Historical Fiction from Sir Walter Scott to Georgette Heyer and Hilary Mantel

(whooshing music)- I'm going to let the passages do the talking a lot of the time, so let's plunge in. Perhaps you'll recognize this first passage, perhaps you'll recognize it even if you actually haven't read the very long novel from which it comes, although some of you will have done, sold 100,000 copies in its first week, who knows how many it's sold since then.

"Wreckage (I)."London, May 1536."Once the queen's head is severed, he walks away."A sharp pang of appetite"reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast,"or perhaps an early dinner."The morning circumstances are new"and there are no rules to guide us."The witnesses who have knelt for the passing of the soul"stand up and put on their hats."Under the hats, their faces are stunned." Of course, it's the opening of Hilary Mantel's"The Mirror and the Light," published after much anticipation in March, 2020. When it appeared, I remember everybody said, oh, it's taken a long time, and then you saw it, and you saw why it had taken a long time. And we are, of course, a few minutes, just a few minutes after the end of the previous volume,"Bring Up the Bodies," at the execution of Queen Anne, formerly Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, and we are in the consciousness of Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist of all three of Mantel's Cromwell novels,"Wolf Hall" novels, Tudor novels, call them what you will. We witness events with his sharp eyes, we feel his appetites, we experience his mixed responses. He realizes he's hungry, he notices the stunned faces of the onlookers, a thought goes through his head,"there are no rules to guide us." And of course, it's a brilliant thought because it might as well apply to his uncertainty about what kind of meal you have after the queen's been executed, as well as the political guidelessness of the world that he's in and that he's partly responsible for, that he has to steer through,"there are no rules to guide us." It seems a really good motto for Mantel's own revivification of historical fiction. We know the story, there's hardly a better known story in English history than the story of the six wives of Henry VIII. Perhaps, I'm sure you, sir, from our discussion before the lecture, will remember Keith Michell, wasn't it, of course, in "The Six Wives of Henry VIII," BBC costume drama all those years ago, a story that everybody knows. But our protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, he doesn't know it, he's in uncharted territory, there's no precedent for this, the morning circumstances are new, and so, of course, the grain of the narration in the present tense, it's always in the present tense, through his eyes, through his consciousness, and always in the present tense, which is actually a narrative tense, very common in literary fiction in Britain nowadays, but almost unknown before the 1960s. It was sort of common, you'd see it in avant-garde fiction in the 1960s and '70s a bit, and now, it's something that Philip Pullman complains about, everybody's writing in the present tense to make their books seem more literary, more urgent, more happening. And this novel, everything is happening, Hilary Mantel makes historical fiction absorbing and demanding through the present tense, so historical events given as they were once experienced. And actually, this comes from somewhere, it comes from a book which I know that Hilary Mantel has read more than once, and which had a great influence on one or two of the 19th century novelists that I'm going to refer to a bit later. And this is a little bit, it's a huge book, it's a huge book and a strange read, a kind of wonderful book to read 50 or 100 pages of, and a numbing book to read 1,000 pages of, in my experience, that's not literary criticism, that's just opinion. But Thomas Carlyle's"The French Revolution," it was the book that first suggested to novelists of the 19th century the power of the present tense. And this is just a little bit, a little example, I thought, the fall of the Bastille, why not? It's got a character called Huissier Maillard, huissier's a title, it means something like officer of the court, it was an honorary title given him because he was supposed to have legal experience. He later became a kind of exponent of show trials and a murderous zealot for the revolution, partly responsible for the September massacres. His real name was Stanislas-Marie Maillard, and he's the guy who leads the revolutionaries storming the Bastille."See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man!"On his plank, swinging over the abyss"of that stone ditch,"plank resting on parapet,"balanced by weight of patriots."He hovers, perilous,"such a dove towards such an ark!" Historians aren't allowed to do this anymore, all the exclamation marks."He hovers, perilous," great, this is real history,"Deftly thou shifty usher,"one man already fell"and lies smashed far down there against the masonry."Usher Maillard falls not."Deftly, unerring, he walks with outspread palm."The Swiss," that's the guy who's in charge of the guard at the Bastille,"holds a paper through the porthole."The shifty usher snatches it and returns.

"pardon, immunity to all."Are they accepted?""'Foi d'officier,'"'On the word of an officer,'"answers half-pay Hulin, or half-pay Elie,"for men do not agree on it." It's amazing, in the middle of this, Carlyle acknowledges that there's different accounts, that everything is not certain, but this is in the middle of an account where he narrates as if he knows it as well as any novelist would know his or her invention."'They are,'" the terms are agreed,"Sinks the drawbridge,"Usher Maillard bolting it when down,"rushes in the living deluge."The Bastille is fallen,"victoire, la Bastille est prise." Not just the present tense, but a weird sort of pseudo-literary language, all those thous.

