Mad, bad, and dangerous to know: Three historical novels
Emma Donoghue. Image source: The Idle Woman
Jorge Luis Borges' 1939 story "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" brilliantly illustrates the impossibility of writing historical fiction without anachronism. After a vast number of rough drafts and "thousands of manuscript pages" Pierre Menard produces a fraction of Cervantes' Don Quixote: "the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part One, and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter." In the translation of Anthony Bonner,
He did not want to compose another Don Quixote—which would be so easy—but the Don Quixote. It is unnecessary to add that his aim was never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. . .
'To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twentieth century it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have passed, charged with the most complex happenings—among them, to mention only one, that same Don Quixote'. . .The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is infinitely richer. [1]
As Borges' droll thought-experiment demonstrates, a present-day novel set in the past, even if it is impeccably accurate, is inflected anachronistically with both the author's and reader's knowledge of the intervening history, and with our experience of vastly different cultures (both material and non-material), sensibilities and conventions. When such a novel introduces inaccuracies of diction or fact, the sense of falsity is heightened.
So with the understanding that anachronism in the genre is unavoidable (but also has degrees), below I comment on three historical novels. Each of the three novels has a female protagonist, who could be described respectively by the three adjectives in Lady Caroline Lamb's description of Lord Byron: "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."
Mad: Margaret Cavendish of Margaret the First
Cover of Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton, Catapult, 2016. Image source: Catapult Books
. . .I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither power, time nor occasion, to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet, rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own. . .
—Margaret Cavendish, "To The Reader," in The Description of a New World,
called The Blazing World (1666) [2]
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, lived during a time of cataclysmic social upheaval. As Margaret Lucas, a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria during the English Civil War, at age 21 in 1644 she went with the queen into French exile. There Margaret met and married William Cavendish, Marquess (later Duke) of Newcastle-on-Tyne; he was a recently widowed Royalist general and 30 years her senior.
Seven years into their marriage Margaret began to write and publish books under her own name, which was highly unusual for the time. What was also quite unusual was that her writing had the full support and financial backing of her husband. In his prefatory poem to The Blazing World, after comparing her to Columbus, who "only discovered" a new world, he wrote of his wife, "But your creating Fancy, thought it fit / To make your World of Nothing, but pure Wit." Ultimately Margaret produced a dozen volumes of poetry, plays, romances, utopian fantasies, philosophical essays, biography and autobiography.
After the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 Margaret became a well-known figure in London, and was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. Crowds would gather at her public appearances; she was nicknamed "Mad Madge" for her eccentricities in dress, behavior, and thought. Samuel Pepys described her in his diary as "a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman," and Dorothy Osborne wrote in a letter to Sir William Temple that "there are many soberer people in Bedlam." In the 20th century, Virginia Woolf wrote of her that "there is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her." [3]
Of course, women have always been under greater pressure to conform to social expectations, with contempt and ridicule among the milder punishments for overstepping their bounds. As Kate Lilley writes in her introduction to The Blazing World and Other Writings, "the number of substantial, elaborately produced books she wrote and published under her own name and at considerable expense, in a career spanning twenty years, constituted her most radical and deliberate infringement of contemporary proprieties." [4]
"Margaret Daughter to Thos. Lucas Esqr. of Essex 2d. wife to Wm. Duke of Newcastle," portrait by Peter Lely, 1665. Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Danielle Dutton's slim novel Margaret the First recounts Margaret's story from her own perspective. She is portrayed as prefiguring our time in multiple ways: a proto-feminist writer of fantasy fiction unconstrained by traditional gender expectations (Cavendish described The Blazing World as "hermaphroditic" and on occasion wore men's clothes, like the disguised character "Travellia" in her novella "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" (1656)). The novel does not attempt to delve deeply into Margaret's psychology, but portrays her largely through her extravagant self-presentation.
To give the flavor of the book, here is Margaret relating her reception among the Dutch (she and her husband moved to Antwerp in 1648):
To my growing delight, I was a hit, my mind, I wrote, a "swarm of bees." That August I cast off my years of mourning, sent maids scurrying down the halls with stacks of black gowns in their arms. To the final parties of the season I wore a rainbow of new dresses I'd had made—one bright as a fiery beam, one as green as leaves. "After all," I told my husband, "dressing is the poetry of women." He heartily agreed. Had I heard it somewhere? I couldn't say. I took to wearing feathered hats like ladies in the streets. (p. 56)
This scene occurs in August 1649. However, Margaret would have been unlikely to don colorful, festive dresses little more than six months after the trial and execution of Charles I, and only five months after her husband's estates had been confiscated.
By the way, the word "hit" employed to mean "a popular success" dates from the early 19th century, not the mid-17th. Danielle Dutton, doubtless, does not care. Her project is to bring Margaret into our time, rather than transport the reader into hers—to recuperate "Mad Madge" as a genderqueer literary pioneer. But I confess that I find Margaret's voice and thoughts as expressed in her writing to be far more strange and wonderful than Dutton's imagined version of her.
