My musings so far had led me to conclude that I should write a historical romance. One to explore the beginning of the mess we’re in today, the climate disrupted and rapidly worsening, millions of lives under threat. Just how and where did it begin, and how had human nature driven it?
As an engineer with a latent interest in industrial heritage, it wasn’t hard to point a finger. The real roots in mass consumption and therefore mass pollution came from the early ‘great engineers’. Those who invented ironmaking in the Black Country and those who invented steam engines to drain tin mines in Cornwall and coal mines in northern England. They became the men who invented railways and mechanised the cotton mills, creating the technology which underpinned the later onset of mass production.
The age was one of rampant masculine competition, a quest for power and glory. The landed gentry found they could make, or lose, fortunes by investing in the new technological ideas. The natural engineers and those schooled in engineering found themselves at the forefront of breathless revolution. The devil took the hindmost - the unskilled, the ungifted, and women.
To illustrate and highlight this process with a story which was entertaining, thought-provoking and emotionally rich didn’t call for a dreary historical fiction detailing the cruelties of the workhouse nor for a Regency romance based on the social etiquette of the rich. I did need to touch on the poverty and hardship and I did need to show the power-hungry, gaming, gambling echelons of higher society driving it all. I thought that the sweet spot which most illustrated the change in human nature and society lay between the cotton mills of Lancashire and steam railway development in Tyneside.
My idea was born. I would put a feisty female protagonist close to George Stephenson, arguably the greatest and most influential of the natural engineers. She would rail at the hurdles before her and she would face the worst of the deprivations of the time. I would put a man with compassion but without competitive drive at the other end of the scale among the titled industrialists, with a coal mine and railway interest near Manchester, the cotton capital. I would add a cotton mill for flavour with a third love interest. My protagonists would feel burgeoning and impossible love while they fought against their class divide and their own destiny, the one to greatness, the other to poverty.
I struggled for a while with some of the basic concepts of fiction. I knew I should write within genre, but I didn’t see a genre which covered the scope of my planned novel. Historical Romance of the period is inevitably Regency Romance, all ball gowns, dukes and rakes. The genre says nothing of the Industrial Revolution, serving as a vehicle for some chest-beating romance. Historical Fiction lay much closer to my objectives of close examination, but would rob me of the emotional context romance offers. I decided to ignore the issue and just carry on, using the catch-all of Romance as my genre.
Putting Dorothy, my feisty protagonist, very close to George Stephenson raised questions about how close could one invent fiction without appearing to rewrite history. His life is well-documented, as I knew well by then with a shelfful of history books focussed on him, all stuffed with post-it notes. If I shoved a feisty redhead into the middle of a documented encounter with another great man, there would have been a record. I had to leave history undisturbed, I saw, and set about planning the closest possible path I could reasonably manage. Dorothy sits with George in his cottage kitchen as he mends clocks and only just avoids being there when he blew himself up with his pit safety lamp experiments. George waves to her and her father at the grand Stockton and Darlington Railway opening, the world’s first public railway. She helps her father on Chat Moss, he surveying for the Liverpool to Manchester railway line, one of the first inter-city passenger railways. Today, you can travel that line, over that Moss, on the trackbed which George built, at the very forefront of engineering technology.
James, my man of the gentry, runs equally close to real history, his estate mirroring a real estate, his friends almost identifiable among the great and the good of Manchester at the time, several years after Peterloo, its repercussions still in evidence.
And so Hearts on the Line was brought into fitful being. What I needed next was some writing craft at my disposal. Time to begin learning.