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‘How
to describe Lord Wellington?’ asks Susanna Clarke in
her extraordinary tome ‘Johnathan
Strange and Mr Norrell. ‘How can such a
thing be necessary or possible? His face is everywhere one
looks, a cheap print upon the wall of the coaching inn –
a much more elaborate one, embellished with flags and drums,
at the top of the Assembly room staircase. Nowadays no young
lady of average romantic feeling will reach the age of seventeen
without purchasing at least one picture of him….every
schoolboy impersonates Wellington at least once a week …he
is Englishness carried to perfection.’
Susanna
Clarke takes great trouble to set the frame for her Wellington
to inhabit, but how do we really know what Wellington was
like – how did anyone know who did not know him personally
in an age without TV or radio or even photography. Exactly
how accurate were the schoolboy impressions. Indeed how
real is Susanna Clarke’s Wellington.
We know from a reading of Andrew Roberts essay for the BBC
on Monachs and Leaders
- Soldiering to Glory
that Arthur Wellesley was not a scholar, indeed failed at
all the schools he attended, including Eton. He was sent
to a French Military Academy (ironically given his future
as military conqueror of France). After a fairly long military
career, where he acquired a reputation for being a harsh
disciplinarian, he became a Tory politician; extremely rigid
in his views and by our stands anti -democratic. He ended
up as Prime Minister.
Delving deeper into Wellesley, and according to Andrew Roberts
in his book Napoleon and
Wellington - the essential Englishman we discover
was born in Dublin but always denied he was Irish, ‘being
born in a barn does not make someone a horse’ was a
favourite saying of Wellesley. Despite this, he was elected
to a seat in the Irish parliament where he attended little
and preferred to play his violin. When the French executed
Louis XV1 in 1793 he became so incensed that he burned his
violin and became a lieutenant colonel of the 33rd Foot
Regiment fighting his first battle in the Netherlands campaign
of 1794.
This is not a paper about Wellington however, merely scraping
some facts off a man’s life to enable one to understand
what a remarkable person he was and how differing fortunes
enabled him to rise to the top of English life. Does it
give insight into how he spoke and carried himself? Burning
his violin was certainly a clue as to his character. Here
was a man making a decision not to have fun anymore but
take life seriously. That’s the kind of detail an historical
novelist would seize upon. That and his antipathy to the
drunken ‘scum’ he commanded. He took soldiering
seriously and was contemptuous of the calibre of men he
had to command. When finally a lieutenant-general in 1808
he was given command of the expeditionary forces destined
for Portugal where he remarked :
‘They (the French)
may overwhelm me but I don’t think they will outmanoeuvre
me…because I am not afraid of them…’
Overall he was in battle with the French on European soil
for nearly six years.
In Susanna Clarke’s novel, in which Wellington appears
often, he is near the peak of his military career, placed
in a real battle in Portugal, in real situations but engaging
with her main character Jonathan Strange, the second most
famous magician in London. For magician in this context,
read Merlin figure, rather than Tommy Cooper in a top hat.
London, the government, worried that things were not going
well for the British troops, sends Wellington a magician.
Naturally, Clarke takes account of his natural disposition
of being a sceptic. She writes:
‘Lord Wellington gave
Strange a sharpe look. ‘What I chiefly need is men.
Can you make more?’
‘No.’ The magician answers.
‘Can you make bullets fly any quicker to strike the
French?’
‘No, my Lord.’
‘The name of the Chaplain is Mr Briscoll, the chief
medical officer Dr McCrigar, should you decide to stay on
in Portugal then I suggest you make yourself known to them.
You are of no use to me.’
Wellington properly dismisses the magician and it is as
we should expect from so ‘serious’ a man. Yet,
of course, Clarke, the author, has to find a way to engage
Wellington’s interest, impress him and make it work.
He will be won over eventually and the French will eventually
be defeated with the aid of magic. So successful will Johnathan
Strange be, Wellington comes to rely almost entirely on
magic to make the difference in battle. But note,Wellington
is never grateful, almost as if he senses his place in history
might be somehow demeaned if word got out and he succumbed
to the ancient dark arts.
