Novelists and their sources - by Gillian Polack

Today I want to explore primary sources. Let me be honest: every day I want to explore primary sources. Today, however, I have a special reason. I’m in the middle of an online chat with some of my writer-friends about making a choice about what a character is going to do in a novel. The novel is set in the nineteenth century (and it’s not mine, so I can’t share more details, I’m afraid) and the character has done something that requires deep secrecy or they will lose everything.

Something that I always return to is that the type of secret a character will have depends very much on the nature of the historical novel rather than the nature of the history. If the novel is Gothic, there might be a child out of wedlock or an imprisoned wife. If the novel is historical fantasy, then the secret is likely to be hidden magic or a family heirloom that could destroy the world or that proves the character is royalty. If it’s historical fiction, then the secret is likely to be something that has been demonstrated as a secret in history as we know it. The character might be Giulia Tofana and the revelation would then be that she had poisoned an extraordinary number of people, for Tofana was possibly the seventeenth century’s most notorious professional poisoner.

The type of novel helps decide the type of secret. That’s a key part of how we tell our stories: finding the right example for the tale we’re telling. When you’re reading a fine novel and you stop and blink and think “That can’t be right” one of the reasons might be that the secret was perfect for another novel, but not for this one.

One of the aspects of historical fiction that I love most is that all these secrets can call on primary sources. Our actual past is complex enough and rich enough so that choosing the right sources can give the perfect secret for a character. The best historical novelists often have an almost uncanny knack for matching up story with source material. (Some of the best have an uncanny knack for inventing an entirely false past that feels perfectly real, but that’s another subject.)

The historian in me has a lot of primary sources on the shelf. I selected three volumes pretty randomly (if I’d seen my copy of Mary, Queen of Scots' trial record, I’d have selected less randomly, but it’s currently hiding from me). I want to introduce you to these three sets of sources and talk about how they might be used in historical fiction. As I said, today is a day for exploring primary sources. This whole article is an excuse for me to play with books, which is one of my favourite, favourite things in life. The reason for this isn’t because I am desperately intellectual. Some days things go wrong and today has been one of them, so this is me sharing comfort food with people who will appreciate it.

The first volume is The Letters of JRR Tolkien. The cover was viciously attacked by silverfish years ago, so it has a false air of antiquity. It’s a modern edition of a modern writer.

What do I need to know about it as a writer? 

Firstly, it’s an edition of selected letters. This means that the editor, Humphrey Carpenter, is presenting us with his view of Tolkien using Tolkien’s own words. Volumes of selected letters for some other writers on my shelves are very selected indeed. So much has been edited out that the person is a shadow of themselves. The first thing I did when I read this book, many years ago, was ask myself how much was Tolkien and how much was Carpenter’s view.

If I were writing a novel about Tolkien, this would be a critical question. These letters explain Tolkien’s interests and his writing style. They’re full of insightful thoughts and self-disparaging wit.

If I were using the letters to give glorious colour to an historical novel set in England’s literary scene in the middle of the twentieth century, then it’s easier. Tolkien’s letters are full of his participation in that world and illustrate it beautifully. 

If I were writing historical fantasy based on anything other than the quite specific world Tolkien inhabited, these letters would be no use at all.

The type of novels we write governs the way we use sources.

Let me go back in time. 

The wonderful thing about going back in time is one reaches a moment when one doesn’t have to seek permission to use a writer’s words directly. Their writing still has to be acknowledged: to claim the words as one’s own is still plagiarism, but it doesn’t break copyright law. This is why some writers use many, many words from Shakespeare’s plays in novels about Shakespeare. It’s an easy way to get colour. It’s not always a wise way to get colour. I’ve pointed out elsewhere that using the very clearly metred lines Shakespeare uses in his plays can totally foul up dialogue when Shakespeare is speaking them as part of ordinary conversation.

Some of Tolkien’s letters may give a hint of his speech. Others are purely formal. 

