Anyone paying close attention to this blog (if any such person exists) will notice that I haven’t posted anything for quite a while. There’s a reason for that: I seem to have turned into one of my semi-fictional characters.

Allow me to explain. For the past several years I’ve been researching and writing a novel based on the experience of a real woman who lived in Baltimore in the early 19th century. Sometime in late 1806, she  became involved with a group of people, most if not all of them young men, who were engaged in putting out a magazine. All of them were volunteers, as was the norm in those days at publications of the kind, and the young men were apparently so busy launching their careers that they didn’t have much time to spend on the magazine.

The woman, on the other hand—a 26-year-old named Eliza Anderson—had plenty of time, since elite women like her didn’t generally hold jobs in the early 19th century. She had a flair for writing, and she seems to have taken on more and more of the workload associated with the magazine. That’s apparently how she ended up as its editor, and then editor of its successor magazine in 1807, even though the idea of a woman editor was almost unheard of at the time.

Eliza threw herself into writing and editing the magazine, which was called The Observer. Although she complained from time to time about the workload and the difficulty of finding decent contributors, she was clearly enjoying herself. And she was on a mission: she thought the taste of her fellow Baltimoreans was sadly lacking, and she wanted to raise the cultural tone of the city. The Observer, she felt, would be the tool for accomplishing that. People began to react to what she wrote, which she seems to have found a gratifying experience.

And now we come to me. Some months ago, I became involved with a group of people, most of them young (younger than me, anyway), who had decided to put out the 21st-century counterpart to Eliza’s magazine: a blog. As is the case with many blogs, all of us were volunteers. The younger people all had full-time jobs and/or young children, and they didn’t have much time to spend on the blog.

I, on the other hand, was basically trying to write a novel that it wasn’t clear anyone would be interested in publishing, and my children were grown. I started writing posts for the blog, in a way returning to my long-ago abortive career in journalism, and I discovered that it was actually much more compelling than writing a novel I wasn’t sure anyone really cared about.

Part of this was because I, like Eliza, am on something of a mission. In my case, the mission has to do with public education. For the past several years I’ve become increasingly interested in the very lively landscape of public education in Washington, DC, where I live.

It was clear that there was a huge amount going on and not enough coverage. (The Washington Post does a pretty good job of writing about education these days, but there’s no way it can cover everything that’s happening.) And to me, improving the state of public education in this city (and this country)  is every bit as crucial as improving the state of public taste seemed to be to Eliza. In fact, when I came across this new blog, which was about to go live, I had been on the verge of trying to start my own blog on DC education.

So, like Eliza, I threw myself into writing for the blog, which is called Greater Greater Education. It’s an offshoot of a blog called Greater Greater Washington, which focuses on urban issues like smart growth and public transportation. I ended up writing more for Greater Greater Education than others did, partly because I had more time. And lo and behold, I’m now the editor.

Like Eliza, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by the workload and the need to rustle up contributors. But, again like her, I’m also gratified by the fact that people seem to be paying attention. Putting out a publication, especially a publication that’s completely staffed by volunteers, can be frustrating, but it’s also exhilarating. I feel Eliza’s pain, but also her joy.

I’m hoping that my experience with Greater Greater Education doesn’t completely parallel Eliza’s experience with The Observer. Eventually, Eliza became preoccupied by vendettas with other editors and writers, and after a year she abandoned the magazine in disgust. Part of the problem appears to have been that people just couldn’t wrap their minds around the concept of a female editor, at least not one as feisty as Eliza. And part of the problem was that Eliza just couldn’t seem to walk away from a fight.

There are plenty of fights available in the education world these days, but I’m not interested in joining them. What I’ve been looking for is a sanctuary where people aren’t just preaching to the choir or calling their opponents names, but rather trying to figure out what actually might work without worrying too much about who proposed the idea or what label is attached to it. So far at least, it looks like Greater Greater Education has the potential to be that place, at least in DC.

So what about the novel that’s now stuck in my computer, which, of course, happens to be about Eliza? Based on what I’ve heard from the few people who have read the manuscript, it basically just needs one more round of revisions and then it will be ready to go. The only problem is that I’ve been so caught up in writing and editing the blog, I haven’t had time to look at it in months.