That Susanna Clarke so effortlessly weaves in a fictional
magician to the great set pieces of British history is an
achievement. Her recreation of the last battles at Waterloo
(and vivid reanimation of dead soldiers for interrogation
purposes) are pure excitement on the page. Upon reading
her work, clearly any history book that now fails to cite
the efforts of Jonathan Strange and his role in British
victories would be remiss. Such is her power in bringing
history to life and making it her own.
Is this just a matter of research? Is the quest for authenticity
all that is required for a successful historical fiction
to work on the page? Clearly not. If research were all,
then it is possible Susanna Clarke would be unreadable.
Her painstaking trouble with atmosphere, place, attitudes
and the day to day concerns of the time made sure that all
around her fictional characters were as authentic as possible,
her sense of situation is so finely gauged anything is plausible.
Her real characters such as the Prime Minister Lord Sidmouth
completely accepts the idea of magicians as quite natural
in their world order, their only requirements being that
the British magicians should be superior in every way to
the continental ones. Of course, it helps that historians
such as Andrew Roberts, Christopher Hibbet, Richard Holmes
and Elizabeth Longford have provided copious minutiae on
the live of Wellington for her to draw upon. People like
Roberts make it easy for the historical novelist. Mentioning
that Napoleon was so confident of victory at Waterloo that
he had ordered roast mutton for his supper and his robes
to be transported to Brussels are exactly the kind of details
a writer can weave into the story. It’s harder when
less is known.
If one were to create historical novel say on the life of
Thucydides (460-400BC) the author of ‘A
history of the Peloponnesian Wars’ translated
by Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College in 1881
- we might think that we have little to go on. We know he
was briefly a general in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta
and failed to save Amphipolis from the Spartans. For this
he was banished. Throughout it all he set out to record
the history, to set matters straight, thinking that as the
Athenians and the Peloponnesians were at the height of their
military powers, the events that would unfold could affect
the world at large.
Daniel Boorstein, writing in The
Discoverers 1983
states ‘we know nothing about his life except that
his father had a Thracian name and that he owned a gold-mining
concession in Thrace and was exiled from Athens for twenty
years.’
His history took 22 years to write and provides us with
great insights into the formation of Hellas as a ‘nation’.
Historical novelists look to the man and contrary to Boorsteins
assertions, Thucydides is a veritable, dare I say it, gold
mine of information. We have dates, we have a man with money
and social standing, a general who has seen battle and lost
many men, a whole city in fact. A man in disgrace, exiled
from power and his friends, who, in his own words states
in his history, ‘ I have described nothing but what
I either saw myself or learned from others of whom I made
careful and particular enquiry.’ Jowett, B (A
history of the Peloponnesian Wars)
Chapter 1 Book 1.
That his work written 400 years before the birth of Christ
is so readable means that, for example, when the film Troy
was being made two years ago, this book was an essential
resource for the recreation of ancient Greek. (Though the
facts of it seem to have been largely ignored.) Thucydides
writes again: ‘Poverty was the real reason why the
achievements of former ages were insignificant, and why
the Trojan War, the most celebrated of them all, when brought
to the test of facts, falls short of its fame and of the
prevailing traditions to which the poets have given authority’.
Jowett, B, 1881 A history of the Peloponnesian Wars Book
1, Chapter Eleven
For the historical fiction writer the observations of battles
won or lost, even the tides that turned, of the number of
galleys possessed by the Corinthians, is all treasure trove.
It need not matter that we have no real idea of how Thucydides
spoke, or what he ate, or who he loved; we know enough to
recreate a former military man with a particular aptitude
for setting the truth down (as he saw it) in epic form.
We know, thanks to his own words, that he believed he was
living in important times that would have reverberations
down history. We understand he was man who sought immortality
with his words.
At his death the work was unfinished, published posthumously
it did not get the acceptance it probably deserved, for
tastes had changed and people in 399 now preferred spin
and glorious histories that did not depend upon the truth.
Epic tragedy, it seemed, was so last century.
