ESCAPING TO THE PAST
Want to learn a little about history? Read more fiction, Jake Kerridge writes.
As I get older, I find myself more and more often wanting to escape the 21st-century mindset and take refuge in history. But I find I'm reading fewer works by professional historians.
We are lucky enough to have many historians writing today with great style and wit — and yet I can't shake off the feeling that they get in the way of the past. Turn instead to what scholars call primary sources — the fiction and poetry of past centuries.
I can spend many happy hours devouring a first-class work of history like David Kynaston's Tales of a New Jerusalem, with its breakneck approach of bunging in as much detail as possible, resulting in an unforgettable collage of postwar Britain. But if I really want a visceral sense of what it felt like to be alive in the 1950s — to feel that grey decade get into my bones like a chill
— I'll pick up Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim or Iris Murdoch's Under the Net and live it vicariously through their downtrodden heroes, Jim Dixon and Jake Donaghue.
If you want to see how people related to each other in Roman times, shelve Mary Beard and plunge into the poems of Horace. “I was going along the Via Sacra,” one of them begins, “meditating on some trifle or other, as is my custom, and totally intent on it.” Horace's peace is suddenly shattered when a fan recognizes him.
Two millennia melt away as the fan starts to behave with that combination of self-importance and celebrity obsession that is so prevalent on Twitter.
It could all be happening this morning as Horace tries to escape from the bore: “Wanting sadly to get away from him, sometimes I walked on apace, now and then I stopped, and whispered something to my boy.”
But wait a minute, says the modern reader: where did this boy come from? Horace gave every impression at the start of the poem that he was wandering lonely as a cloud.
You realize that Horace, accompanied on his walk by his slave boy, would have had a sense of being alone in another person's company that it is difficult for us to understand today. The passage tells us something about the relationship between a master and slave that a historian would find difficult to encapsulate.
One of the pleasures of reading a period text is discovering the ways in which the author's thoughts seem remarkably modern one minute and alien the next. Contemporary fictions of history can replicate this, but only in an artificial way.
However witchily Hilary Mantel gets into the head of Thomas Cromwell, you can't beat a book like Thomas Harman's study of beggars, A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566), for getting inside the Tudor mind. I particularly enjoy his interview with a “Walking Mort” — one of the prostitute-beggars who played on sympathies by pretending to be recently bereaved.
Reading Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771), I was delighted after a couple of pages to meet a digression on the pleasure people take in their own flatulence. That gives a flavour of the Viz magazine-esque sense of humour that characterized the 18th century and would be wiped out in a few decades as Victorian propriety came to hold sway.
There is nothing like period fiction for showing you how people really lived, and crime novelists are especially good at this because they have to offset the melodrama of their plots by carefully grounding their books in contemporary reality.
John Dickson Carr's whodunnit He Who Whispers (1946) is a florid tale of a woman suspected of being a vampire, but it begins with an evocation of London immediately after the Second World War that I always think of when I see pictures of VE Day jubilation:
“People didn't celebrate that victory hysterically, as for some reason or other the newspapers liked to make out,” Carr writes. “What the newsreels showed was only a bubble on the huge surface of the town ... Most people were a little apathetic because they could not yet think of it as real.”
Beware, though, of film and television adaptations of classic fiction. I enjoyed the new version of All Creatures Great and Small, but it seemed inevitable that when James Herriot met his future wife, Helen, for the first time, she would be mastering a bull and not, as in the book, busy making bread. And in Herriot's books, Mrs. Hall the housekeeper is not the eminence grise of the veterinary practice. It's a distortion: showing us women as we like to think they would have been, not how they were.
And there should be a moratorium on Jane Austen characters kissing as a declaration of their love: It is no less anachronistic to have Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth kissing in the street than to have them playing Fortnite or some other video game.