There comes a time in your life when – much as you’d love to avoid it – you just have to admit to yourself “Yep, I’ve gone back in time.” Now, ideally, all our time travelling would be prefaced with cybernetic learning implants, extensive briefings, and all the preparation a shadowy technocratic conclave can provide. Sometimes, though, life deals us an anomaly of physics which rudely plucks us from our daily grind and deposits us in the late nineteenth century, and you just have to play those cards as they fall.

Now, having suddenly become wise beyond your peers’ years, you may be tempted to revolutionise medicine, make a killing in electronics, be credited with a dance sensation, or some other joyride on your era’s coattails. Consider, though, the classic conundrum of time travel: if your actions can effect change on the past as we know it, you risk preventing your own having time-travelled in the first place; in short, a most peculiar paradox. Any attempt to alter history must, logically, be doomed to fail, and to pursue it is to ensure your own waylayment, destruction, or kidnapping by a flock of unusually vicious moths.

Thus, the lesson with which I wish to furnish you today is the simple necessity of blending in; of concocting a cover identity which might, within the bounds of reasonable eccentricity, explain away the oddities which come of being a chronological refugee. Sadly, this means resisting the temptation of an Austenian fantasy of socialising with the rich and beautiful. If you can’t recite in Greek and Latin, manage a dozen farms and dance a Viennese waltz – in short, enjoy all the ridiculous benefits of a classical education – the aristocracy will sniff you out and scandalise you so thoroughly, you’ll struggle to find a rubber duck that would be seen with you in the bath.

(I must admit, I’m being rather unfair to Austen there. So often, her comparatively humble heroes – self-made lineages, moderately successful gentry, impoverished military families, and so on – prove that at an open mind and a kind heart trump the best advantages of wealth and status. This only furthers my point, though: if you don’t have an Eton-and-Oxbridge-style education, there’s no shame in seeking out modest but good-natured company. If you do have an Eton-and-Oxbridge-style education, you’re the proud inheritor of a mindset which has resisted change for centuries, and this guide will be of little use to you anyway.)

Speaking of wealth, a pertinent issue if you wish to acquire any diggings more fashionable than a disused barn and a contemporary wardrobe without someone else’s nametags, you’ll need to determine if any of your saleable skills are backwards compatible. Thankfully, many professions change much less than they stay the same. Actors, journalists, waiters – anyone whose raw materials are human nature – will find there’s been little development in their field. Those whose training is of a more technical bent may struggle, though – computer programmers, aerospace engineers, photocopier repairers and what have you. If you’re a handy typist – and, face it, we all are, these days – you might find a job there, though it’s typically young ladies’ work. If you get desperate, chaps, remember that there’s be work for a sturdy pair of hands before mechanisation takes over, and a reliable fellow can get by without questions being asked as a hauler or lumper (like a hauler, but with fish.)

Now, even if you can fill some comfortable niche in the humdrum-but-welcoming ranks of the upper-working/lower-middle classes, you will need a backstory which accounts for any gaps in your knowledge of notable public figures, landmarks, pre-decimal currency, and how to maintain your toilet with hot irons and unscented sea creature extract. Being from a foreign country is always handy, and incidentally allows you to weave subtle Socratic critiques of your hosts’ social mores into your conversation, a la Voltaire. The danger there is that some wally will pop up and say “Hulloa! I’m from Persia too! آیا شما در تهران زندگی می کنند؟” A safer bet is to pass as a reclusive type from your own area – someone who might know the old houses and the church, but not the residents or the vicar.

Safest of all is probably to be an amnesiac; a shipwrecked colonist, a survivor of a factory explosion, anyone who might be forgiven for remembering how to ride a bicycle but not how to hold a nib-pen, and who’s Queen but not who’s First Lord of the Treasury. Don’t worry about the medicine behind it – the Victorians certainly didn’t. Nineteenth-century fictional characters suffer bouts of brain fever at the drop of a hat-pin (something both spontaneous and difficult to hear.) Complain of nervous flutters, fainting fits, and hysterical palpitations and/or moustache tremors, and you’ll probably manage a prescription for laudanum and perhaps one of those clinical vibrators. If you enjoy the attention, you might even become a cause célèbre – and, so long as no-one actually tries too hard to reunite you with your lost family and friends, you could gain a decent little source of discreet donations.

