‘Talking Books: Novel History’

I found a terrific site called ‘Backdoor Broadcasting Company’, which contains a number of free podcasts from seminars, many of which seem to have been held in London.

The ‘Talking Books: Novel History’ seminar was held at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University College, London on 6th June 2009 and what a delight to hear something so current! What wonderful times we live in – I could barely be back here in Melbourne writing this now if I’d actually attended it!  The seminar was introduced by the historian Joanna Bourke who started with a quote from Sir Leslie Stephen that historical novels were either pure cram or pure fiction.  The question is, however, how can historical novelists and the historical profession more generally attempt to remain true to the core, brittle narratives and images emanating from a complex and perplexing past?  She introduced Hilary Mantel and Sarah Dunant, both of whom have recent historical fiction releases.  Hilary Mantel writes about real characters: Sarah Dunant’s characters are composites, but both approaches rely on archival research to flesh out their characters.  The best historical novelists, Bourke said,  like Mantel and Dunant can teach historians that there can be a different kind of fidelity to individuals in history, one that acknowledges the power of motives over the power of institutions, and the role of contingency as well as causality.

Hilary Mantel’s academic background is in law, not history.  Her historical fiction draws on authentic characters- her most recent book Wolf Hall centres on Thomas Cromwell; her Place of Greater Safety (which was released in  1992  but written much earlier) presents different revolutionary characters as a collage throughout the French Revolution:  Camille Desmoulins, Danton and Robespierre.  She dislikes, but grudgingly accepts the term ‘historical fiction’ because it raises expectations that its practitioners will have something in common.  She sees her writing more as contemporary thinking about past events; she writes about real people who happen to be dead.  Historical fiction, she says, is a way of re-creating what has slipped from the historical record and of seeing justice done by giving a voice to the voiceless, and representing the mis-represented.  Her work emphasizes the role of chance and contingency, where historians are more often wedded to causal links.  What she writes of could be true: she excludes impossibilities and refuses to rearrange history to suit the dramatic process.

Sarah Dunant, on the other hand, was trained as an historian at Oxford University some 30 years ago, where she was discouraged from making up what we didn’t know.  She was taught the grand narrative of big events, prior to the changes of historiography beginning with Christopher Hill that raised questions about women, the poor, the other.  This more recent historiography gives rise to the potential for a new sort of historical novel.  Her characters did not actually exist: they are composites, based on deep secondary research which has delved deeply into the primary sources.  As an historian, it is the fidelity of this research that gives her confidence to develop her characters, using her sources as a pointillist painter might in representing a larger painting.

The two historical novelists were followed by John Sutherland, the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at UCL, author of a number of works on fiction, the fiction industry and best-sellers.  In contrast to the earlier speakers, he questioned whether fiction could recover the past, and claimed that fiction dies if you overload it with too much material (something I tend to agree with).  Good historical fiction, he says, defines our relationship with the past- it tells us about where we are.

I’ve been grappling with the perils and pleasures of historical fiction for some time- some of the posts on this blog reflect this :  the 21st sensibility and unwise (and modified)  claims to better understanding debated with Kate Grenville’s The Secret River; the right to traduce a reputation of a true-life individual while disavowing a work as ‘historical’ in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting; the ‘flim-flam’ of biography in Louis Nowra’s Ice;  the hedgehogs and foxes suggested to Isaiah Berlin by Tolstoy’s War and Peace; the deceptive selectivity of Nicholas Baker’s Human Smoke;  the distinction between ‘voice’ and ‘ventriloquism’ in Rose Tremain’s Restoration.    I keep reading historical fiction because I enjoy it, but every time I’m drawn back to the questions of technique that keep arising and that I never can quite answer.

‘Colonial Improver: Edward Deas Thomson’ by S. G. Foster

Once you’ve got some little way into your research, it’s quite amusing to look back at the things that puzzled or amazed you right at the beginning.  For me, it was coming across so many letters addressed to ‘E. Deas Thomson’.  Who WAS this man, I wondered, who seemed to write with such authority on so many topics- and why had I never heard of him?

Edward Deas Thomson was originally appointed clerk to the Legislative and Executive Councils under Governor Darling in 1829, then went on to serve as  Colonial Secretary for Governors  Bourke, Gipps, Fitzroy and Denison between 1837-1856.   The term ‘Colonial Secretary’ is a little confusing, as it was used both  for the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in London (e.g. Marquess of Normanby,  Lord John Russell, Lord Stanley during Judge Willis’ time in NSW) as well as for the chief adviser and second administrator to the Governor here in the colonies.  In my focus on the empire-wide peregrinations of colonial civil servants and judges as they crisscrossed between Upper and Lower Canada, Newfoundland, Cape Colony, the West Indies, New Zealand, Australia, Sierra Leone etc., I have tended to forget that their mobility was supported by an ongoing administrative structure that remained more or less stable, despite the comings and goings of Governors.   This was the case with E. Deas Thomson who served under four governors, of varying political stances and administrative habits.

