History is People (1971)
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sutcliff_spaceSutcliff's paper for a conference held in Exeter by the journal Children's Literature in Education. It was later printed in the 1973 anthology Children and Literature: Views and Reviews, edited by Virginia Haviland, which you can read at Internet Archive. This is the essay that duskpeterson linked a generous excerpt of in the comments of the "Combined Ops" post (but wait, there's more!) It's one of her longer essays at 3900 words and it's full of interesting details.
A note on some of the people discussed: Two of the quoted letter-writers, Catharine Parr and the Earl of Sunderland, also feature in Sutcliff's enjoyable 1960 non-fiction book Houses and History. Monkey Domville and grandson are mentioned in her memoir Blue Remembered Hills. And if anyone here can identify the Roman officer's letter from Alexandria or the article from the Sunday Times, I'd be very grateful.
I've made two small changes from the text from Children and Literature: "Shut ip, Dickie" to "Shut up, Dickie", and noted in brackets that "Edward" Spencer's given name was Henry.
There is one major spoiler for The Mark of the Horse Lord.
HISTORY IS PEOPLE
All writers with an interest in their work that goes beyond the bread-and-butter level, are aware of some kind of aim, something that they feel they are doing or trying to do. And this I think is, or at any rate should be, especially true of writers for the young. You, reading this, have formed your reading tastes, or had them formed for you; you have also done your growing up (well, most of it; I suppose one never quite finishes until the day one dies) and become the sort of people, more or less, that you are going to be for the rest of your lives, allowing for the natural differences between, say, eighteen and eighty. At any rate, in writing for you, nobody has to feel responsibility for helping to form you, or your tastes. But the reading child is liable to absorb ideas from books which may remain with him for the rest of his life, and even play some part in determining what sort of person he is going to become. Along with most of my fellow writers, I am aware of the responsibilities of my job; and I do try to put over to the child reading any book of mine some kind of ethic, a set of values beyond the colour-television-two-cars-in-the-garage variety. I keep well clear of the treasure-hunt theme (with its under-tones of something for nothing) which in one form or another does seem to rather dog children’s literature; I try to show the reader that doing the right/kind/brave/honest thing doesn’t have to result in any concrete reward (help an eccentric old lady across the road and she will send you to ballet school), and that this doesn’t matter; the reward lies in having done the right/kind/brave/honest thing, in having kept faith with one’s own integrity – and probably in being given a more difficult thing to do next time.
Another responsibility of the writer for children which I try to do my best to fulfil is simply to supply them with words. This may sound trivial and obvious. But the words are man’s means, not only of communicating, but of giving shape and manageability to his own thoughts and ideas. I have heard really tragic stories of children and young people failing in all-important exams or in interviews for jobs, not for any lack of intelligence, knowing perfectly well the answers to questions put to them, knowing what they wanted to say, but simply lacking the vocabulary with which to communicate in plain English. Since children learn their English from story books for pleasure as well as from lesson books in school, this is an appalling indictment of their reading matter, and one which we who write books for them must do something about. America has of late years begun the scientific production of books with graded vocabularies, two hundred words, four hundred words and so on. You match the size of the vocabulary to the age of the child and it all sounds perfectly splendid. But this is to rob children of the beckoning splendour of words they do not yet understand (It matters remarkably little to a child that he does not understand a particular word; it’s the flavour that counts.) and possibly of all curiosity as to words later. This is the eighth Deadly Sin, and I don’t care how scientific it is!
My kind of book, the historical novel, is sometimes looked on as being an easy retreat from the complications and restrictions inherent in writing a modern story for the young. This is unfair! It is true that one has greater freedom in some ways. In Roman Britain or Norman England a boy of fourteen or fifteen can play a man’s part, which is unlikely in the modern world; and the writer can make use of situations which would be far-fetched or even impossible in the present day; and there’s a kind of safety barrier which makes it possible to deal with harsher realities than most children can take in their stride, if one were writing of people and events in their own world as they know it. The safety barrier is, I think, becoming less important, both to children themselves and to parents, teachers and librarians; but I don’t believe that I could make my hero kill himself, as I did in The Mark of the Horse Lord, in a modern story set in everyday England. (One might get away with it in a story set in a very far-off and very “different” place, say New Guinea, but this would be merely to substitute distance of place and culture for distance of time, as a safety barrier.)