My next volume is Ethel Turner’s diaries. Turner (1872-1958) is best-known for the  novel Seven Little Australians (published 1894), and she was a very popular novelist of her time. Ethel Turner’s diaries were written in her private voice, and are more likely to reflect some aspects of her actual speech. In some conversations, it would be possible to reflect her actual words. It’s still not a good practice, for her words are from  a different time and place and carry a different shape to the words of a novelist in the twenty-first century. 

What I’m saying is that another reason we, as readers, might be jolted out of a perfectly good book is because something inside us is noting that change of voice when the writer has used the words of someone else without making it clear. If there is a paragraph added as “Bob read in Ethel Turner’s diary…” and then the words from that diary are quoted, that’s less likely to jolt the historically-aware reader.

Apart from helping a writer understand the voice of a character, what use are the diaries? So very many uses… They’re one of the best sources around for bringing everyday life to the reader. Letters can be good (I love the Paston letters specifically for the moment when Margaret Paston demands a tub of treacle – that demand brings all the Pastons into everyday life) but a good diary shows what the writer did that they felt worthy of comment. 

It might be waking up with a headache, or it might be writing down a secret. It might be hints as to family relationships.  Opening Turner’s diaries at random, I find that, on 26 June 1893, that someone said “a very wicked word, and I overheard’. She went through his denial and his excuses and then declaimed that the child was being ruined. This is immediately followed (in the same paragraph!) by a note about her newest publication.

One small day, and one small diary entry and it reaches out to us. This is why diaries are so handy for historical fiction writers who can use them (not all cultures and not all time periods have diaries): a good diary can make the everyday in a novel vibrant. 

I love diaries and letters so much that I have four shelves of them. They give me time with fascinating people. That’s the gift they give fiction writers who use them cleverly, too.

Alas, I’m a Medievalist, and very few diaries exist for the Middle Ages. In fact, most written sources are quite different for the Middle Ages. The random primary source I pulled down from a shelf (do not ask how many shelves I have of Medieval material, for it’s embarrassing) was Pipe Roll 45, of John I, or, to be more precise, The Great Roll of the Pipe for the First Year of the Reign of King John, Michaelmas 1199. This is one of my actual favourite books. In my perfect world I own many more volumes of pipe rolls. In my imperfect world I have wonderful friends, one of whom gave me this volume.

This volume was published in the year that Tolkien let his friend CS Lewis read The Hobbit for the first time and when Ethel Turner had her sixty-first birthday. It was over seven hundred years after John’s administration was documented in the Pipe Rolls.

It takes a lot of work to write fun stories of daily life from this kind of document. First, knowing Latin helps. Second, knowing the sort of documents copied into these rolls is essential. They’re not casual documents: they’re part of governance. 

Understanding the rules and the background means that a lot of cool stuff can be obtained to write fiction about or to use to bring a place and time to life… but it’s hard work. I was going to do what I did with Ethel Turner’s diaries and open this volume at a random place and give you a cool quote, but the pipe rolls are not written the way diaries are. They’re full of abbreviations and formulae. Names are there, easy to read (Hugo Bardulf, Galfridi f. Petri, Willelmus de Stuteuill) but they are the Latin forms and if you shouted that out to the street only some of the owners of the name would recognise themselves. The language of formal record and the language of every didn’t overlap the way they do, say, for modern England: they were entirely different languages. 

The writer needs to know more about what actually happened in England under John’s rule to effectively use a pipe roll. These rolls were not made to be read alone. They work alongside other documents. This gives writers handy approaches, for used alongside chronicles of the early part of John’s reign and the reasons for some of the entries springs out and gives novelists tools to illustrate disturbances and unrest or to give the actual names of those who might have met with John during his month in England that year.

Not all primary sources are easy for writers to use, and this is an excellent example. Where these are the critical sources for a place or time (as the pipe rolls are for John’s reign) then novelists depend more on the work of historians to make sense of it.

This brings us full circle, for the choice the novelist makes of which historian to use will depend very much on the story they want to tell.

