I learned a new word the other day: paralipomena. It means things left out, usually from a piece of writing, which are used in something else later on. Recycled outtakes, more or less. Of which I have a few.

Playwright Alan Bennett introduced me to the word in one of the essays collected in Writing Home, a miscellaneous book that includes The Lady in the Van, his memoir about the woman who lived in a series of vans parked in his London driveway for seventeen years. (Maggie Smith plays her in the movie, and is magnificent.)

Bennett uses the word to launch his essay Kafka at Las Vegas, giving himself an excuse to publish leftover bits of research behind his two plays about Franz Kafka.

I liked learning it not least because I last posted here about a character I left out of my novel, Mad Richard. This was William Price of Llantrisant, a Victoria proto-hippie I researched but never wrote about in the novel—an unconscious bit of paralimpona-ing on my part. (I don’t think that’s really a word.)

Today I thought I’d bring up a few other factoids I came across while researching Mad Richard, which is set in Victorian times. A couple came from the biography Queen Victoria, Born to Succeed written by Elizabeth Longford. I loved learning them, and ended up leaving both of them out. Writing tip: it’s fatal to fall in love with your research, especially when writing a historical novel. Including too many period details can slow the narrative to a crawl. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you should probably end up with a large stock of potential paralimponas when you finish your book. If you don’t, it’s probably too long.

Longford’s Queen Victoria was written in 1964, and there are several more recent biographies. I ended up with an outtake from one of those, too. Modern doctors now believe that Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, died of either stomach cancer or uncontrolled Crohn’s disease. At the time it was thought he’d died of typhoid. He was 42, and his death plunged the queen into years of mourning.

Surfing the web also alerted me to the fact that Prince Albert gave his name to a form of genital piercing, something that never made it as far as being an outtake in Mad Richard. Urban legend says that Albert invented the piercing so he could minimize the prominence of his large penis in skin-tight Victorian trousers, presumably tethering it to his groin. (Scholars have found no evidence that this was true.)

Despite these gems, Longford’s biography was my usual go-to source for gossipy details about the Victorian era. Longford was an aristocrat. To Debrett’s Peerage, she was Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, and she died in 2002 at the age of 96. She used Elizabeth Longford as a pen name when writing a dozen books, including biographies of Winston Churchill and the Duke of Wellington as well as Queen Victoria. Her long paragraphs burble with breezy particulars: gold for a novelist.

One delightful burble I never found a use for also involved Prince Albert. In 1841, Longford writes, he was “the champion skater on Frogmore pond” with an elegant swan’s head soldered to the tip of each skate.  “When he slipped down playing ice-hockey (Victoria) was amazed at the agility with which he sprang to his feet again.”

I like to picture the very proper Prince Albert playing hockey (I played it this morning) and want those swan’s heads for my skates.

Yet Albert’s skates aren’t as good as my favorite image from the biography: a description of the day in 1877 when Queen Victoria, her daughter Princess Beatrice and a lady-in-waiting were seen “blithely smoking cigarettes on a picnic at Balmoral to keep the midges away.”

I’ve kept picturing Queen Victoria with a cigarette in her mouth ever since.

You can order Mad Richard here.