This is all true, but greater freedom is not in itself a bad thing; and there are plenty of extra problems to set against it, beside the obvious ones of research and historical accuracy. There is the ever-present danger of spilling over into cloak-and-dagger. There is the necessity to keep people from being engulfed in the trimmings. (This can happen very easily, especially if the garnered results of the writer’s research have not been properly digested before being used – nothing is worse for a historical story than undigested fragments of historical background!) There is the problem of making the people as real and individual as their modern counterparts, while at the same time not turning them into modern men and women in fancy dress. There is the problem, too, of the spoken word. Victorian writers, and even those of a somewhat later date, had no difficulty. They saw nothing ludicrous in “Alas! fair youth, it grieves men to see thee in this plight. Would that I had the power to strike these fetters from thy tender limbs.” Josephine Tey, whose death I shall never cease to lament, called this “Writing forsoothly.” A slightly different variant is known in the trade as as “Gadzookery.” Nowadays this is out of fashion; and some writers go to the other extreme and make the people of Classical Greece or Mediaeval England speak modern colloquial English. This is perhaps nearer to the truth of the spirit, since the people in question would have spoken the modern colloquial tongue of their place and time. But, personally, I find it destroys the atmosphere when a young Norman Knight says to his Squire, “Shut up, Dickie, you’re getting too big for your boots.” Myself, I try for a middle course, avoiding both Gadzookery and modern colloquialism; a frankly “made up” form that has the right sound to it, as Kipling did also. I try to catch the rhythm of a tongue, the tune that it plays on the ear, Welsh or Gaelic as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, the sensible workmanlike language which one feels the Latin of the ordinary Roman citizen would have translated into. It is extraordinary what can be done by the changing or transposing of a single word, or using a perfectly usual one in a slightly unusual way: “I beg your pardon” changed into “I ask your pardon.” . . . But I would emphasize that this is not done by any set rule of thumb; I simply play it by ear as I go along.
I seem to have written the word “people” a great many times; and this I think must be because I feel so strongly that history is People – and people not so very unlike ourselves. This is a favourite thumping-tub of mine, and I now propose to thump it for awhile.
The way people act is conditioned by the social custom of their day and age – even the way they think and feel with what one might call their outer layers. To take a very simple and obvious example: The men of the first Elizabethan age (and, Heaven knows, they were a tough enough lot!) cried easily and without shame in public. The rising generation of this second Elizabethan age are returning to much the same feeling, that one’s emotions are not for hiding; but the men of my generation, my father’s and grandfather’s, were so conditioned in their extreme youth to the idea that men simply didn’t, that by the time they were fifteen or sixteen they couldn’t, even in private, except for such things as the death of a wife or child. But that’s not to say that they feel, or felt, any less about the things they would have cried about, four hundred years ago.
I know there are two schools of thought about whether or not human nature actually changes, some maintaining that it does, some – me amongst them – that it doesn’t. I believe most strongly that People Don’t Change, that under the changing surface patterns of behaviour, the fundamental qualities and emotions and relationships remain the same. – Very much the qualities and emotions and relationships, incidentally, that one finds in Westerns; which is one reason why I like Westerns, and why most of the people in my own books would be perfectly at home in Laramie, while I would have no hesitation in sending The Virginian north of Hadrian’s Wall to recover the Eagle of a lost Legion.
But even the surface patterns don’t alter perhaps so much as one tends to think; and it is possible, sometimes, through a letter or a line of ancient poetry or some small object held in the hand, to catch glimpses of people separated from us by two hundred or two thousand years, so like ourselves that for the moment it is almost frightening because for that moment it makes nonsense of time.
About ten years ago, on a Hellenic cruise, I visited the museum at Heraklion, and spent a happy afternoon among the treasures excavated from the Palace of Knossos: octopus and dolphin jars, inlaid weapons, jewellery of intensely yellow gold, ivory bull-dancers in mid-leap. In the corner of one room was a case of little ornaments and children’s toys; amongst them a tiny pottery tree with five or six branches, each ending in a fat little bird. It was painted in stripes, pale and pretty as an old-fashioned peppermint stick, the most completely charming thing. My first feeling upon seeing it was a small sharp shock of delight, and my first thought, “How I should have loved to have that when I was a little girl!” It wasn’t until the moment after, that I remembered that the little girl who must have loved it, and felt that same shock of delight on first seeing it, had been dead for three thousand years or so.