Whether you fly under the radar or above it, so long as you keep your actual origins out of the public light, causality dictates you should be able to live in frugal independence until a wandering temporal waterspout, dusty old relic or wild-eyed inventor with a shock of white hair manages to return you to your original point of departure. Until that point – or until a lonely grave decades before your own birth, if it never comes – remember, the past isn’t so bad! It’s another country; practically a holiday! There’s really nothing new under the sun; texts are called telegrams, but no less vapid for being composed by hand by a bespectacled clerk in sleeve-garters. Students are still students, with surprisingly vicious pranks, and portraits of revolutionary generals on their walls. Slang has always been ridiculous, but the better examples accumulate rather than expire, so you can’t go too far wrong. Incidentally, ‘gay’ has had double meanings of one kind or another far longer than anyone who complains about it has been alive. Otherwise, have fun, avoid crinolines (notorious firetraps, deadlier than any corset,) and if you happen to wander into 1888 Whitechapel, tell me who did it, won’t you?

Now, anyone who knows me will tell you twice that I’m no po-faced evangelist, here to instruct you to get back to Christmas’s Christ-Mass-y roots. I proselytise for no Earthly church, and even if I did, I value historical uncertainty too highly not to admit that the whole thing’s a hodgepodge, an amalgam of too many winterfests, gods’ anniversaries and Classical-era retail scams too count. As far as I’m concerned, Christmas is defined by municipal councils putting giant tinsel decorations on the streetlights, and dreadful Rat Pack-style crooners competing to disgrace jazz’s good name.

No, what interests me here is not the founding of the holiday – be it the commemoration of the incarnation of the martyred creator deity, or anything elsewise – but its, shall we say, active participant. Its chief mythical being – its fairy, goblin, or imp. Yea, it’s Santa himself that I’m pondering – that mysterious fellow who defines Christmas until around puberty and reappears in a more malign aspect with childbirth. Everyone knows he lives at magnetic north, keeps a staff of magical toymakers, is allergic to eggs, and so forth – but dashed if I knew any more than that. I was dimly aware he was once a real man who was noted for his generosity, but I had no idea where he lived, what he did, whether he received remuneration for the use of his image and/or donated the proceeds to charity… twenty-five Christmasses and I hadn’t the foggiest.

Well, I’m not one to take blinding ignorance sitting down, so I did a little superficial research, and discovered a few interesting facts! Saint Nikolaos was a bishop in the early centuries of the Church, who was indeed known for his generosity – distributing gifts to the faithful of his diocese, and so forth. In death and canonisation, he is the patron of sailors, students and thieves (and so, I’d assume, of cussing, informally competitive drinking and regrettable tattoos.) It’s his death in particular which sparked my imagination: for all the years which have passed, his original tomb remains extant, and though his skeletal remains have since been removed, they too are still in Church hands, in a dedicated site in Bari, Italy.

The history of his life and his role in worship is fascinating enough, of course, but what really struck me is the potential for the cruellest act ever committed against child-kind. Simply possessing the knowledge that Santa is dead and his bones are in a box in Italy… the horrors you could inflict! “If you little curmudgeons don’t behave, I’ll take you to Bari, Italy, and show you Santa’s bones!” Heck, there’s a continuing repatriation debate concerning the return of his remains to the original tomb in Turkey – if you timed it right, you could get there while the casket itself was open. Or, or – don’t tell the kids what you’re doing until the last minute! Imagine:

“I’ve got a surprise for you all! Inside this box is Santa Claus! He’s sleeping now, but if you’ve all been good boys and girls, he’ll wake up and have presents for everyone!”
open sepulchre – reveal grisly horror
“OHHHH NOOOOO WHAT DID YOU DOOOOO NAUGHTY NAUGHTY CHILDRENNNN”

I suppose, technically, this trick would work with any box of dead bishop, but I think the genuine article lends it that crucial element of blasphemous verisimilitude. The expense is a problem, certainly – air fares and so on. I can imagine an atheistic primary school writing it off as a study trip… but I prefer to keep politics out of my childhood-destroying pranks, you know. And, yes, the whole business may be cruel, low and mean, but it’s still truer to the known facts of the holiday than a quarter-century and billions of dollars of talking reindeer, chimneys and mutually-contradictory True Meanings of Christmas.

I first discovered this discipline in my researches with the Antipodean League of Temporal Voyagers, assisting with their chronocartographical projections. The classic problems of time travel, well-known to physicists and logicians, remained stumpers – if it is possible to change the past, can one then paradoxically prevent one’s present actions? And why is there no evidence of any future travellers having passed by? If time travel were impossible, neither would be an issue – but the League’s experiments had demonstrated that time travel certainly was possible, and made for a charming Saturday outing at that.

With time, contemplation, and an endless parade of cheese sandwiches, I had a startling realisation – that the mystery suffered for being attempted by such strict rationalists as it had. Its framing assumed that all the variables were known, that motives and actions and consequences were perceptible and measurable – but this is history we’re talking about! If a historian says they’ve measured a motivation, you know it’s time for Nursie to come wheel them off to bed. History, like its practitioners, is vague, grimy and shrouded in mystery and inaccurate lecture timetables.