Bad: Mary Saunders of Slammerkin
Cover of Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue, Virago, 2000. Image source: Delphine Woods
In her 2001 New York Times review of Slammerkin, Laura Jamison wrote that it was "a heady, colorful romp of a novel." Um, no. A "colorful romp" makes it sound like a female version of Tom Jones; instead Slammerkin is more like a version of William Hogarth's "The Harlot's Progress" from the perspective of its doomed heroine Moll Hackabout.
Donoghue, a scholar of literature and sexuality, knows her historical setting (her Passions Between Women and Inseparable were two of my favorite books of 2022), and the novel is based on an actual 1764 trial. The title is an 18th-century term with a double meaning, both "a loose gown" and "a slovenly [with the additional implication of unchaste] woman." But Donoghue wears her learning lightly. She writes with all the fierce energy of her 14-year-old protagonist's yearnings, and brings both 18th-century London and her flawed heroine to vivid, visceral life.
Was it any wonder, then, that she preferred to dawdle away the last of the afternoon at the Dials, where seven streets thrust away in seven different directions, and there were stalls heaped with silks, and live carp butting in barrels, and gulls cackling overhead, and the peddler with his coats lined with laces and ribbons of colours Mary could taste on her tongue: yellow like butter, ink black, and the blue of fire? Where boys half her size smoked long pipes and spat black on the cobbles, and sparrows bickered over fragments of piecrust? Where Mary couldn't hear her own breath over the thump of feet and the clatter of carts and the church bells, postmen's bells, fiddles and tambourines, and the rival bawls of vendors and mongers of lavender and watercress and curds-and-whey and all the things there were in the world? What d'ye lack, what d'ye lack? (p.8)
It's the allurements of the Seven Dials that are Mary's downfall: as she tries to purchase a red ribbon so that she can have something pretty in her life, the seller demands a kiss in exchange, and then backs her against a wall and rapes her. She becomes pregnant, and is thrown out of her house by her mother. She returns to the Seven Dials, but this time to become one of the girls walking the streets and luring cullies to survive. An (only slightly) older and (much) more experienced prostitute, Doll Higgins, shows her the ropes, and a fierce friendship develops.
Expelled from her family, Mary rejects them in turn:
Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing. (p. 84)
The simile of the shipwreck is perhaps a touch literary for the unspoken thought of the now 15-year-old Mary, but Donoghue makes few such missteps.
Although Doll and Mary watch out for each other, appalling things befall the pair, and soon Mary is forced to flee London and a murderous pimp. Although she reinvents herself in a remote town, finding work as a maid and seamstress, her past inevitably catches up with her.
The novel depicts the crushing social and economic forces and sexual double standards that ruled women's lives in the Georgian era. As a maid or a seamstress, Mary Saunders faces a life of unremitting toil. The 19th-century sociologist and reformer Harriet Martineau wrote that "prostitution is fed by constant accession from starved or overwearied dressmakers"; in seeking a better life Mary is trapped by her class and her gender. [5]
Donoghue portrays Mary in all her complexity. She shows us that Mary is not only a victim; she has agency and makes choices, even if many of them are unwise, or bring harm to herself or others. Be forewarned: Mary's world, and her fate, are hard and grim.
Dangerous to know: Elizabeth Cree of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree
Cover of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1995. Image source: Internet Archive
Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) notoriously includes a flashback, narrated by one of the characters, that turns out to be false. Some viewers feel that the sequence violates an unwritten law of cinema: if we see something onscreen, it must actually happen in the world of the characters. However, Hitchcock signals from the opening credits, in which a stage curtain rises on a view of modern-day London, that the distinction between role-playing and real life is itself illusory. The film is also set in the world of the theater, and the two main characters are a famous actress (played by the famous actress Marlene Dietrich) and a drama student (Jane Wyman). As critic Robin Wood describes the film, "Acting is a leading motif: both women act parts continually and habitually, so that there is constant doubt about the real nature of each." [6] Or, I would say, the film suggests that our "real nature" is often malleable, unstable, and shaped by circumstances. Actors just visibly embody this truth that the rest of us strive to conceal.
Literature has a much longer tradition of unreliable narrators, of course. And particularly when a narrator (or even a character) is an actor—a professional dissembler—the reader must be on guard: disguises, false identities, and falsehoods are sure to follow.
Peter Ackroyd is a biographer (Dickens, 1990) and historian (London: The Biography, 2000) as well as a novelist. The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (to give the novel its U.S. title [7]) mixes real figures from 19th century London, such as Karl Marx, George Gissing, and the cross-dressing music-hall star Dan Leno, with Ackroyd's inventions. These include the title character, who in 1881 is hanged for killing her husband Jack by poisoning him with arsenic—not a spoiler, as the hanging occurs in the novel's first sentence—and a Jack-the-Ripper-like serial killer who mutilates his victims and creates gruesome tableaux with their body parts. There is a dual mystery in The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: who is the serial killer stalking the Limehouse district, and why does Elizabeth Cree murder her husband?
Be forewarned that Ackroyd describes the serial killer's murders, narrated in the first person, in grisly detail. There's a reason for the repellent relish with which the killings are described, as it obscures the identity of the murderer. But should you be tempted to read The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, I recommend skipping these sections unless you find entertainment in descriptions of torture and dismemberment.