Memoir vs fiction, by Y S Lee

Over the past two years, I’ve been reading memoirs from survivors of the Pacific War – that is, the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. Nearly all of them are awe-inspiring, and I’ve already blogged here about Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral and Nona Baker’s Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker.

Refresher: historical sources are typically divided into two categories: primary (artifacts from or documents created during the time of the events in question) and secondary sources (an item that interprets and analyzes the primary sources). It’s a broad-strokes sort of distinction that makes putting together a bibliography more straightforward. Although memoirs are typically written after the events in question, they are generally classed as primary sources because their authors were involved in the relevant events.

However! Having recently read a fair amount of memoir, I’ve come to distrust its simple categorization as a primary historical source. This unease began with my first Pacific War memoir, Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral (1949). It’s a brilliant book, packed with adventure and anthropological insight. Freddy’s voice is distinctive and charming, and while he shies away from emotional and psychological insight, I finished the book with a strong appreciation for his character (possibly too strong: my husband took to calling him "your historical boyfriend”).

Freddy Spencer Chapman

Still, I wondered how Freddy could possibly recall the terrifying and chaotic events of his three years in the Malayan jungle in such impeccable detail. This is a challenge in all memoirs. I am hard-pressed to remember what I ate for lunch three days ago, and in times of conflict or high excitement I often question, after the fact, my memories of what went down. Yes, Freddy kept detailed diaries while he was in the jungle, but on several occasions he was forced to destroy them because they were at risk of falling into enemy hands. His surviving diaries are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but they cover only a portion of his time in the jungle.

After reading Freddy’s memoir, I turned to Brian Moynahan’s recent biography of Freddy, Jungle Soldier: The True Story of Freddy Spencer Chapman, for context. Moynahan is a biased biographer – a longtime fan of Freddy who wants to burnish and prolong his hero’s fame. Even so, at one point, Moynahan points out a significant discrepancy between Freddy’s surviving diary and an event he describes in The Jungle is Neutral.

For publication, Freddy altered the event, probably in order to make it feel more dramatic. Moynahan disagrees with this decision, believing the original diary entry to be superior in terms of tension and the sheer danger of the situation. Either way, though, we now have a primary source (diary) imperfectly converted to a memoir - which is still technically a primary source. Yet we already know that it’s been corrupted. And if we have evidence of this with just one of Freddy’s surviving diaries, how many other events have been elided or embellished or just imperfectly reconstructed? We’ll never know.

This question becomes even more complicated when memoirs are written long after the events they describe and are mediated through others. Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker was first published in 1959, fourteen years after Nona Baker emerged from the Malayan jungle, contributed source material to Freddy Spencer Chapman’s official report on local Communist organizations, and returned to England.

Nona Baker is not credited as the author of her memoir!

Baker doesn’t mention keeping a jungle diary. Her narrative voice is quiet, wry, self-deprecating. She doesn’t in any way seek to portray herself as a heroine: rather, she insists that she was only “busily saving [her] own skin”. Perhaps this is why it took her fourteen years to produce a memoir, and why she distanced herself from the story even further: even though her narrative is written in the first person, the book is officially "by" Dorothy Thatcher and Robert Cross. To what extent is Baker’s voice really her own, here? And what sorts of artistic license have Thatcher and Cross taken with the shape of the story?

My last example today (though I have many more!) is actually a novel by Han Suyin (best known for her 1952 novel A Many Splendoured Thing, which was filmed as Love is a Many Splendored Thing and was also later adapted as an American soap opera). And the Rain My Drink is set during the Malayan Emergency of the early 1950s – the last days of the British empire in southeast Asia.

Han Suyin, the pen name of Elisabeth Comber

While And the Rain My Drink is technically fiction, Han Suyin inserts herself (using a name that is itself a pseudonym) into the novel as a character. This is a postmodern move which ought to undermine the ideas of narrative voice and the conceit of “truth” throughout the work. But the character Suyin tells her story in the first person, in conventional and realist terms. Because of this, and since the character Suyin’s biographical details map directly onto those of the author Han Suyin, the whole novel reads instead like a memoir of Han Suyin’s time in Malaya, with a few imaginative excursions. It presses the genre of memoir into the services of fiction - an act that points up the highly contrived nature of memoir itself.

