Filling the cracks with gold

Our November guest is Anne Rooney, appropriately enough since this has been Non-fiction month - did you know? - and Anne has written around 200 books, many of them non-fiction for both adults and younger readers. 

In fact "guest" is a bit misleading, since Anne is here all the time. She is "tech support" for The History Girls and if you have ever seen a post that looked a bit peculiar and checked back later to find it perfect, it's because Anne has been working behind the scenes. We are very glad to have her as a "back room History Girl" and so we welcome her as perhaps a house guest for November.

Photo credit: Luki Sumner-Rooney

Anne began her working life as a medievalist but turned to writing after deciding the academic life was not really for her. She has been writing children’s books for about 15 years, though still makes occasional forays into adult writing, mostly in the area of the history and philosophy of science.  Much of her non-fiction has historical content. She has written fiction with a contemporary setting but featuring historical figures who have endured beyond their sell-by date (did you know that Louis Pasteur, Joseph Guillotin and Elvis Presley were all vampires?) and has specifically historical fiction in the pipeline (Forever, forthcoming 2016).

Anne is a contributor to the History Girls' anthology Daughters of Time. She is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. 

Welcome to Anne, polymath and workaholic.

The cracks are fertile!

Like spies, terrorists and moss, writers of historical fiction occupy the cracks.

It's easy to assume that as we make things up fiction-writers do less rigorous research than writers of historical fact. Why would we spend as much effort as a historian finding out what actually happened and what life was really like, if we're going to write about what didn't happen and what we imagine life was like?

The best historical fiction wears its learning lightly, so it's not surprising readers imagine there's little research. The historian will say, 'look, this is what a Victorian baby-bottle looked like, this is how it was used, this is what the mother put into the bottle to make the baby sleep.' The research is all there, in the foreground. The historical novelist will mention the baby-farmer removing the twist of rag from the neck of the bottle and pouring in a glug of the evil Godfrey's cordial (opium and treacle), but as a reader you won't be thinking, 'ah, that's how a baby was fed when there was no lactating mother.' You'll be waiting to see what happens next. You don't notice the research - it slips down as easily as Godfrey's cordial.

Indeed, much of the research that goes into historical fiction never reaches the page. It informs the writing, but a lot of it is preventing mistakes rather than making a positive appearance. The reader's willing suspension of disbelief will be curtailed pretty quickly if a 13th-century feast includes potatoes, or a lady from the 1700s wears a mauve dress. Research keeps potatoes out of novels set in the Middle Ages. Or sometimes half a day's research will contribute a single word to the book - perhaps one dish in a meal, the colour of a flag or the price paid for a suitable drink.

I write some historical fiction and a lot of historical fact. The research for both starts in the same way, with a broad sweep, picking up all the main events, trends, issues and characters. Then it homes in on the most important areas. Many of the sources are the same: academic and popular history books and articles; museums; archives; talking to experts.

Booth's map, colour coded to show levels of
prosperity and poverty in Victorian London

I’ve been working (slowly) on a story set in Victorian London. My research has been about everyday life, particularly the living conditions of the London poor. The most important primary sources have been Charles Booth’s poor map and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Beyond the textual sources, I've been to the Museum of Childhood to look at baby-bottles, the Museum of London to see contemporary photographs of street life, and the London Aquarium to look at objects found in the mud of the Thames.

Some sources I probably wouldn't have used for historical fact: the novels of Dickens; paintings, newspaper sketches and cartoons; the dolls' houses in the Museum of London which are exact replicas of real homes; films (for atmosphere); and I’ve visited the places, though they are much changed, and walked the routes my characters walk, felt the mud, and watched the tides of the Thames (thanks to History Girl Michelle Lovric for letting me stand on her balcony above the Thames for that!)

It's not just a matter of using additional sources, though. The historian and the fiction-writer look for different things. The historian looks for a coherent narrative in the chaotic remnants of the past -  threads that link events and people, one thing leading to another, explaining another, preventing another. The writer of fiction, as often as not, is looking for the gaps. The historian wants to answer questions; the novelist wants to ask questions. The historian uses the minutiae of lives lived to illuminate the bigger picture, while the writer of fiction explores what it was like living those lives against the background of the bigger picture.

