Misreading history - how can we understand the past better?

Blue didn't exist in ancient texts, meaning Ancient Greeks were colourblind, and some Victorians had a better life expectancy than modern people while eating up to 5000-calorie-a-day diets. These are two ideas that the internet has thrown at me lately.

One of them appears to be quite likely and the other has seemingly been easily debunked. Can you guess which is which? Go on, have a guess.

Well, I'm not going to give you the answer immediately, you'll have to keep reading for that. Lets discuss both of these ideas.

Modern London is far cleaner than the Victorian times

Common conceptions

Those who know anything about Victorian Britain or have, well, colour-vision, would think that the average working Victorian led a sickly, starving life and that it is improbable that an entire, large and diverse population were colourblind. However, it seems like one of these ideas could be true.

Let's look at the Victorian idea first. From Dickens to the Bronte sisters most of our views of Victorian life are bleak. The air and streets were filthy, diseases were rampant, and drinking water was so dirty that one third of children would die before they were ten. With almost no understanding of bacteria or viruses it seems nigh on impossible that adults would have a life-expectancy of 73 for men and 75 for women, even when this number doesn't factor the deaths of children below five. In modern America life expectancy is 79 for women and 74 for men, while the UK is 79 for men and 82 for women. Yes, there has been an increase, but not much when taking into account the medical leaps we have made in the past century.

So did Victorians live this long? And if so, how?

The source I got sucked into about these magic mid-Victorians was persuasive. The mid-Victorian period was between 1850-1870. This was a fairly short period and definitely doesn't include the whole of the Victorian era (it certainly excludes Oliver Twist in the starving 1840). What made these lucky mid-Vics live so long?

One reason was their active lifestyles. The average working-class Victorian did manual labour in some form for over 10 hours a day, six days a week and no-one led a sedentary life. Many workers had to walk for up to 6 miles each day, work on the land and do heavy house work. With a range of 50-70 hours of physical activity a week, even the most dedicated modern gym goer could never hope to keep up.

With all that activity came the need for fuel. Female Victorian workers had to consume 3,000kcl a day while male workers would need 5,000kcl, just to maintain their body weight. Not only did they have to eat almost double what we do today but what they were eating was important.

They spent most of their money on bread, potatoes, and meat, but don't rush for a chip and bacon butty too soon. The Victorians might have spent most of their money on these foods but that was only because they were the most expensive. The bulk of their calories actually came from freshly picked fruits and vegetables that were brought into cities daily via the railways and were extremely cheap compared to modern standards. This led them to eat at least 8 to 10 portions of fruit and veg each day.

So the main question is: does it sound plausible that exercise and healthy eating could really make as much difference as our modern medical leaps?

Keep that in mind while we explore the other idea.

The wine dark sea... Blue didn't exist for ancient people?

When I first heard about this in a TedTalk it blew my mind. Or blue my mind? Anyway.

My imagination went crazy, I just couldn't fathom that ancient people didn't see the world in the same way that we do today. The TedTalk wasn't even about this topic, rather, the speaker mentioned it in passing, but I was suddenly frantically googling to find out all I could: reading articles and discussing this crazy concept with my students.

The crux of this idea is that the ancient people didn't have a word for the colour blue and therefore, couldn't distinguish it. This concept was first brought to light by William Gladstone when he scoured ancient texts in search of colour and found no mention of the word blue. Homer describes the 'wine dark sea' and Nordic writers described the sky as bronze or iron. Not once, in Chinese stories, the Icelandic Sagas, or ancient Hebrew versions of the Bible, is blue mentioned.

I conclude, then, that the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age. - Williams Gladstone

The only ancients that seem to have had a word for blue were the Egyptians, and they were also the only people to have made the pigment blue to paint with. This seemed to suggest that until we have a grasp of making something, we lack language to describe it and therefore may not even see it in the same way.

These articles also mention that various modern hunter-gatherer groups have many words for greens but none for blue - instead, incorporate shades of blue as relating to green. One of the groups mentioned are the Himba people, native to Northern Namibia. A BBC documentary states that the Himba people struggled to correctly identify a blue square amongst green squares - where to us it clearly stands out.

So can language, and the lack of descriptive language, really change how we see the world? The arguments in these articles are certainly compelling.

Is anything real anymore?

It is an intriguing idea that our language may change the way we see the world. If you google 'blue didn't exist to ancients' you will find a plethora of information produced and replicated in countless articles.

If you google 'Victorian life expectancy' you will come across a litany of articles showing that it was around 43 years old.

So, you must be expecting me to tell you that google is wrong, right? Because it would be boring if the obvious answer was correct?

Well, I'm not going to tell you that either is categorically right or wrong. I'm a writer and haven't spent much time researching either of these topics so I'm not qualified for that. (Boo, I know).

But, I will let you know the counter arguments:

There is one video that really feels as though it has debunked the idea blue didn't exist in ancient peoples' vision. It's 25 minutes long and well worth a watch but to conclude the points, if you're a busy person:

• Colour in language is complicated (we call wine white, when really it's yellow, etc.)

• Egyptian blue was widely available to most of the ancient world due to trade links

• Colour perception is the same despite how the colour is made in nature - whether it is pigment or illusion we still see blue the same way

• Many of these ancient texts were poetic works - describing the sea as wine dark, or the sky as iron wouldn't be out of place in a modern poem

• The editors of the BBC documentary exaggerated the scientific findings with the Himba people - they could all identify the blue square

There are more points but, already, all of these are pretty effective arguments that ancient people could see blue. Despite this, it is still fun to think about how we could see the world in different ways - there's definitely a story here somewhere...

The Victorian diet is a story I initially clicked on this video sceptically. It's by one of my favourite youtubers who talks about diet and habit forming. She usually does her research so, despite my scepticism, I settled in to watch.

She is largely summarising a 2009 paper in which the authors explore the mid-Victorian era of diets and life expectancy. The points are what I've talked about above - and they seem valid and reasonable. You can watch the video here or read the paper here. To counter-argue her points, there is plenty of evidence about the low life expectancy and poor conditions at other times in the Victorian era.

My take on it all?

Seeing as you've read this far, I'll let you know my opinion.

I'm totally taken in by the debunking of the idea that blue didn't exist. It seems too unlikely that so many people couldn't see blue when it's all around us in nature.

I also find that there is a truly convincing argument in that paper that the mid-Vics, in that short period, had a great diet, active lifestyle and life expectancy. We see time and time again that diet, exercise and routine truly do make massive differences to our overall health.

How can we use history in writing?

For me, both of these ideas are really interesting. I love the thought that language could change our vision and that diet and exercise really helped prevent ailments and promoted longevity even when medical understanding was limited.

With most of history, it takes a lot of combing through many archives to get a glimmer of what the past was really like. With understanding history we must be patient and open to having our minds changed with new evidence - just like with science.

However, as a creative writer sometimes you don't need all the facts. Just the kernel of an idea for your next story...

And on that note, I'm going to stop being sedentary and go for a walk under the iron-grey sky and eat an apple, in some attempt to emulate the active mid-Victorian super-lifestyle.

Thank you for reading! Have you come across any interesting ideas on the internet lately? Let us know in the comments and we'll have a look into them. All ideas have the potential to be ideas to write about and even if something is not true, it could make a great story...

Let us know what you think about these ideas and see you next week!

Sarah x