Historical Fiction for Children

Capturing the Past

Fiona M. Collins, Judith Graham

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134133376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Historical fiction has a great deal to offer as its readers and devotees have always known. The time is ripe however for the historical novel and historical picture book to be promoted more emphatically so that many more are made aware of the delight and learning to be found in the genre. The editors of this book invited authors, academic writers and teachers to reflect on the nature, scope, range and richness of historical fiction for children. What is collected here provides an overview of the field, a consideration of significant writers of historical fiction from the nineteenth century onwards, a sense of the various historical eras commonly explored (Stone Age to World War 2), a discussion of commonly raised issues, themes and topics such as child labor, slavery and migration, and a forum for writers to reveal their insights into the writing of historical fiction. Julian Atterton, Berlie Doherty, Michael Foreman and Philip Pullman have made contributions. It provides evidence of children and students engaging creatively with historical fiction.

Section 1
Exploring the narrative past

Chapter 1
Dogs and cats: the nineteenth-century historical novel for children

Dennis Butts

Dennis Butts tracks historical fiction’s development in the nineteenth century back, in terms of events, to the French revolution and, in terms of writing, to Shakespeare’s history plays and the eighteenth century novel The Castle of Otranto. The major writers, both male and female, of the century are presented and, at the same time, Butts is able to show us how the novel moved from presenting history in somewhat indigestible form, with overt political or religious agendas and formulaic plots, to stories with more engaging juvenile heroes and more entertaining story-lines, such as we find in Robert Louis Stevenson.

It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon which for the first time made history a mass experience, and moreover on a European scale.

(Lukács 1969)

The historical novel seems to fall into two distinct categories. You could call them the doglike and the catlike. The doglike is when the author deliberately looks back and makes his characters subordinate to his history. Generally such books are large and a shade ponderous, but helpful; and they never mind being put down in the middle. The second, or more catlike category, is when the author looks not back but about him and his history is subordinate to his characters. These books tend to be smaller, sleeker, and more self-contained. They don’t aim to be particularly helpful, but, once picked up, they grip rather more and firmly resist being put down.

(Garfield 1970)

As Georg Lukács has argued, the historical novel arose in the early years of the nineteenth century, around the time of the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, when people began to see in history something which deeply affected their daily lives. Partly because of the spread of literacy and improvements in communications more and more people began to realise that public events and changes in government affected individual destinies (Lukács 1969).

Novels set in the past were to be found in the eighteenth century, of course notably in such Gothic fiction as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), with their antique costumery and melodrama, and some children’s writers drew on that tradition in their early attempts at historical fiction, such as we see in Barbara Hofland’s Adelaide; or the Intrepid Daughter (1823). This tale, set in sixteenth-century France and England, tells of how young Adelaide, who is separated from her parents at the time of the Protestant persecutions, returns to Paris disguised as an English soldier. When some friendly nuns offer her a shelter, and then introduce her to a mysterious lady they have been sheltering for the last ten years, readers will not be surprised to discover that she is Adelaide’s long-lost mother. All ends well when peace returns and Adelaide even finds her missing father. But despite the references to Henry IV and Queen Elizabeth, Mrs Holland is more interested in telling her melodramatic and coincidence-driven story than in giving an accurate picture of the historical period, and the characters are all very much influenced by the time in which the writer was living.

With such novels as Waverley (1814), however, Sir Walter Scott not only depicted convincing characters within a realistic historical context, but also portrayed the complex relationships between the actual conditions of life as lived by individuals and the historical events which affected their daily lives. In Waverley, when young Edward joins his regiment in Scotland and gradually falls a victim to Jacobite intrigues, Scott develops a story which enabled him to depict the political struggles of eighteenth-century England and Scotland, and show the ways in which ordinary people were affected by a terrible civil war.

Although Scott is rightly regarded as the crucial influence on the rise of the historical novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is also important to recognise the powerful impact of Shakespeare’s history plays upon Scott and most historical novelists since him. For it was in that great cycle of plays on British history from Kingfohn to Henry VIII, particularly those dealing with the Wars of the Roses, that Shakespeare revealed that wonderful mixture of private and public worlds, with imaginary as well as real characters.

The towering popularity and influence of Walter Scott’s novels in the nineteenth century gradually led to the rise of more serious, more credible, and more carefully-researched historical fiction. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1802-73) led the way with such novels as The Last Days of Pompei (1834), and Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) and Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852) all helped to establish the form of the historical novel by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Although women writers, with the exception of Anne Bowman (1801-90), played little part in the contemporaneous rise of the children’s adventure story, they made a considerable contribution to the development of children’s historical fiction. This was probably because, while restrictions on their careers meant that most women could not compete with the exploits of such men as the sailor Captain Marryat (1792-48) or the soldier Captain Mayne Reid (1818-83), historical writing depended more upon reading and research than actually experiencing seafaring or military adventures.