E. Deas Thomson was born in Edinburgh in 1800 to a family with naval and merchant connections.  His father was  the sometime accountant-general of the Navy, and family drew heavily on the patronage of Sir Charles Middleton (Baron Barham) , First Lord of the Admiralty, and his family after Sir Charles’ death.    His mother was from South Carolina, where Thomson’s father had worked as a plantation agent for his uncle.  After marriage, the couple moved back to Scotland but Deas Thomson’s mother seems to have not settled well and returned alone to South Carolina after suffering a period of paranoia, leaving the 5 year old Edward with his father.  Edward was educated at Harrow, then spent two years in France,  returning to London for a period before travelling to America, then Canada after attending  to business arising from his mother’s death in 1826-7.  The French and American connections, though not necessarily out of the ordinary, do suggest a broader experience than many other civil servants may have been exposed to.

Through his contacts with Sir Charles Middleton’s family, he appealed to Huskisson, then Secretary of State for War and the Colonies for a position in the colonial civil service.  At first he was offered the position of registrar of the Orphan Chambers in Demarara, then a second offer of Clerk of the Council of New South Wales, which he accepted, despite the lower salary, on account of the healthier climate.  This consciousness of the tropical climate, and its deleterious effects, is an ongoing theme in the English imagination of Empire.

He came to his position as Clerk of the Councils via a circuitous route.  The previous incumbent, Henry Grattan Douglass had been removed from the position, and Darling tried to replace him with his own brother-in-law Henry Durmaresq. However the appointment was vetoed by the Colonial Office after complaints of nepotism and Darling was warned against the appointment to public office of  ‘any relative or near connection’.  The position was then open for Thomson’s appointment.

Thomson was not particularly impressed with the drought-striken New South Wales during his first year in 1829, but his perceptions improved as the drought lifted and his friendship with Governor Darling developed.     He maintained a good relationship with Darling’s replacement, Richard Bourke ,and dined frequently with him, despite differences in political stance.  He married Bourke’s daughter Anna, which then placed him in a similar position to his predecessor Dumaresque when Bourke recommended Thomson (his son-in-law) as a replacement Colonial Secretary in place of Alexander Macleay- an erstwhile friend whose nephew ended up marrying Thomson’s own daughter in 1857- ah, the tangled intermarriages amongst colonial ‘gentry’ family!

Despite Bourke’s qualms about nepotism, the appointment went ahead, and as it was, Thomson remained Colonial Secretary for twenty years, long outlasting his father-in-law’s stay in New South Wales.   As such, he acted as confidant, advisor and spokesmen for the succession of governors.  His role changed after the 1842 Constitution introduced a partially-elected Legislative Council, and again with 1856 responsible government when, relucant to engage with electoral politics, he became a life appointee of the Legislative Council where he came to be aligned with the conservative element.

My own awareness of E. Deas Thomson, however, arises from his position as medium between Governor Gipps (the governor in charge during Judge Willis’ time in Port Phillip) and official and individuals in the community at large.   The protocols of communication were an important means of control:  individuals and government officials were instructed to direct all communication with the governor through his Colonial Secretary, and all communication with the Secretary of State in the Colonial Office in London also had to be channelled through Governor Gipps in Sydney (and hence, his Colonial Secretary E. Deas Thomson).   Certainly individuals could, and did, circumvent this process by writing directly to the undersecretary at the Colonial Office , but by Judge Willis’ time this practice, overtly encouraged by Undersecretary Robert Hay in the mid 1820s, had been regularized by the new undersecretary  Sir James Stephen.   Likewise,  there was an off-record back channel of communication within the colonies as well:  Gipps wrote personally to Superintendant La Trobe, and Thomson himself maintained long-standing communications with Denison in Van Diemen’s Land who was later to become Governor of New South Wales.   Indeed,  Thomson became increasingly critical of Governor Gipps’ carelessness in communications with local politicians,  and his inability to recognize when to speak and when to remain silent.  At the same time, leading members of the community recognized that it was better to sound out Thomson before approaching the Governor directly. (Foster, p. 62).

E. Deas Thomson himself has been cast as ‘conservative’ in his politics, particularly when he became a political actor in his own right after representative and then responsible government was granted to the colonies.  Certainly he came to be  seen to represent the interests of the squatters,  and expressed wariness and distaste for universal suffrage and wanted the constitutional backstop of a conservative upper chamber on a restricted franchise.  However, other aspects of his politics are less clear-cut.  He was a lifelong Free Trader, right from his time back in Scotland where he attended lectures by J. R. McCulloch.   He supported the idea of ‘improvement’- a theme picked up on in Foster’s title to his book- through schooling, universities, postal communications, railways, and his involvement in a range of benevolent societies and educational instutions including the Australian Museum and Sydney University.