Good historians know that history only comes to life when we see how it was lived. The details of lives and personalities offer the best way into imagining and engaging with the past. Social histories such as Sarah Wise's The Blackest Streets (2009) about the Old Nichol (a desperately squalid slum in Victorian London) are distilled from reports and personal narratives. They are ripe for plundering. As fiction writers, we can take a nugget of true narrative and spin a whole life-story from it. It’s like taking a spoonful of sugar and spinning it into candyfloss. The sugar tastes different when mixed with the air and the truth tastes different when expanded with imagination – the story adds texture and volume and specialness to the spoonful of truth.

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), before
the nose incident

Take Tycho Brahe's moose. Tycho Brahe was the last great naked-eye astronomer and the first to contradict Aristotle's (and the Bible's) notion that the heavens are fixed and there can be no new starts. So he has his place in the history of astronomy. But he is far more interesting than that. He ruled autocratically over the island of Hven off the coast of Sweden where he had his observatory. The more famous astronomer Kepler worked as his assistant for many years. Brahe wore a prosthetic metal nose, having lost part of his real nose in a duel over a mathematical formula. He died of politeness - refusing to leave a feast to urinate, he suffered a burst bladder. And he had a pet moose, which died after drinking too much beer at a feast and falling down the stairs. None of Brahe's eccentricity has much bearing on the history of astronomy, but it is exactly the kind of gift a fiction-writer is delighted to find in the historical record.

If you were to set out to write a history of Brahe and his moose, you'd find scant material. Its existence and death are recorded in Brahe's correspondence, but only briefly. For the historian, that's frustrating; gaps in the historical record make the job harder. Historians are not allowed just to make up something to fill the gap. They must work from the evidence around the gap and try to fill it, seamlessly, by extending from the edges. If the task goes well, the evidence criss-crosses the space representing our ignorance and supports a plausible structure of conjecture. It’s like detective work. It’s challenging, inspiring and sometimes frustrating.

Fictional historical writing, on the other hand, flourishes in the gaps in history. The fiction-writer can weigh up the evidence, choose a plausible narrative and treat is as though it were the truth without excuse, apology or accommodation. It's where we don't know what happened that we can let 'what if' run free. Like parenting, fictional history has to be good enough rather than perfect. It must be consistent with the facts – or honest about where it is not consistent – but can go beyond them without having to defend its choices. In parenting, if everyone is alive and intact at bedtime, it’s a good day. In historical fiction, if the dead are still dead and no worlds were destroyed – well, it’s a pretty good start.

Writing historical fiction, we focus on creating the world as experienced by the people we are writing about. What did they eat for breakfast? What’s it like to walk through streets full of horse manure and dog poo? How do you occupy yourself when it gets dark at 4 pm but you can’t afford lights? What is your attitude towards food if you eat tasteless gruel every day? How far will you go trying to keep warm in the winter? Do you believe in ghosts? Are dogs frightening? Is a baby more a burden than a treasure? These are rarely the questions asked by factual histories. The answers come from the exercise of empathy on the stuff of research. We share the same minds and bodies as people of the past, so we can put ourselves into their shoes – or bare feet – and imagine how they experienced life. The historian benefits from empathy, but must leave the larger part of imagination at the study door.

More has been lost from the historical record than has been preserved, and the further back you go, or the deeper into any particular area, the less there is. It’s often a frustration for the historian, but a gift for the fiction-writer. The unknown is where imagination has always played - 'here be monsters'.

Perhaps one of the differences between what a historian does and what a writer of fiction does with the slabs of research and the gaps between them is best illustrated by two approaches to mending broken things. If we think of the historical record as the broken fragments of the past, the historian is aiming for this:

This is one of three Qing dynasty vases accidentally broken by a visitor falling down the stairs of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2006. After weeks of careful conservation work, the joins are invisible to the naked eye. You can see the process of reconstruction here.

The writer of historical fiction is aiming for this:

Hey Rosetta! album cover for Second Sight,
using Japanese Kintsugi bowl

The ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi aims to make something beautiful from broken objects by highlighting the breaks. The admirer is not asked to ignore the fractures but celebrate them. The cracks are often filled with resin enriched with gold. I think that’s what we are doing as we write historical fiction – filling the cracks in reality with gold.


Anne Rooney's latest non-fiction book is The Story of Maps:

Look out for the competition tomorrow to win a copy.

And thanks for visiting, Anne, and sharing your immense experience of the different uses of research.

