There’s a post over at Reading the Past which discusses the presence or absence of actual historical characters and events in historical fiction and whether the absence of them in books defines historical fiction or not.
I’m rather of the opinion that—going by the HNS definition—that it doesn’t make any difference whether there are any actual historical figures or notable events in the book or not. In fact—for every single historical book to have real life historical figures in it would actually be ludicrous, for it would mean if you were writing about ordinary people living their ordinary lives—say slaving away in the cane fields of America or grubbing a living in the sordid streets of the Potteries—to suddenly introduce a real historical person would be a huge jolt. I mean, look at even everyday lives today, how many people can say that they’ve met someone of note? (And I don’t mean a Big Brother Sleb, but someone that history will remember, such as Nelson Mandela or Mother Theresa?
Granted there is a real life person in Transgressions, the clever and charismatic Matthew Hopkins of Witchfinder fame. (Ignore the Vincent Price version puhleeze, that’s soft porn, just about) But that wasn’t exactly a conscious decision to include him, 
Jonathan just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And as for historical events, it would have been a little difficult to have two young men in 1642 NOT aware of the impending war. That being said, there is a true story which involves a farmer being asked if his land can be used for one of the battles and he said “Who’s fighting who, then?” (Communication not being a key aspect of the 17th century, and obviously not everyone knew about the war!)
But I don’t think it’s necessary at all to base your historical around real life events, or real life characters, and in fact its the stories that aren’t that I find most interesting. If anyone has read “The Boy I Love” by Marion Husband you’ll see that it’s just a story about people, living their lives. In the same gentle manner that many of A J Cronin’s books are written, or Cookson’s. 
To expect every book to be set around a historical event is also ludicrous. People always pick the same events too. I’d like someone to make a study of books written about the Titanic and add up how many people to date have sailed on the ill-fated ship. I would bet that her complement of passengers has increased by at least three-fold. I’m surprised she managed to get out of the harbour without sinking!
That being said – It always surprises me, with the enormous wealth of GLBT characters in history, that there aren’t more books about real characters.
So what do you think? Should historical novels all include famous people? Famous events? Or do you think that the little stories are just as important as the big ones?
April 2, 2009 at 11:41 am
Obviously I agree with you. My famous characters appeared because they were, like Hopkins, in the right place at the right time.
I am more interested in the ordinary people. Too much is lost about them.
April 2, 2009 at 12:22 pm
So what do you think?
I think that unless you get it absolutely right (like your Witchfinder bloke) introducing a ‘historicosleb’ can be just as clunky as one of those TV dramas which sweep past a newspaper stand so we can see the Titanic headline and know it’s 1912.
Should historical novels all include famous people/Famous events? Nope.
Or do you think that the little stories are just as important as the big ones? Yes, yes and thrice yes.
Charlie
April 2, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I personally have included Savonarola driving up in his masserati while shagging Cosimo di Medici (condoms and lube! safe sex!) as a perfectly non-anachronistic history device. Oh, and he used a zippo to light up the Bonfire of the Vanities. Just FYI.
April 2, 2009 at 5:01 pm
It wasn’t a Zippo, you filthy liar. It was a firecracker. One of those Hannah Montana ones. :_)
April 3, 2009 at 9:30 am
OMG. YOU CAUGHT ME OUT!!!
Did you ever see “Hanah Montana and the Manatees of Doom?”
April 2, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Personally, I’m often put off if the novel I’m reading contains too many historical characters I’ve heard of – I know (from painful an swiftly-curtailed experience) that it’s harder to include well-known historical figures, because of how much everybody already ‘knows’ about them, but to me it’s always smacked of a kind of laziness… not so much the books that set out to tell a tale centred on well-known figures or their families (though I often don’t even bother picking that kind of book up – not my cup of tea), more the kind where a fictional protagonist continuously meets “the great & the good” from whatever era the book is set in, without there having been a specific reason in the original set-up…
I’ve probably phrased that rather clumsily. What I meant was that I, personally, much prefer the fiction that I read to contain fictional characters, and only passing reference, or brief appearances by, known historical figures, and that only where completely appropriate and which I would continue to believe to be appropriate if I sat down and read up on the historical events of the era in which the book is set… In your example of your witchfinder, if you hadn’t included Hopkins, then I sat down to research the era myself, I would wonder why you had not included a meeting between your character and Hopkins when they were in such close vicinity…
(that example would make a lot more sense if I’d read your book. Sorry I’ve not; what I’ve written is based on what you’ve said here & in other posts)
Hope you can make some sense out of what this post (if not, blame Alex. Her fantabulous writing messes with my brain!)