But here again, maybe I should look to Eliza. Somehow, during the year that she was writing and editing The Observer, she managed to translate not one but two works from French into English: a pamphlet on military strategy written by the man who would soon become her husband, and a racy novel about an extramarital affair. (That last one didn’t help her reputation in Baltimore much.) If Eliza could find the time to translate two books, surely I can find the time to finish one that’s pretty much already written.

Or can I? We’ll see.

I’d intended to write this blog post about a dictionary of late 18th-century slang that I’ve been consulting for the past several months–I’m writing a novel set in 1807, and some of my characters are of the rougher sort. Always on the lookout for good blog material, I’ve been keeping a list of colorful terms that I thought would make for amusing reading.

But I seem to have been done in, to a certain extent, by 21st-century technology. I had the dictionary (which I found online through Google books) “bookmarked” on my old computer, which recently died a slow and rather painful death. My new computer is way healthier, but it’s never heard of my old bookmarks. And when I Googled what I remembered as the title of the dictionary–A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue–I got plenty of results, but none of them matched the dictionary I’d been taking notes on.

So, rather than being able to search for fuller definitions of the terms I jotted down, I’m reduced to a couple of small scraps of paper where I made the jottings. But I will forge ahead, in antiquated fashion, and try to write a blog post based on scrawled pencil-and-paper notes.

Many of the terms I wrote down had something to do with sex and/or prostitution, because one of my characters is a prostitute. Some of these terms interested me because they haven’t changed, or haven’t changed much. The term “short-heeled wench,” to describe a woman of easy virtue, sounds a lot like the modern (or at least relatively modern) “round heels.” And it’s pretty easy to deduce the meaning of the phrase “touch up a woman,” meaning “to have carnal knowledge of her.”

But then there are the phrases that, despite their colorfulness, have gone out of use. “To join giblets,” for example, strikes me as a nifty euphemism for having sex. Maybe we can bring it back? And then there’s the term “larking,” which my now irretrievably lost dictionary defined, tantalizingly, as “a lascivious practice that will not bear explanation.”

I also came across some intriguing terms to describe a woman who (as they used to say) has “gotten herself” pregnant: to have a white swelling, to have sprained her ankle. Then there’s the phrase “in her tantrums,” which, alas, I neglected to write down the definition for. I guess I’ll never know.

Some non-sexual phrases haven’t changed: shoplifter, skinflint, shilly shally, ship shape (I must have been scrolling through the “s”s that day). There’s also “the parleyvous lingo” as a term for French–no surprises there.

Then there are words that are still in use, but have taken on a different meaning. “Vamp,” for example, which has come to mean (among other things) a woman who seduces men, used to mean “to pawn anything.” And, at the risk of antagonizing an entire country, I confess that I was amused by the phrase “the urinal of the planets” to denote Ireland–presumably inspired by its rainy climate, but no doubt also inspired by prejudice against its inhabitants.

That’s about all I can say for the mysteriously vanished dictionary, since I’m unable to consult it further. But, as they say, when one door closes, another one opens. None of the terms I’ve mentioned above are in the dictionary that predominates in my search results for the term “A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” a volume that dates to 1811. But on the other hand, it contains a whole new world of slang waiting to be explored.

Just looking around at random, for example, I came across the following entry for “Cundum,” apparently an archaic version of the word condom. “The dried gut of a sheep,” the dictionary helpfully explains, “worn by men in the act of coition, to prevent venereal infection, said to have been invented by one Colonel Cundum.” Who knew?

There’s more–apparently these “machines” were sold “by a matron of the name of Phillips, at the green canister in Half-moon-street”–but I’ll save the remainder of the entry for another blog post. Those of you who are yearning for more ancient slang, and perhaps fresh insight into some of the terms in use today, watch this space! Or, alternatively, you can just Google “A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue” yourself.

When you spend a fair amount of time reading documents that are 200 hundred years old, as I do, you inevitably come across unfamiliar words—or words that, even if familiar, are being used to mean something different from what you think they mean. And sometimes you start wondering about how and why those words have changed.

