Historical novels

It is difficult to achieve success in writing “historical” plays and novels, i.e. plays and novels in which the social background is not that of the writer or of the public for whom he is writing. The effort to resuscitate an alien social background seldom produces effects that do not seem either shoddy or laboured. The reason is that social facts, when presented as a setting for personal relations, must be sketched in with a touch which is at the same time light and sure; and this touch is difficult to achieve except when the artist is portraying social facts with which he is intimately acquainted at first hand.

Elsewhere:

Though “historical” novels are apt to set my teeth on edge by offering me a stone instead of bread, I should be ungrateful indeed if I failed to acknowledge my debt to Herodotus for his tales of Mycerinus and Rhampsinîtus and Nitocris, to Leo Tolstoy for his War and Peace [see two posts to date on the intelligentsia in Russia], to Naomi Mitchison for her The Corn King and the Spring Queen, [footnote: London 1931, Cape.] to L.S. Woolf for his The Village in the Jungle, [footnote: London 1913, Edward Arnold.] to O.E. Rölvaag for his Giants in the Earth, [footnote: New York 1927, Harper.] to Georg Moritz Ebers for his Uarda, [footnote: English translation by C. Bull, Leipzig 1877, Low, 2 vols.] to Victor Hugo for his Quatre-Vingt Treize and Les Misérables, and to Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian for their Le Blocus. When I looked in at Phalsbourg on the 26th July, 1929, en route from Calais to Constantinople, its bastions and casemates were already so familiar to me that I could hardly believe that I was now setting eyes on them for the first time. I had found Le Blocus in a row of discarded books on a shelf in the pantry at No. 12 Upper Westbourne Terrace, and Quatre-Vingt Treize on a shelf in my Aunt Gertrude Toynbee’s flat.

The Herodotus stories are of ancient Egpyt.

Naomi Mitchison, a Victorian radical in the twentieth century, a Haldane by birth, died in 1999 aged 101. The Corn King and the Spring Queen deals with Marob, a frontier state on the Black Sea between Greek enlightenment and Asian barbarism, a kind of Scythia. Marob’s primitive communism is shattered by the arrival of a Greek Stoic who converts Tarrik, one of the leaders of Marob ritual, breaking his magic. (It sounds a bit like a Tippett opera.)

Tarrik, the apostate, goes to Greece and is followed by his fellow-Marobian Erif Der (Red Fire), whose magic now only works when she is among those who share her beliefs, mostly women. Tarrik, Erif Der and their Spartan allies are defeated by the Macedonians and flee to Egypt. Here the Marobians again encounter the old magic, this time in the rituals of Isis and Osiris. Further plot details withheld! Mitchison drew heavily on James Frazier’s monumental taxonomy of magic and religion, The Golden Bough. The book is in print. No doubt its theme of a clash of cultures appealed to Toynbee. (This synopsis referred to an online account by Gavin Grant.)

Leonard Woolf’s novel, also in print, is set in colonial Ceylon, where he had worked as a civil servant. So it is indeed a novel “in which the social background is not that of the writer or of the public for whom he is writing” even though it is not, as far as I know, strictly speaking “historical”. It seems to be, rather, a precursor of A Passage to India or Burmese Days.

Ole Edvart Rølvaag (1876-1931, OUP used an umlaut) emigrated to the plains of South Dakota from Norway. Giants in the Earth is a prairie classic about Norwegian pioneers in the Midwest and is in print. It cannot be called even a novel “in which the social background is not that of the writer”, since Rølvaag lived in the Midwest. Toynbee is using the word “historical” from the rather subjective viewpoint of an English reader.

Georg Moritz Ebers (1837-1898) was a nineteenth-century German Egyptologist. There is an “Ebers papyrus”. He also wrote novels about Egypt. Several of them, including Uarda, are online at Project Gutenberg.

Hugo’s Quatre-Vingt Treize is about the royalist counter-revolutionary uprising in the Vendée in 1793. Trollope’s only historical novel, La Vendée (1850), was about the same subject, and it appeared nearly a quarter of a century before Hugo’s.

Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian were a nineteenth-century double act, a bit like the two twentieth-century Brooklyn cousins who wrote under the joint name of Ellery Queen. They published as Erckmann-Chatrian. (Mascagni’s opera L’amico Fritz, recorded by Karajan, is based on one of their novels.) Le Blocus (1866) is about Phalsbourg’s resistance against the Allies in 1814. There is an Erckmann-Chatrian summer festival in the town.

Toynbee’s journey from Calais to Constantinople via, inter alia, Phalsbourg, was made by car, and is described in A Journey to China, or Things Which are Seen (1931).

I have already linked to Steve Trussel’s site on prehistory in fiction and done a post about Khushwant Singh’s Delhi.

A Study of History, Vol I, OUP, 1934 (footnote)

A Study of History, Vol X, OUP, 1954 (Acknowledgements and thanks)