When does a novel cease to be historical, and become contemporary? The Historical Novel Society defines historical fiction as novels 'written at least fifty years after the events described, or written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events.'
In 1930, Sellar and Yeatman said that history ended in 1918 when America became Top Nation and history came to a.
More recently, Francis Fukuyama suggested that history ended with the fall of Communism in Europe in 1989.
My personal definition is that history is events that are not within the memory of the person who is reading or writing about them, or studying them. But as a lecturer in adult education, I sometimes find myself teaching subjects that are history to me, but that some of my students lived through.
Conversely, the Cold War is part of the history curriculum in English schools. No-one now of school age was alive at the time of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. But for many who teach the subject, the Cold War was central to their view of world affairs in their childhood and early adulthood. Few, if any, of the post-war generation expected the Wall to come down in their lifetimes.
Yet the Berlin Wall existed for just 28 years. It is barely a blip in the whole history of Europe. It will probably hardly rate a mention in the history books of the future.
There’s an important point here for historians, and especially for writers of historical fiction. We lump together several centuries and call them ‘the Anglo Saxon period’ or ‘the Middle Ages.’ But these are not homogeneous periods, any more than the twentieth century was. Change was slower in the past, but it happened. A seventy year old, in any century, will not have the same life experiences, or the same perceptions of his or her world, as a twenty year old. And events which may have had a major impact on the lives of people in the past may barely be mentioned in the history books.
Hi – thanks for the link to this. I haven’t yet worked out how to find interesting blogs, so I just wait for links and recommendations!
ReplyDeleteYou make some very good points here. I have experienced this in a number of ways:
As a parent, I find my children taking so much for granted – from central heating to cartons of fresh orange juice, from calculators to colour television – that was not available during my childhood. (And don’t even get me started on Google and the iPlayer.) Even to me, listing the things we didn’t have makes that era seem mediaeval by comparison, yet I know it wasn’t. It was just as modern-thinking and technologically minded as today.
Again as a parent, my children have been known to ask me questions like “Was World War Two when you were a child?” despite the fact that they have studied WW2 at school, they know which year I was born, and I have explained to them about my own parents being at Primary School during the war years.
I am even guilty of this myself: although I knew to the day when my late mother-in-law was born, I still found myself at a total loss to know whether her childhood home would have been lit by oil lamps, gas or electricity. I was too embarrassed to ask what I knew was probably an extremely stupid question, and now I shall never know.
And finally, although to my annoyance I can’t think of a single example at the moment, I have often been reading an article in the paper where some twenty-something journalist talks about the way things were in the Seventies, for example, and I think, “Hold on, that was the Sixties. It wasn’t like that in the Seventies, it really wasn’t. Am I going mad, or is this person writing complete rubbish?”
We lump together several centuries... Change was slower in the past, but it happened.
I think you may have just done the same thing there yourself. (Disclaimer: I’m not a historian, I just like to read about it. And while I do know that until about twenty years ago, correct usage was ‘an historian’, I have no idea what is correct now...)
In the future, people may think that a society that took almost a hundred years to move from the internal combustion engine to limited space travel was fairly slow-moving. We only see it as fast because we’re very close to it, in the same way that the bushes as the side of the railway line flash past so fast you can hardly see them, while the countryside in the distance lies peacefully still so you have time to study it.
And I’m guessing that a society where the language moved from that of Chaucer to that of Caxton in less than a hundred years must have been pretty fast-moving in at least some respects.
I haven’t commented on any other posts yet, but I am reading and enjoying!
although I knew to the day when my late mother-in-law was born, I still found myself at a total loss to know whether her childhood home would have been lit by oil lamps, gas or electricity.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that's an unreasonable thing not to have known. Just because something was available doesn't mean everyone had it. My house, built 1904, was orginally lit by gas. My neighbours have told me that some of the houses in the street still weren't fully electrified when they moved here, close to fifty years ago. I imagine in areas where gas wasn't laid on, some people were still using oil lamps up to (what we would consider) relatively recently.
some twenty-something journalist
Yes, it's really annoying when they get all excited about a 'new' story that everyone else has known about and taken for granted for years.
A much worse instance was this week on 'Edwardian Farm' when one of the presenters, a professional archaeologist, said he thought fish and chips was a thing of the seventies. As someone who can remember buying sixpenn'orth of chips wrapped in newspaper in the '60s, I was appalled.
a society that took almost a hundred years to move from the internal combustion engine to limited space travel was fairly slow-moving
It's interesting to look at it in terms of lifesapans. Someone who was born around 1830, before rail travel had really begun, could have lived to see aeroplanes. Someone born in the 1860s could have lived to read about the atomic bomb - in fact people born in the 1870s were involved in the decision to manufacture it.
Thanks for commenting!