Another staple of history, like much of cautious academia, is the ornamentation of established ideas with small but striking adornments of revision – the buttonholes of progress, we might say. With this in mind, I recalled a popular theory: if we can travel to the past and still retain the present, then what has already happened – including what has happened to time travellers – is set, fixed, unchangeable. The present we now enjoy relies on time travellers having done their work, and could never have been otherwise! Our records show no evidence of time travellers, exactly… which proves that what time travellers there have been have avoided being recorded! What alterations they have made to the timeline (in order to keep it exactly the same) have been masterfully subtle, possibly by chance, or out of fear of discovery… or of those damnable time-moths!

*ahem* Sorry, became incautiously academic there. To return to my sound, valid, and extremely persuasive reasoning… the “closed loop” theory, as it’s titled by people a good deal clever than me, allows for time travel by predestining the actions of time travellers. In such a system, you can’t go back and prevent, say, World War II – and it’s entirely possible that your meddling in the affairs of the Weimar Republic actually contributed to causing it all along. Do you really want something like that on your conscience? Better to stay out of mid-twentieth-century politics altogether.

Now, you may well ask: does this mean I have no control over my own fate? If I would be powerless to act on past events, would it not be foolish to assume I had free will in the present? Perhaps, but, again, we must consider the possibility from a historic viewpoint. The closest we can come to knowing to determining for certain what may have happened to any given temporal voyager – barring chancing it ourselves – is through examining accounts and records the same as we would any other event. The future might be predetermined, but we cannot know it with certainty – and what difference is there between an uncertain future, and a certain future that is not known? Thus, Retroprophecy; the finding of future-knowledge in the study of the past, endowing visions and predictions with all the glorious uncertainty of historical fact.

The waters of this practice run deep, but I can think of an immediate application: the vetting of any potential time traveller against records of individuals of similar appearance, who have seemingly appeared from nowhere and who either disappeared just as mysteriously, or met nasty (possibly moth-related) ends. With the identification of these cases, and the blacklisting of any who may have been time travellers one doesn’t wish to become, I imagine the rates of death by Bronze Age-weaponry, matchlock pistol-fire and Borgia-related dismemberment could be reduced significantly. What do you think? If you have some ideas for Retroprophetic methods – or are even an established practitioner! – write to FrillyShirt here or at the address below, and share your views!

Second item of today’s business: my interview with the BryonySeries blog having been posted there in full, I thought I might include a copy here, for what amounts to posterity in this day and age.

1) What is the difference between a dandy and a fop? How do you define yourself?

“‘Fop’ has long been an insult, meaning someone showy and silly, but in that role, it’s entirely archaic now, so I’ve picked it up as an umbrella term for anyone who likes dressing up. Besides, being showy and silly sometimes – and a little self-deprecating, too – is fun! Being stylish is out of style, so there’s no harm in acknowledging one is a bit of an oddbod for doing it.”

2) And dandy?

“The dandy is a particular breed of fop – the two terms might have been synonymous once, but dandyism has since been associated with Beau Brummell and his crowd, and its ethos laid down by Baudelaire. The dandy is a creature of society and status – he dresses conservatively, but with great care to detail, to position himself at the very forefront of fashion. Essentially, he seeks to embody the aristocratic man – to demonstrate that he has absolutely no concerns beyond his own leisure.I… am not a creature of society and status. Not that they’d have me, of course, but I’m a quiet, uncompetitive sort of fellow, with no interest in the caprice of the fashionable elite. No more can I claim the aristocratic aversion to trade, and all that’s practical, in dress or in life. What I wear, I wear in the interest of self-expression, not status – a pursuit that anyone with an interest should be entitled to follow, I think, so if clothes should be hardwearing and economical as well as beautiful, all the better.”

3) Why do some people equate the terms with effeminate personalities?

“That’s a bucket and a half of cultural hangups right there! Men are spatial, women are verbal; men are practical, women are social; men are timeless, women are fashionable… better scholars than I have written books upon books trying to figure out where and when these ideas came from, but their net effect is the conviction that any man who dedicates himself entirely to feminine pursuits – to looking nice, showing off, and so climbing the social hierarchy – must at least be effete, if not somehow flawed as a human being. It’s hardly the worst thing to come of ingrained cultural sexism, though, and if a foppish chap has no insecurities on his own part, it shouldn’t really bother him.”

4) Any particular fashion styles particularly associated with dandyism?