Perhaps this is only appropriate – that we should end up in such an ambiguous tumult. A wide view of history will always include competing voices, and the line between fact and fiction begins to blur immediately upon examination. I’m thrilled to be feeling my way, step by careful step, in the company of such splendid adventurers.

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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/The Agency Quartet (Walker Books/Candlewick Press).

Historical Sources for Historical Fiction - Gillian Polack

Last month I made a rash promise. I promised I’d talk about sources. Now that my mind is on other things, I’ll still talk about sources, but not in the way I originally intended. I’m writing a book on the relationship that fiction writers enjoy with history, and that’s colouring everything I do. It definitely colours this post.

Compared with modern history, there are so few sources for the Middle Ages. ‘Compared with modern history’ are tricky words, however. There are a lot of sources. A vast number and range. They’re not always obvious, however, nor are they easy to interpret. And the reason we look at them shapes how we interpret them. Some of this I talked about last month.

Last month I focussed on cosmetics. 

Our main sources for cosmetics right now are a very small number of key manuscripts. These manuscripts talk about what cosmetics women used, they prescribe how women should behave, and they that give recipes for them. We’re not talking about that many documents, in total, and they cover the whole of Western Europe. This means that, from them, we don’t know what cosmetics a given woman would use. Big statements like “All women wore lead paint” are based on a tiny number of sources. A pale face in a picture doesn't mean the woman in the picture is depicted as wearing lead paint. I found you an example of this:

There are also some rather wonderful archaeological remains. Combs are my personal favourite, but they aren’t the only archaeological survival, by any means. One of the big lessons I learned when I worked on The Middle Ages Unlocked, was that on some subjects Katrin (my archaeologist co-writer) knew many things that I did not. My archaeology was a mere two years at university and was a very long time ago. The knowledge differential between me and someone who works in a particular field and knows their stuff is vast and full of chasms. 

Even the stuff Katrin only half-knows is more than what I know in her field. I hope that the same applies to mine and that she was sufficiently awed by my historical understanding for the world to be balanced, but that’s somewhat irrelevant here. What’s relevant is that archaeology is constantly growing and changing and dipping into a popular work won’t give you nearly as much information as learning how to interpret reports of digs or analyses of types of finds. Those finds won’t tell you how someone wore make-up, but they will give you more information about the devices used to make oneself beautiful, and that information helps us flesh out those rare mentions in manuscripts.

The trick is, then, not just knowing what kind of sources are out there, but gaining access to them and putting them in their wider cultural perspective.

One of my favourite websites for small archaeological finds is finds.org. It’s an online database of the small things found by various people in the UK. Each find has a description, but you’ll not get detailed analysis of how it fits in with other finds. Whether this brooch is typical or this tool is normal for a time and place isn’t something you’ll find out without checking what the experts have to say. Sources speak, but they speak much better when they’re interpreted by those with vast amounts of knowledge and experience.

What I do, when I’m researching for a novel is use a mixture of primary sources and the studies of them by those who know more than me. In the happy (but small) areas where I’ve done my own research and I am the researcher, I can bask in the sunshine of actually knowing what I’m doing, but most of the time I argue with myself and try to expand my understanding of the place and time I’m writing about, so that I can use studies critically and not misinterpret the sources too badly.

How does this relate to historical sources for fiction? Intimately. A source is as only as good as the person who looks at it. If you look at a beautiful manuscript and have no idea of the language it’s in or that it’s in a script that predates your period by five hundred years or that it was written by the exact person you want to star in your amazing tale, then it’s a huge waste. 