Harriet Martineau (1802-76) was the first writer to bring Walter Scott’s serious interests to children’s historical fiction. Already a successful and respected authoress for her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) and such children’s stories as Five Years of Youth (1831), her early work tended to be too didactic. But there are signs of a more imaginative approach to children’s literature in her collection of 1841, The Playfellow.

The Playfellow really consisted of four stories, published quarterly in 1841. One of them The Crofton Boys is in fact an early example of the school story. But the other tales Feats on the Fiord, The Settlers at Home and The Peasant and the Prince are historical. The Peasant and the Prince consists of two short stories set in eighteenth-century France, one an anecdote about the young Marie-Antoinette, the other a bleak account of the sad life of the Dauphin, who died aged ten in 1795. But there is more anger than history in these brief tales. Feats on the Fiord is an imaginative tour de force, however. Set in eighteenth-century Norway, the main story describes the adventures of Odda, a mischievous but brave herdboy, and Erica, a timid, superstitious maid, after Erica’s lover Rolf disappears and the small rural community is threatened by pirates. The landscape of mountains and water is vividly realised, and in the treatment of Erica and her superstitious fears Harriet Martineau not only reveals insights into endurance under stress, but also successfully evokes the collision between an older folk-culture and a newer but dogmatic Christianity. The Settlers at Home is a Robinsonnade set in seventeenth-century England during the Civil War, and concerns the Linacre family who are Dutch refugees. They have settled on drained land in Lincolnshire, but are victimised by local people, and are caught up in the Civil War when some of the king’s enemies open the sluices and cause a sudden flood. The young children become separated from their parents and are marooned on high ground. The situation becomes desperate and the baby dies, but the children survive the crisis with courage and ingenuity until they are eventually rescued. What is impressive about this story, told with taut narrative skill, is the way in which Harriet Martineau demonstrates the effects of the historical circumstances of the English Civil War upon the lives of ordinary, innocent, and apparently uninvolved individuals.

The history of the Civil War also helped to inspire what is arguably the first enduring historical novel written for children in the nineteenth century, The Children of the New Forest (1847) by Captain F. W. Marryat. This tells of the four Beverley children who are orphaned during the war after their father dies fighting for the Royalists. Marryat vividly describes how the children are taken into hiding in a cottage in the New Forest, where they are disguised as the grandchildren of a poor forester, and taught hunting, housekeeping and farming. Dramatic adventures follow as the four children escape capture by parliamentary troopers and their cottage is besieged.

Marryat’s storytelling is not without faults. His grasp of dates and the ages of his characters is shaky in places, and his handling of the French political background is unnecessarily detailed. But the tale contains less moralising than the works of his predecessors as Marryat learned to express his ideas more dramatically through his characters. The children not only lose their parents but soon lose their elderly mentor, the forester Jacob Armitage. They have to learn to stand on their own two feet, and in the figure of Edward Beverley, a fiery, arrogant, persevering, sympathetic teenager, we may say that the nineteenth-century juvenile hero had arrived.

Marryat was also successful in relating the individuality and psychology of his characters to the historical circumstances of their age. Thus Edward Beverley and Mr Heatherstone, the Parliamentary superintendent of the Forest, are both portrayed as individuals, but their conflicts mirror some of the acute problems of seventeenth-century England, the tensions between loyalty to the king and a sense of justice, for example. Marryat brilliantly succeeds in depicting some of the major events of seventeenth-century England by focusing his story on the events of the civil wars as they affect the private lives of a small group of individuals.

An unsuccessful Reform candidate for Parliament who had also served briefly during the 1839 Rebellion in Canada, Marryat is clearly sympathetic to the royalist cause, but is in fact hostile to the extremists on either side. While denouncing the regicides, he is unafraid to criticise the king’s absolutism. Edward comes to realise that The king was obstinate, the people resolute, until virulent warfare inflamed both parties, and neither would listen to reason’ (Marryat 1847 from Butts 1991). Wounded several times in his distinguished naval career, Marryat knew at first hand what war really meant. He was writing in the 1840s at the time of the Chartists, when Britain threatened to become two nations again and the whole of Europe was erupting in revolution. His novel, by contrast, expresses a movement from antagonism between two sides towards reconciliation, a movement suggested not only by Edward’s gradual appreciation of the integrity of Mr Heatherstone, the moderate Parliamentarian, but also by Edward’s marriage to Heatherstone’s daughter Patience, which thus carries a powerful political as well as moral symbolism, as Marryat suggests the resolution of those self-destructive forces which threatened to engulf Britain in the 1840s as they had in the seventeenth century.