Through Thucydides, Homer, Herodotus and Polybius we can
write about this ancient world with some degrees of certainty.
Can we accurately recreate the people of Troy? Clearly when
Wolfgang Peterson drew upon Homer’s epic poem as a
‘resource’ he was not aiming for authenticity.
Scholars can’t actually agree as where Troy stood,
there being no remains. Besides which, there are so many
contradictions and points of view. It must have been hell
deciding which story to tell. Luckily for us, it seems,
in the film version, the Trojans and Myceneans spoke with
impeccable cut glass English accents, were spotlessly clean
and lived to ripe old ages. Achilles was not a thug, but
a gentleman and only slightly enamoured with his pal Patroclus
(as one wouldn’t want to turn off the middle-aged white
bread audiences of Kansas.) Of course to represent history
with total authenticity, we would have to look more closely
at Thucydides account, rather than the boasting style of
Homer. Reading carefully, although the tally was 1200 ships
sent against Troy and a real spectacle on film, only the
Boetians ships were large, carrying one hundred and twenty
men. Some could carry fifty men, but Thucydides ponders
why there is no mention of the sizes of other ships. He
suspects that the force that arrived was less than great
and given that the seize actually lasted ten years, rather
than the film’s brief few months, the facts do not
point to anything decisive, or grand as has grown with the
telling down the ages. This would not suit the cinema audience
and I dare say, had it been an historical novel, may not
have attracted a large readership had ‘authenticity’
been paramount.
Clearly Oliver Stone is not in Kansas anymore as in his
Alexander the Great (2004) he takes great trouble
to recreate authenticity with costume and location. Nevertheless,
all the children and Alexander himself seem to have spent
a gap year in Belfast and yes, we have no real idea of what
Alexander did sound or speak like, but it’s entirely
possible that he may have been Macedonian. What we do know
about him, according to Arrian, in his work Anabasis, (modelled
on the work of Xenophon) is that possibly he was born on
July 20th 356 or 355. That he had one dark eye and one pure
blue. That histories were also written about him by Plutach
and Diodorus, men who did not meet Alexander. Plutach’s
work written in 100 AD. Ptolemy was the historian (and King)
who actually knew Alexander and recorded his own History
of Alexander, but none of these works refer to Alexander
dying his hair blonde.
Does it matter? Film, like historical fictions are only
entertainments, after all. They are not supposed to be scholarly
works and would bore us all rigid if they were. The very
fact that Arrian wrote Anabasis about Alexander meant that
the after effects of his empire building were reverberating
through history and that sometimes it is hard to separate
fact from myth, even just a few years after an event.
Mel Gibson with his epic The Passion of Christ (2004)
– a film telling of the final hours of Christ’s
life is unusual in that it is spoken in Latin and Aramaic
with English subtitles. This lends it sense of authenticity,
at the same time ran a huge risk with audiences. That it
became the most profitable historical movie of all time
is testimony to the careful research done by Gibson and
the writer Benedict Fitzgerald and the topic itself. But
was it authentic?
Was this the real Christ? Were the Romans so callous and
cruel? These were the last hours of Christ and it could
be this was how it was or just another, rather vivid illustration.
The point of historical fiction, I suppose, whether in film
or print, it that everything is open to interpretation.
Was Christ even real? That of course is another debate,
but to strip away the layers of propaganda about him, what
he meant, what he said, how he acted, who he trusted is
hard. Everything we know about him was written after the
event, some by men who knew him, such as the apostles, some
by those who merely set down the oral histories after the
filter of time.
This paper is entitled ‘Bringing the Dead back to life’
but, if you came thinking it is about Frankenstein or the
work of Anne Rice, interesting though they may be, you will
be disappointed. It’s about how we can find the right
voice and manner through research to bring real characters
to life in the writer’s ‘special world’.
