The familiar words – The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – open L.P. Hartley’s wonderful novel, The Go-Between. Published in 1953, the protagonist, Leo Colston, chances upon his diary written over the summer of 1900 and the unfolding story, reflecting back upon those pivotal months and reawakening suppressed memories, allows Leo to view the impact of its events over his subsequent life.
It also offers the author a chance to reflect and portray the changes and shifts in society – from a midpoint place of what Leo calls this hideous century back to the waning Victorian era at the dawn of the 20th century.
The micro details of Leo’s life are thus set against the macro picture of the times.
One of the joys of reading novels set in the past is, to me, to gain a feel for what it was actually like to live then. Not a historical record but a real lived experience of the times.
And I’m not talking about truly historical novels set in Tudor times or the civil war or the French Revolution et al.
For these days, change is so rapid, so bewilderingly and frantically hectic, that simply slipping back 30 or so years to the mid 1990s will reveal to us a very different place to where we live now. How we live now.
Think of it:
No instant and perpetual connection with mobile phones for a start.
An absence of the internet to look up, check, verify (assuming the search and its findings are accurate!) dates and facts.
No internet shopping or checking bank balances, paying bills, transferring money at any time of the day or night from our own homes.
Our lives were, in fact, inevitably far less cluttered by such activities.
Tip back another 10 years to the mid 1980s – and another to the mid 1970s ….and yes, indeed, the past certainly feels like a foreign country. We did things very differently.
Dickens set some of his novels in what I call his ‘recent past.’
The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836, is set around 1827 to 1828. Barnaby Rudge, published in 1841, is set in 1780. Martin Chuzzlewit, written in monthly instalments between 1843 to 1844, appears to start somewhere around 1830 as there is a reference to the ‘new London Bridge’ which opened in 1831.
And of course novels such as Great Expectations and David Copperfield, encompass the tale of a protagonist who grows from childhood to adulthood, the latter aligning with Dickens’ present so there is an inevitable sweep across eras, allowing him to write with hindsight.
George Eliot’s Middlemarch, published in volumes between 1871 and 72, is set between 1829 to 32 and the personal lives and relationships of her characters – the micro details – are very clearly defined against the macro picture. The setting reflects a time of dramatic developments in politics, science and industrialisation and the characters’ reactions to such turmoil is often used by Eliot to portray aspects of them – for example, protagonists who welcome such change and reform with excitement are contrasted with those who hold negative and reactionary views . Writing some 40 years after the events means she is writing with the gift of hindsight and awareness of the longer term impact on society.
In my own very humble way, I have always set my novels in the recent past – whether that is in the now seemingly remote era of 1983 in The Odyssey of Lily Page or the dual time line of late 1960s and early 2000s of The Legacy of Mr Jarvis or the more recent ‘recent past’ of 2005-06 of Miller Street SW22.
And now with my fifth novel, I am digging far further back with my first truly historic novel in that I am writing of a time before I was alive – notably WW2 – and once that is finished, my sixth novel is likely to be set in WW1.
So what is the attraction of writing about the past where they do things differently ?
Well, yes – just that.
Just as I want to read fiction about lives in the past, to gain a sense of the recipe of the times, the warp and weft of the texture of daily life 50, 60, 70 or more years ago, I write about the past partly to examine its impact upon my life and the lives of others.
To understand.
The choices we made and the avenues we ventured down.
Even, perhaps, to forgive ourselves for certain directions taken and what subsequently might seem like wrong-turnings or regrettable decisions.
For we are, like it or not, very much defined by the era into which we are born, however much free will we think we possess.
And we ask too few questions when older family members are alive, lacking the curiosity or interest when young, so that writing novels set when our familial predecessors were living is a way of finding a link, getting to know them, connecting with the course and flavour of their experiences.
Or so it feels to me.
And apologies for finishing with a quote from T.S. Eliot of whom I know very little and probably understand less, but I do love the words which certainly speak to me:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
The door never opened is a wonderful way of thinking of novelists embarking on the adventure and the creative process of telling a story …taking a step over the threshold of that door and inviting readers in!
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