Sources are only as good as the person using them and are always biased at our (the user’s) end and at the original (writer’s) end. Interpretations are only as good as the brain and thought and understanding of the person using them. And that person needs to remember (I write notes to myself, for it’s a continual reminder, not a once-off) that people in the past were real and had private lives and were grumpy in the morning or tired at night and had to go and milk the cows when they’d rather be writing and… Sometimes we get annotations or comments in the manuscripts that tell us these things, and those notes are writing gold. Most of the time we have to look very carefully at a list or a letter and work out who the writer was from what they didn’t say as much as from what they do say.

That’s why I decided against giving a list of sources in this post. I thought it might be more useful to talk about the most important factor in someone’s research: how they think and discover and interpret.

So many writers want to cut research corners. They ask me for digests of what I know. “Summarise twenty years of your work in three minutes, please, for that’s all the time I can spare this subject.” This is not a wise approach for a writer. The trick with sources is not accessing them: it’s understanding them.

My research (for the ‘I’m-not-a-fiction-writer’ side of me) is generally text-based. Medievally speaking, for me, this mostly means literature. There are bunches of non-literary Medieval written sources, hidden away in archives, staring us in the face as the charters for towns and the underpinning of various family histories. I tend not to work with these for my academic side, for I am addicted to stories.

What I do as a novelist, is read general works on the subject until I understand where current research is going, how it interprets that place and time and what spin it gives to sources. I collect primary sources and then read them myself wherever I can. All of this recent experience comes from me working on a period so alien to me that I’ve had to start from first principles – I can’t trust my common sense, because my common sense will be trumped by my preconceived assumptions at every point, and preconceived assumptions tend to make a rather predictable work of fiction. Also a shallow one.

So, I’ve read a bunch of works by historians and archaeologists and have a fair general knowledge about the setting for this novel I’m working on. I’ve started reading primary sources and taking notes about particular tidbits that’d be handy for the novel. This is my actual beginning. From here I’m working on turning my new adventure into understanding of a deep enough sort that it can inform my novel.

It’s the difference between looking at a source and looking into a source and understanding it. 

I keep using the word ‘understanding’ because that’s the way to get the sources to talk back, to reveal their information and to let them help you bring the novel to life. It’s the difference between giving a reader flat information about a place and a time and giving a reader a lively story where the time and place is integral to the story.

'From the Horse's Mouth' by A L Berridge

Historians can be a sad bunch when it comes to primary sources. We talk of gold, of ‘treasure trove’, and last month I even called the letters of a colour sergeant ‘the Holy Grail’. There’s something magical about reading the words of people who were actually there, and knowing that at last we’re getting close to the truth.

Or not. 

Before cameras and sound recordings, primary sources are entirely human things. People can mishear, misunderstand, misremember, misscribe or mistranslate, and once Caxton came on the scene they could even misprint as well. 

'The Wicked Bible' of 1631. Spot the misprint...

Our frailty runs even deeper than that. Goebbels’ speeches are primary sources, so is Bismarck’s ‘Ems telegram’, and if Holborn’s portrait of Anne of Cleves is of debatable accuracy then so is Henry VIII’s reported reaction to it. People are subjective at the best of times, dishonest at the worst, and anyone who’s ever attended a trial knows that primary sources can be the most unreliable of all. 

Some are better than others, of course. A will is a will, an Act of Parliament is an Act of Parliament, and carefully typed memoranda about ‘sonderaktions’ or sterilizations were quite enough to hang both authors and recipients at Nuremberg. Yet even official sources of information are still human. There are misprints in Hansard, lies on birth certificates, non-existent voters on electoral rolls, and if the phrase ‘massaging the figures’ is modern, the practice itself is not. The 1664-5 London’s Bills of Mortality show a mysterious rise in the vaguer causes of death – as if trying to avoid a panic by concealing the true numbers of those who actually died of Plague.

