oday, I was forced to think about methods of authentication. I have a scene or two in my book in which my heroine heads to a bank to make a withdrawal from an account. When I originally wrote them, I did a little bit of research to see where banks were and what interest they paid and that sort of thing, but the research I found did not give me any details about the actual practice of banking in London in 1836. Feeling to lazy to delve further, I made a mental note to do Actual Research (namely, hoping someone on the Beaumonde knew better) later, and I made the rest up. (For those of you who are cringing at this lackadaisical attitude, I have to say that there are some historical details I find endlessly fascinating–like, when did the courts of law and equity merge? And what happened to cases pending in Chancery when they did? There are others, like, say, everything to do with finance that I find immeasurably boring.

This, I thought, fell in to the latter category. It turns out I was wrong. Well, wrong about some of the details I’d made up, but also wrong that the details would be boring. It turns out–and this is oh-so-topical–that problems of authenticating identity have always existed. My biggest problem in thinking about banking in 1836 London was this. By the time 1836 rolled around, London was a large enough metropolitan region, and the larger banks had sufficient clientele, that authentication by recognition was simply not much of an option. That is, the banks had lots of clients, and while they probably knew the wealthier ones (or, more like, the solicitors of the wealthier ones), they probably didn’t know Farmer Jones and Grocer Bob. How did Farmer Jones and Grocer Bob go about keeping a banker? In other words, even setting aside questions of bank failure, how could Farmer Jones walk into a bank and trust them not only to keep his money, but to give it up to Jones–and only Jones–on request? And these mundane details that were of actual plot-significance for me–who would actually bother to write them down?

After all, there are so many aspects of our life today–how an ATM card works, for instance, and the manner in which checks function, and the financial web that allows us to walk up to a bank in the Netherlands and withdraw Euros from the American Dollar salary direct-deposited by our employer–I mean, all of those words today, if you had no idea what they meant, wouldn’t even explain how the system works. Enter this incredibly detailed description of how banking works. It is essentially a comprehensive manual, describing exactly how to run a bank, with everything discussed in both minute detail, with a running commentary about the purpose of all the things that are required. It discusses things I would never even have thought of researching, but that I got wrong, including the method in which debits and credits were entered into an account (I shoulda known that they did double-ledgered accounting–of course they did double-ledgered accounting–my brother taught me better than that!), and the manner in which debits and credits were entered (they were not, as I had thought, entered as 3l 5s 2d, as sums were so often written–that takes too long. Instead they were £ 3-5-2.

I also learned that when people talked about a holographic draft, they meant a draft in the account owner’s own handwriting–a historical detail that I suspect can’t be used since the word “holograph” would only confuse the modern reader who attributes a very different meaning to the word. They also had a signature registry, which they used to match signatures on drafts. In any event, I feel suitably chastened. I thought I was going to be searching after arcane details, but it turns out that I was actually searching after intelligent solutions to an extremely hard problem.

I had dreaded it for so long, and it was fun! It was like going to the dentist and getting a book instead of a teeth-cleaning!