Clearly it is easier
for a work set in the 20th Century because we have so much
archived in every shape. Records, paper, tape, film, photographs,
almost anyone of note has been interviewed, however briefly,
and if you want to know how say, Young Winston talked or
carried himself, the clues are in his own writings and comments
made about him in the newspapers of the time, even Punch
magazine. But Winston is an easy target and no challenge
at all. Finding facts and details on his wife Clemmie as
a young woman would be a challenge worthy of a historical
novelist, for less is known, her opinions reserved. However
we do have her letters. Mary Soames had unique access to
the personal correspondence between Winston and Clementine
and these entitled ‘Speaking for Themselves’
was published by the Churchill Centre in New York in 1999.
How she tolerated a man with such an ego was then never
remarked upon in Tatler or The
Times Diary. We do not have, as now, the benefit
of a gushing Hello
puff piece or a tabloid bust up on the lines of ‘Winston’s
cigars in bed drove me over the edge’! This
is for latter day historical research for the likes of historical
novels about the Beckams and Rooney’s for the next
generation of writers. With Clemmie we do know she spent
most of her fifty-six years of marriage apart from her husband.
This resulted in nearly 2000 letters exchanged between them
from 1908 to 1964. We are fortunate that she also knew how
to describe herself: I am
stupid and clumsy, naturally quite self-reliant and self-contained’…she
was wistful too, missing her husband often – ‘Time
flies stealing love away and leaving only friendship which
is very peaceful but not stimulating or warming.’
For the historical novelist looking to portray an important
and lasting marriage that spanned a turbulent period in
British history, these letters, are a rich vein in understanding
both the characters and the way decisions were made in those
times.
The nineteenth century is still a rich vein to explore.
Good records, photographs for at least half a century and
good sketches prior to that, receipts, unpaid bills, servants
hired and fired, gossip noted, all buried in books and magazines
and museums. In researching for my own book Diamonds
– The Rush of 1872 I read many books around that
period. America was in a post civil war economy undergoing
rapid modernisation as the railways colonised huge spaces
and drew cities together as never before. It is not just
the research that matters here, I needed, as a writer, to
become someone who instinctively understood, indeed thought
with a 19th century values and attitudes, particularly American
attitudes and conventions.
I like the little details. On family life in the Prairies
by Leroy Judson Daniel’s in his book Tales
of an old horse trader he writes:
‘My Dad was a Southern
Gentleman. He would go in and sit on his chair, anybody
who happened to be in his chair would get right out, no
other chair would do for him. At four o’clock in the
morning he’d give a war whoop and everybody had to
get up, but he stayed in bed until breakfast was ready…’
Note that four o’clock and shudder.
Leroy in his ‘oral’ history chronicles something
that barely gets a mention when we romance history. We record
the arrival of the car and men like Ford or Chrysler or
Hudson who developed and mass-produced them, but we never
talk about the horses they displaced. It is offensive to
some to talk of a holocaust when talking about horses, but
men like Leroy Daniels were paid to despatch old and young
horses to the slaughterhouses of Chicago by the million.
If not to Chicago, then hundreds of thousands of horses
and mules to the war front in Europe to die on the battlefields
in the First World War. He made a fortune shipping them
there and another bringing them back, but when they came
home, the car had taken a grip and no one wanted them, so
with Leroy’s help they were turned into dog food or
stew for humans for shipment back to a starving Europe.
Has it any relevance to the tale I was telling, perhaps
not, but it was a reminder to me that sentimentality had
no place in the 19th Century or the early 20th. Progress
took no prisoners. When writing about characters that lived
and breathed then, it is good to remember that.
The joy of research is finding books or obscure accounts
of real people, perhaps not the heroes and people of note,
but the one’s who do their bidding. Sometimes you uncover
unpleasantries by today’s standards. There is a very
poignant Canadian play Ernestine
Shuswap Gets her Trout by Tomson Highway; It is about
the Aboriginal concept of land ‘ownership’ and
in this case, the rights of the Kamloops Indian Band. The
British contempt for native Indians in Canada is illustrated
in this play set in 1910. How a series of legislations about
property rights of white immigrants, slowly and deliberately
impoverished a proud people living off the land, until they
become beggars and were dehumanised in the eyes of the settlers.