“Across foppishness as a whole, it matters less what is worn than that wearing it is considered a valuable pursuit – something artistic, something worth developing in their life. Dandyism in particular, well, I might call it “fashionable menswear, only more so” – their checks more checked, their ties more tied, their pressed lines more pressed. King Edward VII is a good example of this menswear-pushed-to-the-extreme – and speaking of extremism, he was a probable Nazi sympathiser to boot. Fascists’ neckties aside, foppery covers many traditions – chaps in velvet and lace stand out, of course, but someone who really cultivated the cardigan could as well claim the name.”

5) Why are dandyism, foppery and clothes-horsing around prickly subjects?

“Believe it or not, there are still dandies in the Brummellian tradition who get a bit narky about anyone else using the term. They’re not all bad, but if you look, you’ll find they’re just some of many with very forthright opinions about the right way to dress up. Don’t dress too ostentatiously, don’t wear anything old-fashioned, don’t wear dark colours, don’t wear bright colours, don’t wear this style of coat or that style of collar, don’t answer back, respect your elders, God save the Queen, etc., etc. Folks to whom dressing is an act of social conservatism; a preservation of standards, in which fun and creativity play no part.”

6) How do the arts fit into the dandy persona?

“It’s true, the old chestnut, that to some, life itself is a work of art. Of course, given how difficult it is to find two people who would agree on a definition of ‘art’, that might not help us much. I have my own take, following my Transcendental leanings: that art is the creative process which brings together who we are and what we experience, “realism, spiritualism,” and the “aesthetic or intellectual,” as Walt Whitman put it. In other words, art is knowledge, art is thought, and nothing we do can but be artistic.”

7) So why does the 19th century attract you?

“For so much that defines modern life – mass production, urban industrial society, global electronic communications, capitalist class stratification, mass transit, the works – we can point to the 19th century and say “this is it. This is where it was born, or at least had its adolescence.”

8) Why do you say that?

“The transition to a meritocratic, democratic, professional, educated, rational society – which we now take absolutely for granted – was so dramatic, written in such great letters across everyday life, that it produced some of the most wonderful, fascinating, sometimes genius, sometimes bizarre movements, practices and ideologies that have ever been seen.”

9) Such as?

“Production and population rose, education and publication rose, world cultures blended, and more people were having more ideas than ever before. On the flipside, many of the efficiencies and simplifications of modern mass production hadn’t caught on yet, so the new methods were being used to create richer or sturdier goods.”

10) Like clothing?

“Clothing’s a great example here – the modern suit is a loose, shapeless garment compared to its Victorian counterpart, being designed to fit as many potential customers with as little work as possible. Groups like the Arts & Crafts Movement sprung up, debating how to retain this quality of workmanship while cheap goods to those who needed them. That’s a debate that’s still going today, among – for instance – the steampunk community.”

11) Any dandies worth emulating and why?

“I’ve introduced a feature to FrillyShirt recently, called the Public’s Peacocks – accounting the lives and lessons of clotheshorses who took up the cause of the poor and downtrodden, in practical politics or otherwise. There’s quite a lot of them to work with, surprisingly enough! But, even leaving politics aside, there are many fine foppish sorts who lived beautiful, inspiring lives. Oscar Wilde stands out, as he always does – for all his caustic wit and regrettable legal decisions, he was the most kind and tender man, and he wrote the most marvellous essays on the spiritual life.

12) Anyone else?

“For a more quiet, practical sort of fop, I greatly admire the American Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau, in particular, was one who lived, worked, created and dressed all according to his own ideal – designing his own suits for country walking and for his scientific pursuits. By way of an example local to my hometown, I’d point to the Patersons – a whole family of artists, designers and philanthropists, who not only brought Aestheticism to Melbourne, but who did much to lay the foundation for Australian art as it exists today. A marvellous clan, the subject of my own continuing research and writing – and not once have I seen any of them looking less than stunning.

13) “When did your love for the nineteenth century begin?

“I suppose it was around when I began my history degree. I was a vehement radical in those days, utterly dedicated to improving the common lot by political action. Gradually, I discovered my love for history in general, the wonderfully bizarre nineteenth century in particular. At the same time, I was introduced to some wonderful artists and writers – the Romantics, the Post-Impressionists… Joseph Beuys was a big one, too – whose work celebrated the art of life. Studying under the philosopher Freya Mathews, and by her being introduced to Kant and Schelling and to Taoist thought, was the next big step – redefined my concept of the self in nature, of morality, and all that jazz.

14) What does creative expression mean for the fop?

“That the same skills which help us live beautifully can help us live well, That understanding and celebrating who we are can help us understand and celebrate the world around us. Painting, prose, weaving, dance – all means by which we comprehend what cannot be expressed more simply. I mustn’t waffle on too long, but essentially, to live artistically is to grapple with Life’s Big Questions, to go beyond pure reason and pure science, to seek the truth in your every pursuit.”