Then Homer has that lovely bit in the Iliad, just before Hector goes out from beleaguered Troy on the final sally that ends in his death. He is saying goodbye to his wife and baby son, and
How many infants since Homer’s day must have been terrified by the sight of father in an over-splendid hat? I know one myself, when we were both about five. He was supposed (though he turned brilliant later) to be slightly retarded; and for this, his Nannie held his parents to be entirely responsible. They had taken him to see his Grandfather – known throughout the Navy as “Monkey” Domville, for reasons which were painfully obvious – in full dress for some Court function; and the poor child, who was quite used to his Grandfather in the usual way, had taken one look at him under a gold-laced cocked hat, screamed wildly, and according to Nannie, fallen in a fit and never been the same child since.
There’s another tiny story about Hector and his son which I like: that the boy’s real name was Astyanax, but Hector called him Scamander after the river which ran through the Plain of Troy. No reason is given for the father’s choice of name, and one can only assume that Astyanax was a wet baby. The small family joke may be Homer’s rather than Hector’s, but it is still of respectable antiquity, and it’s a joke that might quite easily have been made this morning.
In Britain, very early letters, etc., have very little chance to survive the climate and conditions; but everyone knows how long papyrus holds together in the dry air of Egypt; and there is in existence a delightful letter dating from Roman times, from a young officer of the Legions stationed at Alexandria, to his mother. (To this day, it is generally to the mother rather than the father that a boy turns when he wants a bit extra.) “I hope you are well as I am. Please send me two hundred Drachmae. I’ve bought a mule cart and that has taken all my money; so dear Mother, do please send me my month’s allowance. Valarius’ mother sent him plenty of olive oil and a parcel of meat and two hundred drachmae! Please send me some money and don’t leave me like this. My brother wrote to me but only sent me a pair of drawers. Please answer this letter quickly. Give my Greeting to all at home. Your loving Son.”
From Mediaeval times onwards, of course, many English letters have survived. I cherish extracts from three in particular: one Mediaeval, one dating from Tudor times, and one from the Civil War.
The first is a lovely piece of husbandcoaxing, written in 1443 when scarlet gowns were the height of fashion. On September 28th of that year, Margaret Paston, wife of a Country Knight, wrote to her husband who was in London and suffering from a bad leg of some kind: “I would ye were at home, if it were for your ease, and your sore might be as well looked to here as it is where ye be now; liefer than a gown, though it were of scarlet.”
History doesn’t record whether the good knight took the hint; but I hope so much that he did.
The Tudor one is from Catharine Parr to Tom Seymour, Lord High Admiral of England. One tends to think of her as dull and middle-aged; in fact, she was a woman of great charm and intelligence, and she was only thirty-six when she died. She was married off to old men and widowed twice, and was already engaged, for the first time by her own choice, to Tom Seymour when Henry VIII cast his eye on her. And after his death she went to her own house at Chelsea; and Tom came courting her again. They were married, and when their child was born, she died. The recent T.V. serial, “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” did less than justice to her relationship with Seymour, suggesting that after the King’s death she had no longer any wish to marry him, and was forced into it for reasons of State. Reasons of State there were, for the marriage, and entanglements with the Princess Elizabeth too; but whatever the Lord High Admiral’s feelings for the ex-Queen (my own guess is that he was one of those men capable of being genuinely in love with two different women at the same time), her letters to him, written from Chelsea in the months before their wedding, are the letters of a woman serenely and very happily in love.
And again she writes a note to Tom, who was in the habit of walking across from Westminster through the fields in the early summer mornings. “I pray you let me have knowledge overnight at hour you will come, that your portress may wait at the gate to the fields for you.”
Last of all, the Civil War letter. Edward Spencer [Henry Spencer], Earl of Sunderland, declared for the King, and five letters which he wrote home from the Royalist army to his young wife are still in existence; the last written just four days before the second battle of Newbury. His adored little three-year-old daughter must have sent him a “Scribble” letter of the kind so often enclosed with a mother’s letter to her husband away from home – to Heaven knows how many servicemen in Heaven knows how many wars since then – for he sends her this message: “Pray bless Poppet for me, and tell her that I would have written to her but that, upon careful consideration, I find it to be uncivil to return an answer to a lady in other characters than her own, which I am not yet learned enough to do.”
