Tongue of the Times

The free Beantown daily newspaper BostonNOW features a profile of Matthew Pearl, the 32-year-old author of The Dante Club (2003) and The Poe Shadow (2006), in which, among other things, book editor Cris Rodriguez teases out Pearl’s technique of accurately capturing the dialogue of his chosen time periods:

Part of that research is learning how to write accurate 19th[-century] English. All the more so for The Poe Shadow than The Dante Club, since the former is narrated by an 1840s Baltimorean. “It is a challenge to write in the first person,” Pearl said. “Sometimes, it feels to me like writing science fiction.” He says it happens to be history, but it’s another universe, one that requires all sorts of new rules imposed on the text. To do it, he compiles files, sometimes hundreds of pages long, of the language as it was used in the 1800s. He even has a subset devoted to insults. As he researches, he continues to note new expressions and words, and he’s been known to occasionally subject himself to reading a 19th-century slang dictionary. He jokingly calls it “cheating” to read the dictionary, but I think he’d agree that anyone willing to read through such dense writing earns his spoils.

Later in Rodriguez’s piece, Pearl says that he’s currently working on “another story of literary history”--also set in the 19th century--“with similar themes to those in The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow,” and with a cast that includes characters from The Dante Club. You’ll find the full story here.