Truth is Stranger than Fiction
09 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
I have always been a fan of history, world and American, ancient and contemporary, and of its cousins, genealogy and antiques. Dusty things, distant relatives, days of old and decades past . . . I can’t imagine my life without the traces and places of long ago. Perhaps I am marooned here with one foot on the terra firm of today and the other not quite here, stuck in a wad of chewing gum in some long-past time. Here’s hoping that stringy, sticky glob of gum holds fast.
History pieces together stories of people and places frozen in time, allowing us experiences otherwise lost to us. More than that, as we meet those people and visualize those places, we bring our own lens of context and imagination to the factual historical journey. We become detectives, interpreters, and theorists and, in some way, participants.
History isn’t only memorizing facts from a high school textbook . . . or any book for that matter. Gaze into the eyes of a sitter in a Renaissance painting or the eyes of a child in a naïve 1840s folk art portrait, noticing the delicate brushstrokes and the carefully orchestrated background details that complete the story – that is also a history lesson. Listen to a Celtic ballad passed down through the generations and played today as it was then, on favorite fiddles and plaintive tin whistles, telling a tale of “then” that speaks clearly to “now” – that is also a history lesson. Take a trip to (not always) Merry Olde England with Jane Austen or Willie Shakespeare – yes, another history lesson.
Lately, my historical foraging has taken me to the nineteenth century for book research. That research introduced me to an unexpected array of real-life characters, some qualifying as close or extended family, and many others whose life orbits happened to intersect those of that family of mine. My book research found me spending hours and hours immersed in the electronic pages of nineteenth century newspaper archives. Victorian era mainstream journalism, unfettered by today’s political correctness and fear of lawsuits, is often a titillating mix of fact, opinion and conjecture. As I found and read articles relevant to my research, nearby headlines and subtitles beckoned, and my eyes wandered. Those wandering eyes glimpsed, fixed on and then took in many an article that had no relation to my research. In some cases, my curiosity was piqued and, sooner or later, I started digging to find out more about the person or event my wandering eyes had discovered. While I truly enjoy telling a story, when it comes to investigative research, I am a hopeless addict. No twelve-step program could ever cure me of my obsessive love of the “hunt” and, should one come along, nothing could get me to sign on.
Among the inadvertently discovered was the true story of a twenty-something Jersey girl named Jenny who literally woke up and found herself in a heap of trouble in 1878. Jenny’s story, like so many others I have discovered in my research and writing, could be filed very nicely under the popular Jersey saying – “you can’t make this stuff up,” or said in a more traditional way (for those of you not from The Garden State), truth is often stranger than fiction.
Rather than “Jenny,” the sensationalized newspaper caricature, hopefully you will find her more a Victorian era “Jenny from the block,” sans the glitz and glamour of the lady from whom I borrowed that moniker, yet not without her own life-transforming drama.
Join me as I unravel the true story of a farmer’s daughter turned city girl and, perhaps, murderess. Subscribers will receive new chapters of the story each month via email pdf along with background on the investigative research process. Subscribers will be able to post comments and questions on the Reader Forum page of this website including theories of the crime as it unfolds. The series will kick off in January. The post-holidays winter doldrums are coming – a great time to put on your slippers and play history detective or just get lost in another time and a sensational crime. Subscribe now, click on link - upper right