As well as by political controversy, England was also convulsed by religious controversy in the 1840s with the activities of the Oxford Movement, so it is not surprising that one strand of historical fiction for children derives its main inspiration from the impulse to propagate Christian values. Some children’s literature had always done that right from such works as James Janeways’ A Token for Children of 1671.

But writers began to appear who produced more substantial historical fiction in the interests of piety, such as Mrs J. B. Webb, whose Naomi; or, the Last Days of ferusalem, was published in 1841. This story of the Roman conquest of Palestine and the destruction of Jerusalem focuses upon the lives of a Jewish family whose daughter Naomi eventually becomes a Christian, and it contains much detailed history about the Roman invasion and the dissensions of rival Jewish sects. But it is clearly written to attract ‘the attention of the young and thoughtless to the wonderful fulfilment of the prophetic word of God’ (Webb, Preface, 1841). Though less exotic, the historical novels of Mrs Emma Marshall (1830-99), such as Under Salisbury Spire (1890), are similarly pious.

Only Charlotte M. Yonge (1823-1901) really succeeded in animating this sub-genre of the historical novel, however. Famous for such adult novels as The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and children’s stories such as The Daisy Chain (1856), she also produced over a dozen works of historical fiction including The Lances of Lynwood (1855) and Grissly Grisell – a Tale of the Wars of the Roses (1893). Writing most successfully about the Middle Ages, Charlotte Yonge, in Suzanne Rahn’s opinion, led to a radical rethinking of the historical genre by being the first writer to re-orient history from a child’s perspective (Rahn 1991, pp. 1-26). While this may underestimate the achievements of earlier writers, such as Harriet Martineau and Captain Marryat, there is no doubt that Yonge was a novelist of distinction. The Little Duke; or; Richard the Fearless (1854) is one of her most enduring tales. Beginning in AD 43 at the Castle of Bayeux, the story focuses on a youthful hero, eight-year-old Richard, son of Duke William of Normandy, and is a tale about a boy growing up amid all the intrigues and violence of tenth century Normandy. When his father is killed, young Richard swears vengeance, but gradually learns not only how to survive in this brutal society but how to forgive his enemies. Although dated in some ways, Charlotte Yonge remains an impressive writer.

By the second half of the nineteenth century historical fiction for children was well established, so that even a successful writer of contemporary adventure stories R. M. Ballantyne (1825-1894), author of The Coral Island (1858), was tempted to work in the genre with The Norsemen in the West or America before Columbus (1872). But a near contemporary of Ballantyne, George Alfred Henty (1832-1902) was to challenge even Ballantyne’s popularity by his distinctive brand of historical fiction in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Henty had been a successful journalist and war-correspondent, covering many campaigns and wars in Europe and beyond before publishing his first children’s book Out on the Pampas in 1870. Henty published his second children’s book The Young Franc-Tireurs, about two English boys caught up in the Franco-Prussian War, in 1872, and The Young Buglers in 1880, a story of the Peninsular War, which evidently gave him the idea for writing other historical novels (Arnold 1980).

Henty’s historical fiction is of a familiar but distinctive kind. The plots are extremely formulaic and recur from one book to another, despite being set in different periods. The heroes are ‘manly’ boys of 14 or so, of no great social or intellectual distinction but endowed with a good deal of ‘pluck’. After a crisis at the beginning of the story, perhaps the death of a parent, the young lad leaves home to repair the family’s fortunes. He then survives a series of adventures, such as skirmishes, attempted kidnapping and imprisonment before a great culminating crisis, usually a major battle which is successfully won, before the hero returns home triumphant.

Henty’s With Clive in India; or; the Beginnings of Empire (1884) is typical. It tells the story of 16-year-old Charlie Marryat who leaves home in Yarmouth after the death of his father to obtain employment as a civilian writer for the East India Company in eighteenth-century Madras. On the journey out he distinguishes himself fighting privateers, and then, on reaching India, volunteers for servi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Contributors’ biographies
• Section 1 Exploring the narrative past
• Section 2 Writing about the narrative past
• Section 3 Teaching the narrative past
• Bibliography
• Index