Fraudulent Folly

While on the lookout for dodgy historical goings-on for my quackery website, I discovered the following case of Victorian literary dishonesty that forms a salutary tale for the plagiarists of modern times.

Like many newspapers past and present, The Bristol Mercury ran a regular Poet's Corner. The quality of this was as variable as you can imagine, but in June 1872 it printed some poignant lines by one T. L. B. of Clifton Wood. Nature and Faith was purportedly written to commemorate someone's death in May of that year, and it began:

We wept – 'twas Nature wept – but Faith

Can pierce beyond the gloom of death

And in yon world so fair and bright

Behold thee in refulgent light;

We miss thee here, but Faith would rather

Know thou art with thy Heavenly Father.

Comforting words indeed, if you like that sort of thing. Unfortunately for T. L. B., bereaved people had been receiving this poem from sympathetic friends since its publication in The Floweret Gathered by Thomas Goodwin Hatchard fourteen years previously – and some of them were readers of the Bristol Mercury.

One correspondent politely suggested that the poet must have made some mistake, while another called his actions 'as flagrant an instance of literary fraud as I have ever met with.'

The best response, however, came from Poet's Corner regular W. H. Dowding, who addressed the hapless T. L. B. with lines that are still relevant to the problem of plagiarism today:

Oh! T. L. B., though to me you're a stranger,

Allow me to send you a rhyme, in my way,

To tell, that by actions like yours there is danger

Of losing all claim to the chaplet of bay;

If you had tarried for sober reflection,

Surely you would not have acted so wrong,

Plain common sense must have told you, detection

Would follow your fraudulent folly ere long.

Strive not the voice of your conscience to smother

Just for a few fleeting moments of fame.

Rob not the wreath from the brow of another,

Such a mean act is deserving of blame.

Beauty and truth shall flourish for ever,

Falsehood shall perish 'neath scorn and disdain;

Work, if you can, with an honest endeavour

Work, if you can, with your own pen and brain.

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We are the past

I click a lot of links on Twitter. Often I cast an idle glance at what's there (picture of a cute cat doing something cute; the Daily Mail's latest calculated attempt to stir up outrage) and then click away again. A few weeks ago, however, I followed a link to the documentary Morning in the Streets, made in Liverpool and other parts of the North West in the 1950s. Although it's 35 minutes long, and therefore way beyond the attention span of the 'younger generation' to which I tragically still pretend to belong, I watched it from beginning to end. As well as a joke about a budgie, it contains footage of some schoolkids, about the age my parents were at the time, singing a playground song:

'Write me a letter, and tell me when you're better, and don't forget your good friend Pat.'

The song has stuck in my head ever since, as if it were there already, and watching the video made me think about people's approach to the past and how I want to approach historical fiction.

I was surprised to feel a sense of nostalgia while watching – after all, I wasn't around in the 1950s so any memories I have of that time are second-hand, passed down from family members and absorbed through literature, photography and film. I did feel nostalgia, however – for the sunshine and the hand-knitted cardis and the traffic-free streets – even though the sensible part of my brain was well aware that there has never been a golden age. Will the early years of the 21^st century ever be viewed in the same way?

It's hard to imagine people in 2111 looking back and thinking how lovely and simple life must have been before the advent of flying cars and implants that allow messages to be sent direct from one brain to another. But surely they will. With medical advances, some of us might even be alive, complaining about young people and remembering how much better things were in our day. Others will laugh affectionately at pictures of unwieldy iPhones that required you to spend many seconds typing out a whole text message.

We will be someone's concept of the past – we are continually creating the history of the future, living out the nostalgia of later generations. Yet it doesn't feel like that, does it? It just feels like life. While attempting to write historical fiction, I find it worth remembering that I'm an inhabitant of history too.

I don't think there is much room for nostalgia in histfic, because it seems to me that it's not really about the past. It's about the present - just a different present from the one in which we happen to live. Historical fiction is about the here and now that belongs to individuals - not 'Victorians' or 'Georgians' or 1950s Liverpudlians, but people with a story to be told.

An editor's visitors - 1890

It's my turn to blog on Strictly today, but a few hours before this post is due to go up, I, as an international woman of mystery, will have just (I hope) arrived home from a top-secret mission to the Middle East. (Well, it's not really top secret, but it sounds cooler and more enigmatic that way.) I am, therefore, scheduling this post in advance. I'm handing it over to one Arthur Lockyer Esq, a Victorian editor who gives a glimpse into the process our writerly forebears had to endure when submitting their work. This is an excerpt from a piece he wrote for The Graphic newspaper in April 1890.

