Ye Goode Olde Days: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

So said LP Hartley at the start of his novel ''The Go-Between''. Any prospective time travellers should also add the following: "make sure you get your shots before you go -- and ''don't drink the water''. Also, pack your own toilet paper!" The fact is that while we like to think that the past was just like the modern day but with funny hats and folk music, many of the things we take for granted just weren't common -- or even available -- back then.

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* Highlighted in "Sunday Mourning", an issue of ''[[The Sandman]]'' in which the immortal Hob Gadling, who has been around since Medieval times, visits a Renaissance Faire and complains that in the real Renaissance he would see people with cancers that ate their faces away.

* An Al Hartley-era ''[[Archie]]'' [http://www.misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/stupidcomics210.html comic] has the gang transported to an idyllic 1890's small town with none of the ills of today's world...and none of the ills of the 1890's either.

 

* [[G. K. Chesterton]] was often accused of making the past look better than the current age. He responded by saying he was correcting the "Whiggish" view of history. That being the view that all the mistakes of the past lead towards a better future.

* [[The Pyrates]] is set firmly in a [[Ye Goode Olde Days]] version of [[The Cavalier Years]]. [[George Macdonald Fraser|The Author]] lampshades this immediately following the idyllic introduction, saying that historians would no doubt point out the complete lack of sanitation, hygiene, or social services. He concludes that the historical characters, "happy conscienceless rabble that they were," likely wouldn't care, and urges the reader not to, either.

* Averted in [[Time Scout]]. In fact, the suggestions given in the first paragraph of are taken up by people in the book! They get multiple shots, they take many, many preparations against death and disease, they understand that they may have to be quarantined when they return, and men intending to go brothel-hopping downtime even get ''surgically restored'' '''''foreskins.'''''

* ''[[Septimus Heap]]'', despite [[Word of God|being set in a world like the 17th century]], has quite high living standards and sanitation.