From Cringes to Corsets: Making History Relatable for Young Readers

When I was a kid, my favorite historical facts were the ones that made me go, “EW!” You know the ones—you were taught them, we were all taught them: Romans ate dormice and wiped their bums with a sponge on a stick; Ancient Egyptians pulled people’s brains out through their noses. But as I grew older, it was exactly the opposite kind of fact that started to intrigue me. What do you mean this recipe for almond butter is 400 years old? People went on vacation to Nazi Germany? And everyone in the 17th century loved horoscopes?

(Hopepunk and Stories That Refuse to Give Up.)

When we teach children about history, we often focus on the differences between us and our ancestors, not the similarities. But when researching my debut children’s book, Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveler, I came to believe there’s a historical precedent for almost everything. Our ancestors are not aliens—they’re us, just in a different time. They loved like us and they laughed like us, and that thing about the sponge on the stick is actually seriously up for debate.

Lily Tripp is a story about an ordinary 13-year-old British girl—except, of course, for the all the time traveling. Every New Year’s Day, Lily lands in a different century, and she has to figure out how to navigate the past. When I decided I wanted to combine my childhood love of diary-style books with my passion for history, I was keen for Lily to escape the confines of the elementary school curriculum. I didn’t want her to meet Cleopatra or catch a glimpse of Henry VIII—this book wasn’t going to be about wars, weddings, or beheadings. I wanted to give children an insight into ordinary domestic life in the past, so they could really feel like they were time traveling too.

Because here’s the truth about almost every major historical date: People ate breakfast. They toasted bread before battles and made porridge the morning after the revolution. Remembering a simple fact like this helps us to understand history as real, lived experience, rather than a list of important dates.

The twist to Lily’s history-hopping is that unlike most time travelers, she doesn’t go alone.

Everyone else she knows comes along too: her crush, her family, her best friend, her mortal enemy, her teachers, and even her cat all land in different eras with her. But naturally, of course, only Lily remembers they’re all really from the 21st century, which means that while everyone else fits in easily, she’s fighting a constant battle to not stand out.

Bringing Lily’s peers with her like this enabled me to make history keenly felt. If your mortal enemy Georgia mocks your sneakers in 2025, then guess what? She’s also going to laugh at your lack of “shoe roses” in 1621. And while Georgia might think fake tan is all the rage in modern times, she’ll be painting blue veins on her forehead to look extra pale in the past. I hoped, when writing, that parallels like this could show young readers that although the specifics of our lived experiences change over time, the sentiments behind them often don’t. I wanted to highlight this so that instead of just questioning the past, children could start to question the present, too. Isn’t it just as silly to be picked on for your sneakers as it is to be picked on for your shoe roses? Are historic witch trials really as alien to us as we’d like to think? And are the way things are the way things always have to be?

To get the historical details in Lily Tripp right, I consulted 143 history books, 52 academic articles, and 13 issues of a 1970s teen magazine. (Please gasp!) It was fun to uncover a wide mixture of the unusual and the relatable. Take breakfast, as I said. On Lily’s first day in 1621, she has porridge for breakfast—but she also notices other people are drinking beer, which is baffling to her. When she later lands in the 1970s, she marvels that her brother has his breakfast cereal with warm milk and sugar on top. We have to give credit where credit’s due: Some things were better in the past.

I’m only half-kidding. When we emphasize the differences between us and our ancestors—what was strange, what was gross—then we may feel we have nothing to learn from them. That’s just simply not the case. When Lily lands in 1621, she’s a maid, and she’s surprised to find that her bosses often treat her better than she expected—eating meals with her and her fellow servants, and helping one of them when they get sick. In the early modern era, servants were considered part of the family and weren’t just hidden away. That isn’t to say they weren’t also often treated terribly (Lily also experiences this firsthand), but it’s something surprising that keeps us questioning the past.

I am very lucky that a friend’s mother is a school librarian, which means she was able to offer a few of her children a sneak-preview of Lily Tripp before it came out. I was beyond touched that a few of them handwrote some reviews for me—but while I’m always thrilled to be told I’m funny, it was the lines about history that impacted me most. “I was a bit surprised when I learned about the normal lives that people had a long time ago,” penciled one child. Another wrote: “This book made me look at the past differently as in history lessons it always makes the past sound very bad.”