Four days later he was killed in action.
Forgive me if I have meandered too long among my favourite bits and pieces; thumping my favourite tub. It is important to me, all this, because History is People and I try to teach history. The man’s eye view of history, not the God’s eye view. It is because history books must of necessity take the God’s eye view, that they can so easily and so often become dull; that, and because they so often break it up into set, static pictures, each, as it were, separately framed (often by the reigns of succeeding monarchs), instead of treating it as a living and continuous process, of which we are a part, and of which our descendants (supposing we haven’t blown the world up) will be a part also. I feel it to be enormously important that the young should be given this sense of continuity, that they should be given the feeling of their roots behind them. To know and really understand something of where one came from helps one to understand and cope better with where one is now – and where one is going to. And as we today are standing too near our own particular stretch of history to be able to make out the pattern and “see how the story ends,” so I feel that history can best be brought to life for children through people in the like situation with regard to their own stretch of history, people standing too close to see the pattern, and who, like us, “don’t know how the story ends.” That’s my justification for being a historical novelist and not a historian. But they must be people with whom the children can identify through the fundamental sameness – like calling to like under the changing surfaces.
Some years ago, I was struck by a Sunday Times article putting forward the theory that the ability to write for children is the result of an unlived pocket of childhood left over in the writer. I think this is very probably true – it was certainly true of Rudyard Kipling and Beatrix Potter, and it is certainly true of me. But I think also that it draws heavily on a feeling for the primitive and fundamental things of life. The young have this feeling very strongly. It is why myths and legends, certainly not meant for children, have been taken over by them. It is one of the reasons why children like Westerns, and why I – as I said before – like them too. Legends and Westerns and my sort of historical novel are all alike in dealing in the big basic themes, comradeship between men, loyalty and treachery and divided loyalty, love and hate, the sense of property, revenge for slain kinsfolk; and of course the age-old struggle between good and evil. As I say, the instinct for this is strong in children; in most adults it has been pushed down, sometimes only a little way, sometimes almost entirely, into the subconscious; but it is always there, forming a common ground on which children’s books can appeal to adult readers. Which is why it is not only unnecessary, but wrong, to write down for children; instead, the child should be drawn out and up. This is why books can play such a great part in a child’s development, enlarging him and giving him a broader and deeper awareness – and why we who write for children carry such terrible responsibility on our shoulders.
So – I have said what I wanted to say. I hope it makes sense to you. It is all true; but in case you think it all sounds too earnest and didactic, I will add one thing more: – that basically, fundamentally, and at the beginning of all things, I merely find, or am found by, a story which I want to tell, which seems to me worth telling, and above all, which I want to hear; and to tell it to the very best of my ability. All the rest, if I’m lucky, is added unto me in the course of the telling.
duskpeterson linked a generous excerpt of in the comments of the "Combined Ops" post (but wait, there's more!) It's one of her longer essays at 3900 words and it's full of interesting details.A note on some of the people discussed: Two of the quoted letter-writers, Catharine Parr and the Earl of Sunderland, also feature in Sutcliff's enjoyable 1960 non-fiction book Houses and History. Monkey Domville and grandson are mentioned in her memoir Blue Remembered Hills. And if anyone here can identify the Roman officer's letter from Alexandria or the article from the Sunday Times, I'd be very grateful.
I've made two small changes from the text from Children and Literature: "Shut ip, Dickie" to "Shut up, Dickie", and noted in brackets that "Edward" Spencer's given name was Henry.
There is one major spoiler for The Mark of the Horse Lord.
