in a pirate ship or taking the air in Hyde Park on horseback.
World building, whether for sci fi, fantasy or historical writing, works best when the writer has done his or her homework. When building a world from scratch, that includes notebooks covering geography, history, languages, customs, religious or spiritual beliefs, the presence or absence of magic, and on and on. Lots of work!
Historical romance writers have it easier in that we can research times past to find out about the world our characters are going to inhabit. We also have giant binders full of information, of course. We just have to research existing knowledge, using the best research material we can find.
Even simple things were harder 150 years ago. Travel was a much bigger deal when Victoria ascended the throne. In an era when it’s possible to cross hundreds of miles in a single day by car, it’s nearly impossible to grasp the speed of carriage travel. Drive your car down your street at 14 miles an hour and try to imagine that as the absolute top speed you can achieve in a vehicle. The sensory description will be entirely different in the 19th century world. Hoofbeats, not the sound of tires, characterized traffic, for example.
To our modern sensibilities, the past is an alien place, not just physically, but in mental attitudes. Victorian England was a place of overt class consciousness, where people who moved from level of society to another (up or down) were viewed with suspicion, if not outright scorn. There was a strong impetus to keep to one’s place, and not only in the upper classes. This attitude loosened up as the 19th century wore on, but even servants preferred to work for a suitably aristocratic family to one with ‘new money’. America also had its unofficial aristocracy, with Ward McAllister’s decree that truly fashionable New York society was made up of only 400 people. (He was trying to keep out those dreadful Westerners, Midwesterners and Vanderbilts at the time.)
If a writer chooses not to have her characters reflect the social mores of an era, her characters need solid motivation to explain why they think differently.
What are your favorite details about historical romance? The clothing? The food? The customs? Let us know!
Ann Stephens 
Love it. I really relate to this, world building is absolutely integral to my own sci-fi fantasy novel. It’s something I’ve slaved over, and have researched endlessly. It incorporates real cultures from all over the world, and from all periods of time. It’s incredibly exhausting, the most work of any part of my novel so far, but I think it’s really paid off in a world that’s rich and immersive, far more so than any book I’ve read outside of Tolkein or Dune. The only question becomes: where does the detail exceed the reader’s attention span. When is it too much, and when is it not enough? Very hard to say, and makes the “show don’t tell” rule an imperative. Thanks for the post! Reassuring to know other’s contemplate the same thing.
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Fantasy/Sci fi is my second favorite genre, Pearson! Having seen how much work goes into creating an alternate universe, I can only congratulate you on what sounds like meticulous world-building on your part.
And details…how we love them, and we must use them with care. I try to avoid big chunks of description because that slows the reader down. Mixed in with action/dialogue, it adds interest but doesn’t put the reader to sleep. *grin*
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