April 2, 2009 at 3:38 pm
I dislike the massive “oh and suddenly Napoleon entered the room” inserts which leave you going WTF! and I’ve seen a hell of a lot of those – yes I agree with you, it’s tiring to see “little billy mudlark” bumping into everyone from the Duke of Wellington to Napoleon. I’ll forgive Sharpe for this only, because he’s hot.
It would have been perfectly realistic for Jonathan never to have met Hopkins face-to-face, even if he had (as he does in the book) go into the Chelmsford Assizes to see what’s going on, and where all the crowds are heading to. It’s quite unlikely he’d had met him, in fact–but being the person he was, seeking truth in his life, it seemed to good an opportunity to miss to get him embroiled in it. But it wasn’t any part of the plan when I sat down to write it.
April 2, 2009 at 5:02 pm
“oh and suddenly Napoleon entered the room”
Yes, well, he had already perfected transformer technology long before Star Trek ever came about. *cough*
April 2, 2009 at 3:30 pm
What you’re saying makes a great deal of sense. I don’t see any point to chucking historical figures in without reason, but when appropriate, why not?
I think the closest I’ve come is having characters mention well-known contemporary figures–Edward Pellew, George Washington, etc.
The concept of anyone being asked if armies could hold a battle in his field makes me wonder if that isn’t some sort of rural myth… it sounds awfully polite and unmilitary.
April 2, 2009 at 3:47 pm
The Age of Sail thing insists that at some point you are going to have to deal with real life personalities–unless you have an entire new section of the fleet with a Green Admiral or something, specially as the Navy was its own closed set and everyone knew everyone as it were, so that makes perfect sense.
I didn’t find a written citation for that story, but it was told to me by a real ECWS geek who has more books on the subject than I have books, and he’s like the equivalent of Admiral over the Society, I think it’s as true as it can be. As to being asked, oh yes, that’s definitely true. The large battles were very much a staged event, you didn’t just spot each other across a horizon and set to – it was “we will meet here at 8am, and the battle will not begin until 10″ – and the landowners were asked for permission. Of course there were skirmishes where it was less formal, but the major battles such as Edgehill and Naseby were done in that way, which is why we have such detailed drawings of the battle lines such as this one, as the artist had time to go up a hill and sketch it.
http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/britlit/milton/images/3island2.JPG
April 2, 2009 at 3:32 pm
I have Admiral Rodney in False Colors partly because I’m a Rodney fangirl, and partly because, given that he’s the commander in chief of the station they’re serving on, it would have been almost more of a struggle not to include him. I think it’s another of those balancing acts. I really wouldn’t fancy reading a novel in which the protagonist notched up a collection of meetings with famous people, but on the other hand I do enjoy the occasional history-celeb. I know I was all ‘eee! Matthew Hopkins!’ when I read Transgressions, and it definitely added to my enjoyment. But I certainly wouldn’t say it was necessary in every historical.
April 2, 2009 at 3:50 pm
As I said to Lee, Age of Sail stories can’t help it, no matter how lowly your protag is, eventually he’s going to come across some God of the sea, even if only spotted greeting a captain on the Quarterdeck from afar, ships are very small worlds, the navy too. But yes, I read a book a few years ago where–a bit like Forrest Gump, the protag met just about every famous person that was taking part in his piece of history and it just got annoying after a while.
April 2, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I’d say that not only is it not necessary to have actual historical figures in a historical novel, it can sometimes be a bad idea – there’s a risk that the book then becomes about them and not about the created characters. That’s not something I’d want.
April 2, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I agree, in the end you want to invest your sympathy with someone new, not someone that you already know.
