Does the Historical Novel Need Defending? — Charles Palliser on Neo-Victorian Fiction and The Quincunx

A Literary Essay on Historical Fiction, Neo-Victorian Studies, and the Modern Historical Novel

This literary essay by Charles Palliser explores the status of the historical novel, Neo-Victorian fiction, and the relationship between nineteenth-century narrative form and modern literary experimentation. It examines writers such as Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Michel Faber, A. S. Byatt, and John Fowles, and reflects on the intentions behind The Quincunx.

Does the historical novel need defending?

Until recently the historical novel has tended to be patronised as mere “costume drama” and seen as “escapist”. Often that charge has not been unfair and although much of the writing in that genre has aspired to be nothing more than enjoyable entertainment - Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances or Winston Graham's Poldark novels - the best work, I want to argue, has specific rewards to offer to readers.

Of course there is nothing wrong with enjoyable and escapist entertainment and historical fiction has given a huge amount of pleasure to many readers. But it can do more than that and it has risen in status in the last forty years – a change to which the late and much lamented Hilary Mantel contributed hugely both by her example in the Wolf Hall trilogy and by her argument, in the 2017 BBC Reith Lectures, that it can be viewed as a legitimate form of scholarly investigation of the past.

The historical novel has a specific appeal which I think I can cast some light on through my own experience. I loved the genre as a child in the novels of Alfred Duggan, Henry Treece, Geoffrey Trease, and Rosemary Sutcliffe, and have never stopped enjoying that kind of fiction. Those children’s novels had varying degrees of historical accuracy and for their authors, scholarship was less important than telling a good story. But the settings and situations were exotic enough to arouse my interest: sailing ships, stage-coaches, chariot warfare, gladiatorial combats, and so on. Novels like those must have inspired many children to want to study history more formally at school or university.

What was and still is the appeal for me? Partly it’s a way of learning about a different culture and often one that is strange and exotic. But less obviously, there’s a dialectic of strangeness and familiarity: these are characters in situations that are extraordinary but their emotional and rational responses display few differences from those of people living now. That means that a historical novel with the ambition to be more than just “costume drama” can tell the modern reader as much about our period as about the past.

Just to illustrate that, I cite these novels which deserve much more than this brief mention:

Valerie Martin’s Property conveys the mind-set of the slave-owning class by focusing on the relationship of a Southern woman with her enslaved maid and powerfully illuminates modern-day attitudes towards race and notions of freedom. And Pat Barker’s three novels set during the First World War and sometimes called The Regeneration Trilogy, focus on the treatment of shell-shocked or “traumatised” soldiers and with the gay poet Siegfried Sasson as a central figure, cast light on our own attitudes towards war and sexuality.

I think we find that same dialectic – less starkly, of course - in Victorian fiction. The characters we are reading about are only a few generations removed from us and so there are many elements in their lives that are completely familiar to us. And yet there is the strangeness of a hierarchical class system, of the subordinate status of women, of the power and pervasiveness of religion, and of the acceptance of grave social injustices like public executions, the treadmill, slavery, transportation, and so on. The “exotic” nature of those aspects of the society depicted is all the more striking because the form – the Victorian novel – is so close to the kind of fiction we mostly read now.

That’s to say that the nineteenth century is when the novel flowered from seeds planted in the previous century and the form of the novel that evolved then has remained more or less the model for most subsequent fiction.

It is the modern historical novel that is set in that period that I am mostly talking about here because those are the most interesting precisely for the reason that they both mirror and yet distort the kind of fiction readers are familiar with. I mean works like Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White.

Most readers know about the Victorian period mainly or even solely through the fiction. That means that by adopting the conventions of the nineteenth century but offering a present-day perspective, historical novels like those two can do something very interesting: they can accentuate the jolt of surprise in the dialectic of strangeness and familiarity. As readers we think we know what we are being offered because the form and content seem familiar, but then the novelist can surprise us with something that the Victorian novel simply did not do.

I tried to do that in my first novel, The Quincunx, which I thought of as a “reconstruction” of the mid-Victorian novel that is familiar to readers in the work of Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Thackeray, and others.

Therefore The Quincunx stays very close to the conventions of the period and I aimed to write sentences that could have been written in about 1850 and to use the dramatic structure mostly favoured by Victorian novelists in which the action is carried forward in scenes between the characters or actions performed by the central character. (Eschewing, that is to say, ways of conveying the narrative solely through the consciousness and memory of the “focaliser” demonstrated so well by Proust and adopted by many later novelists.)

What was my intention? I wanted to write a novel that contained within itself an argument – a dialectic? – between two ideas of what it was. It can be read as a straightforward Victorian novel but its title and its structure suggest something very different. Everything, in terms of the form, comes in fives: five Chapters making up five Books in each of five Parts. And that is true of the content: there are five warring families fighting a legal battle over five generations. And all of that culminates in the moment when the hero has to solve a puzzle in the form of a vast quincunx of quincunxes that will, he hopes, tell him who he is and also raise him from deepest poverty to vast wealth.

To draw attention to that element, I wanted to call the book “a post-Modernist Victorian novel” but my first publisher – perhaps wisely – objected.

I wanted to lure the reader into assuming that the novel would follow more or less the conventions of the period, but then to pull some surprises...

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About the Author

This essay forms part of the literary reflections of Charles Palliser and relates directly to his novel The Quincunx.

Learn more:

👉 Biographyhttps://www.charlespalliser.net/biography

👉 The Quincunxhttps://www.charlespalliser.net/the-quincunx

👉 Homepagehttps://www.charlespalliser.net/