Fences are built, cows removed from fields, intermarriage
is declared illegal. Restricted from even fishing for salmon
in their ‘own’ river or eating berries on the
hills around them, they developed health problems they had
never experienced before. History is also about remembering
and uncovering unpleasant facts and bringing them alive
to a new generation.
Research can also take you to places you hadn’t expected
to go to and the writer can easily be side-tracked by a
peripheral character whose history seems so much more detailed
than the ones he or she may be writing about.
Such a case arose for me when writing Diamonds.
One of the principal characters was a prominent banker in
San Francisco called William Ralston. He plays a key part
in the story but is not the focus of the book. Yet the more
I read about him, the more I began to regret that the book
wasn’t actually about him. Such a lot is recorded,
whereas my own main protagonists were slim pickings historically
speaking. Real, but they neglected to write their memoirs,
leaving others, who plainly did not like them, to record
their impressions of them. Ralston, having achieved an international
reputation as a banker well recorded by George Lyman, who
wrote Ralston’s Ring
in 1937,Scribner - detailing his life and somewhat
dubious business practices.
The discipline, of course, is to stick to the plan, not
be distracted, but it is an awful temptation.
My own story takes the simple tale of how two men John Slack
and Philip Arnold, found the first diamonds in the USA and
parleyed it into a fortune. Ralston, Chief Cashier at the
Bank of California is the linchpin of that story. In 1872
by George Lyman’s account, and records of the Bank
of California, Ralston is San Francisco. Nothing happens
unless he says so. He controlled the flow of gold and silver
from Comstock via his ‘ring’ and pretty much strangled
all other attempts of enterprises that he did not invest
in. You could imagine him as ruthless, but no account I
found painted him anything other than a good guy, caring,
aiming to boost California at every opportunity. He didn’t
cheat on his wife, or beat her, and was easily the most
respected man (and hated by those whom he didn’t support)
in the city. Even his former business partner Asbury Harpending
in his autobiography (James H Barry Press 1913) who was
eventually ruined by him did not have a bad word to say.
But even so, he could not be the focus of the book. Yet
the more one looked, the more remarkable he seemed. Born
in Plymouth, Ohio to a rich ferry owner, at a time when
the Ohio River was the only road north and south. However
the ferry sank and the family fortune with it. Young William
Ralston became a clerk on the Mississippi floating palace
The Constitution (The Palaces were like Las Vegas Casino’s
today but steam powered ferries).
Each day Ralston mixed with gamblers, pretty girls, bounders
and pirates. The New Orleans of the 1840’s was pretty
exciting and it is assumed that Ralston got a good training
in all aspects of finance and vice. He certainly liked the
good life.
When the gold rush news reached them in 1849 Ralston wanted
to go, but didn’t have the ready cash. In George Lyman’s
book he quotes Ralston saying‘ I want to go like
a white man’, he declared, ‘And I think it will
take about $300.’ He was 23, bronzed, brave, smiling,
courteous, eager eyed, ready to put into practice what the
river had taught him’.
Yet he did not reach the gold fields in the rush. At Panama
he ran into old ferryboat friends Garrison and Feltz. They
realised that there was money to be made ferrying men and
their goods across the Isthmus (Between Panama and the Pacific)
and it was here, back in the ferry business that Ralston
made his first fortune as a ferry captain.
By the time my heroes met him in San Francisco in 1872 the
former clerk from Ohio was the Donald Trump of his day and
not only ran the Bank of California and owned the largest
hotel in town and building another, still larger, he also
lived like Napoleon in a 180 bedroom mansion, the only one
lit by gas in the USA. In the 18th Century and earlier,
naked ambition, greed, and life itself just had to be lived
to the full, hang the consequences. Young men talked of
adventure, making fortunes, or dying grandly to impress
the ladies. At least that’s what Bernard Cornwell’s
Sharpe would understand. A soldier on the make in a time
of endless opportunities. Cornwell’s popularity is
a combination of good writing, amusing stories, an indelible
character who takes great risks and possesses ruthless charm,
all set against a background of meticulous historical research.