Paul Dowswell's favourite historical character - Rudolph the second

Prague today

It's a pleasure to welcome Paul Dowswell as our guest blogger for July, especially since he gallantly accepted the brief to write about his favourite character, which all the History Girls are doing this month.

 

 About Paul: 

I've worked in publishing for over twenty five years. I went freelance in 1999 after eight years with Usborne, where I was a senior editor.
History is my specialist subject but I also enjoy writing about natural history, science, geography, in fact almost anything, apart from golf and mechanical engineering. I have a shamefully encyclopaedic knowledge of popular music,

I’ve written over 60 books for UK publishers.  I grew up in Chester and escaped to read History at London University (Goldsmiths’ College 1975-1978). After 15 years in London, I moved to Wolverhampton, where I live with my wife and daughter. I also play with a variety of bands in the pubs and clubs of the West Midlands.








My favourite character

Prague c.1

(Woodcuts and engravings from the era show that much of the city of Prague remains from Rudolph’s time).


I was at a History Association event in London recently, and broadcaster Bettany Hughes gave a speech revealing that 90% of all TV history is about the Nazis, the Egyptians or the Tudors. I’m assuming that ‘the Nazis’ includes World War Two in general, but I’ll bet another 9% is split between the Romans and The Great War, and the final 1% divvies up between everything else. I’m sure we’re a little broader in the publishing world, but those three major TV areas, and the Romans, must take up the vast majority of subjects for historical fiction too. (I’ve written about the Nazis and both the World Wars.)

Many readers like to read about what they know about, which is understandable. But those of us who write historical fiction know there’s so much that’s fascinating outside the well-ploughed areas. That’s why I chose to write about Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor in late Renaissance Prague, who is a central character in my book ‘The Cabinet of Curiosities’.

I wrote ‘Cabinet’ after becoming fascinated by the Renaissance paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo – surreal and disturbing portraits, centuries ahead of their time. His most famous is Vertumnus – his depiction of Rudolph II in fruit and vegetables. A culture which produced something so magnificently strange and original sparked further investigation. I was not disappointed. Rudolph II was just as unusual as his portrait.

There’s a picture on Wiki

Here, likewise from Wiki, is a picture of the Emperor as himself.


He had a great thrusting Habsburg jaw and fleshy lips, which gave him the look of an obstinate bulldog. But he spoke quietly and patiently, without the usual princely arrogance. He seemed to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. I think Rudolph was a man who endured his life rather than enjoyed it.

He ruled over a world that was still in thrall to Aristotle, Plato and other great philosophers of the Classical Era. It didn’t seem strange to Rudolph’s contemporaries to be so influenced by a mind-set that was, even then, nearly two millennia old. Save for gunpowder, the printed word, and the discovery of the Americas, the ancient world wasn’t that different from their own. They thought the Ancients were cleverer than they were. That’s why Rudolph had a special interest in Alchemy. He and his contemporaries believe the Ancient Egyptians could turn base metals into gold. To them, alchemy was a lost art. Of course, it turned out to be a blind alley, although it did lead to the beginnings of modern Chemistry.

Golden Lane, inside Prague Castle

Many of these little houses were home to the alchemists employed by Rudolph. They worked in nearby workshops built into the Castle walls.

But Rudolph was open to new ideas as well as old. He believed, quite reasonably, that if he could gather up all the knowledge in the world it would help him understand the purpose of existence and the mind of God. To this end he developed a mania for collecting ‘wonders’. He lived in a chaotic world, his private rooms littered with extraordinary instruments and curious objects, paintings piled up against the walls, and great heaps of books. He also set aside four ball-room size halls in his palace for his collection. This great depository is known as his Cabinet of Curiosities: and it was an extraordinary collection of mechanical and scientific instruments, biological and geological specimens, paintings, engravings and holy and mythological relics. Dürer’s famous watercolour of a young hare was in there and, supposedly, nails from Noah’s Ark, feathers from a phoenix and the dagger that killed Julius Caesar.

Whilst other Cabinets of the age were just a higgledy-piggledy collection of curios, often kept in an actual cabinet, Rudolph’s vast collection was arranged in an order bordering on ‘scientific’.
Lucky for us that the collection was well documented. Some was moved to Vienna following Rudolph’s death in 1612 and some was scattered to the four corners of Europe when his Palace was looted by Swedish Troops in 1648 during the 30 Years War. Only a fraction of it can still be found in Prague.