in the 1830s, they didn't say thou. All those inversions of sentences, of word order, and finally, of course,"La Bastille est prise," which is both a bit of history, that's what they said, but also a bit of present tense narration, not the Bastille was taken, but is taken. And that's the whole of Carlyle's "French Revolution," is narrated in the present tense, had a big influence on Mantel's historical novel of the French Revolution,"A Place of Greater Safety," although that moves around between tenses a lot. She uses tense oscillation in, actually, a couple of her early novels, but the insistent historic present tense was new in "Wolf Hall," and it restores, of course, provisionality, risk, uncertainty, luck, danger, you don't know what's going to happen, if you're Thomas Cromwell, to the past, the past that we know very well, but the people in it didn't know it. So here's another little bit, this is from "Wolf Hall," and another example of how she uses the present, and Cromwell's lens upon it, but also how she does something which other historical novelists, including some were going to look at extracts from this evening, have really struggled to do, which is, how do you turn research into fiction? Mantel became famous and formidable for the incredible amount of research that she did for these novels, and for her ability to claim that nothing she wrote in any of them ever contradicted what historians could declare to be fact. Here is, we're after Cardinal Wolsey's death, and remember, we're in Cromwell's head, although we're in a third person narration."The cardinal's scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty."They cannot be wasted."They will be cut up and become other garments."Who knows where they will get to over the years?"Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion"or a patch of red on a banner or ensign,"you will see a glimpse of them"in a man's inner sleeve"or in the flash of a whore's petticoat."Another man would go to Leicester to see where he died"and talk to the abbot."Another man would have trouble imagining it,"but he has no trouble," he of course is Thomas Cromwell. It tells us, in a way, this passage, something that Mantel must have found out about through her reading, about the value of textiles in the 16th century, particularly the scarlet, the rich, scarlet textiles of Cardinal Wolsey's clothing, which is going to be, as we would say, recycled. But of course, it's not inert information here, is it, that's what's so good about her as an historical novelist, it's a path of thinking in the main character's head. He's obsessed, Cardinal Wolsey's his patron, he's Wolsey's protege, Cardinal Wolsey, he's perhaps the only man in England who loves Cardinal Wolsey, and all those bits of fabric that he will glimpse will be reminders for Cromwell of the man he so much admires. Research into fiction is a tricky thing, and we will find examples in a second of where research has stayed pretty much like research on the novelist's page. So, historical fiction now seems something we're willing to take very seriously. Hilary Mantel wrote a lot of novels before she wrote "Wolf Hall," and if you haven't read any of them, they're mostly really, really good, but it was here, with this novel, that she suddenly became, really quite suddenly, a kind of grande dame of British fiction. And I played a tiny, walk-on role in that, my only sort of brush with immortality, and it is entirely a vicarious one, because she won the Booker Prize in 2009, and I was one of the judges. This is the Man Booker Foundation, they did this as a publicity photo at the time, and there are the six novels that were on the shortlist. And I'm going to say something briefly about them in a second because the shortlist that year, from which Mantel emerged as the winner, tells us something, I think, about the history of historical fiction, as it were. And we had to line up, in 2009, once the shortlist was declared, each of us clutching a volume. Jim Naughtie got to hold"Wolf Hall," of course, he said, "Ah, I'll have that one." I can't even remember, oh yes, I had Sarah Waters, which I really love, Sarah Waters' "A Little Stranger," I think I got that one. Anyway, we all stood, I've never been to a press conference, before or since, I have to say, and I hadn't realized that, at press conferences, journalists ask slightly unpleasant questions, they're not there to ask nice questions, and of them started pointing out,"Oh, they're all historical novels," or most of them are historical novels,"Why can't you read novels which are about things now?" I remember someone saying. And it is true, to go through them, Sarah Waters' "The Little Stranger," it's a wonderful sort of ghost story narrated by rural GP, first person narrative, who becomes involved with a local landowning family in Warwickshire, but the crucial thing, it's set in 1947, it's about a new world, post-war world, it's set in 1947, so just over 60 years earlier than the time when it's published, 2009. And remember that 60 years because we'll be coming back to it. Adam Foulds' "The Quickening Maze," which had the virtue of being the shortest of the novels, that's set in the 1840s, it mostly focuses on the rural, so-called peasant poet John Clare, who was a patient in a mental asylum in Epping Forest, along, actually, with the brother of the poet Alfred Tennyson, who makes a walk-on appearance in the novel. One feature, often, of historical novels, particularly those set more than a century ago, is that famous people have walk-on parts. A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book" is set in the 1890s running up to, ending around 1919, after the First World War, it's about the fortunes of a bohemian and sexually badly behaved family who do art, and write children's books, and make paintings, mostly in rural Kent, and it has walk-on parts of people like J.M. Barrie, I think appears in it, other famous writers appear in it, I think Virginia Woolf appears in it near the end, and so last decade of 19th century, first two decades of the 20th century. Simon Moore's "The Glass Room" is about a house, it's about a modernist