A man who did not grasp opportunity was a plain fool. Risks
were taken daily and generally it was assumed another opportunity
would come tomorrow.
Ralston, in my book, is an older version of himself. The
man made good, the gambler suppressed but not entirely.
Attracted to each and every scheme that comes along with
the instincts of a gambler, striving to stay on top of the
heap as new challengers emerge.
When history recalls him however, if at all, they remember
only that after a run on the bank he drowned himself in
the bay. History belongs to the victors it is often said,
but the historical novel belongs to the revisionists. The
dead cannot sue for libel or seek redress but the writer
has a duty to represent them truthfully , as the facts present
themselves. The ethics of setting real characters in impossible
situations with incredible characters is perhaps another
debate, but the critical and popular success of Susanne
Clarke’s novel would indicate that combining the real
with fantasy will work, as long as the backdrop feel authentic.
Jan Morris writes in Heaven’s Command – An
Imperial Progress on the rise and fall of the Victorian
Empire. Though not writing historical fiction, her research,
as others who help us decode the past, can form basic tools
for authenticity. Letters reveal so much about the times
people lived in. (How delightfully convenient they have
found 1000 letters written by Lord Nelson in his bicentennial
year). Writing the past as fiction means that one has to
understand how they think and talk. Morris’s work on
the Victorian Age enables understanding.
Morris quotes Ruskin: If we can get men, for little pay,
to cast themselves against cannon mouths for the life of
England, we may find men who will plough and sow for her
– who will bring up their children to love her.’
Disraeli wrote ‘The English have a choice, a comfortable
England or a great country, an imperial country, a country
were your sons, when they rise, rise to paramount positions
and obtain through their actions the esteem of their countrymen
but command the respect of the world.’ His words
that could have been spoken by any Roman Emperor.
If Disreali, a Tory Prime Minister and novelist (Sybil and
Tancred) was colourful, which he certainly was, what was
it that made him so attractive to voters? His politicies
or his personality? Can one mine his books and speeches
to find the essence of the man? Fortunately we have Dizzy’s
own words to help us portray him: ‘A man can know
nothing of mankind without knowing something of himself.
Self-knowledge is the property of that man whose passions
have their full play, but who ponders their results.’
The same for Shaw, Wells, Jules Verne. There are photographs,
transcripts, letters, memoirs and their own words but without
also bathing oneself in the social context of their times,
it is impossible to recreate them with any authenticy. Bernard
Shaw the playwright, according to Mrs Patrick Campbell,
the noted actress, with whom he was obsessed, was cantankerous,
witty, stiff, awkward, shy, and yet dextrous in his writing.
In the play by Jerome Kilty ‘Dear Liar’
he brings their copious correspondence to each other alive
and their stormy, often petulant demands. Shaw and Campbell
are of their times and peculiar to it, but their sentiments
and feelings are universal.
The fact is that the past is full of inconsistencies, moral
turpitude, ineptness, stupidity, fallibility, sexual perversion
and the odd moments of luck and opportunity. Sometimes you
get to thinking that these people had no concept that they
would be found out and be judged. Luckily for us there was
John Galsworthy to record it for us in his novel The Forsyth
Saga which documented Victorian England and perhaps froze
it for all time in aspic, as indeed A le Recherche Temps
Perdu by Marcel Proust did for France.
For myself, the most useful histories are not written about
Prime Ministers or about Captains of Industry, but by those
who were there, the ordinary men and women recording each
day, good or bad, often without judgement.
Bayard Taylor wrote his Eldorado
– about his experiences in the Californian Gold Rush
in 1849. It is a nice contrast with Mark Twain’s account
‘Roughing It’
ten years later. Horace Greeley of the New
York Tribune commissioned Taylor to go west and record
the events as they unfolded. The result is the not so accurate
but fascinating record of the birth of a new California
during the first gold rush. Hardship, greed, generosity,
death and the law (or lack of it) described with much colour.
Through Taylor we discover not just the trials and tribulations
of the gold prospectors but the astonishing profiteering
of all those who would supply food, lodging, drink, tools
and land to support the endless army of hopefuls that arrived.