April 2, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Interesting post. I’ve always set my stories in the past, but never go so far as to include actual historical figures–except a project I’m developing now [was a pet project, now has publisher interest] is based solely on historical figures [Elijah, Elisha, and Jehu] and set during an notable event. Since this is a graphic novel-romance, I can get away with certain things [making Elisha the same age as Jehu, and a bit more attractive] but am I committing the ultimate sin by changing Elisha’s age, even though I’m staying true to the history [as a religious leader, he orchestrated the military coup against the house of Ahab]? I know I’m pushing it by making Elisha queer, so why not play with his age and looks a bit for the sake of erotica?
April 2, 2009 at 3:53 pm
This sounds fascinating, and if there is no evidence to the contrary, why the hell not?
April 2, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I like my historical fiction to educate as well as entertain me but the inclusion of historically note-worthy people and events isn’t necessary.
I also like to read AU historical stories with famous historical figures and events because the whole point of an AU is a re-imagining of a story/characters you are already passingly familiar with.
Too many historically significant characters does give a story a sort of fan-fiction feeling, imo.
April 2, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Yes, I don’t mind there being a lot of real life people in the Novik novels because once you go back the bit where certain people are alive when they should be dead it’s interesting to see how things move along.
April 3, 2009 at 6:32 am
In my first m/m I did have a real figure interact with my characters, but it was one of those instances where it seemed so eerily real. One of my main characters name began with the letter M. I had given him this name before I even decided on the story. When I read about Whitman’s mysterious M, it just seemed too perfect not to introduce him into the story. The time frame and his work as a nurse in Civil War field hospitals, plus some of his noted habits made it not out of the realm of possibility that there might be some intersecting.
In one of my stories set in the 1870s/80s, it also seemed a possibility that one of my characters might meet a real historical personage.
This second batch of stories is set right around major changes in the Russian world, but I tried to use these historical moments with their impact on the people involved. The 1880s was a time of large immigrations to America.
The wip I’m working on now, has some historical moments, but uses the transcontinental railroad as part of the setting.
I love history!
April 28, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Hi, can I say something as a writer of ‘period fiction’. In my novel ‘The Magpie’ I used the names of real ‘historical people’ (Lord Curzon, Trotsky, Stalin, Winston Churchill et al)as required because ordinary people read about people such as these in newspapers in real life, and the decisions made by world leaders do impinge upon the lives of the lowly. I wasn’t consciously writing hostorical fiction and I wasn’t consciously using historical characters for verisimilitude – I just used references to the above as a genuine means of furthering the plot and showing how a decision made in Revolutionary Russia could affect the life of a boy living in Bombay who is being used as a spy. It never occurred to me that readers might want to agonize as to whether I was a genre imposter. Perhaps genre pedants should try to write something set in the past without making reference to real events or real people – I think they’d find they were writing ‘fantasy’.
May 22, 2009 at 9:40 pm
I realize I am very late to this party but oh well…hopefully someone will catch this comment.
For me, I like both. About a year ago, I read Loving Frank by Nancy Horan which was centered on the very scandalous affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. The author basically used real events in their lives (and kept to the timetable) and used her imagination to fill in their conversations and turn it into a story. It was very well done. When I finished LF, I read Death in a Prairie House which was basically the non-fiction story of the same time and events. It was good but non-fiction–lots of footnotes and so on and it wasn’t a story per se. I am glad I read both.
Another book that I finished recently: The Black Tower by Louis Bayard. This has a central character, Vidocq, who was a real person (time and place: 1815, Paris). The story was: what if the Dauphin, who would become King Louis XVII, hadn’t been murdered as a child? There were plenty of fictional characters in the story, too, so it was more of a blend than Loving Frank. (Bayard has also written The Pale Blue eye which features Edgar Allan Poe as the detective. I haven’t read that one yet).
Then there are the stories that are totally fiction, or maybe only have a mention of famous people (the President, Admiral, Queen). Those work for me too. The book cover illustrated above, The Boy I Love, has all fictional characters set in a fictional town.
I guess my point is that they all work, in the hands of a skillful writer and I enjoy the whole continuum of “faction” to “fiction.”
Leslie