Two concepts to keep in mind when using society are politeness and scandal. Politeness extends beyond etiquette; there are simply things that a member of society will not do. Open displays of emotion were not permitted in polite society. Men, especially heads of households, kept from discussing business or delivering troubling news to women. A common practice was for the head of the family to read a newspaper and then relate appropriate news to his wife and daughters. A gentleman or his wife would never be seen doing manual labor, that’s what servants were for. And although the coin had long since left circulation, the guinea was used to quote prices for art, horses, land, and professional fees.
Scandal was the one thing that a member of British Steam Age society had to avoid. Having a mistress, for example, was not nearly as bad as society finding out about it. Many marital partners quietly accepted that their partner had a paramour as long as they were discreet. This extended to other vices as well, especially overindulgence. It was also scandalous for the upper class to engage in business (patronage was a different matter).
Other nations had their own class systems. American Victorianism was an offshoot of the British Victorian lifestyle that occurred chiefly in heavily populated regions of the United States, such as New England and the Deep South. The name, derived from the reign of Queen Victoria, of course, reflected the heavy British cultural influence on the United States during the time.
As American business people of the Second Industrial Revolution created sprawling industrial towns and cities in the Northeast, land ownership created a de facto elite even though “all men are created equal.” The growing upper class in the U.S. mimicked the high society of their former mother country in dress, morality, and mannerisms. The period included various activities: the Second Industrial Revolution, the Women’s suffrage movement, and Republican political domination.
Former slaves and other Americans of African descent also tended to be treated as a lower class.
In Russia, the peasantry resented the noble landowners, especially those that had formerly been serfs (emancipation occurred only a decade prior to the Victorian Age).
In Japan, the Emperor clashed with the samurai class, which he intended to abolish.
In the colonies and empires, social classes were divided by race and ethnicity as well.
Society provides many hooks for campaigns in Steamfunkateers. A broke baron tries to court an American heiress, who is secretly a vampire. A noble finds himself in love with a peasant whose mother was actually murdered by the noble’s father. A samurai kodenbushi (Legendary Samurai) might not wish to lay down his sword for the emperor, so he enlists the aid of Tewodros II, Emperor of the Ethiopian Empire. In exchange, he helps Tewodros II defeat the British during the British Expedition to Abyssinia.
Courtship was a very formal affair and allowed for little time between prospective partners to get to know each other. Marriages were based on social desirability, not romantic love. This enforced prudery fueled interest in literature about sexually charged vampires and dashing rogues.
In your campaign, such a situation might lead to married people having affairs, or single people sneaking around to be with those that they could never marry. These affairs can be used for blackmail purposes, or to allow unlikely characters to have intimate information and contacts that would otherwise be unavailable. Even player characters—especially Dandies and Femme Fatales—can use this to their advantage, using their wiles to gain benefits.
Progress
Another key theme in the Age of Steam was progress. Science captured the imagination of the public, and there seemed little that science would not achieve. Railroads, telegraphs, and steamships connected continents. A canal was dug through the Suez. Factories churned out machine-made products. Gaslight kept cities alive well into the night. Electric light bulbs and telephones were even making their debuts.
This scientific and technological progress fired the imagination of novelists. Jules Verne wrote about vessels that could swim beneath the ocean, take to the air, or even be shot into space. H.G. Wells explored the concept of a time machine, first in the short story “The Chronic Argonauts,” (1888) and later his better known novel The Time Machine (1895). The latter novel was in part an allegory on social classes, with the far future being divided between the beautiful Eloi, a childlike race with everything provided for them, and the hideous Morlocks, a bestial, industrial race that provides for the Eloi, who are, in fact, their food source. Neither race was as intelligent as the time traveling protagonist.
While perhaps not as extreme as the Morlock future, progress and industrialization in the Age of Steam did have its downsides. The poor flocked to the cities in the hopes of finding factory work. What they found was low wages, poor working conditions, and crammed slums (also known as rookeries). Smokestacks belched black smoke into the air and stained clothes, obscured vision, and, in extreme cases, caused suffocation or drowning (as those who lost their way fell into rivers). Disease tore through the densely populated rookeries. Human evolution, promoted by Charles Darwin, suggested that man was little more than an advanced machine, possibly with no God to guide him.
Needless to say, this dark side of the industrial revolution and evolutionary thought also fuelled novelists. A few decades prior to the Age of Steam, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein or a Modern Prometheus as a warning about man daring to play God. The works of Charles Dickens, many of which showcased the plight of the London poor, are still very popular. During the Age of Steam, Robert Louis Stevenson combined science and the restraints of polite society in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Politics
While America and France had their major revolutions in the previous century, the nineteenth century was almost continually marked with revolutionary fervor. Many dissatisfied subjects and citizens, mainly from the lower classes of their respective societies, stoked the fires of revolution. Partly spurred on by Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, popular revolutions exploded across the European continent. For the most part, these revolutions were suppressed. Communism made its resurgence during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, when a socialist government emerged to take over Paris. This Paris Commune reigned for two months until it was defeated by the regular army. Communism would remain an issue across the European continent throughout the Age of Steam, although somewhat curiously, Britain and America were virtually untouched by the fires of communism.