The editor probably suffers more than any other professional man from the visits of people whom he has no desire to see, but who are eager for a personal interview with himself. In this respect, therefore, his ideal of bliss lies in the two polysyllabic words, inaccessibility and invisibility. In the case of an extensive and highly organised concern, it is possible to achieve the first of these two substantives.

Let us give an example. You want to see the editor, or one of the editors, for in such an establishment there are often several of them. But you have learnt from private sources that the name of the particular editor whom you wish to see is Marmaduke Johnson, and so, with your manuscript in your hand or concealed somewhere about your person, you climb a steep narrow staircase until your progress is arrested by a sort of sentry-box, wherein sits an undersized, but preternaturally intelligent, youth. He has a manner as if the name of Johnson was entirely foreign to his ear; nevertheless he is fairly civil, and after inspecting your card, and holding a colloquy with an invisible person through a flexible tube, he hands you over to a commissionaire. The military hero, after conducting you along several passages, suddenly says 'In here, sir,' and ushers you into a small room containing nothing but a desk, two chairs, and a rather ancient map of London.

You inspect the map for about five minutes, when the door again opens, and in comes an elderly gentleman in spectacles, who asks you to be seated, and listens to your statement with patience and courtesy. You say to yourself, 'What a nice fellow Marmaduke Johnson is!' Unfortunately, however, this is not Johnson at all, but only his deputy, for presently the elderly gentleman says: 'Your manuscript shall have Mr. Johnson's best attention.' He then bows, touches a bell, the inexorable commissionaire appears instantly, like an Arabian Nights' genie, and in another two minutes you are politely marched off the premises, without having even seen the great man's coat-skirts. This is a specimen of the Inaccessible Editor, and a very enviable mortal he is, in this respect.

But, as spacious premises and a large and well-trained staff of subordinates are required to render an editor triumphantly inaccessible, some editors, who do not possess these advantages, strive, often with indifferent success, to render themselves invisible. Some accomplish this by notifying to their would-be interviewers that they are to be seen on Fridays between 4 and 6 P.M., and by taking care always to be absent on those afternoons; while others have a couple of doors to their den, and when they hear in the outer office the voice of a well-remembered bore they bolt incontinently through the inner doorway down the staircase, and hide themselves until the bore's patience is exhausted, and he reluctantly departs.

The Authenticity of 'Now'

There's a scene in my first novel where the main character, a nurse, sweeps herbs over the hospital floorboards in an attempt to mask the smell of the patients. It's no big deal; just part of what she happens to be doing at the time, but several readers have mentioned it as a fascinating historical detail; an example of how carefully I must have researched the era.

But the truth is... I, er... made it up. I don't know whether it was routine practice for 18th-century hospital staff to spread herbs on the floor – but equally, there's nothing to say that one resourceful individual in one hospital wouldn't try it out.

Is this, therefore, historically accurate or not? I believe it to be authentic – herbs were around then, brooms were around, smells were around, it makes sense to use the former to deal with the latter. But what if someone, having read the book, starts telling their friends the interesting fact that 'in the olden days, hospitals used to put herbs on the floor!' Is it unfair on readers to make them believe in something when it's just an illusion? 

Personally, I don't think it's unfair at all – history involves a lot of individuals doing individual things, and sometimes those individual things aren't what a GCSE history book says 'the Georgians' (or whoever) homogeneously did. In fiction, what's important is whether something is possible and believable within the context of the time.

In a recent piece for the Guardian, James Forrester pointed out a mistake in an un-named book set in the 14th century – the narrative mentioned that there were 'no priests within a three-day ride,' and Forrester's knowledge of history enabled him to work out that there would in fact have been several thousand.

Now, I don't know what this book was, and chances are the author really couldn't be arsed to get the facts right, but unless the story has a modern, omniscient narrator, then it's being told from a historical point of view – the point of view of someone living in their own version of 'now'. I don't know about you, but in my 'now' – the 21^st century – there is an awful lot of stuff I'm unaware of and an awful lot of stuff I get wrong. Should a 14^th century character really be expected to have accurate details about every single thing that is going on in their 'now'?

Maybe the narrator has no idea about the priests, but makes the statement anyway so as to appear authoritative. Maybe they've been told this by someone with an ulterior motive, and are naïve enough to believe it. Or perhaps the statement is an intentional teaser for knowledgeable readers; a hint that something is amiss and that the narrator has intriguing reasons for giving the wrong information. Maybe it's a way for the author to conspire with his or her audience, and reward the alert ones with an extra clue to the mystery.

Readers are quite entitled to enjoy feeling clever when they perceive historical inaccuracies, but there's also a danger of congratulating yourself so much that you miss out. If the 'mistake' turns out to be an early warning of the political machinations that ultimately endanger the hero's life, then it's even cleverer – and more satisfying – to have used your superior knowledge to work that out.