house in what's now Czechoslovakia, sorry, what's now the Czech Republic but was then Czechoslovakia, and it starts in the 1930s, when it's built, and it's about the people who live in it, including a group of Nazis in the 1940s, and it spans about 50 years, but it mostly takes place in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. And "Wolf Hall," of course, the fortunes and maneuvers of Thomas Cromwell. Actually, they said that five of them were historical novels, and I hope I've described how indeed that's the case, but the sixth one, J.M. Coetzee's sort of auto-fiction "Summertime," actually, even that is set almost all in the 1970s, so is three or four decades in the past, almost historical, we might say. And that slightly hostile question from the hacks in the room passed into quite a lot of the coverage of it, what's with this historical stuff? And here's an article the next day in "The Times,""Tale of Tudor intrigue is hot favorite," well, they were right about that,"as judges rewrite Booker Prize history," that's a sort of "Times" version of wordplay. But this is the thing I want you to look at,"Shortlist," I don't know if it's legible,"Shortlist dominated by form once taboo," that's what the subs decided, the subs on the desk decided that's what this article was really about. The form once taboo, of course, is the historical novel, and the article itself, this is just a little quote from it, pinpointed the surprising, interesting fact that historical fiction was back in the frame as something to take seriously."When the Booker Prize was set up 40 years ago"to reward fine literary fiction,"historical novels,"like crime stories, thrillers, and romances,"were considered unworthy of consideration." I think the subs missed that, considered unworthy of consideration, it's not euphonious English prose, but still,"Yesterday, the judges for this year's prize"announced a shortlist"anchored more firmly in the past"than any before,"final proof that the snobbery that used to confront"writers of historical fiction"is now dead." Well, I think the story's a bit more complicated than that, in ways which you might want to ask about in the Q&A at the end, and there are novelists, I don't know, William Golding did quite well on Booker Prize shortlists with novels which were historical, but still, still, there's obviously some truth, some kind of momentum in this sort of narrative."Wolf Hall," after all, was an historical novel in the fullest sense, not only set in the historical past, a time beyond the memory of anybody who would read it, but featuring famous historical figures. This is the method pioneered by somebody that we're going to come to in a second, Walter Scott, used by Dickens and other Victorians, like George Eliot, whose fictional characters brush against real ones. Incidentally, it's the version of historical fiction much approved by the great Marxist theorist of fiction Gyorgy Lukacs, the Hungarian Gyorgy Lukacs, who wrote this once famous book, which I don't think people read anymore, called "The Historical Novel," which, weirdly, takes the work of Walter Scott, a Tory monarchist, a Tory unionist monarchist, now a bit of an embarrassment to the people who rule Scotland, his great big statue outside Waverley Station, Lukacs, the Marxist, took Scott as history's leading example of how historical novels should be made to work. He thought that Scott was actually, hardly knowing it perhaps, writing about the class struggles that formed European history. So, we're going to go back to Scott in a second and see how it could be that historical fiction's gone through a strange trajectory, from being the best, to the worst, to the most interesting again. But before we do so, we need to focus on what the problem is, I think, for historical fiction, and it's best summed up by one of my favorite stooges, Henry James, who usually has something interesting, often wrong, but still always interesting to say about whatever genre or movement we want to look at. And here he is, he's writing to good friend of his, the novelist Sarah Orne Jewett, an American novelist, and she had sent him a copy of her latest novel, which was her first historical novel. It's called, brilliant title, I haven't read it, I've read a resume of it, but it has got a great title, I kid you not, her new novel was called, in 1901,"The Tory Lover," which is brilliantly ambiguous, isn't it, is it the Tory lover, or the Tory lover? I'm not sure, but it's set in Maine during the Wars of the American Revolution in the late 18th century. And James replied to her, perhaps tactlessly, but for us interestingly, what are you doing? I mean, in his Jamesian way, he's saying to her, what are you doing writing historical fiction?"The historical novel," in inverted commas, his inverted commas,"The historical novel is, for me, condemned,"even in cases of labor as delicate as yours,"to a fatal cheapness."You may multiply the little facts"that can be got from pictures and documents,"relics and prints"as much as you like," the research, one might say,"the real thing is almost impossible to do,"and in its essence,"the whole effect is as nought."I mean, the invention,"the representation of the old consciousness," those are his capital letters,"the soul, the sense, the horizon,"the vision of individuals"in whose minds half the things that make ours,"that make the modern world,"were non-existent." If Hilary Mantel does, or tries to do anything, it's the consciousness of a person in the past, isn't it. Henry James says you can't do it."You have to think with your modern apparatus,"a man, a woman, or rather 50,"whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned,"you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force,"and even then, it's all humbug." How can a novelist, great passage, I don't know what poor, old Sarah thought, I mean, she'd written a novel, she finished it, published it, how can a novel imagine how people in the distant past might have thought? And a pressing problem connected with that which I want to look at, how can a novel imagine how people might have spoken as well? Now, there can't be, I've