The history of the gold rush is exciting, simply because
it is about risk taking, thousands winning the lottery overnight
and even more thousands losing it all at a game of chance.
Where prospectors went, whores, bankers and storekeepers
followed.
Ships came in from all over the world. Taylor records that
from China (and yes China was there from the beginning)
one ship arrived filled with men armed with 250 prefabricated
houses. Later historians would recall the resentment between
the white incomers and the Chinese and the tensions that
grew out if it. By 1851, as the easy money ran out, despair
set in for those who hadn’t made it. 100,000 men and
not a few women came in 1849, most stayed to become Californians
for lack of any resources to go back. Curiously, although
rising crime is often associated with the tales of the Gold
Rush, the first recorded hold up didn’t occur until
1856.
Legends were quick to grow. ‘The honest miner’
by Joseph Henry Jackson recalls many of the stories of each
new town as the gold fever took hold. Songs began to circulate
that had a realist take on the situation:
Hangtown Galls are plumb and rosy
Hair in ringlets, might cozy,
Painted cheeks and jossy bonnets
Touch ‘em and they sing like hornets
Hangtown gals are lovely creatures
Think they’ll marry the Mormon preachers
Heads thrown back to show their features
Ha, Ha, Ha Hangtown gals.
But the reality was often quite different. Women with skills
could command a price. Jackson cites a real advertisement
from a Miners newspaper of the period.
A
Husband Wanted
By
a lady who can wash, cook, scour, sew, milk, spin, weave,
hoe, (can’t plow), cut wood, make fires, feed the pigs,
raise chickens, rock the cradle, saw a plank, drive nails.
She is neither handsome nor a fright, yet an old man need
not apply, nor any who have not a little more education
than she has, and a great deal more gold, for there must
be $20,000 settled on her before she will bind herself to
perform all the above.
Address answers to Dorothy Scraggs with real name to PO
Marysville.
One wonders what kind of response she got and it does reveal
quite clearly what a wife was supposed to perform to keep
her man in those times.
Jackson reveals that contrary to general images of the gold
rush, the average age of the ‘49’ers was between
18 and 35. It was tough up there. Not many men actually
got rich or at least held onto their fortunes, despite the
fact that some 600 million dollars was extracted by hand
in the first few years.
An early death was common, there were no hospitals, and
the doctors there were, were charlatans and the dentists
often killers leaving their victims to bleed to death. Men
would pay any price for a cure or to be rid of pain and
it was rich pickings for the medical ‘profession’.
In Mountains and Molehills
by Frank Marriot, he recalls a funeral of a preacher
which went from pious to chaos as diggers discovered gold
dust in the grave and the body was abandoned in the mad
scramble to get their hands on the gold.
There was glamour in the mud too. Anyone looking for a subject
to write on in the context of the gold rush should look
to the travelling theatricals.
In Nevada City in 1859, a Mrs Hayne put on Camille
to great success one night. In the next ten nights she also
staged full productions of Romeo
and Juliet, Lucretia Borgia, The Lady of Lyons, The Love
Chase, The Hunchback, and Camille for another three
performances.
Miners were great supporters of the ‘arts’. Other
nights they’d come to watch snake tamers, French Ballet,
even Oscar Wilde reading prose. Civilisation followed the
prospectors as small towns grew.
A favourite story took place in Silver City in 1863. It
was told to me by a real estate agent keen to sell a particular
"Victorian style’property. It’s about a successful
silver miner who imported a grand prefabricated metal Victorian
Villa. It’s still there, stamped corrugated tin, the
wallpapered walls, and a stoop all around the whole house
with its’ beautifully crafted fitting. It was erected
and the rich prospector moved in. That very night, at a
game of poker, he lost the house and his fortune. The new
owner decided to dig a hole for an outhouse the next day
and promptly fell into a mineshaft to his death. The house
was clearly cursed and remains there, to this day 140 years
on, currently for sale to one ‘lucky’ owner.
In bringing the past back to life it is these little details,
the very human elements of extraordinary lives that fascinates
and enables the writer to animate the characters they conjure
up from the dead.
