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Part 1 of Regency!Superman vignettes for Janeuary 2026
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Janeuary 2026
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Published:
2026-01-01
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525
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Eavesdropping

Summary:

Hearing the crunch of footsteps approaching, Clark ducked behind some shrubbery (fortunately, the Wayne mansion's ostentatious topiaries were tall enough to conceal even someone of his considerable stature), just in time to hear someone's slurred voice holding forth, "Clark Kent? He's the natural son of somebody...."

Notes:

This is the first of a series of linked Regency-themed Superman vignettes I wrote for the Janeuary 2026 challenge. I'll post the rest over the coming days. This one was written for the prompt "garden."

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Hearing the crunch of footsteps approaching, Clark ducked behind some shrubbery (fortunately, the Wayne mansion's ostentatious topiaries were tall enough to conceal even someone of his considerable stature), just in time to hear someone's slurred voice holding forth, "Clark Kent? He's the natural son of somebody. Hard to guess where Jonathan Kent found him -- Kent's a good farmer, but sticks to his own turf and rarely sets foot outside of Smallville. Found him he did, though, and arranged his schooling and all that. Paltry as the Kent property is, and entailed too, the boy must of course make his own way in the world, so it's a newspaper reporter he's to be."

A moment of silence ensued, while the slurred voice's listeners absorbed this. Then another unseen voice asked, "Smallville, you said? Isn't that where that magistrate's son -- the one who defied his father and became a ship's captain..."

"Captain Luthor? Aye, some say he lived his youth in Smallville, but others say he was brought up in Hell. For sure, wherever he sprang from, he grew up ruthless, fearing neither man nor God: it's how he was able to make his fortune so quickly from privateering, and now he's used all that money to buy up factories up and down the coast, he'll soon be the richest man in England."

"You sure of that? Don't forget whose garden you're standing in, Whitney!"

"The Waynes will never be poor, but mark my words, Lex Luthor's something else. Bruce Wayne spends his days idling and gaming, and this charming party we're at is a fine example of his elaborate entertaining, but what Luthor lacks in perruque, he more than makes up for with ambition. It's what he aims to do with that ambition that's got some folks worried."

Another voice, a gruff one, cut in: "Some say this hero that fanciful ladies have dubbed the 'Super-Man' has got Luthor himself worried. Anybody who doesn't abide by the strict letter of the law will have to answer to the Super-Man -- that's what the gossips in Metropolis are saying."

"You believe those rumors? An angelic being in a carmine cape who thwarts bank robbers and rescues fainting virgins from highwaymen? Some drunkard's hallucination is all there is to that, I wager."

"Not true! My cousin once saw with his own eyes..."

The voices trailed away, and Clark slowly straightened up, heart pounding. Lex Luthor was never far from his thoughts, but to hear the man's name spoken aloud by others never failed to make a flush rise in his neck and cheeks and ears. Especially here, hiding from Bruce Wayne's party in Bruce Wayne's shadowy garden, he couldn't help but be reminded of that afternoon when he was eighteen, in the disorientingly tilting shadows of his father's dark barn: Lex's hot thumb and forefinger wrapped around his throat, Lex's teeth testing the sensitivity threshold of his earlobe.... But that had been years ago. Lex never acknowledged him now; the previous week, Clark had overheard someone say that Lex was on the verge of marrying into the Teschmacher family. It was as if Lex didn't remember him at all.

Notes:

As I was writing this, it occurred to me that there aren't a ton of newspaperman protagonists in the fiction I've read that's set in the Regency period. Will Ladislaw from Eliot's Middlemarch did come to mind, but that novel takes place in the somewhat liminal space of 1829-32, and Will's job was to help "conduct" and "manage" his newspaper rather than hit the pavements doing actual reporting. Also, interestingly, Will's role vis-a-vis newspaper owner Mr. Brooke is described as a kind of gentleman's favor rather than a typical employer-employee relationship: Dorothea uses the wording "Dear uncle has asked Mr. Ladislaw to conduct the paper for him," instead of "Dear uncle has hired Mr. Ladislaw to conduct the paper for him," seemingly at least partly to minimize the declasse connotations of being in newspapers. This idea that journalism may not have been considered the most respectable profession circa 1830 is bolstered by comments made elsewhere in Eliot's novel by the character Sir James Chettam in a dialogue with the Rector:

"What a character for anybody with decent connections to show himself in!--one of those newspaper fellows!"

"What can you expect with these peddling Middlemarch papers?" said the Rector. "I don't suppose you could get a high style of man anywhere to be writing up interests he doesn't really care about, and for pay that hardly keeps him in at elbows."

I try to take these contemporary attitudes into account in the way I word Clark's self-description of his journalist activities in my next vignette.

Lex Luthor is commonly portrayed as a titan of industry, so that was why I chose to make him a factory/mill owner here, a la Robert Moore in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (which does take place during the Regency, although it was written later). I also made Lex's job history include some privateering because (1) I wanted to insinuate that he leveraged his ruthlessness to accumulate a lot of wealth very quickly (unlike Robert Moore, who was financially struggling much of the time), and (2) I like the resonances with Frederick Wentworth's naval successes in Persuasion. Wentworth is probably Austen's most quintessential "self-made man," and I wanted to make it clear that although Lionel Luthor's own career and position in society were nothing to sniff at, Lex is also to a certain extent a "self-made man," not just someone who passively inherited his societal position.

Clark is, of course, a child of mysterious parentage, but that doesn't outright preclude him mixing with respectable society: his social position is perhaps somewhat comparable to that of Harriet Smith in Emma (who, on her first introduction in the text, is described as "the natural daughter of somebody") or maybe Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (another novel whose temporal setting overlaps with the Regency).

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