The lives of E. Deas Thomson’s surviving children illustrate major themes in Thomson’s own life.  His eldest son suffered an ‘unstated ailment’ and could not hold down a job and drew on large sums of his father’s money- shades, perhaps, of Thomson’s mother’s ‘instability’; or maybe just colonial waywardness??? A second son became heavily involved in the Church of England and the temperance movement- the ultimate ‘improvement’ activity.  His three daughters’ marriages are a microcosm of empire: one married a nephew of Thomson’s own predecessor as Colonial Secretary, Alexander Macley; another married a member of the Indian civil service, and the other married a naval officer.

Thomson’s own early career demonstrates once again the importance of patronage in embarking on a colonial role.   Patronage seemed to make the world go round, but it’s easy to overlook its infantalizaing aspects.  Thomson’s own father, dismissed from his position as accountant-general in the Navy by the incoming Whig Government, turned his attention to a rich widow.  To his son he wrote:

The party I have had in view and still have, if it can be accomplished is a Mrs C a person about 50, being neither (of course) young nor handsome but with more good temper than falls to the lot of most people in life- She is the widow of an army surgeon who has been dead about 7 years- Her father left her about 15,000 pounds which has not been decreased but rather added to… Lord and Lady [B]arham approve the Match  & have visited & paid the necessary attention (quoted Foster p. 36)

Shades of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice??  I suspect, but am not certain, that by now the Barham influence rested with 1st Earl of Gainsborough- or perhaps Lord and Lady Barham are a different branch of the family?  Ah, it’s hard to shake my 21st century perception that there’s something rather demeaning in all this deferral.

Foster paints a picture in this biography of a public servant who was not just a cipher for the Governor but who had influence in his own right.  He was in the mould of 19th century gentlemen improvers: he was concerned to ‘maintain balance’ between the forces in society, and he embraced technology, communications and education as a way of improving society.  His efficiency as public servant and administrator in many ways blunted the calls for responsible government: had the position of Colonial Secretary been filled by someone less capable, there would possibly have been more political agitation for constitutional change, much earlier.

References:

S. G. Foster Colonial Improver: Edward Deas Thomson, Carlton Vic. Melbourne University Press, 1978

‘The Judicial Bench in England 1727-1875′ by Daniel Duman

This book is a prosopographical study of the 208 men who ascended to the judicial bench in England  between 1727-1875.  “Prosopographical??” I hear you ask.   My Concise Oxford dictionary defines prosopography as

Description of person’s appearance, personality, social and family connections and career; study of such descriptions.

This is the second prosopographical work I have read, and I really quite enjoy it.  (I just want to show off that I can use such a word- I have no idea how to pronounce it, so I’ll just have to write it. )  The first was a book about the Colonial Office and the governors sent to the various colonies (Cell, 1970). Prosopography is not  so much descriptions of individuals, as a compilation of multiple biographies to develop a broad sketch of a particular career group.   The methodology uses biographies, memoirs, diaries, letters and personal papers to compile statistics about particular life events- birth place, birth order, schooling, occupation, place of residence, income, marital status etc.   From this emerges a picture of the “typical” judge or colonial governor which, although of course a generalization, helps to highlight the exceptional and anomolous.

Duman categorizes his judges into five separate time-spans of about 25-30 years which reflect social and professional changes occuring in Britain at the time.  He argues that, instead of being a ladder to success for men of lowly means, the law was always the preserve of upper middle-class and middle class men.  Landed gentry were not particularly attracted to it as a profession because, unlike the army or church, patronage was of limited use if you were incompetent.  There were more certain ways of maintaining one’s status without entering into the lottery of the law.  Likewise,  lowly families would not have been able to financially support their sons over the decade of insecure and poorly paid idleness, waiting until the briefs started to come in.

Although in the second half of the 19th century the law became more accessible to the sons of merchants and proprietors,  the ‘great public schools’ remained the educational nurseries, and Oxford and Cambridge (and later Dublin) remained the main universities attended.   The men on the bench may not have been so enmeshed in the landed gentry as they had been in the past, but they were just as much imbued with a belief in the sanctity of private property.

There is barely a mention of the colonial judiciary in this book: instead, these judges are the ones who succeeded ‘at home’.  Nonetheless, for colonial judges, the experience of the colonies and the nascent law administrations they encountered was laid over the formative, common experience of the bar back in Britain.

I find this broad-brush depiction of a designated profession in this book quite fascinating.  The statistics and generalizations are interspersed with particular case studies,  fleshed out with letters and diary entries.  The intent is to develop a profile of a class as a whole, which could be a reductionist, disembodying act, but the re-introduction of individuals back into this meta-biography returns it to the realm of the personal again.

