About the Cyclopedia

History

This Cyclopedia began with complaints. People who liked Shadows in the Fog found that they were unsure how to run it, because they didn't know enough about Victorian London, Jack the Ripper, or the like. As I discussed it with players and correspondents, it became clear to me that much of the information I had long since absorbed in the course of researching the game was not in any way common knowledge, especially perhaps among Americans.

I originally intended to write a Volume 2, which would contain lots of useful information on London, but I kept feeling that if I were to go to the trouble of writing such a book, it would take many years and a lot of effort that really should be expended elsewhere in my life. So what to do?

It was after playing in a game inspired by and partly based on the rules of Shadows in the Fog that I stumbled on the whole Wiki thing. Yes, I didn't know about them, and in fact had never heard the term. For his espionage game, my friend set up this wiki, and over the course of play I could see the thing coming to life. So that seemed like a great idea for Shadows in the Fog itself.

After some discussion on The Forge, Trevis Martin agreed to host the site here, and we began setting up.

The Sources

One of the things I had discovered was that there are a considerable number of wonderful websites on all things Victorian, with Jack the Ripper and London numbered clearly among them. And as you browse these sites, you keep stumbling on yet more material. So my initial object was not so much to lift all their good work, but to provide sketches and links to those sites.

The principal sites have been:

The Victorian London Dictionary (http://www.victorianlondon.org/)

• You can buy the whole site on CD-ROM, for $25 (or £12).

City of Shadows (http://cityofshadows.stegenga.net)

The Victorian Web (http://www.victorianweb.org/)

Casebook: Jack the Ripper (http://www.casebook.org/intro.html)

You will see links to these again and again. There are other very useful sites; see Links.

I have also transcribed things from various books, of course.

Where Things Stand (Jan. 7, 2005)

There are a lot of blind links, of course, but the framework should be functional and navigable. If it isn't, please email me. We have added an exciting piece of code that allows you to get a list of all the blind links (or "stubs"), written by BryantDurrell^?. You can find it at PagesWanted, at the top of the CyclopediaHome page.

The biggest thing that's missing is much discussion of the occult. That's because it's not something you can find reliably on the web, so a little wandering about and cutting-and-pasting isn't going to cover it. So for me, it's a matter of getting some free time to write pages on major types of occultism and various occultists, going through my various source materials and references. This isn't a quick process, however. If you want to add material in the meantime, please do so, but be sure to cite your sources so that when I (or anyone else) go and edit later on, I know what you're referring to.

There also isn't much general-purpose weirdness here, although there was a lot in London (still is). That's because my first priority has been to get a functional wiki up; strange things largely come later. If you know some odd things about London, please stick them right in, and be sure to put references not only in the Dictionary and other appropriate indexes but also in the WeirdLondon section of the CyclopediaHome front page (under Shadows of London). Eventually I hope that this section will be large and dense.

Where Do We Go From Here?

My hope is that others will add material of all sorts. There are, god knows, lots of blind links that need to be filled in. There are also huge quantities of places, people, events, and things that need to be added.

And, of course, there's all the weirdness you come up with, the Inventions.

So how does this work?

Links: rather than add a blind link, create a page for whatever you've found. Copy or transcribe a small piece of the material, using quotation marks and ellipses to indicate what originally appeared elsewhere. Conclude with a bullet-point that gives the source and website.

Transcriptions: be sure to indicate what is from the original source, and give a bullet-point giving the source.

Images: unless the image is very small, I'd much prefer that you add a link rather than the image itself. Space is not unlimited.

Cross-references: unless and until Trevis and I think of something clever, you need to add references to the LondonDictionary as you go along. I find it easiest to add the reference first to the People, Places, or Events sections, then stick in a cross-refrence to the Dictionary. Somehow I suspect there is a way to do this automatically, at least with the People and Places indexes, but I haven't figured out how to do this yet.

Topical Pages: please feel free to add some topics to the CyclopediaHome front page, but if it gets too long it will be unnavigable. Better would be to add subtopics as appropriate, remembering of course to add them also to the Dictionary. If there's some major topic I've missed, please drop me an email.

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 29 Dec 2004

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