HISTORY IS PEOPLE
All writers with an interest in their work that goes beyond the bread-and-butter level, are aware of some kind of aim, something that they feel they are doing or trying to do. And this I think is, or at any rate should be, especially true of writers for the young. You, reading this, have formed your reading tastes, or had them formed for you; you have also done your growing up (well, most of it; I suppose one never quite finishes until the day one dies) and become the sort of people, more or less, that you are going to be for the rest of your lives, allowing for the natural differences between, say, eighteen and eighty. At any rate, in writing for you, nobody has to feel responsibility for helping to form you, or your tastes. But the reading child is liable to absorb ideas from books which may remain with him for the rest of his life, and even play some part in determining what sort of person he is going to become. Along with most of my fellow writers, I am aware of the responsibilities of my job; and I do try to put over to the child reading any book of mine some kind of ethic, a set of values beyond the colour-television-two-cars-in-the-garage variety. I keep well clear of the treasure-hunt theme (with its under-tones of something for nothing) which in one form or another does seem to rather dog children’s literature; I try to show the reader that doing the right/kind/brave/honest thing doesn’t have to result in any concrete reward (help an eccentric old lady across the road and she will send you to ballet school), and that this doesn’t matter; the reward lies in having done the right/kind/brave/honest thing, in having kept faith with one’s own integrity – and probably in being given a more difficult thing to do next time.
Another responsibility of the writer for children which I try to do my best to fulfil is simply to supply them with words. This may sound trivial and obvious. But the words are man’s means, not only of communicating, but of giving shape and manageability to his own thoughts and ideas. I have heard really tragic stories of children and young people failing in all-important exams or in interviews for jobs, not for any lack of intelligence, knowing perfectly well the answers to questions put to them, knowing what they wanted to say, but simply lacking the vocabulary with which to communicate in plain English. Since children learn their English from story books for pleasure as well as from lesson books in school, this is an appalling indictment of their reading matter, and one which we who write books for them must do something about. America has of late years begun the scientific production of books with graded vocabularies, two hundred words, four hundred words and so on. You match the size of the vocabulary to the age of the child and it all sounds perfectly splendid. But this is to rob children of the beckoning splendour of words they do not yet understand (It matters remarkably little to a child that he does not understand a particular word; it’s the flavour that counts.) and possibly of all curiosity as to words later. This is the eighth Deadly Sin, and I don’t care how scientific it is!
My kind of book, the historical novel, is sometimes looked on as being an easy retreat from the complications and restrictions inherent in writing a modern story for the young. This is unfair! It is true that one has greater freedom in some ways. In Roman Britain or Norman England a boy of fourteen or fifteen can play a man’s part, which is unlikely in the modern world; and the writer can make use of situations which would be far-fetched or even impossible in the present day; and there’s a kind of safety barrier which makes it possible to deal with harsher realities than most children can take in their stride, if one were writing of people and events in their own world as they know it. The safety barrier is, I think, becoming less important, both to children themselves and to parents, teachers and librarians; but I don’t believe that I could make my hero kill himself, as I did in The Mark of the Horse Lord, in a modern story set in everyday England. (One might get away with it in a story set in a very far-off and very “different” place, say New Guinea, but this would be merely to substitute distance of place and culture for distance of time, as a safety barrier.)
This is all true, but greater freedom is not in itself a bad thing; and there are plenty of extra problems to set against it, beside the obvious ones of research and historical accuracy. There is the ever-present danger of spilling over into cloak-and-dagger. There is the necessity to keep people from being engulfed in the trimmings. (This can happen very easily, especially if the garnered results of the writer’s research have not been properly digested before being used – nothing is worse for a historical story than undigested fragments of historical background!) There is the problem of making the people as real and individual as their modern counterparts, while at the same time not turning them into modern men and women in fancy dress. There is the problem, too, of the spoken word. Victorian writers, and even those of a somewhat later date, had no difficulty. They saw nothing ludicrous in “Alas! fair youth, it grieves men to see thee in this plight. Would that I had the power to strike these fetters from thy tender limbs.” Josephine Tey, whose death I shall never cease to lament, called this “Writing forsoothly.” A slightly different variant is known in the trade as as “Gadzookery.” Nowadays this is out of fashion; and some writers go to the other extreme and make the people of Classical Greece or Mediaeval England speak modern colloquial English. This is perhaps nearer to the truth of the spirit, since the people in question would have spoken the modern colloquial tongue of their place and time. But, personally, I find it destroys the atmosphere when a young Norman Knight says to his Squire, “Shut up, Dickie, you’re getting too big for your boots.” Myself, I try for a middle course, avoiding both Gadzookery and modern colloquialism; a frankly “made up” form that has the right sound to it, as Kipling did also. I try to catch the rhythm of a tongue, the tune that it plays on the ear, Welsh or Gaelic as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, the sensible workmanlike language which one feels the Latin of the ordinary Roman citizen would have translated into. It is extraordinary what can be done by the changing or transposing of a single word, or using a perfectly usual one in a slightly unusual way: “I beg your pardon” changed into “I ask your pardon.” . . . But I would emphasize that this is not done by any set rule of thumb; I simply play it by ear as I go along.
