Of its time and place?

I have spent a lot of time this week searching through late nineteenth and early twentieth century texts relevant to various aspects of life in the areas of South Wales where my family were living and working then. I wanted to get a feeling for places and people as well as some additional factual information to inform my writing of the family story. It turned out to be an interesting experience in itself, however, getting to grips with the contemporary writing style! Pages of turgid prose, so earnestly expressed.

Perhaps you can judge a book
by its cover?!!

I must admit that I was tempted to give up on the "History Of The United Society Of Boilermakers And Iron And Steel Shipbuilders". But I'm so glad that I didn't - having waded through pages of what appeared of questionable interest to anyone, written with true Victorian gravity, I hit upon three paragraphs with direct relevance to my grandfather's trade union activity in a long-running industrial dispute of the early 1890s - information that then made perfect sense of subsequent events. Worth every minute I'd slogged through the book!

But it started me thinking about writing as so often being of its time and place and why some books are able to transcend those barriers, to interest and enthuse generations of readers in diverse locations and cultures. I thought of  - and indeed got out again - some of the classics I had read as a youngster. No way now would I read a contemporary book with such dense descriptive paragraphs as you find in Dickens' "A Tale Of Two Cities" - but how I loved that book in my teenage years. And the Robert Louis Stevenson adventures I had read as a child - very much of their time and place but transplantable certainly to the 1950s and 60s, and I hope beyond. In the 1990s my children were fascinated by C. S. Lewis and Tolkein - and the Narnia books still sell in their thousands despite their '40s style. So called "young adult" fiction of today is very different I know, but I would be very interested to see how much of it survives and still entrances in sixty years time!