sodden thought

[ritaxis]

I'm sitting here looking at old old luggage labels (and other hotel advertising papers,some are clearly not luggage lables)(by way of Abi's partihelia at Making Light). And Of course, I'm thinking of stories to go with these luggage labels, as you do, and suddenly I'm wondering:

Is it possible there are more fictional Europeans of the late 19th century-earliy 20th century, all told, than there were real ones? Or is it possible that there are more fictional people in some smaller piece of geography, say, Paris, or Bath?

Comments

[ellarien]

I can see that being true for small classes of people -- non-Royal English dukes in the early nineteenth century, for example, or middle-class English murderers in the early 20th. (I'm pretty sure there are more TV murderers in the contemporary UK than real ones, too.) Otherwise it may depend on where you stop counting the fictional people in crowd scenes.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've had this thought about the Napoleonic Wars -- specifically the reason Britain won is because of all the fictional sea captains helping out.