mentioned him already, there can't be a novelist to rival Walter Scott in his influence or his fall from greatness. On the title slide, I saw that we've called him Sir Walter Scott, although, for a good chunk of his career as a historical novelist, he wasn't Sir Walter, he was just Walter, he got made Sir Walter I think in 1820 by a grateful Prince Regent, become George IV, who thought that Walter Scott, thought his novels were okay, but also, he thought he did great things for the unionist cause north of the border. The reasons why Scott went from being regarded, generally, throughout Europe, as the greatest living novelist, he went from being that to somebody that I can guarantee, I think I can guarantee that not a single one of my students at UCL, some of whom are actually quite well read, who study English literature, I'd pretty much guarantee that not a single one of them would have read a Walter Scott novel. They only read them if we tell them they have to for the exam. And the reason for his high standing in the 19th century, maybe this is also the reason for his tumble down the literary chart since, was that he really invented historical fiction. Sure, novels in the 18th century had been officially set in the past, but they weren't much interested in that past. If you read Daniel Defoe novels, written in the 18th century, officially set in the 17th century, but he's not at all interested in finding out or telling you what that past, for him, was like. And Scott's invention was really widely recognized and celebrated. The phrase historical novel was first used in English in 1826, in an Edinburgh magazine,"Blackwood's Magazine," to refer to the genre that Scott had spawned. He began, in 1814, with this, it's the title page of the first edition of "Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since," And it's a novel in which Scott's wavering hero, Edward Waverley, he's a young idealist who reads too much poetry and too many romantic tales of the past, and thus gets drawn, almost without knowing it, into the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion against George II. So actually, you'll see "Sixty Years Since" isn't accurate. It was accurate when Scott first started writing the novel, but by the time it was published, it was 70 years since. And I suggested 60 years was an interesting thing to think about as a span because it's a bit of British history that Scott was concerned to return to, it's the biggest bit of British history where, for a person like him, people in Scotland, and to some extent England, had their biggest go at a revolution, which was defeated. But also, 60 years, becoming 70 years, for Scott, was interesting, I think, because it meant that even his older readers themselves would have no adult memory of events, so it places, in an age of shorter lifespans than now is the case, it places the events just beyond the horizon of the adult recollection of the reader. Now, Waverley's involvement, we know as we read it 'cause it's history, we know what happened, or the readers in 1814 certainly know what's happened, they know the rebellion will fail, they know that Waverley's ideals are intoxicating, but are doomed. And my great friend and fellow Scott aficionado John Sutherland, in his biography of Walter Scott, which I recommend to you if you're interested in Scott, points out that, of course, because Waverley's going to be the hero, he's got to be happily married off at the end, he's got to learn the errors of his ways, but also be rewarded, so when he fights for the Jacobites in a battle against British Hanoverian troops, he manages to be really brave but not kill anybody. So he just goes through the whole battle rescuing people, but apparently not killing anybody. Scott, this was the first of his novels, and it gave its name, in some ways, to the rest of his novels. I remember both my grandfathers, both difficult, in their different ways, men, were Scott aficionados, they both had, as I'm sure lots of, one of them was born at the end of the 1890s, one was born in 1900, and like many men and some women, but particularly men of that generation, they each had a complete set of the "Waverley" novels on their bookshelf, that was sort of standard, but it's a very old fashioned and odd taste now. It was confirmed to me, recently, I read A.N. Wilson's very readable memoir, and very self-damning memoir, entertainingly self-damning memoir,"Confessions," and he says that, during a long illness in his late 20s, he read his way through all the novels of Sir Walter Scott. I don't believe his illness was long enough to do that, but anyway, he obviously made a good go at starting on them, and he says in his memoir,"I do not think there is any pleasure"to match that of reading Scott." Now, he must know, former young fogey that he was, he must know how utterly unlikely a statement that is. I always assumed that Scott was doomed to obsolescence, until I read that, recently, the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University had found a really good way to reanimate interest in him by not only teaching his novel "Ivanhoe" in a module on the English 19th century novel, but, even more excitingly, telling the students, giving the students who were to take the module a great big trigger warning about "Ivanhoe.""Amongst the aspects readers might find disturbing,"this text includes offensive depictions of People of Color"and of persecuted ethnic minorities,"as well as misogyny." I don't want to dwell on that particularly apart from saying that it's sort of the most exciting thing that's happened to Scott studies in the last 50 years, and it got Scott into every single broadsheet newspaper, and "The Daily Mail," and the Scott Society came out of the woodwork, and relatives of Scott were found, and it was all very exciting, and I presume a few copies of "Ivanhoe" actually passed across the counter at Waterstones as a result. Now, I have read "Ivanhoe," and indeed I reread it for this lecture, I've read Ivanhoe three times in my life, my goodness, and a chronicle of wasted time, you might think. I don't want to go through the trigger warning