I seem to have written the word “people” a great many times; and this I think must be because I feel so strongly that history is People – and people not so very unlike ourselves. This is a favourite thumping-tub of mine, and I now propose to thump it for awhile.
The way people act is conditioned by the social custom of their day and age – even the way they think and feel with what one might call their outer layers. To take a very simple and obvious example: The men of the first Elizabethan age (and, Heaven knows, they were a tough enough lot!) cried easily and without shame in public. The rising generation of this second Elizabethan age are returning to much the same feeling, that one’s emotions are not for hiding; but the men of my generation, my father’s and grandfather’s, were so conditioned in their extreme youth to the idea that men simply didn’t, that by the time they were fifteen or sixteen they couldn’t, even in private, except for such things as the death of a wife or child. But that’s not to say that they feel, or felt, any less about the things they would have cried about, four hundred years ago.
I know there are two schools of thought about whether or not human nature actually changes, some maintaining that it does, some – me amongst them – that it doesn’t. I believe most strongly that People Don’t Change, that under the changing surface patterns of behaviour, the fundamental qualities and emotions and relationships remain the same. – Very much the qualities and emotions and relationships, incidentally, that one finds in Westerns; which is one reason why I like Westerns, and why most of the people in my own books would be perfectly at home in Laramie, while I would have no hesitation in sending The Virginian north of Hadrian’s Wall to recover the Eagle of a lost Legion.
But even the surface patterns don’t alter perhaps so much as one tends to think; and it is possible, sometimes, through a letter or a line of ancient poetry or some small object held in the hand, to catch glimpses of people separated from us by two hundred or two thousand years, so like ourselves that for the moment it is almost frightening because for that moment it makes nonsense of time.
About ten years ago, on a Hellenic cruise, I visited the museum at Heraklion, and spent a happy afternoon among the treasures excavated from the Palace of Knossos: octopus and dolphin jars, inlaid weapons, jewellery of intensely yellow gold, ivory bull-dancers in mid-leap. In the corner of one room was a case of little ornaments and children’s toys; amongst them a tiny pottery tree with five or six branches, each ending in a fat little bird. It was painted in stripes, pale and pretty as an old-fashioned peppermint stick, the most completely charming thing. My first feeling upon seeing it was a small sharp shock of delight, and my first thought, “How I should have loved to have that when I was a little girl!” It wasn’t until the moment after, that I remembered that the little girl who must have loved it, and felt that same shock of delight on first seeing it, had been dead for three thousand years or so.
Then Homer has that lovely bit in the Iliad, just before Hector goes out from beleaguered Troy on the final sally that ends in his death. He is saying goodbye to his wife and baby son, and
. . . as he spoke, Hector held out his arms for his boy, but the boy shrank back into the nurse’s bosom, crying and scared at the sight of his father, for he was afraid of the gleaming metal and the horsehair crest when he saw that dreadful thing nodding from the top of the helmet. Father and mother laughed aloud, and Hector took off the helmet and set it down on the ground, shining and flashing. Then he kissed his son and dandled him in his hands and prayed aloud to Heaven. . . .
How many infants since Homer’s day must have been terrified by the sight of father in an over-splendid hat? I know one myself, when we were both about five. He was supposed (though he turned brilliant later) to be slightly retarded; and for this, his Nannie held his parents to be entirely responsible. They had taken him to see his Grandfather – known throughout the Navy as “Monkey” Domville, for reasons which were painfully obvious – in full dress for some Court function; and the poor child, who was quite used to his Grandfather in the usual way, had taken one look at him under a gold-laced cocked hat, screamed wildly, and according to Nannie, fallen in a fit and never been the same child since.
There’s another tiny story about Hector and his son which I like: that the boy’s real name was Astyanax, but Hector called him Scamander after the river which ran through the Plain of Troy. No reason is given for the father’s choice of name, and one can only assume that Astyanax was a wet baby. The small family joke may be Homer’s rather than Hector’s, but it is still of respectable antiquity, and it’s a joke that might quite easily have been made this morning.
