Why read historical novels?
Steve Cox, author of the Tom Tyler series and good friend of Timepieces, gives his own take
There are several reasons for doing so:
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
– L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between
We do it to learn about the past, to meet people from other times and cultures. And we do it to learn about ourselves. After all, we are fundamentally the same people as were here (or there) centuries ago. So, historical fiction enables us to touch, somehow, those people and live their experience in a more visceral way than by reading history textbooks.
“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.”
– Nora Ephron
Fiction of any kind can offer an escape from today’s world. The past is very useful for this. It’s more settled and feels more secure than our day-to-day lives - often unstable with world events usually beyond our influence.
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
– James Baldwin
Stories built around real events can also provide insight into the present. History unfolds through interconnected cycles: small personal decisions, wider social movements and enormous political forces. Understanding what happened in the past helps us recognise what may be happening again.
At the most personal level, fictional characters facing difficult choices can offer us knowledge, strategies and understanding that we can carry into our own lives. (Ed’s note: Who hasn’t been inspired by Churchill?)
But me? Why do I read historical fiction? I think it’s partly a way of testing my own character. I love learning about history and about people living through challenging situations. I read about fictional people and wonder what I would do in their situation. How would I respond to that crisis? Sometimes I imagine that I would handle things better than the protagonist. At other times, the story illuminates a part of me I know would fail the test.
After all, we are all works in progress. Growing up takes a lifetime and, in my case, lots of books.
 | A guest post by
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As I wrote on my first post for Timepieces, explaining why I now prefer historical to science fiction:
'I do miss the old millennium, all of 27 years ago, when, the world seemed more sane, the most extreme, conspiratorial and hateful voices maintaining a much lower profile. Before 9/11 - the 25th anniversary of which is rapidly approaching - since when so much has changed for the worse. By contrast with the late 20th century, the present often feels exhausting, too absurd to want to think about for long; the future, even more so. The past, by contrast, more easily casts an illusion of comprehensibility, of manageability, for being more contained.'
The past certainly seems a more approachable country, even if its easier to get to the future.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-205748411
Undeniably, the present and the future feel unstable and worrying. I have often caught myself looking back longingly to days when life seemed simpler and safer. As a post WW2 baby, I’m lucky to have lived through some of the most stable and prosperous years this country has ever known. Yet the second Elizabethan period was an exceptional time. Few eras have ever offered ordinary citizens such comfortable lives. As a keen genealogist, I spend a lot of time digging about in records of the lives of the people who have gone before us, and invariably I find myself thinking ‘I’m glad I wasn’t alive then!’ High infant mortality, chronic air pollution , unsafe drinking water, child labour in mines and mills and low life expectancy for adults are just a few of the trials of everyday life that have been consigned to history in the UK. War after war consumed entire generations of young men, and women had no agency over their own lives, either financially or physically. My own great grandmother watched her sixth child, her only daughter, die of pulmonary failure caused by air pollution, aged just six months, on Christmas Day 1916. And she just had to get on with it. Life was incredibly hard in the past, and looking back helps me keep things in perspective. Yes, these are worrying times, but all times are worrying. It is human nature to look into the future with trepidation. Back when the global population reached two billion, the received wisdom was that the world could not sustain a population of three billion. Yet here we are approaching nine billion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting for a moment that the current global political and environmental climate are nothing to worry about. I’m suggesting that if history has taught me anything, it is to appreciate the lives we have.