except to say, offensive depictions of People of Color? Maybe, but only because one of the nastier Norman knights in it has two Moorish servants, which he certainly wouldn't have had, actually, in the late 12th, early 13th centuries, but beyond that, they're not particularly the objects of scorn, or bad treatment, or anything, they're just mentioned in passing. Persecuted ethnic minorities? Maybe that refers to the fact, which is very important in "Ivanhoe," two of the main characters are Jewish, and worth thinking about, because Scott would certainly have thought that his novel was written against Antisemitism, because, without exception, all the bad people, including Prince John, are absolutely horrid about Isaac, who's a money lender, and his daughter Rebecca, who's actually a bit of a heroine and saves Ivanhoe's life through her medical skills at one stage. And so Antisemitism is an index of badness in the novel, but it is true, probably, that if you were to read it, you would find Scott's own representations, certainly of Isaac, uncomfortable-making, maybe, maybe. Misogyny? Now, that was a tough one for me. What you could say about "Ivanhoe" is that this novel, like most of them, has two attractive women in, and the hero falls for one and learns that he has to marry the other. I mean, that is a classic, but Thackeray does that in "Vanity Fair," there's always an attractive but dangerous woman and a fair-haired, less sexy, but actually good woman, who, if you're the hero, you get to marry. Certainly stereotypes, certainly, you could say, sexist, but I think misogynist means hating women, and I'm not sure, really, it's that, and I think even the tender students at Warwick University will have managed to read it without anything more than a snort of derision at the sort of two-dimensional nature of the representation of the female characters. But anyway, everybody suddenly got interested in Scott again and I went back, as I said, and reread it to see whether it was this kind of needling or potentially offensive text, and one thing that, of course, one thing I reminded myself of, that I rediscovered, is indeed that "Ivanhoe," which was a huge bestseller when it appeared, is indeed a lot about race, but it's about Normans and Saxons, and a funny thing, obsession that Scott has about them as two groups that represent a clash of mutually incomprehensible languages, out of which the English language comes, and mutually exclusive philosophies of nationhood, which somehow will combine to produce England, and then eventually Britain. To give you a sense of what I mean, here is the opening chapter of "Ivanhoe," where we meet two swineherds called Wamba and Gurth, and they're talking to each other."The dialogue which they maintain between them"was carried on in Anglo-Saxon,"which, as we said before,"was universally spoken by the inferior class." It's a classic Scott thing,"which, as we said before," he's quite a garrulous narrator, he says things more than once, and then he says, oh yes, and I've said that more than once."It was universally spoken by the inferior classes,"excepting the Norman soldiers"and the immediate personal dependents"of the great feudal nobles."But to give their conversation in the original"would convey but little information to the modern reader,"for whose benefit"we beg to offer the following translation,"'The curse of St. Withold upon these infernal porkers!"'The curse of St. Withold upon them and upon me"'if the two-legged wolf snap not up some of them"'ere nightfall,"'I am no true man,'" Well, he's translated it, but into a sort of peculiar, antique prose. And when the Normans speak, it's even odder, and I would say more awkward. This is Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, yes, Reggie Beefhead, let's call him, talking in wonderfully absurd, pseudo-antique diction to a friar, whom he suspects of sympathizing with the lower orders. And remember, of course, he's actually talking in French, he's talking in Norman French,

"Thou seest, Sir Friar,"yon herd of Saxon swine, who have dared," the swine, this time, are people,"who have dared to environ this Castle of Torquilstone."Tell them whatever thou hast a mind"of the weakness of this fortalice,"or aught else that can detain them before it for 24 hours."Meantime bear thou this scroll."But soft, canst read, Sir Priest?" Hard to read out, actually,'cause it's such gobbledygook. The narrator of a Scott novel, however, is completely different, the narrator of a Scott novel is a person who sounds remarkably like Walter Scott, actually, an enlightened modern man, certainly a man, probably educated in Edinburgh. Remember, all these novels are published anonymously, all Scott's novels are published anonymously, so even though by the time "Ivanhoe" comes out, lots of people, maybe most people, know who the "Waverley" novelist is, the official pretense is it's not Scott. And the narrator kind of surveys the manners and characters that he describes from a proper distance. And here's a little example, so this is a group of mostly, Saxons versus Normans, this is a Saxon group, and they're going off on a journey through the woods."As the cavalcade left the court of the monastery,"an incident happened"somewhat alarming to the Saxons,"who, of all people of Europe,"were most addicted to a superstitious observance of omens"and to whose opinions can be traced most of those notions"upon such subjects"still to be found among our popular antiquities." So you see, he's with you in 1819, as it were, telling you about the past, but knowing that he and you are looking back from a long perspective."For the Normans,"being a mixed race and better informed,"according to the information of the times,"had lost most of the superstitious prejudices"which their ancestors had brought from Scandinavia,"and piqued themselves upon thinking freely on such topics." So not only is he not going to absorb, digest his research, he doesn't want to, he wants you to hear the knowledge that he's gleaned from his reading."In the present instance,"the apprehension of impending evil"was inspired by no less respectable a prophet"than a large, lean, black