In Britain, very early letters, etc., have very little chance to survive the climate and conditions; but everyone knows how long papyrus holds together in the dry air of Egypt; and there is in existence a delightful letter dating from Roman times, from a young officer of the Legions stationed at Alexandria, to his mother. (To this day, it is generally to the mother rather than the father that a boy turns when he wants a bit extra.) “I hope you are well as I am. Please send me two hundred Drachmae. I’ve bought a mule cart and that has taken all my money; so dear Mother, do please send me my month’s allowance. Valarius’ mother sent him plenty of olive oil and a parcel of meat and two hundred drachmae! Please send me some money and don’t leave me like this. My brother wrote to me but only sent me a pair of drawers. Please answer this letter quickly. Give my Greeting to all at home. Your loving Son.”
From Mediaeval times onwards, of course, many English letters have survived. I cherish extracts from three in particular: one Mediaeval, one dating from Tudor times, and one from the Civil War.
The first is a lovely piece of husbandcoaxing, written in 1443 when scarlet gowns were the height of fashion. On September 28th of that year, Margaret Paston, wife of a Country Knight, wrote to her husband who was in London and suffering from a bad leg of some kind: “I would ye were at home, if it were for your ease, and your sore might be as well looked to here as it is where ye be now; liefer than a gown, though it were of scarlet.”
History doesn’t record whether the good knight took the hint; but I hope so much that he did.
The Tudor one is from Catharine Parr to Tom Seymour, Lord High Admiral of England. One tends to think of her as dull and middle-aged; in fact, she was a woman of great charm and intelligence, and she was only thirty-six when she died. She was married off to old men and widowed twice, and was already engaged, for the first time by her own choice, to Tom Seymour when Henry VIII cast his eye on her. And after his death she went to her own house at Chelsea; and Tom came courting her again. They were married, and when their child was born, she died. The recent T.V. serial, “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” did less than justice to her relationship with Seymour, suggesting that after the King’s death she had no longer any wish to marry him, and was forced into it for reasons of State. Reasons of State there were, for the marriage, and entanglements with the Princess Elizabeth too; but whatever the Lord High Admiral’s feelings for the ex-Queen (my own guess is that he was one of those men capable of being genuinely in love with two different women at the same time), her letters to him, written from Chelsea in the months before their wedding, are the letters of a woman serenely and very happily in love.
I would not have you think that this, mine honest goodwill towards you, proceeds from any sudden passion. For as truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was free, to marry you before any man I know. However, God withstood my will therein most vehemently for a time; and through His grace and goodness made it possible for me to do what I could not think possible, to utterly renounce mine own will and follow His willingly. It would take too long to write all the story of this matter. If I live, I shall tell it to you myself. I can say nothing; but as My Lady of Suffolk saith, ‘God is a marvellous Man!’
Katryn the Queen.
And again she writes a note to Tom, who was in the habit of walking across from Westminster through the fields in the early summer mornings. “I pray you let me have knowledge overnight at hour you will come, that your portress may wait at the gate to the fields for you.”
Last of all, the Civil War letter. Edward Spencer [Henry Spencer], Earl of Sunderland, declared for the King, and five letters which he wrote home from the Royalist army to his young wife are still in existence; the last written just four days before the second battle of Newbury. His adored little three-year-old daughter must have sent him a “Scribble” letter of the kind so often enclosed with a mother’s letter to her husband away from home – to Heaven knows how many servicemen in Heaven knows how many wars since then – for he sends her this message: “Pray bless Poppet for me, and tell her that I would have written to her but that, upon careful consideration, I find it to be uncivil to return an answer to a lady in other characters than her own, which I am not yet learned enough to do.”
Four days later he was killed in action.
