Given to think, by an exchange yesterday, of how far it's reasonable to go in combatting some prevalent error in understanding, in my particular instance, of certain facets of Victorian medical practice.
I can see writing an article or book which is on some topic one already perceives as worth writing about in which one engages with some other person's deluded somewhat mistaken take on it (and beats it to death with a rotten codfish). But not picking apart something that is, or ought to be, a non-topic to begin with.
The trouble with prevalent delusions is that they are usually, at bottom, nice and simple and soundbitey, whatever the structure of elaborating some particular bee in the bonnet thesis might be.
The basic tenet of all the 'Mr S of Stratford did not write Shakespeare' pretty much comes down to 'William S was a yob from the provinces without the benefits of education and moving in high society, with a record for poaching deer and a c.v. that included holding horses outside inns, working in the degraded profession of actor'. Once you have assumed that this person could not possibly have written the plays attributed to him, you are free to set up your own candidate and torture the evidence until it gives in.
Similarly, I don't think anyone is even going to get published writing a book on The Identity of Jack the Ripper: something we are never going to know, have you considered how many people there were living in London at that date, plus, major port city with teeming numbers of transients? rather than putting up their particular candidate and knocking down everyone else's.
Therefore, I am not really enthused by the thought of a project which would involve going through the footnotes in a work which I will not name, quoting what the texts in question actually say and how this does not actually support the arguments being made, and adducing contrary evidence.
It is, among other things, a wholly negative enterprise. I can't see any positive gains beyond the correcting error, and blowed if I can think of a sexy USP to put over the end product ('Victorians, sex, doctors, and the rise of electrical appliances: a much more complex story, with massive degrees of nuancing', is just not going to get the media coverage, even if it got published).
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