historical fiction

historical fiction, The origins of the British historical novel are congenital with those of the Gothic novel, in the larger-than-life conceptions of Elizabethan and ‘heroic’ Restoration drama. Deeper roots can be traced in medieval romances of chivalry. A convenient generic starting point is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). As W. Scott noted, this was ‘the first attempt to found a tale of amusing fiction upon the ancient romances of chivalry’. Otranto patented many of the conventional devices of the Gothic-historical tale—the ruined but menacing castle with its labyrinthine passageways, secret compartments, hideous dungeons, haunted suites, trapdoors, oratories, and chambers of horrors. Clara Reeve frankly proclaimed her The Old English Baron (1778) to be a ‘literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto’. Following Walpole, the Gothic pile became the main element of the emergent historical novel ( Scott's Kenilworth, 1821; Woodstock, 1826), but precise generic description was slow in emerging. In the mid-18th cent., ‘romance’ tended to denote a specific corpus of sagas of chivalry (such as Amadis of Gaul). Charlotte Lennox's anti-romance The Female Quixote (1752) satirizes the heroine's infatuation with these ‘old tales’ (as does the opening chapter of Scott's Waverley, 1814). With Clara Reeve's authoritative distinction (in The Progress of Romance, 1785), ‘romance’ was identified as a narrative set in the past, as opposed to the ‘novel’ which is set in the present.

‘Historical romance’ is thus a term with something of the tautology about it. A distinctive turn to the embryo historical novel was given by the ‘national tale’. In the late 18th and early 19th cents fiction was used to advance nationalist causes and sentiment. A useful starting point for the English national tale is Thomas Leland's Longsword, Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance (1762), set in the 13th cent. and chauvinistically ‘English’. Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1778) was the most influential work in this vein, and anticipates in some respects Scott's Ivanhoe (1819). These ‘national tales’ celebrate the peculiar virtues of English (more specifically, much-romanticized ‘Saxon’) democracy, as founded and defended by English knights and barons. The Scottish national tale was popularized by Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (1810), a precursor of Scott's efforts in the sub-genre. After Scotland and England, Ireland furnished the richest crop of national tales. The Wild Irish Girl (1806, subtitled A National Tale) by Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan), has, at its centre, a long disquisition on the aboriginal culture of the pre-colonial Irish civilization. The greatest and earliest of the Irish national tales is Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800); this powerful depiction of mid-18th cent. Irish life was an influence which Scott acknowledged in his afterword to Waverley. Whether Edgeworth's or Scott's novel should be regarded as the first ‘historical novel’ in English is a moot point, but there is no dispute that Scott's 25 Waverley novels (1814–32) established the historical novel as the dominant style of fiction in the first half of the 19th cent. Scott's range of historical setting is remarkable: from the early ‘Scottish novels’ (e.g. The Heart of Midlothian, 1818; Rob Roy, 1817), through the English Middle Ages (Ivanhoe, 1819), Jacobethan England (The Fortunes of Nigel, 1822; Kenilworth), medieval France (Quentin Durward, 1823), the Middle East of the Crusades (The Talisman, 1825), and the Roman Empire (Count Robert of Paris, 1831).

For most of the Victorian period the historical novel retained its Scott-established status as the most respected of fiction's genres. Major titles include: Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond (1852), Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), A. Trollope's La Vendée (1850), Wilkie Collins's Antonina (1850), G. Eliot's Romola (1863), E. Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Hardy's The Trumpet Major (1880), C. Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), and C. Kingsley's Hereward the Wake (1866). As with Scott, these novelists ranged freely through the British and European past, strictly observing his rule that authentically ‘historical’ personages should be introduced only as supporting characters.

The respectability of historical fiction was boosted by factual works such as Macaulay's History of England (1848). The Victorians would have rated more highly the efforts of E. Bulwer-Lytton, whose The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) is among the handful of successful historical novels with a Graeco-Roman classical setting, along with Pater's eccentric Marius the Epicurean (1855) and Charles Kingsley's ferociously racist Hypatia (1853). Catering for the popular audience, G. P. R. James wrote numerous historical novels; more interestingly, W. H. Ainsworth pointed the so-called ‘Newgate’ novel (e.g. Jack Sheppard, 1840) towards crime fiction. Ainsworth also drew on Hugo's example in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1830) with English ‘topographical’ romances such as The Tower of London (1840) and Windsor Castle (1843). An uncategorizable masterpiece is Shorthouse's John Inglesant (1880), set in the English Civil War period.

At the end of the 19th cent., several distinguished novelists explored the romantic potential of the genre, notably R. L. Stevenson with adventure tales such as Kidnapped (1886) and dark studies in psychology such as The Master of Ballantrae (1889). There was a huge market in ‘manly’ historical yarns for boys, often with a strong imperialist tendency. The most famous exponents were G. A. Henty and his disciple G. Manville Fenn. Weyman and Haggard straddled the adult and boys' market. Following Scott, there remained a strong link between historical and regional fiction; Blackmore's tale of 17th-cent. Devon, Lorna Doone (1869), and S. R. Crockett's (see Kailyard School) tales of Lowland Scotland are examples.

The sense that historical fiction had sunk to the condition of adventure stories for boys, and romance for the millions, has cast a blight on the genre in the 20th cent. Ambitious literary writers like A. Huxley or Orwell were more inclined to dabble in ‘future history’, with science fiction (see Brave New World, 1932; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949). F. M. Ford's Katherine Howard trilogy (1906–8) was hailed by Conrad as the ‘swan song of historical romance’. Although he had high hopes for his historical fiction (such as Sir Nigel, 1906), Conan Doyle discovered that readers preferred Sherlock Holmes. The historical fiction which the masses did like were ‘Regency romances’, such as Farnol's The Broad Highway (1910) and The Amateur Gentleman (1913), a sub-genre continued later by G. Heyer and Barbara Cartland. Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)—a romanticization of Dickens's French Revolution melodrama A Tale of Two Cities—was wildly popular. Drawing on the nautical-historical novel pioneered by Marryat (in the 1830s), C. S. Forester launched his middlebrow Hornblower sequence (set in the Napoleonic Wars) in 1937. Mary Renault's novels of ancient Greece (e.g. The King Must Die, 1958) appealed to the same public.

It was a feature of popular historical fiction in the 20th cent. that its practitioners have been hyper-productive. Barbara Cartland produced 600 or so titles. More impressive is the work of Eleanor Hibbert, who has written over 100 historical novels (mainly for a female readership) as ‘Jean Plaidy’, ‘Victoria Holt’, and ‘Philippa Carr’. New directions in historical fiction as an ambitious literary genre were indicated by Fowles's Victorian romance crossed with French nouveau roman, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). G. MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series adopted the schoolboy villain of Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), to suit 1970s and 1980s tastes. That there remains literary life in the form is indicated by historical novels which have won the Booker Prize: J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), Byatt's Possession (1990), and B. Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (1992). R. Tremain's Restoration (1989) has a lighter touch than these but is a major achievement, as are the historical fantasias of P. Ackroyd. The genre of scholarly historical pastiche has been continued by C. Palliser and L. Norfolk.