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Insights to be gained

I have been looking again at Kim Cook’s article ‘Finding Facts in Fiction’ in the April issue. For some time now I have been scouring novels, both new and contemporary, for the sort of background colour and flavour that can never be got from vital records and census entries. I have already taken extracts from the work of a number of the authors mentioned by Kim. Present-day writers, such as Bernard Cornwell, can only be admired for their skill in piecing together highly convincing descriptions of the periods about which they are writing, based on their own meticulous research. At the same time, we must be very grateful to contemporary authors, such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, for recording in such detail the sights they saw and the experiences they had.

Many subtle and factual nuances can be gained from writers of fiction, such as ‘I’ve lived here … sixty year come St Thomas’, spoken by a character in George Eliot’s (1859). This simple observation underlines how the calendars and lives of our ancestors were governed by the church and its saints’ feast days, with which, I presume, everybody was familiar.