Forgive me if I have meandered too long among my favourite bits and pieces; thumping my favourite tub. It is important to me, all this, because History is People and I try to teach history. The man’s eye view of history, not the God’s eye view. It is because history books must of necessity take the God’s eye view, that they can so easily and so often become dull; that, and because they so often break it up into set, static pictures, each, as it were, separately framed (often by the reigns of succeeding monarchs), instead of treating it as a living and continuous process, of which we are a part, and of which our descendants (supposing we haven’t blown the world up) will be a part also. I feel it to be enormously important that the young should be given this sense of continuity, that they should be given the feeling of their roots behind them. To know and really understand something of where one came from helps one to understand and cope better with where one is now – and where one is going to. And as we today are standing too near our own particular stretch of history to be able to make out the pattern and “see how the story ends,” so I feel that history can best be brought to life for children through people in the like situation with regard to their own stretch of history, people standing too close to see the pattern, and who, like us, “don’t know how the story ends.” That’s my justification for being a historical novelist and not a historian. But they must be people with whom the children can identify through the fundamental sameness – like calling to like under the changing surfaces.
Some years ago, I was struck by a Sunday Times article putting forward the theory that the ability to write for children is the result of an unlived pocket of childhood left over in the writer. I think this is very probably true – it was certainly true of Rudyard Kipling and Beatrix Potter, and it is certainly true of me. But I think also that it draws heavily on a feeling for the primitive and fundamental things of life. The young have this feeling very strongly. It is why myths and legends, certainly not meant for children, have been taken over by them. It is one of the reasons why children like Westerns, and why I – as I said before – like them too. Legends and Westerns and my sort of historical novel are all alike in dealing in the big basic themes, comradeship between men, loyalty and treachery and divided loyalty, love and hate, the sense of property, revenge for slain kinsfolk; and of course the age-old struggle between good and evil. As I say, the instinct for this is strong in children; in most adults it has been pushed down, sometimes only a little way, sometimes almost entirely, into the subconscious; but it is always there, forming a common ground on which children’s books can appeal to adult readers. Which is why it is not only unnecessary, but wrong, to write down for children; instead, the child should be drawn out and up. This is why books can play such a great part in a child’s development, enlarging him and giving him a broader and deeper awareness – and why we who write for children carry such terrible responsibility on our shoulders.
So – I have said what I wanted to say. I hope it makes sense to you. It is all true; but in case you think it all sounds too earnest and didactic, I will add one thing more: – that basically, fundamentally, and at the beginning of all things, I merely find, or am found by, a story which I want to tell, which seems to me worth telling, and above all, which I want to hear; and to tell it to the very best of my ability. All the rest, if I’m lucky, is added unto me in the course of the telling.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-01 02:11 am (UTC)(*Whistling, goes off to solve this interesting problem.*)
Okay, I am 90% sure that Sutcliff lifted the Roman quotation from the unabridged version of this 1957 Associated Press article:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/3003910/verne-b-schuman-translates-ancient/
As you can see, that's an abridged version; I couldn't locate the unabridged version. The scholar mentioned in the article also wrote academic articles during this period - here's one, though it doesn't have that particular letter in it - and so it's just conceivable that Sutcliff read the translation of the letter in a more scholarly setting. But looking at that first paragraph of the AP article, I think it's all too likely that Sutcliff got the idea for this entire essay from that news article.
According to a PhD thesis I found, the "unlived pocket of childhood left over in the writer" quotation originated from Joan Aiken. (By the way, it appears you have a typo in that part of the transcription?) The thesis says the phrase appeared - presumably as a reprint of the Sunday Times article - on page 34 of the 1982 British edition (Elm Tree Books) of Aiken's book The Way to Write for Children. Unfortunately, that phrase doesn't appear in the 1982 American edition. Anyone here have a copy of the British edition?
no subject
Date: 2020-04-01 05:10 pm (UTC)That first paragraph on Schuman is extremely suggestive. I think you're probably right.
I don't have the Aiken book, but I checked a couple of anthologies on the off-chance. I didn't find the Times article, but coincidentally she said something similar in an essay called "Purely for Love" in this same Children and Literature (p.144): "They address themselves to children because they need to, they are writing for the unfulfilled part of themselves." Sutcliff quotes the "unlived pocket" line in several places IIRC, so it's satisfying to know where she got it.
Thanks also for the heads-up on the typo. :)
no subject
Date: 2020-04-02 01:44 pm (UTC)Whether she was right that people don't change, it's certainly a recipe for engaging characterisation in a novel.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-03 12:00 pm (UTC)It's an interesting point – whether to focus on samenesses or differences between time periods. Probably a matter of the author's interests, but I expect the former has the wider appeal with readers.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-03 12:31 pm (UTC)