dog," ha ha, those Saxons,"which, sitting upright,"howled most piteously"as the foremost riders left the gate"and presently, afterwards,"barking wildly and jumping to and fro,"seemed bent upon attaching itself to the party." Scott, actually, even when he is sometimes unconvincing about human beings, he's never unconvincing about dogs, he's absolutely brilliant on dogs, and their behavior, and their breeds, and if you're a dog lover, I recommend Scott to you as the bard of dogolatry. You have to read quite a lot of pages in between, but the dogs are important in all his novels, without exception. So, as Scott himself said in his dedicatory epistle to "Ivanhoe,""In point of justice to the multitudes"who will, I trust,"devour this book with avidity,"I've so far explained our ancient manners"in modern language,"and so far detailed the characters and sentiments"of my persons"that the modern reader will not find himself,"I should hope,"much trammeled by the repulsive dryness of mere antiquity."In this, I respectfully contend,"I have in no respect exceeded the fair license"due to the author of a fictitious composition." So he represents the past, but sort of escapes it. The whole point, in a way, is to enjoy it and to know that you've escaped it. It's difficult to exaggerate the popularity and influence of Scott in the first half of the 19th century. In the 20th century, literary historians invented the word Scottomania to characterize this passion. I thought I'd give you just one or two little examples of Scottomania. These are the costumes of a posh costume ball that took place in Brussels in 1823, and there was a rage through Europe for "Ivanhoe" balls. So you had a ball, everybody had to come as a character from "Ivanhoe," which everybody had read. And this is Ivanhoe and this is le Chevalier Noir, the Black Knight. Spoiler alert, it's Richard I dressed up in black armor, and stepping in to save everybody at the last possible moment. And these guys actually went to the party in Brussels like this. Three years later, another ball, this time in Vienna, another "Ivanhoe" ball. I think the costumes in Brussels are positively chaste compared to the costumes in Vienna. This is Lady Rowena, who is the woman that Ivanhoe's eventually going to marry. He fancies Rebecca, but he's not going to get her. And this is Ivanhoe, apparently. So there's lots of dressing up stuff, there's also, he's much beloved painters in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, and after. Eugene Delacroix was a particular Scottomaniac, can one say that? I've just said it. He was a Scottomaniac, and he did several of Scott's, here's a couple of them. This is Rebecca and the wounded Ivanhoe, Torquilstone Castle I mentioned, it's where Reginald Front-de-Boeuf hung out, and he has Rebecca and Ivanhoe as prisoners there. Ivanhoe's been wounded in a joust, and they're looking out the window'cause they're hoping that the Saxons are going to come and rescue them. And Delacroix did this scene, actually, more than once. And a little bit later, 1846, they are rescued, but then another bad, bad Norman knight abducts Rebecca, and he's carrying her off, and Delacroix thought this was a great, and indeed, I'm afraid he thought probably sexy scene,"The Abduction of Rebecca," 1846. So they're just little examples of what was happening throughout Europe in the wake of the "Waverley" novels, and I concentrated on "Ivanhoe" as Warwick University directed me to, really. Scott bequeathed, really, to the Victorians, the extraordinary high status of historical fiction. And he himself, I think, sort of half saw through it. And you'll know, if you know me at all, that I always manage to smuggle Jane Austen in somehow, and here she is, but smuggled in fairly, I think, this time, because it's an illustration of Scott's self-skepticism, actually, about the whole historical fiction business. He's writing in his journal, he probably knows that his journal will, one day, be published, but he's not overtly writing for publication, it's his private journal."Read again, and for the third time at least,"Miss Austen's," this is 1826, so this is nine years after Austen's died,"Read again, and for the third time at least,"Miss Austen's very finely written novel"of 'Pride and Prejudice.'"That young lady has a talent"for describing the involvements,"and feelings, and characters of ordinary life"which is, to me,"the most wonderful I ever met with."The big bow-wow strain I can do myself,"like any now going,"but the exquisite touch which renders"ordinary, commonplace things and characters interesting,"from the truth of the description and the sentiment,"is denied to me." Scott was intellectually, I think, a very honest man, and an excellent critic, actually, he wrote by far the best review, best article about Austen's fiction that was published in her lifetime, a review of "Emma." Essentially, the big bow-wow strain, that's, if you like, that's historical fiction, that's what he does, battles, landscapes, kings, queens, princes, dukes, and he sort of recognizes that, in some way, perhaps the whole genre is inferior to what Jane Austen is doing, what's denied to him. Every major Victorian novelist after Scott, every major Victorian novelist attempts the genre, Thackeray with "Henry Esmond" and "The Virginians," George Eliot with "Romola," Trollope with "La Vendee," Elizabeth Gaskell with "Sylvia's Lovers," people don't realize even she did it, set during the Napoleonic Wars, Thomas Hardy with perhaps his least often read novel,"The Trumpet-Major." Yet every Victorian novelist also, however good, encounters all the problems of realizing the distant past. And here's a little example from George Eliot's "Romola," which is set in 14th century Florence, and how do you make people talk? And this is Nello, the barber, and Nanni, the tailor, and they're talking about Savonarola, the incendiary, fundamentalist preacher, the guy who invented the bonfire of the vanities, burn all your possessions. And Nello says,"I fancy there is no room"in that small cup of thy understanding"for any other liquor than what he pours into it," i.e. Savonarola's