Character: Colin

We have a male technically inclined guy, and after going back and back forth over the immigrant experience, he is the character who represents the immigrant.  Not necessarily an immigrant himself, but tied to that experience.

Now, if you go over the history of the steam engine, many of the advances come from Welsh and Scottish engineers.  Now, doing a Scottish accent in writing makes me think of bad Star Trek fanfic as writers try to handle Scotty, and in comparison how many people know about the Welsh engineers?  Better yet, no one would expect me to write a Welsh accent.  And I suspect any readers from the United Kingdom will tell me that there are many Welsh accents, but here in the US, most wouldn't know a Welsh accent if it came up and smacked them around.  Plus, BBC Wales is responsible for UK's finest export, Doctor Who.  But I could drop some Welsh words into the story, not too many, just nicknames and casual words and the like.  Words that you learn very young, such as dad, mom and the like, before you get introduced to proper words and pronunciation in school.  Not that any of the characters necessarily went to school, public education started around this time frame but was far from universal.

They are old census data from Wales online, and did some poking around, trying to see the type of names, if there was a lot of Welsh Gaelic names.  Fortunately, the databases I found showed mostly traditional Anglo-Saxon names, so no big adjustments.

Colin.  Nice, formal, but not too high-falutin.'  The father’s name, Malcolm.  Slight similarity, feels related, but this way I don't have to worry about people being confused over whether or not one is a junior or the third, or the like.

So someone who came from Wales, and thus was observing the first steam engines and drays would be a good individual to bring over the technology and try to take advantage of it.  But the children of immigrants are more interesting.  Colin was either born in the US or just before his family immigrated here, so that he knows that his family hasn’t been always well-off, but at the moment is comfortable.  There is always pressure in the immigrant family, drives to succeed, for the children to do better, to be more than the parents.  Well, that is a common pressure in any parent-child relationship, but it has a different type of tenor in immigrant families, because the children literally have opportunities that the parents never dreamed of having.

We have already determined that the story structure has pushed us in the direction of merchants, and Colin is the technically inclined character.  Add in the pressures of an immigrant family, we have instant character tension.  A father, that has created a merchant business, wants something more for his son, which means that he wants his son to move beyond the merchant class to the upper class, which means for the time period something like the leisure class, bankers, property owners, and the like.  But the son, raised around the steam engines, wants to mess around with them, modify them, something that looks like manual labor which is fairly low class.   This is a time where class is a lot stronger than now, far more European in tone.  (Of course, this is a Europe perceived from America.  Other than a week spent in Scotland, I don’t have a lot of firsthand experience here…)

So we have a pivot for Colin’s character to rest on, an inherent tension between what he wants to do and the future his father, Malcolm, wants him to do.  To become more integrated into society at large.

Which gives an opening for the more socially aware and powerful character, Nellie.