Sarah Perry
I am a Victorian
After the publication of my 1890s-set novel
The Essex Serpent, I’d be asked how I’d set about creating the novel’s 19th century voice. Had I saturated myself in Dickens and the Brontes? Had I spent months reading 19th century correspondence?
Embarrassed, I’d explain that my prose style had not been arrived at deliberately but by mistake. The truth is that I write as I do not out of admiration for writers I’ve tried to emulate, but because, to all intents and purposes, I’m a Victorian myself.
I was born at the end of 1979, missing the “Millennial” tag by 33 days. My parents were members of a Strict Baptist sect and the customs of the chapel where I spent most of my time outside of home and school were similar to those of a devout society in the mid-19th century. I wasn’t allowed to wear trousers, or go to the cinema, and at home we had no television or pop music. I was encouraged to read classic literature — there was a lot of it in the house, and I read
Jane Eyre when I was 8, having mistaken it for a children’s book — but above all I was constantly
exposed to the King James Bible.
It was read aloud at mealtimes and in long passages during the several church services I attended each week; I read it privately, and memorised passages to recite during competitions, in which colouring books of illuminated Bible verses were given as prizes; and once a year I sat the Scripture Exam, an event I looked forward to because we were all given jam donuts as a treat when we put our pens down.
As we all know, the English language is so full of aphorisms drawn from the King James
Bible that even someone who has never opened a copy will be regularly quoting it. We escape by the skin of our teeth, we bite the dust, we know a leopard can never change his spots; we like to eat, drink and be merry, and we know that for every thing there is a season.
If ever there were times I resent my unusual childhood — anxious, in my early days of writing, that I’d never develop a style suited to the century I lived in — I’ve come to be grateful for it. I understand now that the King James Bible is not merely a great work of art that is also the basis of a faith but that it also represents the extraordinary power of storytelling — not least its ability to convey vast and complex ideas. A single chapter of the Old Testament can rival the longest and most sophisticated Russian novels for tales of intrigue, love, betrayal and courage, while the parables of the New
Testament distil revolutionary and challenging concepts into brief, lucid fables, easily passed on by word of mouth.
But it’s the King James Bible as a radical political text that most excites me. Its status as a pillar of the literary canon has given it a coating of dust but it’s a blood-soaked book, drawing on the work of the martyred William Tyndale, and created in act of rebellion against a state that denied its citizens freedom of conscience.
When copies of the Bible in English were smuggled in wine barrels across the Channel, they were discovered by the bishops and burned on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. So it has come to represent for me a kind of ideal of what literature should be: artistically exhilarating, of course, but also inclined to be dangerous.