Historical fiction

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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.

historical fiction. In the 19th century Sir Walter Scott provided a model for writers in many countries who looked to historical fiction as a means of creating both a distinctive national identity and a usable past, and there were frequent calls for ‘an Irish Scott’. Yet Irish attempts in this direction, even in the hands of talented writers like John Banim (The Boyne Water (1826) ) and J. S. Lefanu (The Cock and Anchor (1845) and Turlough O'Brien (1847) ), were notably unsuccessful. One reason for their failure was that the Irish intellectual and literary milieu was not as well developed as that of Scotland. Despite outlets such as the Dublin University Magazine, Irish writers of any literary pretensions were usually published in Great Britain and wrote with an English audience in mind: 19th‐century Irish novels are often presented through the eyes of an English visitor who serves as stand‐in for the reader. This need not by itself have been fatal (Scott often uses this sort of ‘mediocre hero’ as reader‐surrogate when describing unfamiliar societies), but it imposed constraints not only on the amount of knowledge that could be assumed but on the attitudes that could be expressed.

Secondly, and possibly more important, it proved much harder to construct an ‘acceptable past’ in 19th‐century Ireland, where religious and political divisions ran deeper than in Scotland. This was exacerbated by the use of historical fiction in verse and prose as a medium of mass political instruction (exemplified by Thomas Davis's proposal for the systematic composition of ‘a ballad history of Ireland’), which naturally encouraged unwillingness to enter imaginatively into other points of view or confront the fact that the idealized past had contained factors which produced the detestable present. Apart from those writers who confined themselves to straighforward politico‐religious propaganda (e.g. Charlotte Elizabeth, Derry (6th edn. 1836), P. G. Smyth, The Wild Rose of Lough Gill (1883) ), some were frightened away from historical fiction by its political implications (like Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (c.1776–1859), who began but then abandoned a novel about Red Hugh O'Donnell), while others found the form disintegrating in their efforts to depict extreme violence and cultural disruption ( Emily Lawless, Maelcho (1894) ). Many, by facile use of the Scottian motif of the reconciliation through marriage of opposing traditions, or by the reduction of the past to a picturesque backdrop for romance, evaded the implications of the conflicts which they described and severed the linkage of private and public spheres associated with the best historical novels.

Twentieth‐century Ireland continued to produce historical fiction of varying degrees of merit, but the form no longer has the same degree of expectation attached to it. In Ireland, as elsewhere, the historical novel as a genre has lost much of the critical respectability it enjoyed in the 19th century, when Scott was placed on the same level as Shakespeare. The image of Irish history as a single great narrative leading to a predestined conclusion has been intensively deconstructed. There has been widespread debate about how far Irish culture and society should still be seen as suffering from the effects of its colonial past rather than from problems characteristic of modern developed society as a whole. Many writers have anatomized the inevitable subjectivity of historical self‐images. There has been a general tendency to move away from the great story and its protagonist (and from the respectable, Whiggish Scottian viewpoint) to focus on history as experienced from below through its impact on everyday lives. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus called history ‘a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken’; Birchwood (1973) by John Banville has been described as presenting Irish history as an enormous black joke.

The Scottian tradition has, however, survived and even been revivified by greater willingness to face up to pain, loss, and defeat. Significant historical fictions have continued to be produced, whether in support of accepted self‐images ( W. F. Marshall, Planted by a River (1948); Francis MacManus, The Greatest of These (1943)) or more critical ( Sam Hanna Bell, A Man Flourishing (1973); Thomas Kilroy, The Big Chapel (1971) ). William Buckley's Croppies Lie Down (1902), now almost entirely forgotten, is seen by some critics as significant in the move towards naturalism. There has also been a shift in the historical themes which attract fictional treatment. For example, the dismantling of the post‐1690 political settlement during the 19th century means that the Williamite War is now of little interest to writers outside Northern Ireland, while the Great Famine and the Land War, which for 19th century writers were contemporary, have become the subjects of 20th‐century historical fiction ( Liam O'Flaherty, Famine (1937), Land (1946); Tom Murphy, Famine (1968) ) because of their formative influence on contemporary society. Irish writers will continue to draw on the past to illuminate present discontents.

Bibliography

Cahalane, J. N. , Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (1983)

Patrick Maume