All western nations were subject to anarchism. Anarchism was the term given to a movement that sought violent overthrow of the government. While some anarchists were communists, anarchism was a movement all its own. Indeed, any group that used terrorist tactics to influence government was considered an anarchist. Significant anarchist activities throughout the Age of Steam included assassination attempts on the German, Russian, Chilean and British leaders (the attempt on Russian Tsar Alexander II was successful). In Britain, anarchism was equated with Irish separatists (the Fenians). While Fenian terrorist attacks were primarily used as scare tactics, they made assassination attempts on Queen Victoria and stabbed the Chief Secretary of Ireland to death in 1884.
Communism and related equality movements could provide interesting background color or the motive behind intrigues. Anarchist attacks can add an element of surprise to any Steamfunkateers campaign. Indeed, the PCs could be in a public building or park on an unrelated adventure when an anarchist bomb or assassination attempt springs out of nowhere. In a covert campaign, the PCs could be Black Dispatches, or even Pinkerton agents, tasked with eliminating anarchist threats.
Religion and Magic
While the Age of Steam was marked by increased interest and application of science and technology, magic and folklore continued to be practiced, particularly among people of African and Asian descent. Indeed, throughout the world, people continued to make offerings to fairies or place wards upon their households and children. Victorian literature tended to portray faeries as tiny winged humanoids or small humans with st
ocking caps (these latter types were usually called elves). Sometimes these creatures would be portrayed as stunningly beautiful humanoids—the typical RPG version of the elf.
During the Age of Steam there were many great Black men and women whose lives were bolstered, or broken, by the arts of legerdemain, divination and prestidigitation. These virtuosos of voodoo, stage magic, fortune-telling and mesmerism all came to fame through the workings of the arcane. Here are a few of note:
Richard Potter (1783 – 1835)
Born July 19, 1783, Richard Potter is celebrated as the first successful stage magician in America.
Potter was born in New Hampshire, the son of an English baronet and an African servant woman. He was educated in Europe before beginning his 25-year career as a performer in post-Revolutionary America. He lived with his father in Hopkinton, NH, until he married his wife, Sally, and had three children.
Potter is also credited as America’s first successful hypnotist and ventriloquist. One of the earliest records of his stage shows is November 2, 1811, in Boston at the Columbian Museum. The performance featured ventriloquism and magic. Potter is believed to be the first to use a ventriloquist’s dummy and could skillfully throw his voice, using human speech and sounds that perfectly imitated the chirping, cooing and caws of birds.
Potter performed in Boston, throughout New England, and Canada. Witnesses of Potter’s shows say he was able to walk through a log. The crowd that watched him do this assumed the log was hollow. But when they checked out the log for themselves they discovered it was completely solid! Another of Potter’s amazing tricks was his ability to take a ball of yarn and toss it high into the air, where it would slowly unravel. Potter would then climb up the yarn and vanish into the clouds before hundreds of spectators.
His shows also regularly included prestidigitation with eggs, money, and dice; throwing knives at assistants; touching a hot iron to his tongue; walking on flames; and dancing on eggs without breaking them.
Potter was very successful and it is said that he made $4800 for 20-day engagements in the early 1800s, allowing him to buy a 175-acre farm in Andover, New Hampshire, in the village now known as Potter’s Place. His story intrigued Harry Houdini, who became a huge fan.
JK Rowling, author of the mega-successful Harry Potter series of novels, named the popular teen magician after famed stage magician Harry Houdini and Houdini’s idol – the first known stage magician in America – Richard Potter.
Potter died on September 20, 1835. Sometime after his death and the death of his wife, Sally, the couple was buried in the front yard of their estate. A few years afterward, however, the house burned down. Potter and his wife’s graves were moved to their present site in 1849. All that remains to this day is a small plot with the gravestones behind the railroad station at Potter’s Place.
GMs, in your Steamfunkateers campaigns, perhaps Richard Potter didn’t actually die. Perhaps one of your players is a student of Potter, or Richard Potter himself.
Marie Laveau (1794 – 1881)
Recognized as the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, there is no magician, conjurer, witch, or fortune teller who has risen in status or fame to rival Marie Laveau.
Marie Catherine Laveau was born in New Orleans on September 10, 1794, the daughter of two free Blacks – Marguerite Darcantel, a former Haitian slave and Charles Laveau, a wealthy, Black plantation owner of mixed race.
Raised by her mother and grandmother, both Voodoo priestesses, Marie Laveau spent most of her adult life in a world where Voodoo was neither alien nor uncommon. She was a very spiritual person who blended, in the Creole way, Voodoo with Catholicism, especially the saints. For Laveau, Voodoo was an extension of Catholic practices and Catholicism, a focus toward the same Bon Dieu (God), natural and familiar, to Voodoo.