doctrines. Listen to the stiltedness, this is George Eliot, who's simultaneously writing "Silas Marner," which has some of the best and most believable dialog in all 19th century fiction, I think."'And it were well for thee, Nello,' replied Nanni,"'if thou couldst empty thyself of thy scoffs and thy jests"'and take in that liquor too.'" Sort of cod Shakespeare, somehow, in there."The warning is ringing in the ears of all men,"and it's no new story,"for the abbot Joachim"prophesied of the coming time 300 years ago,"and now Fra Girolamo," that's Savonarola,"has got the message afresh,"he has seen it in a vision"even as the prophets of old,"he has seen the sword hanging from the sky.""'Aye, and thou wilt see it thyself, Nanni."'if thou wilt stare upward long enough,' said Niccolo,"'For that pitiable tailor's work of thine"'makes they noddle so overhang thy legs"'that thy eyeballs can see nought above the stitching board"'but the roof of thy own skull.'" Where does that come from? Somehow, maybe, in her reading of something, George Eliot thought that she'd found that idiom, or maybe just invented it, or translated it from Italian into semi-English. Listening to the strange stiltedness of this dialog is a funny thing, but it makes the advice that was given to Trollope sound quite prescient. Here's Trollope's autobiography, we should note that, even though he says this advice was given to him in 1857, the autobiography wasn't published until a year after his death in 1883, by which time, when he was finalizing the autobiography in his last years, historical fiction was definitely on the way out, out, out. And he's got his new novel, "The Three Clerks," which is not historical novel, and he's taken it along to the publisher."I was about to depart with my bundle under my arm"when the foreman of the house came to me."He seemed to think it a pity I should go"and wished me to leave my work with him."This, however, I would not do"unless he would undertake to buy it then and there."Perhaps he lacked authority,"perhaps his judgment was against such purchase,"but while we debated the matter,"he gave me some advice."'I hope it's not historical, Mr. Trollope,' he said."'Whatever you do, don't be historical,"'your historical novel is not worth a damn.'" Now, the sad thing is that, as time passes, I have not sufficient time to do justice to where the historical novel went, because it went where those "Times" journalists said that it went, it went into popular fiction, it went into popular fiction, it went into Jean Plaidy, it went into Georgette Heyer. I'm a bit of a fan of Georgette Heyer, in a way, and we've certainly got time for one of these passages. It's from her novel "Frederica," and it's set, like almost all her novels, in the Regency period, it's set in 1819, "Frederica." All you need to know in order to understand this passage is it's got two main characters, sorry, it's set in 1818, not 1819, it concerns a rich, cynical, single aristocrat called the Marquis of Alverstoke, who's recruited by a distant cousin, Frederica, to help find husbands for her impecunious sister, her oldest sister, but also the two younger ones. And Frederica herself believes herself, late 20s, to be too old to win a husband herself, and of course you can judge what's going to happen, I think, I think you can judge what's going to happen. And when I tell you the scenario, surely, into your heads comes one word, that word is "Bridgerton," because indeed, this, not Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer is where "Bridgerton" comes from, and you'll see why in a second if I read this. This is Alverstoke's sister talking to him."'Do you forget I am your sister?'"'No, I've never been granted the opportunity to forget it.'"'Oh, don't fly off the hooks again."'You can have no notion how bracket-faced you look"'when you get into one of your pelters."'Console yourself with my assurance"'that if Buxted had left you purse-pinched,"'I should have felt myself obliged"'to let you hang on my sleeve.'"He looked mockingly down at her."'Yes, I know you're about to tell me"'that you haven't sixpence to scratch with,"'but the plain truth is"'you are very well to do in the world,"'my dear Louisa,"'but the most unconscionable pinchpenny of my acquaintance."'Now, don't nauseate me by prating of affection,"'you've no more for me than I have for you.'" It's great, it's great, in a way, in a way. She did her research, unlike, I think, George Eliot, certainly unlike Walter Scott, she was concerned to insert as much real language from the period as she could get, not that perhaps anybody really talked like this, but so convincing was her research that actually, if you go online now to look for lexicons of Regency English, you'll find that almost all of them, there's quite a few, particularly because of the whole "Bridgerton" thing, the whole cult of neo-Regency novels in North America, but all the lexicons of Regency English online are all actually based on Georgette Heyer, they're not actually based on historical research, they're based on her. Now, I must hasten to my end. We go through, as it were, popular fiction, which became increasingly, actually, research-attentive, and later versions, from Patrick O'Brian to, today, Philippa Gregory maybe, those are novelists who are proud, and have always been proud of the amount of research they do to write their novels. But it's also, I'm going to skip through him, it's also gone to other places, and it's gone into literary fiction, and I just end with a few words about that,'cause that's where we started. This is one kind of place it goes to, this is Paul Kingsnorth's 2014 novel "The Wake," set in 11th century Lincolnshire. Okay, okay, he's heard Henry James and he's going to give you the whole thing in 11th century English, but it's not of course 11th century English, it is a sort of fictional version of 11th century English, and, in its way, as fictional as that funny Scott translation. Actually, when you read it, it looks hard at first, but it's not, it's deliberately not hard, so there's one word which is indeed a true Old English word which is hard in this whole passage.