From the collection at the Wellcome Library, London

 It doesn’t even have to be deliberate. I don’t think there’s a single lie in the ‘General Orders’ issued during the Crimean War, for instance – but neither is there anything that reflects the real truth. The coffee ration sounds excellent – unless we know it consisted of green beans which the men had no fuel to roast. The issue of fuel seems sensible and timely – unless we know the roads were impassable between Balaklava base and the lines, and that most men received nothing at all.

William Howard Russell

 Newspapers were better informed, and William Howard Russell’s descriptions in The Times still remain the best and most quoted source on the suffering of our soldiers. Yet Russell was still a journalist, and his hastily filed reports of battles are as riddled with sensationalist errors as the worst tabloid of today. His nadir is undoubtedly the night battle of the 1855 Grand Sortie, where he announces the death of an officer who was still alive (Colonel Kelly), reports the wounding of one who was very much dead (Captain Vicars), and ascribes a heroic rock-throwing role to one who had been wounded in the arm an hour earlier and was incapable of lifting so much as a handkerchief (Major Gordon).

It’s understandable. Russell wasn’t in the battle himself, he had to rely on what people told him, and in this instance we can argue he’s not really a primary source at all. His failings should not affect the reputation of the London Times, the unquestioned Paper of Record for such official facts as court appointments, ship arrivals, casualty rolls, and of course the lists of ‘Hatch, Match and Dispatch’.

And then again…

For my latest Crimean novel I wanted someone to survive the sinking of Resolute in the Great Storm of 1854, but while N.A. Woods of the Morning Herald claimed nine men survived the wreck, all other sources reported the ship lost with all hands. I turned to the one unquestionable authority - the London Times.

There it was, the official report I was looking for. While other ships had a list of survivors after their names, poor Resolute was recorded simply as ‘totally lost’. I resigned myself to the rewrite, but as I glanced down the rest of the column this little item caught my eye:

It’s a letter from the one officer to survive the wreck of – the Resolute.

It still needn’t shake our faith in primary sources. The newspaper was a secondary, it only printed what it was given, and it was the survivor’s letter that set the record straight. Official records can always be trumped by actual letters, diaries, and memoirs, the story that comes to us straight from ‘the horse’s mouth’ of people who really know. We must make allowances for bias, of course (especially in a war) but primary sources are still the only direct route to the truth.

So they are, but it can still be the devil’s own job finding it. I’ve been lucky with my earlier novels in that historians have been over the ground before me, but Soldiers of the Queen deals with the later Siege of Sevastopol, which is almost entirely virgin territory. Usually there’s been nothing but primary sources to work from, and I soon learned what any policeman or barrister could have told me at the start: that no two witnesses ever agree on what they see.

It’s been a nightmare. I’ve tracked down over a dozen first-hand accounts of the Grand Sortie, for instance – and no two of them tell the same story. I’ve always tried to avoid contradicting eye-witnesses in my writing, but for Soldiers of the Queen I’ve sometimes had no choice. In one case I’ve even chosen to go against the only eye-witness – a sin so heinous that I wanted to use this post to explain it.

The witness concerned is that same Colonel Kelly whose demise was so prematurely reported by Russell, and who was in fact captured by the Russians on the night of the Grand Sortie. He was alone at the time, and the explanation he wrote to his wife is thus the only one we have: 

‘I was surrounded by eight or ten Russians, who leaped into the trench as I was passing to form up the men, having come from some distance on the right… I owe my life, under God, to a Polish soldier of the name of Stein, who prevented me from being bayoneted after I was on the ground.’

