Transported in time

Or, Why I'm recommending Molly and the Captain!

I love historical novels. I always have. I think some of my most memorable reading experiences as a child were stories of time shift, where ordinary children suddenly found themselves witnessing the past, walking among ghosts, watching historical events unfold around them. For an isolated child like me, with brother and sister both grown up and gone, these were wonderful revelations of where exciting companions might spring from, and different worlds that could be visited. I’m remembering Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time, LM Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, and Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. All of these featured children left alone and looking for company in a strange new location, with the added advantage that although the past was glimpsed, sometimes only in a dream, the real world could be easily regained if adventures became too scary or intense.

Not all of the books I loved as a child had this timeslip effect: some were pure Victorian gothic: Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and Antonia Barber’s The Ghosts, made into a lovely, if rather scary film called The Amazing Mr Blunden.

The 1972 film version of The Amazing Mr Blunden, directed by Lionel Jeffries, starring Diana Dors as the evil Mrs Wickens

And then I discovered Jean Plaidy in my teenage years, and suddenly I knew more about intrigue, sex and murder at the court of Catherine de Medici than any fourteen year old could need. I lapped them up, the Medicis, the Borgias, the Tudor Series, and a particular favourite, The Goldsmith’s Wife, which was about Jane Shore, the mistress of Edward IV. I thought I had read most of her work, but a quick trip to Wikipedia today tells me that Plaidy must have been one of the most prolific novelists of all time and I barely scratched the surface. In a fifty year career, starting in 1941, she published over 190 novels using eight different pseudonyms. She wasn’t even called Jean Plaidy - her real name was Eleanor Alice Burford. Very recently I picked up Madame Serpent, the first of the Medici sequence, in a junk shop, but I’m too nervous to start reading it in case the magic has fled. Because, of course, since then I have discovered so many more masters and mistresses of the art.

Historical novels today, unlike spy stories, romances, thrillers or fantasy, can hold their heads high as a respected genre of literary fiction. Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies have been more than worthy Booker Prize winners, as was The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, which won in 2013. I loved this book, with its clever plot, its hint of the supernatural, and its unusual structure. It is one of those creations where I am just blown away by the skill with which the writer has immersed me in Gold Rush New Zealand in 1866. Like everyone else, I suppose, I read fiction to be taken out of myself, to appreciate the vast scope of human experience and to be shown a different life, and Catton has completely succeeded in this novel. I mention it because she was only in her twenties when she wrote it, and I think if I spent the next decade researching a particular period of history I would not be able to bring even a tenth of the wealth of detail and authenticity that she does to the page. Heigh ho.

Historical fiction has been around almost as long as novels themselves. I’m no expert, but I imagine that the genre really took off with Sir Walter Scott, the Waverley novels and then Ivanhoe being publishing phenomena. Scott had cottoned on to the essential truth of the species: that houses and fashions may change, but people stay the same. He described this best in the opening chapter of Waverley: there are ‘passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day.’

The trick to great historical fiction is to get the mix right. Obviously the author has to avoid anachronisms: one of my favourite Tudor crimesolvers, Shardlake, would have found his life immeasurably improved by access to a mobile phone. Although I don’t think SG Maclean’s Damian Seeker could have improved on his beautiful black stallion for getting round the back streets of London. Dialogue, in particular, is tricky to get right, it has to sound authentic…but too much archaic language can put the reader off. When the Victorian cleric Charles Kingsley was creating the work that first made his fortune, Westward Ho!, he wanted it to be a convincing portrait of Elizabethan seafaring life. But his very wise publisher, Daniel Macmillan, cautioned him about overdoing the Gadzooks and Verilys: ‘The style is now getting a bore. The free march of your own style will be much more Elizabethan in manner and tone than any you can assume. We feel sure it will be a right brave and noble book, and do good to England…’

All of which brings me to the two novels I have read over the past month, both published in the last ten years. The first is an absolute behemoth of a book, Death and Mr Pickwick, by Stephen Jarvis.

800 pages of close-set type is not something to be undertaken lightly, and I had to tackle this book in two halves, with some light reading in between. Jarvis has an argument to make, and that is that Charles Dickens was not the original creator of Mr Pickwick: that honour falls, in a closely-evidenced plot, to the artist and engraver Robert Seymour, who famously killed himself shortly after the first instalment of The Pickwick Papers was published. Dickens, and Chapman his publisher, had to scrabble around to find a replacement illustrator, and landed on Hablot Browne, otherwise known as Phiz, to go with Boz, Dickens’ pen name. I suspect if I were not so interested and emotionally involved in the world of Victorian publishing, I would not have been brave enough to pick this book up, but I am glad I persisted with it. Of course all the best and funniest bits belong to the Pickwickians themselves, and the fact that the book is only text, so that Seymour’s illustrations have to be described in words, and put into context, as Dickens did for him, weakens Jarvis’ case of originality. But it remains a fascinating study of fame and fortune: The Pickwick Papers was of course The Tortured Poets’ Department of its day, the world went mad for Pickwick and everyone wanted a piece of the action.

So, last but by no means least, I give you Molly and the Captain by Anthony Quinn, published in 2022. This is a much easier read, and I absolutely fell for it. It comes in three parts, each roughly a hundred years apart, starting in 1785, and each in a different style. The first section is a journal written by a young woman called Laura Merrymount, one of two daughters of a famous Georgian portrait artist, very much in the mould of Gainsborough. You can see how cleverly the beautiful book cover gives you the hint…just look at those lovely eyes…

Daughters chasing a butterfly by Thomas Gainsborough c. 1756 (The National Gallery)

Laura and her sister have been famously captured by their father in a painting known as ‘Molly and the Captain’. In the first section, Laura discovers her father’s secrets and is forced to re-assess everything she thought she knew about her family life: it is a touching portrait of sisterly love, and of the power of forgiveness. And these themes, together with an exploration of artistic talent and of the sources of inspiration continue through the second and third sections, as we move in pursuit of Molly and the Captain, from the late Victorian artworld and auction houses of Chelsea, to the more complex worlds of art and culture in 1980s north London. Throughout the three intertwined stories run little coincidences and telltale signs, such as trips to Eastbourne a hundred years apart, accidents of near drownings, and houses two hundred years and two hundred yards away in Kentish Town. Reading this book, skimming through two centuries of London history, and watching the same truths about sisters, love and family play out, was to me the perfect example of Scott’s insight, that there are passions common to all men, and all women, in all stages of society, and it just takes the talented author’s touch to bring them into the light.

My battered, cherished editions, bought for my 7th birthday in 1969

Postscript: I have just read an interview in last week’s New Statesman with the bestselling historian Peter Frankopan, who says that the best piece of advice he has ever been given was that if you want to write good history, you should read lots of novels. No-one teaches early-career scholars how to write well - there is too much focus on methodology and footnotes. He says that he has learned a lot from novels over the years: I couldn’t agree more! Although I’m not sure he is talking about Alison Uttley…