"See, I had cnawan yfel was cuman"when I seen this fugol glidan ofer." So, "See, I knew evil was coming"when I saw this fugol gliding over," what do you think fugol means? Bird, bird, fugol is a genuine Old English word for bird. And the fabrication of the language of the past becomes a feature of all sorts of attempts at historical fiction. James Meek's "To Calais, In Ordinary Time," set in the 1340s, the time of the Black Death, and whenever he goes to one of the characters, he starts narrating in a language which is sort of cobbled together from a mixture of the Oxford English Dictionary and his memories of Chaucer,"On the leavings of housewives' stockpots"the children laid owl pans and rotten crow,"rib of vole and otter,"a deal of brock rigbone, some small fowl carrion,"and the shells of things that crawl in mold," and so on. But there's also a different approach, and this is where we'll end, which is, I guess, here are two examples, I think, of really cracking, I just thought I'd throw in a couple of recommendations, cracking, really good, recent historical novels, Samantha Harvey's "The Western Wind," which is set in a very, very damp Somerset in the 15th century, and "Golden Hill," which is set in New York in the mid 18th century. And these books, in a sense, sort of try to get you into the mindset of the past without necessarily replicating the language of the past. Recent novelists have found, carry on still finding, that actually, historical fiction provides a peculiar sort of freedom. The constraints that come with attending to events, conventions, social laws of the past actually allow for a kind of formal inventiveness that can be rather exciting, I think, to the novelists as much as to the readers. So this is where, of course, we have to end, and have to end we do, there's only one way to do it, the end of "The Mirror and the Light." And we can't be in any doubt where we're going with this,

on the 28th of July, 1540, Thomas Cromwell will be beheaded at Tower Hill. While we know where he's going, he sort of does not. Mantel brilliantly exploits the predestination of historical fiction, which comes alive in the gap between the reader's knowledge, the protagonist's uncertainty."Beneath him, the ground upheaves."The river tugs him."He looks for the quick-moving pattern,"for the flitting, liquid scarlet."Between a pulse beat and the next, he shifts,"going out on crimson with the tide of his inner sea."He's far from England now,"far from these islands,"from the waters salt and fresh."He has vanished,"he is the slippery stones underfoot,"he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself."He feels for an opening, blinded,"looking for a door,"tracking the light along the wall." And of course, he and we go back to the opening of "Wolf Hall", actually, where, as a boy, he's struck down by his father, and sees close up the slippery stones by the riverside, that's how "Wolf Hall" begins. Now, his consciousness, which has been our consciousness too, floats free, but blindly fumbling, the mind that Hilary Mantel's created holds all our attention and is overcome, overwhelmed. And it's an ending that feels bleaker, maybe, more moving maybe, because, of course, of the author's own untimely death just two years later. But it's one thing, it's an ending that is also a kind of new beginning for other novelists. Thanks very much.(audience applauds)- Thank you very much, professor, for this fascinating lecture. As usual, we'll start with, well, we have time for a couple of questions, so we'll start with our audience online. Someone's asking about Charles Dickens in particular, that's one of the novelists you haven't mentioned.- He's in my comfort zone, Sophie, luckily, very much in my comfort zone. Well, Dickens, of course, he wrote two historical novels,"Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of Two Cities, and "Barnaby Rudge," for him, was like "A Place of Greater Safety" for Hilary Mantel, actually, that was going to be her first novel but she kept publishing other things, that was the novel she really wanted to publish, and it sort of grew beyond her control. And Dickens was like that, when he wanted to be taken seriously as a novelist, of course he made his name instantly with "Pickwick Papers," but he had this really serious thing, "Barnaby Rudge," which he thought would really make people believe in him as an artist, not just an entertainer. And in fact, he published it quite late, I think it was his fourth novel to be published, fact check on that one, but anyway, he'd been writing it all along, it was his pet project, a novel, which is a good novel, it doesn't perhaps work as well as his later one,"A Tale of Two Cities," which is actually his most frequently republished novel of all his novels, and was peculiarly, I've never quite found out why, but something for me to research, was especially popular in Eastern Europe, where, despite the fact that it shows revolution to be violent and homicidal, but perhaps it also shows the aristocracy to be absolutely appalling, heartless, amoral oppressors. But anyway, it's a wonderful novel, I think, and perhaps the most successful, possibly, most successful Victorian historical novel, and you can gauge why just in brief with that famous opening, which I was talking about with some of the audience

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,"it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,"it was the epoch of belief,"it was the epoch of incredulity,"it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness,"it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair," and so on. And then he says, at the end of the paragraph, in sum, it was just like now, where people are always saying things about their own age which are always superlative, we've never done this, it's the worst time, it's the best time. And one of the reasons that it's a brilliant novel is because it's a novel about characters' own sense of the history, I think, they're going through, rather than our sense now, in a Scott manner, of what we think of them, and that's the historical strength of "A Tale of Two Cities," and one of the reasons it's memorable, apart from the fact that it's also sometimes funny, is that it concentrates on what the characters think the history they're going through means.- Thank you very much, professor, and please join us for Professor Mullan's next lecture on the 5th of April, endings.- It's about endings, yes, it's about endings, and it's the last, lamentably, the last of my Gresham lectures. Be there or be square.(audience laughs)- Thank you.(audience applauds)