Historical
Fiction is popular; one only has to look at the best seller
list any month.
As Professor Allan Bloom writes in his seminal work –
The Closing of the American
Mind, ‘all the
world was mad in the past, men always thought they were
right and that led to wars, persecution, slavery, xenophobia,
racism and chauvinism. The point of (writing history) is
not to correct the mistakes and really be right but rather
not think you are right at all. Not to take the moral stance
is important. Today’s set of standards and morals do
not fit comfortably with the mores of even 20 years ago,
never mind 100, 200 years’
American history, as well as British is filled with unimaginable
cruelties, with often a complete disregard for the environment,
the welfare of mankind or the creatures that inhabit it.
We suffer guilt because we displaced the native humans in
America, Canada, Australia and more but we cannot undo it
or even make amends.
Everything was in the name of progress. Only now we realise
that Columbus and Hobart or Hudson or Captain Vancouver
discovered nothing that wasn’t already there. Elsewhere
was filled with indigenous people who had a history of their
own, oral history, rituals and rules that we totally ignored.
History is about battles, political and military. Even as
I write this one is being fought now over the last of America’s
forest where President Bush has decreed open to exploitation.
An indelible act of aggression against the environment that
will have devastating consequences if not defended. This
is how the tectonic plates of human history are formed.
History as taught is often about heroes, royalty, pioneers,
but perhaps only now we realise that there is another history,
untold, unknown.
We are nations living in constant denial of history, distorting
events because we no longer find them palatable. What stories
will come out of Iraq? What will emerge from the ruins of
Zimbabwe? Who will they blame? the tyrant or us for not
coming to their aide?
Is history important?
Right now there are tensions between China and Japan over
events that happened seventy years ago or more. Massacres
that will not be forgotten. We in Europe have recently celebrated
our 60th VE day when we found peace again after five years
of war. We still recall the fallen from the First World
War and the reverberations from that mindless war echo through
everything we are and do. History is a part of us.
The 20th Century was one of constant displacement and people
flowed like seismic waves across the world fleeing one oppression
after another. America was filled in the previous two centuries
with people fleeing starvation or religious persecution.
This century will also find upheavals as we learn to live
or die by the consequences of decisions taken in the last.
We can take lessons from history too. In New York of the
1880’s almost seventy percent of the population were
immigrants, often Irish or German, living in unimaginable
horrors. The census figures complied for New York by Jacob
A Ruis gives in 1889 for example 349,233 immigrants landed
at Castle Garden, New York. 43,000 of them Irish, 75,000
German, 44,000 Italian, all heading to live in the tenements,
poor, often illiterate, often sick, vulnerable to all kinds
of exploitation where the statistical death rate was 25
in every thousand.
The result of this immigrant explosion and the crime that
came with it was all recorded in the amazing book by Herbert
Asbury ‘The Gangs of New York’. Written
in 1927 it shows a transforming society undergoing huge
change, ruled from top to bottom by various levels of the
elite. For the top of the heap you can read ‘The
Age of Innocence’ by Edith Wharton in 1920, both
stratas of this society have been filmed with a real respect
for authenticity by Martin Scorcese. That these titles still
resonate is testimony to the importance of historical fiction
and records to make sense of our lives.
I started out by considering how it was we create the people
of the past with any sense of authenticy, yet end up talking
about the future. The society you encounter through research
has rules; one must observe the beliefs and structures of
that society, no matter how alien they may seem to the present.
The duty of the historical novelist is to time-travel, discard
the values of the present and become one with the characters
you meet, be the sword in Sharpes’ arm, be the locomotive
in Stephensons yard, be the target for German bombers, be
the executioner and the heart, once stabbed, that stops
beating.
© Sam North June '05
sam.north@port.ac.uk
Presented at the Great Writing Conference Portsmouth June
11th 2005
all rights reserved 1999-2007
Diamonds
- The Rush of '72
By Sam North
Buy now from Amazon.com
'a
terrific piece of storytelling' Historical Novel Society
Review
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Sunday
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ISBN:
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