HISTORICAL FICTION

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 18761, 27 December 1930, Page 15

HISTORICAL FICTION

NOVELIST’S HARDER PART. Mr. Alfred Tressider Sheppard, the author of “The Art and Practice of Historical Fiction,” is a distinguished exponent of the craft upon which he writes. He makes it clear that he has chosen the harder part of fiction, and that historical romance is much more laborious to write than the novel of contemporary manners. “Charles Dickens,” he recalls, “needed no knowledge of books to write ‘Pickwick.’ But ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ was a different matted.” He applied for advice to Carlyle, and was staggered when a van-load of volumes drew up before his door. To literary aspirants holding the belief that historical fiction is easy or offers large monetary rewards, Mr. Sheppard quotes the historical advice of Mr. Punch: “Don’t.” “The historical novelist,” he says, “must study books on costume, on coinage, on the contemporary history of other States; he must read contemporary letters, diaries, despatches, even legal documents and medical works. Nothing dealing with his period and locality should be foreign to him. He may have to go to work on heraldry, on botany, on etymology, on arboriculture, on agriculture. Picture galleries and museums, cathedrals and churches and castles all yield their spoils.”