[This post originally appeared on ActiveHistory]
I can trace my interest in the past to a single book: Jack Whyte’s The Skystone, a story set in the time of the legendary King Arthur. First published in 1992, when I was 12, The Skystone had
just about everything necessary to hook a young kid: historical
imagination, magic, war, heroism, and enough “adult” subject matter to
make this my childhood version of 50 Shades of Grey. My dad
gave me the book – a fact I desperately tried to forget while reading
some of the more erotic passages – and he continued providing me with
whatever Whyte wrote until I was sick of stories about King Arthur and
the Knights.
Fast-forward twenty years, and I’m once again reading historical
fiction. Both my father and my father-in-law suggested Hilary Mantel’s
Man Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall,
the story of Tudor England told through the fictionalized life of
Thomas Cromwell. I haven’t read fiction for years, but thought I’d give
it a try; once again, I find myself hooked. And I’m obviously not the
only one. The success of Wolf Hall has led me to wonder if this is someone else’s The Skystone,
and what future academic work might be traced back to a few evenings
spent with Thomas Cromwell? I found myself particularly interested in
Henry VIII and his court during a recent trip to England and France.
While I was wandering Versailles I was struck by the fact that Louis
XIII’s hunting chateau (which served as the foundation for the great
palace) was constructed over eighty years after Thomas Cromwell lost his
head.
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| Vimy Monument (author's photo) |
Elsewhere during the trip I was similarly struck by the inspiring
links between literature and history. One day we rented a car and drove
from Paris to Vimy, as I had never seen the battle site. Putting aside
the contentious claims about Vimy as a founding moment for Canada, the
site and the monument are breathtaking. It’s hard not to be moved when
thinking about what the Great War soldiers endured. The monument, of
course, has its own story – and its own fiction. Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers –
which tells the story of a family of carvers who participate in
building the Vimy monument after the war – is a great introduction to
this part of Canadian history.
It is impossible to ignore history in the rest of Paris. We were
staying close to Place de la Bastille, which commemorates many
significant events. This was the site of the old Bastille Fortress,
stormed and taken by Republicans during the French Revolution. These
were “the best of times” and “the worst of times” that inspired Charles
Dickens to write A Tale of Two Cities, one of the most popular works of historical literature.
On the site of the old Bastille fortress now stands the July Column, a
monument dedicated to the French Revolution of 1830 that ended the
reign of King Charles X. The July Column is within walking distance of
the famous Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, which is
regularly flush with copies of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
This fictional account of what France went through between the end of
the Napoleonic Wars and the Paris Uprising of 1832 (which sought to undo
the 1830 Revolution commemorated by the July Column at Place de la
Bastille) truly captures the spirit of the age.
Really, the exact subject of the historical literature is less
relevant than the act of reading it. I can’t say I know much more about
Late Antiquity than I learned from Whyte, but those books inspired me
to think about the past, ask historical questions, and, ultimately,
become someone who spends time digging around in dead people’s
business. It is that general desire to know about the past that drives
historians and it might be useful to include more fiction in our
teaching – at both the graduate and undergraduate level – as a palate
cleanser to prepare for the next course of academic monographs.
In fact, during my PhD coursework my class was assigned Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams,
an excellent fictionalization of Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood’s
early years. We had lively debates about the meaning and use of
historical fiction, and the majority of us thought it was an excellent
exercise in evaluating the past. I’ve subsequently passed the book on
to a number of friends, all of whom now have some idea about
Newfoundland and Confederation.
An interest in the past needs to be nurtured and developed, and the
academic monograph is not necessarily the best starting point.
Historical literature might be the ideal gateway drug because it urges
the reader to investigate context, question what happened, and evaluate
why it matters.