Let me offer an example. In 1807, a Baltimore magazine called The Observer discussed a highly anticipated concert, where (it said) “Mr. Nenninger, and a number of amateurs, will delight the scientific ear with a variety of both vocal and instrumental music.”

I was immediately brought up short by this use of the word “amateur.” Yes, it denoted someone who wasn’t being paid for his or her efforts, just as we might use it today (although, in fact, lack of payment became a subject of dispute on the part of at least one of the performers). But there was none of the derogatory connotation that often attaches to the word nowadays, when the adjective “amateurish” is used to mean substandard. Instead, the word seemed to have a meaning closer to its Latin root “amo,” meaning “I love.” (For now, I won’t attempt to parse the word “scientific,” which is also used in the article in a way we wouldn’t expect.)

In fact, the word “amateur” originally just meant someone who did something because he loved to do it, not because he expected any profit from it. And in the old days—let’s say, the early 19^th century—this was often considered a good thing. The Observer itself, like most magazines of the day, was written by “amateurs.” Its editors and correspondents received no pay, and there’s some indication that they would have bristled at the idea. They were “gentlemen” (or, in the rare case of The Observer’s editor, a lady), and their journalistic endeavors were undertaken out of a sense of civic duty—or perhaps out of a desire for amusement—not for what they might have dismissed as mercenary reasons.

To some extent this seems to have been a holdover from feudal, or at least aristocratic, times, when those at the top of society essentially lived off the profits from their land holdings and didn’t have to sully themselves by actually working for a living. The arts, in particular, weren’t seen as something one would get paid for, exactly. Ladies (and, to a lesser degree, gentlemen) learned how to play an instrument or sing or draw as part of their education. It was a way of passing the time and amusing others, not a way of making money.

Of course, there were “professional” artists as well, but in Europe they weren’t necessarily paid for their labors in any sort of quid pro quo arrangement. Often they had patrons who supported their work in a more disinterested fashion.

But in the United States in the early 19^th century, there were—at least theoretically—no aristocrats. There were plenty of wealthy people, of course, but they didn’t necessarily see supporting artists as something it made sense to spend money on. The demise of aristocratic patronage was a phenomenon bemoaned by The Observer, but it was the wave of the future.

Until now, perhaps. Yes, wealthy Americans did eventually become patrons of the arts. And—on the other hand—there have always been starving artists. But with the arrival of the Internet, the number of people creating “art,” or at least engaging in pursuits for the love of them rather than for any financial reward, seems to have exploded.

This phenomenon is particularly evident in the realm of publishing. Technology has now made it far easier to self-publish—whether it be in the form of a blog, an e-book, or a traditional hardcover book. And there are online magazines where, just as at The Observer in 1807, no one gets paid for their efforts (my son, in fact, is a founder of one of them).

So, are those who write (or are creative in other ways) for the love of it to be considered “amateurs,” in the modern, derogatory sense of the word? Or in the flattering, elitist sense attached to it in 1807?

I think the answer here is “neither.” There are plenty of traditionally published authors who aren’t able to support themselves from their writing—even authors whose books are reviewed favorably in such places as the New York Times. Are they “amateurs”—in the derogatory sense—too?

At the same time, it’s undeniable that the self-publishing revolution has led to a lot of publications that only the author’s mother could embrace. (I should add that this is NOT true of my son’s magazine!)

So perhaps “amateur” is a word we should return to its origins, simply to denote someone who does something out of love. Whether others will love what they do is another question. But of course, that’s also true of those artists and writers who are lucky enough to be able to make a living from their creations.

One of the things I love about writing historical fiction based on the lives of real (albeit obscure) people is the weird interplay that sometimes occurs between what I imagine and what really happened.

The novel I’m currently working on is based on a year in the life of a woman named Eliza Anderson, who edited a magazine in Baltimore in 1807. Anderson got into a lot of journalistic vendettas that year, some of them stemming from the fact that she was a woman engaging in activities that women at the time weren’t supposed to engage in, and some of them stemming from the fact that she was vehement in voicing opinions that proved controversial.

