Novelists need time. Novels are made in part from recollection. This was as true of the Victorians as of writers today. Certainly Dickens was prepared to write about contemporary social conditions and abuses in, for example, Hard Times, not to my mind one of his best novels, though F. R. Leavis thought it was. But, though Dickens was living in the Railway Age, his characters usually travel by stagecoach. It is the world of his youth, even the world of his childhood, that he portrays most vividly. His rival Thackeray was a fine journalist, alert to changing fashions in manners and morals, but Vanity Fair, published in 1847, is set in and around 1815, the year of Waterloo. Middlemarch (1871) is one of the greatest of Victorian novels, but, in setting, it is pre-Victorian, treating of the agitation of society in the run-up to the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Only a couple of Scott’s novels (The Antiquary and St Ronan’s Well) are set in his own time; the half-dozen best of the Waverley novels deal with the Scotland of the century before he was born, while his greatest commercial success, Ivanhoe, goes back to the Middle Ages.
There are reasons why authors may choose to turn to the historical novel. The first is commercial. A good historical novel may sell better than a good contemporary one, and it may stay in print much longer. It is also perhaps more likely to be reprinted, simply because it doesn’t date. A novel about Thomas Cromwell will probably be as interesting in 20 years as it is today. This isn’t necessarily the case with a novel treating of what is immediately interesting in 2009.
Then novelists are always in danger of running out of material. Your own experience and your observation of the world around you may yield matter for perhaps only half a dozen novels. The more you write, the thinner the matter may be, and the more hours you spend at your desk, the fewer you spend out there in the world where material is to be gathered. But there is no dearth of matter in history. Reading will give you the stuff from which innumerable novels may be made. Your eye may not be as keen as when you were young, your ear not as alert, your receptiveness to new experience may have become dulled, but history offers you a rich choice of subjects.
Finally it gives you what all novelists seek — and often despair of finding: the outline of a plot. You still have to devise incident and dialogue, to flesh out characters and work up descriptions, but at least you know the road you are travelling. There are signposts along the way. You know you have to get Caesar to the theatre of Pompey on the Ides of March 44 BC. You know your destination. What a relief!
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.