But listen, I’ll get off my high horse (did you know, horses were smaller in the past?). There are also PLENTY of facts in the book that make you go, “EW!,” and emphasize our differences with our ancestors. At one point in the 17th century, Lily reads one of the only books available to her, The English Huswife, Contayning the Inward and Outward Vertues Which Ought to Be in a Compleat Woman, authored by Gervase Markham and first published in 1615. She reads Markham’s remedies for various ailments, such as grinding up goats’ hooves and putting them in beer if you wet the bed, or putting egg whites on your pimples. She also discovers his antiquated ideas, such as the belief that a woman should suppress any thoughts that contradict her husband’s.

It’s surprising to Lily that this antiquity is still alive in the 1970s (the sexism, not the crushed up goats’ hooves). Here, she learns about the Women’s Liberation Movement and is shocked to discover that women in England can’t open their own bank account without their husband’s or father’s permission. But again, while facts like these can shock and surprise, I also hoped that showing how pervasive these attitudes are could lead children to question contemporary culture too.

Trying to get all of the minutiae right in Lily Tripp often required a lot of rewriting. It was only when working on my second draft that I realized people didn’t use forks in England in 1621. While I hadn’t written a fork-based scene that I needed to cut (phew!), I recognized that it would be odd for Lily to travel back in time and not remark on the fact that people were eating with their hands. I slipped this in, and then decided I wanted to write an author’s note at the end of the book where I could provide extra details about things like this that Lily sees but doesn’t necessarily understand. In this note, I wrote about Thomas Coryat, an English traveler who saw people eating with forks in Italy in 1608. When Coryat tried to bring the fork back to his mother country, he was mocked relentlessly and nicknamed “Furcifer”—essentially Latin for “fork rascal.”

There were also a bunch of facts I found out that I didn’t have room for anywhere in the book, but now seem to be permanently etched in my brain. One of my favorites is that Henry VIII owned a bracelet featuring the words, “Plus tost morir que changer ma pensee”—French for “I would rather die than change my mind.” Tell that to your first wife, Henry! (And your second, and your third, and your...)

Another thing I couldn’t include—because, sadly, the time periods and locations in the book didn’t quite match up—was that in the 17th century, men and women wore heart, moon, and star shaped patches on their faces to cover their blemishes and scars. I simply adore how neat this precedent is for our modern pimple patches. Wearing little colored stars on your face just seems so thoroughly modern; one person interviewed by the New York Post in 2024 even lamented, “It’s so silly, like we’re all just walking around with stickers on our faces now? Where is the decorum?” Critics in the 17th century also expressed similar sentiments, with the English physician John Bulwer calling it a “vaine custome” in the 1650s. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“Decorum” is a word we often associate with the past—when we’re not complaining about our ancient ancestors being gross, we imagine that our more recent ones were much more prim and proper than we could ever hope to be. This can be equally alienating to anyone studying history, which is why I was thrilled every time I found some sort-of ye olde quote that revealed the truth about our similarities. I loved hearing that a parishioner named Susan Kent was bored at church in 1624; that she thought her minister spoke “such a deale of bibble babble” that she had to “sitt doune in my seat and take a good napp.” I truly adored reading that Lady Anne Clifford went to Goodwife Sislye’s house in the 1610s and ate so much cheese that she was sick.

I think a lot of people have wished—at one point or another—to have been born in a different time or place. We fantasize about dating in a time of dance cards; attending a ball where Mr Darcy admires our dress. We wonder if things might’ve been simpler for us in the past, before mobile phones and before self-checkout machines told us there was an unexpected item in the bagging area. But what we forget—and what Lily finds out, a little painfully—is that wherever we end up, we have to be ourselves. Our ancestors also dealt with low self-esteem, heartbreak, friendship fallouts, and mean girls—and they didn’t even have air fryers to soften the blow.

Time will tell if children take any of this away from Lily Tripp—much of it is under the surface, and there are plenty of other non-historical and very distracting things in the book, from guitar-playing heartthrobs to pet chickens. But if a single reader feels they understand the past a bit better after reading, I’ll be absolutely thrilled. And if another spots an error in the book—or a fact similar to fork-less-ness that I’ve forgotten to mention—I’ll be happy to learn about it too. I really believe that when we engage with ordinary history, we can all be time travelers.

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