One of the things that outraged her fellow Baltimoreans was Anderson’s denunciation of her hometown as a cultural wasteland. It’s hard to assess how accurate this claim was, but Baltimore was a town that had grown rapidly—it was the third largest city in the country, and it basically hadn’t even existed thirty years before. There was a lot of new money around, possibly unallied to a great deal of sophistication. Unlike New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Baltimore hadn’t had time to develop many cultural institutions. And unlike Europe, the United States as a whole lacked an aristocracy that saw the support of the arts as one of its civic duties.

In an essay that ran in May 1807 in her magazine, The Observer, Anderson delivered an impassioned lament on the state of the fine arts in Baltimore, and the lack of support that condemned a Mr. Nenninger—a German violinist residing in town—and other European musicians to make a living by “teaching brats without ear or attention” and “playing cotillions to dancers who have no idea of measure.” She declared that Baltimoreans’ “insensibility on this point is Vandalism indeed—yes, Vandalism, we cannot refrain from giving its true and merited epithet.”

This “Vandalism” comment—along with another line in which she labeled Baltimore “the very Siberia of the arts”—caused a sensation. Challenged to retract both expressions, Anderson instead repeated them, and apparently took great pleasure in doing so.

I’m in the process of writing a second draft of the novel, and I decided to add a new scene: an evening party hosted by Anderson, shortly before she made her “Vandalism” comment, which would give some idea of her social circle. She and her doctor father were friendly with some of Baltimore’s wealthiest families, but they also socialized with a number of struggling European artists who had fetched up in Baltimore due to the conflicts then roiling the Continent.

Who to have on the guest list, I pondered? Well, the German violinist Nenninger, of course. And Maximilan Godefroy, the French architect who Anderson would marry the following year (causing something of a scandal, since she was technically already married and had to secure a divorce from her first husband). Who else? I decided to throw in a real person who was a friend of Godefroy’s, and something of a celebrity: Benjamin Latrobe, the pre-eminent American architect during this period, who was supervising the construction of a cathedral in Baltimore that he had designed (and which still stands). Latrobe didn’t actually live in Baltimore, but he had many ties to the place, and it’s not unreasonable to place him at a party there (one of his sons settled in Baltimore, and there are still Latrobes in the area to this day).

Searching through biographies of Latrobe and Godefroy in search of factoids I could insert as conversational tidbits, I came across an intriguing footnote in the Godefroy biography (The Architecture of Maximilian Godefroy, by Robert Alexander). It appears that Latrobe and Godefroy both held a low opinion of the level of culture in Baltimore, and the author even attributed Anderson’s characterization of the city as “a Siberia of the arts” to Godefroy’s influence—albeit with no direct evidence.

Towards the end of the footnote, I was startled to see a quotation from a letter Latrobe wrote to Godefroy in January 1807—just a few months before Anderson’s first “Vandalism” statement, and my fictional dinner party: “I believe anything that can be said of the Vandalism of the Baltimoreans in the arts,” Latrobe opined, “provided it is exceedingly absurd & ridiculous.”

Wow. Not only did I discover that Godefroy—and Latrobe—probably fueled Anderson’s scorn for her compatriots’ artistic sensibilities, I accidentally stumbled across words that I could put in Latrobe’s mouth at the dinner party, and which would then find their way into print in the essay Anderson was shortly to write. In my scene, I can have Anderson think, after hearing Latrobe speak of the “Vandalism” of the Baltimoreans, that he has hit upon le mot juste to describe her fellow citizens. And, since I’m including excerpts from The Observer as part of the narrative of the novel, a few pages later readers will see that she steals the phrase to use in her next issue. Not only that, but the scene will give some context to Anderson’s views on culture, which can strike the modern ear as pretty elitist: she was far from the only one who felt this way at the time.

What really thrills me is the fact that I decided to put Latrobe at this party without even knowing he’d said anything about “Vandalism.” I could easily have missed the footnote about Latrobe’s letter and never discovered he’d used the word. But thanks to whatever gods help historical novelists out with these things, I’ve come up with a nice little sequence of events—and one that I’ll know (even if my readers don’t) has some basis in truth. Maybe not everyone would get such a kick out of that, but it made my week.