Treasures from the Prague Museum of Decorative Arts:


Rudolph was fascinated by automata like this mechanical monkey which can play a tune on its violin. The one in the picture dates from 1800, but similar devices could be found in his Cabinet. One of his favourites was a mechanical peacock, complete with real tail feathers, which strutted around making mating calls.

Rudolph was especially interested in miniature timepieces similar to this one, and would join his craftsmen at their workbenches to try to learn their skills. Contemporaries noted his Christian modesty – an appealing trait in an all-powerful ruler.

A book from Rudolph's era

He had a vast library and was intrigued by the great variety of life on Earth.

As well as amassing his extraordinary collection, Rudolph was also a great patron of the arts and sciences. His court in Prague became an oasis for natural philosophers (as scientists were then known) in a Europe shackled by religious dogma and haunted by the Inquisition. Under Rudolph’s protection, natural philosophers could investigate and share their knowledge of the newly-emerging sciences without fear of being executed as heretics. This was an age, after all, where an astronomer could be burned at the stake for stating that the Sun was at the centre of the Solar System rather than the Earth. In his patronage of alchemy and fascination with the world, Rudolph was an early champion of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century.


His court attracted the liveliest minds in Europe. Among them was Rudolph’s Imperial Astronomer Tycho Brahe, and Brahe’s collaborator Johannes Kepler, who had the magnificent job title of ‘Imperial Mathematician’. Kepler went on to produce ‘The Rudolphine Tables’, named in honour of his patron and based primarily on the painstaking astronomical observation work of Brahe. These tables revolutionised the study of ‘celestial physics’ and were invaluable to the astronomers who went on to shape our understanding of the universe.

Brahe, incidentally, was a character and a half. He had a silver nose, having lost his own in a duel, and kept a pet elk, who died after it drank too much beer at a party and fell down a flight of stairs. If only the Slebs who inhabit the pages of ‘Heat’ magazine were half as interesting.

The Cabinet contained many astronomical instruments. Brahe would have used tools such as this in his observation of the heavens. Kepler, his successor, was able to make use of a telescope, an invention which arrived too late for Brahe.


Another of Rudolph’s admirable qualities could be seen in the citizens of Prague. Unique in mainland Europe, Jews, Protestants and Catholics lived and prospered side by side. Muslims too, I suspect, would have been welcome, had not the Holy Roman Empire been at war with the Ottoman Turks. Rudolph ensured the activities of the Inquisition were restricted to witchcraft cases. Unsurprisingly, he came under intense pressure from Spain, the centre of Catholic Orthodoxy, to allow the persecution of ‘heretics’ within his realm. Rudolph dealt with these earnest attempts to save the world from Satan’s clutches by keeping Spanish emissaries waiting to see him for months and even years on end. I can sympathise.

Rudolph had his faults of course. He was a shy, secretive man quite unsuited to the demands of his office. Some historians blame his ineffective leadership on the 30 Years War which broke out six years after his death. His war with the Ottoman Turks was also a disaster for his Empire and he ended his life imprisoned in his castle and stripped of his powers.

He was a major hypochondriac, convinced he was afflicted by all manner of diseases. He certainly suffered from depression, and his court physicians recognised this – they described his condition as ‘melancholy’ and would have said he had a disorder of the humours, probably too much black bile. Most likely because of his melancholia, he was a great champion of what scientists today call ‘New Age Bollocks’. He was especially fascinated in gemstones, which were thought to possess mystical powers. Lapis Lazuli, for example, was supposedly effective in ‘keeping the soul free from error, fear and envy’. Rudolph wore gemstones next to his skin and ingested them as medicine, ground to a powder. His depression plagued him throughout his life – all the more reason to admire his tolerance and passion for art and science.

I think we get our expression ‘Bohemian’ – in the sense of unconventional and freethinking – from Rudolph’s Prague. I admire his open-mindedness, especially in the face of the era’s very circumscribed religious orthodoxy, and I admire his acceptance of other creeds and cultures in a world where superstition and intolerance were regarded as cardinal virtues.

Prague castle

A goblet made from sea-snail shells

Rudolph kept many elaborate items like this in his Cabinet.
















Thanks, Paul, for this fascinating insight into a man who inspired one of your own books.