Fiction tells us something about how life was lived, in a way wickopaedia does not do. We know that you can put an extraordinary amount of interpretive pressure on all the details in Jane austen's stories. She did her research so that when she references mister bingley coming into town with four or five thousand a year, it's because he had inherited from his father more than £100,000. The distances between travelled by characters, between certain places. That is the kind of precision that you and i expect from James joyce.