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My family's dinner conversation this evening was about time travel.
"If you could", I asked, "would you rather travel forward or back in time?"
The consensus, four out of four votes, was to reverse time's arrow. Each of us gave a reason why we'd prefer to travel into the past.
My 17 year-old daughter, a high school senior, has much to fret about: will her marks be good enough; will she get into her preferred college; will she like university? It's hardly surprising that she'll let the future come when it may. "Bad things will happen in the future, they always do. If I knew ahead of time what was going to happen, I'd have to carry that burden."
A goodly number of our book shelves are groaning under the weight of volumes my wife has collected on eighteenth and nineteenth-century cottages, country houses, and gardens. Were she to time travel, she'd head straight to Bath in the hope of seeing Jane Austen promenading down Great Pulteney Street. (The illustration above is a contemporary portrait of Jane herself.)
Time travel is not a new topic for my younger son, my 15 year-old (my 22 year-old is at university, a history major). Wells's The Time Machine is the stuff of his dreams. I asked, "Why not travel into the future?" "Because I don't want to spoil the surprise!"
For me, the past is not a foreign country. I grew up in a Victorian house built in 1870, full of antique furniture, old books, and ghosts (yes, ghosts). My hobby is collecting and studying 450 million year-old fossils. If I could travel into the past, I'd select London in about 1810, the Romantic period, a place and point in time I've spent much of my adult life reading about and writing about.
It occurred to me that studying the Romantic period is a kind of time travel, writing about it a kind of time machine.
Read this blog and we'll time travel together.
In my next post: The Duchess of Devonshire's protégé: Francis Hare-Naylor, a very Romantic story.