For a historian, Ackroyd makes a number of surprising errors. Early in the novel, Jack Cree records in his diary a visit to the attic room of a prostitute:
There was a soiled mattress upon the floor, while on the walls she had pasted photographs of Walter Butt, George Byron and other idols of the stage. (p. 28)
This is an odd detail for Ackroyd to include. The entry is dated "September 6, 1880," but in 1880 it would be highly unlikely for an impoverished prostitute to own photographic prints. The photographs on the walls would had to have been cheap reproductions cut from newspapers or flyers. However, the mass reproduction of photographs on paper using the half-tone or rotogravure processes only became widespread after 1880; the first rotogravure newspaper supplements were published in the 1910s. [8]
It's possible that these could be photographic cartes de visite or cabinet cards bought at a photographer's or stationer's, which could feature actors or other public figures; in the Victorian era middle-class families collected these cards and preserved them in albums.
Dan Leno in female costume by William Davey, early 1900s, published by J. Beagles & Co. Image source: National Portrait Gallery London NPG Ax160245
However, such cards would seem to be beyond the means of a street prostitute: a Victorian advertisement lists the price of a cabinet card (about the size of a modern postcard) as three shillings, nearly a week's wage for a factory worker, while the smaller carte de visite cost a shilling and sixpence. It's very doubtful that an alcoholic prostitute barely surviving in a dismal garret and drinking her gin out of a chamberpot (!) would have such costly items pasted to the walls.
More egregious errors: "Dan Leno. . .was no longer the anxious young comic whom Lambeth Marsh Lizzie first met in 1864; now, sixteen years later, he was the established star of the halls who was billed as 'The Funniest Man on Earth'" (p. 168). Dan Leno might well have been anxious when onstage in 1864, as he was then only 3 years old; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives his birth date as 20 December 1860. Elsewhere Lizzie describes him during their first rehearsals together as "only fifteen" (p. 108), but this is off by a dozen years. It's strange that Ackroyd, the author of histories of drag (Dressing Up, 1979) and the theater (The English Actor, 2023) should make such an easily-checked mistake.
Speaking of errors of chronology, in his diary entry for "September 26, 1880" Jack Cree records that "I went back to New Cross and listened to my wife playing a new tune by Charles Dibdin on the piano" (p. 192). A new tune by the prolific Dibdin would be remarkable indeed in 1880, since (according to the ODNB) he died in 1814; he was one of the favorite songwriters of Jane Austen.
"Let Bucks & let bloods to praise London a-gree / Oh the joys of the country my Jewel for me / Where sweet is the flow'r that the May bush adorns / And how charming to gather it but for the thorns. . ." Charles Dibdin's "The joys of the Country," from a manuscript of vocal music in Jane Austen's hand, copied c.1790–c.1805. Jane Austen House Museum CHWJA/19/3. Image source: Internet Archive
But my main objection to The Trial of Elizabeth Cree isn't the sloppiness of Ackroyd's evocation of its period. It's that Ackroyd exchanges the slow building of suspense (about how the lives of the serial killer and the other characters will intersect) for a surprise twist at the end (the killer isn't the character whom we've been led to believe). Perhaps this is Ackroyd's homage to Victorian melodramas and sensation novels, but I found it to be the final miscalculation in a disappointing book.
Ackroyd's novel has been adapted as a feature film, The Limehouse Golem (2016), starring no less an actor than Bill Nighy as the police inspector pursuing the murderer. It's also been adapted as an opera, Elizabeth Cree (2017), composed by Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts with a libretto by Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning librettist Mark Campbell. Clearly, then, my negative reaction to the novel is not shared by everyone.
- Jorge Luis Borges. Fictions. Edited and with an Introduction by Anthony Kerrigan. Calder & Boyars, 1974, pp. 42–51. UK edition of Ficciones, Grove Press, 1962.
- Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, Penguin, 2004, p. 124.
- Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 18 March 1667 [Old Style] / 1668 [New Style]; https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/03/18/; Dorothy Osborne, in Kingsley Hart, ed, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, Folio Society, n.d., p. 58; Virginia Woolf, "The Duchess of Newcastle" in The Common Reader: First Series, Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 78. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822010374056&seq=92
- Kate Lilley, "Introduction," in Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, p. xi.
- Harriet Martineau quoted in Samantha B. Vance, Revisiting Dickens, "Prostitution in Victorian Britain - Presentation Page." https://revisitingdickens.wordpress.com/prostitution-victorian/
- Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited. Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 80.
- The U.K. title is Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. The U.S. title seems a distinct improvement.
- Rachel A. Mustalish, "The development of photomechanical printing processes in the late 19th Century," Topics in Photographic Preservation, Volume 7, Article 10, 1997, pp. 73-87. https://resources.culturalheritage.org/pmgtopics/1997-volume-seven/07_10_Mustalish.html; Library of Congress, "The Rotogravure Process," in Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures, 1914 to 1919. https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-rotogravures/articles-and-essays/the-rotogravure-process/. By the way, "Walter Butt" and "George Byron" seem to be Ackroyd's inventions; I've been unable to trace any performers of those names in the 1870s.