Laveau married a Jacques Paris in 1819 and went to live in New Orleans’ French Quarter. For whatever reason, Charles Paris soon died, however, and she was left with two children to care for.
After Jacques’ passing, the “Widow Paris” worked as a hairdresser and as a nurse, even performing minor surgery when necessary. Her nursing duties included ministering to prisoners on death row as well as taking in the sick to be nursed in her home. During the worst breakouts of Yellow Fever and Cholera, Laveau was a saint who saved many, and helped make the transition to death a comfortable one. She was there, in the worst hospital wards, using her knowledge of herbal medicines and Voodoo prayers to save the dying. This was frowned on by the local church, but nobody could stop her.
Being a free woman of color meant that “Mam’zelle Laveau” was free to own slaves. She took advantage of this…not to make life easier on herself, but to put herself in a position to free her enslaved people.
She entered into a common-law marriage with Christophe Glapion, a member of a prominent local family, and they had five children together – only two of whom survived to adulthood. Although Marie never abandoned her Catholic roots, she became increasingly interested in her traditional African beliefs and quickly developed a reputation as New Orleans’ leading voodoo queen.
While voodoo was commonly practiced in New Orleans, it had a fearsome reputation and a history of fueling revolution and slave revolts and was actually banned at different times in Louisiana history. Marie Laveau’s marriage of voodoo beliefs to Catholic traditions helped make voodoo more acceptable to upper-class New Orleans society. She regularly presided over public voodoo ceremonies in Congo Square – one of the few locations in rigidly segregated New Orleans where people of different races could mix freely – and made a good income selling charms, curses, and blessings to people of all social classes. The fact that many of her clients were servants in upper-class homes also gave her a spy network which helped reinforce her supernatural reputation to the wealthy patrons who asked for her services.
The dark consultation of Marie Laveau was sought by the many great men and women of New Orleans. They would visit with Laveau at her St. Ann cottage, sit with her and discuss business matters and affairs of the heart. After fully understanding the situation, Marie would give them advice on how to proceed and insight into their past, present and future… and she was always right.
Marie disappeared for a time. It is said that she went off to train with a famous Voodoo priest named Doctor John, who was believed to be a free Black man with so much experience in dark magic, that he has never been discovered because of this power.
In 1830, several years after her disappearance, Marie returned as Voodoo Queen, now armed with the most potent rituals, a pet snake named Li Grande Zombi, and, it seemed, eternal youth.
Marie Laveau had an extremely complex reputation in later life, both feared for her power as a voodoo queen – with numerous stories about the things that “happened” to anyone who offended her—and admired as a living saint due to her humanitarian work.
At the time of her death in 1881, eminent writer Lafcadio Hearn referred to her as “one of the kindest women who ever lived”. Her fame also guaranteed prominent obituaries in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the New York Times.
After the announcement of her death, however, many witnessed Marie Laveau walking the streets of the French Quarter as she always did and to this very day people claim to see Marie Laveau walking about on her beloved St. Ann Street.
In the Steamfunkateers universe, Marie Laveau is the ex-wife of Baas Bello and is murderously jealous of Baas and Harriet Tubman’s friendship (see Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman for the whole story).
Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814 – 1904)
Called “the Mother of Civil Rights in California” from work she initiated in the 1860s, Mary Ellen Pleasant’s achievements in the struggle for the rights of Black people and women went unsurpassed until the 1960s.
Pleasant was once the most talked-about woman in San Francisco. When other Black people were rarely mentioned, she claimed full-page articles in the press. She helped shape early San Francisco, and covertly amassed a joint fortune once ass
essed at $30,000,000.
Pleasant was born a slave near Augusta, Georgia in 1814, the daughter of Virginia governor John H. Pleasants’ son, John H. Pleasants, Jr. and an enslaved Haitian Vodoun priestess.
After witnessing the death of her mother at the cruel hands of a plantation overseer, Mary Pleasant had to make her way through life largely on her own.
Pleasant dropped the ‘s’ in her last name, changing it to ‘Pleasant’ and fled to New Orleans, where she found employment as a linen worker at the Ursaline Convent. A short time later, she went to work as a free servant for a Louis Alexander Williams, a merchant in Cincinnati. Williams promised that, after Mary served the Williams family for some time without pay, she would be freed legally. However, Williams, in debt and ultimately jealous of his wife Ellen’s affection for young Mary Pleasant, eventually placed her into nine years of indentured servitude with an aging Quaker merchant known only as Grandma Hussey. Indentured servants could be of any race, and Pleasant, a child of mixed parentage, who in her earlier years was of a very light complexion, was told not to reveal her race – a heavy burden for a girl of about eleven.
Pleasant adopted Ellen Williams’ name, becoming “Mary Ellen Williams” and she learned business as a clerk in Grandma Hussey’s general store. Although she could not read or write then, she said in her final memoir, “I could recall the accounts of a whole day, and she [Grandma Hussey] would set them down and they would be right as I remembered ‘em.”
Pleasant grew smart and witty, and adopted abolitionist beliefs and the principles of equality that those beliefs taught her.
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