how poor do you want them?

[marycatelli]

It's a question about characters, but it's also a question about worlds.

Most people reading a fantasy novel are not aware that they themselves live in a post-scarcity world of utopian abundance.  If you told people living a century ago that the poor have a major health problem from obesity, and they would have thought you crazy.  There are people in the world today who still find it wonderful; one journalist was told by a boy in the Third World that he wanted to visit America -- to see a place where poor people are fat.

And then there's medicine.  Take Queen Victoria.  She was the daughter of the fourth son of George III, and the reason she succeeded to the throne was that her cousin the Princess of Wales died in childbirth, and her uncle William IV's legitimate children did not live.  It was thought little short of miraculous that all her own children lived to adulthood.

Then, leaving aside your readers, how much of it do you want?  When women gave birth every other year and nursed on the off years to have ten children -- that would mean, usually, two who lived to adulthood.  That would be No Fun At All, and would logically preclude many things she could do.  As Virginia Woolf put it, "Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children--no human being could stand it."

Not that her husband would be much to be envied, in the overwhelming number of cases.  Most would be doing field work.  Which is gruelling and exhausting.  Very exhausting.  And rather dull for a story, especially since he's not going to be up to much else.

Being a fantasy work, of course, there's always the option of magic.  But how much?  I read so many works where the magic would have to be shoved on to have the level of health and agricultural production that are displayed but in which magic is actually showed in much more limited use.

Comments

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I think this is in the category of the Magical Fields Of Misplaced Buzzwords, and the horses that work like fuzzy cars....

(Folks seriously have so little idea of how much skill and technology is involved in our modern agriculture!)

[marycatelli]

Definitely. The whole syndrome of not realizing that your current environment does not in fact cover all of space and time.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Also, a realistic portrayal of the poverty of pre-industrial societies would be Exceedingly Grim, to the point of destroying the appeal of the work.

I remember a story that included a realistic portrayal of an elderly peasant couple who were taken by a group of nobles to be servants on their search for a supposedly evil wizard. When the poor old woman unthinkingly anticipated a question and answered it before the noble actually articulated it, and became terrified she'd be beaten for insolence, my slow burn started. By the time it was revealed that the wizard wasn't in fact evil, but was just a geeky guy who was inventing disruptive technologies Connecticut-Yankee style, and that the nobles were not only going to kill him, but destroy the peasant couple as well because they now knew too much, I wanted to call in an air strike. Although I would've been satisfied with having every one of those noble lords shot from cover. Let them know what it's like to be terrified and helpless for a change.

[marycatelli]

Hummm. Yeah. Unpleasantness would be a big part of it -- but, to be fair, it wouldn't really be as noticable to the characters as to us. Their noses would get inured to the way things smelled, everyone takes it for granted that nobles can abuse their position, etc.

Of course, pushed too far, you end up with the opposite problem, with the notion that since children died a lot, no doubt their parents didn't grieve, and the like.

[onelastsketch.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

I'm not sure that I agree any "accurate" portrayal of a preindustrial society need be necessarily all-out-grim. Peasants in medieval Europe had plenty of festival days, for instance, communal gatherings and the like. And, as Mary pointed out, people inevitably get used to certain things and leave them unquestioned, especially in a medieval context where even the accepted cosmology of the world supported the status quo.

And the simplest point: no matter how horrific the situation, someone can find scraps of happiness here and there.

[marycatelli]

There may even be respects in which their lives were better.

I have known people to have apoleptic at the idea that modern life is not superior to all before in every possible way.