It seems straightforward enough – until we read the account published thirty years later by Alexander Kinglake, official chronicler to the Expedition to the Crimea:

Alexander Kinglake by Harriet M. Haviland

‘[Kelly] had gone but a little way further, when – standing together in the trench – he saw a group of seven or eight soldiers whom he took in the darkness to be men of his own regiment – the 34th. So going close up to them, he directed these men to ‘fall in’ with the other men under Jordan. He was met by an uproar of outlandish cries, and found that he had been accosting the enemy. He brought out his revolver, and pointing it at the head of the nearest foe, pulled hard, though in vain, at a trigger held fast by the safety catch. Whilst lowering his weapon in order to push back the bolt, he was felled by numbers of blows… and when on the ground was bayoneted in the right shoulder, in the left hand, and in the right leg…’

Kinglake’s story stands up to examination. The night of March 22nd was very dark indeed, and that Kelly’s mistake was a plausible one I was able to confirm from a letter of Private William Stray, who described a ‘narrow escape’ of his own in the same battle:

 ‘a number of Russians were together in one part of the trench, and the night being very dark I mistook them for our own men, and I thought they took us for Russians, they were firing on us, and under that mistake I ran up to them shouting damn your eyes, you are firing on your own men, but I soon found out my mistake.’

Extract from William Stray's letter

It’s credible then – but it contradicts the version of Kelly himself, and surely the primary source should be taken above the secondary? Yet Kinglake was scrupulous, he corresponded profusely with every witness he could find, and the only possible source for this anecdote has to be Kelly himself. Why on earth would Kelly change his story all these years after the event?

The answer, I think, is a very human one. The mistake of approaching the enemy, the failure to release the safety catch – the whole thing is deeply embarrassing, and Kelly may well have balked at revealing the truth to his wife. But what is humiliating to a man in his thirties can become a wonderful after-dinner story in his sixties, and I see nothing strange in Kelly finally giving Kinglake the true version of what happened.

Yet there remained one niggle: Kelly was at some pains to assure his wife that he had not been bayoneted while on the ground, yet Kinglake insists that he was. Kelly didn’t mind admitting he’d been wounded, so what on earth was so embarrassing about having received those wounds on the ground?

I’m afraid I think I know that too. Colonel Reynell Pack of the 7th Royal Fusiliers cheerfully recorded in his memoirs that Kelly was ‘most careful of himself’ and used to go to the trenches ‘swathed and wrapped up like a mummy’. The story circulating at the time was therefore that the Russians had only failed to kill Kelly because the bayonets ‘did not penetrate through his numerous garments’…

I might have put that down to ordinary inter-regimental bitchiness, except for the confirmation of an even more impeccable source. One of Kelly’s own letters actually describes his attire for the trenches like this: 

‘a flannel vest, then a chamois one, and over that my shirt…. Then I had my flannel drawers, and over them my chamois ones; then came my regimental trousers with my long blue knit stockings drawn over them. Over my shirt… a blue sailor woollen jersey…a pair of sailor’s flushing trousers… Mr Philipson’s coat, with a comforter round my neck… over that my greatcoat… and over all my mackintosh…’

Reynell Pack was telling no more than the embarrassing truth. I suspect Kelly did indeed survive by virtue of his clothing, and the only amazing thing about it was that the Russians managed to wound him at all. His own account of his capture turns out to be unreliable in every detail, and I went with Kinglake’s version after all.

Colonel Richard Denis Kelly after the war

Yet there’s more than one kind of reliability, more than one kind of truth, and if Kelly’s letters didn’t explain much about the Grand Sortie they revealed an awful lot about the man himself. The same was true of Colour Sergeant Clarke’s letters, and is one reason why I still love primary sources above any others. They always tell us something, even if it isn’t what we’re looking for - or what the writer intended.

Those General Orders, for instance, proved conclusively just how out of touch Headquarters really were. The misleading Bills of Mortality show clearly the extent to which plague was feared. Even lies can tell us a truth, and libellous pamphlets circulated about Marie Antoinette certainly confirm the extent to which she was hated. Secondary sources can tell us these things, but primary sources show them red and raw.

Which is why I love them even more as a novelist than I do as a historian. Primary sources can take us there, bring us close enough to touch. I even loved typing out that little bit of Stray’s letter, because its dreadful punctuation helps me hear his voice. Research isn’t just about ‘knowing’, it’s about seeing, hearing, and ultimately feeling – and if I work hard enough I hope that one day my novels will do the same.

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A.L. Berridge's deeply neglected website is here.