References

John W Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Policy Making Process, 1970

Daniel Duman The Judicial Bench in England 1725-1875: The Reshaping of a Professional Elite, 1982.

Brigid Brereton ‘Law, Justice and Empire: The Colonial Career of John Gorrie 1829-1892″

1997

I’ve  often found, when I shut the covers after reading yet another colonial judicial biography, that however much I may have enlarged my understanding of a particular colonial official, there is still an opaque screen of inscrutibility about him.  There’s the judicial mindset that sees nuances and distinctions across all aspects of human interaction, and then it’s overlaid with the expectations and restrictions of the worldview of the early Victorian colonial gentleman.  Whatever humanity or common feeling the biography may have evoked, I’m left with the knowledge that the past is, indeed, as L.P. Hartley famously announced, a different country, and the people who lived there were of a different kind too.

However, this biography by Brigid Brereton, is different.  It came to me well recommended as an excellent example of judicial biography, and it is.   Perhaps it’s the choice of subject.  John Gorrie, the son of a dissenting United Presbyterian Church minister, took from his Scottish education and bar training an emphasis on philosophy, and working from first principles rather than the English reliance on case law- and indeed, though he worked for the Colonial Office all his professional life, was was not ever admitted to the English Bar.  This meant that he was well-placed for those colonies of the Empire where England took over from another European colonial power, where a pre-existing Continental system of justice  was already in place.  Hence his initial placement at Mauritius, the former Ile-de-France, which passed to Britain by conquest in 1810.  Here he worked under Governor Arthur Gordon,  who became confidante, friend and patron, and who was largely responsible for his second posting to  the newly-acquired British colony of  Fiji.  His experience with multi-racial colonies led to his final posting to Trinidad, which was enlarged to include Tobago.

Gorrie was not particularly interested in a judicial career, even though that is what he ended up with.  He had a deep commitment to political action as a way of bringing about change, and was heavily involved with the Aborigines Protection Society.  This led him to involvement with the Governor Eyre case on the part of the mutineers, and a lifelong interest in protecting the imported and native labourers in plantation colonies.   In his youth he had contact with the English radicals, especially Cobden and Bright, stood for parliament himself, and worked as a journalist on their  Morning Star newspaper.

It is in his correspondence with Governor Gordon that we see a man who is more recognizably modern than many of the other 19th century judges I’ve read about.  There’s a intimacy and affection in his relationship with Governor Gordon, and his writing, informed perhaps by his journalistic experience, has more colour and flow than similar correspondence I’ve read. He lived life fully: he enjoyed balls and social occasions, supported different philanthropic bodies, and enjoyed sports with his family.  And, when the political causes he espouses resonate with twentieth century liberal democratic thinking, then he comes over as one of the “good guys”.

But, of course, he was not a democrat as such, and much of his temperament and courtroom interaction is strongly reminiscent of that of Judge Willis.  He rubbed up badly against the entrenched elites in the colonial societies he moved between.  And, as is often the way, they got him in the end, although he died before he had a chance to contest his dismissal properly back in Britain.

This is a wonderfully contextualized biography.  The details of the social, political and historical mileui of each of his postings make each one seem quite distinct, even though there were many commonalities between them.  Gorrie himself comes over as a complete, coherent man who acted  consistently within a moral and political framework.  I wonder if this lies in the teller, or the tale?

‘David Collins’ by John Currey

If my postings here have been a bit erratic lately, it’s because I’ve been going back and forth between home and my little caravan on the Mornington Peninsula.  It’s daggy and unsophisticated but as the sun sets over the bay, it’s a beautiful spot- here’s my view from outside the van, just up the track a bit.

Being in such close proximity to the 1803 settlement at Sorrento has prompted me to read John Currey’s biography of David Collins- the leader of the aborted settlement of a consignment of convicts direct to Port Phillip.  By sending the fleet straight to Port Phillip from England, the Colonial Office intended to both quickly create a British presence and to alleviate the moral corruption of the constant inflow of convict blood into Sydney.  The settlement only stayed in Port Phillip for eight months until it shifted to Risdon Cove (Hobart) in two separate journeys separated by months.

The author, John Currey, describes himself in his preface as “an independent scholar without access to the services and resources normally associated with an academic environment”.  He has written and edited  a number of works of early Australian settlement.  The epigraph that commences his preface is an admonition from Andre Maurois’ Aspects of Biography (1929):

Every biographer should write on the first page of his manuscript: ‘Thou shalt not judge”.

He draws heavily on Collins’ letters to family and patrons, family papers and official correspondence, supplemented by newspaper comments and other peoples’ observations and comments on their relations with Collins.  Currey is scrupulous in his search and documentation, and almost succeeds in following Maurois’ advice.  But even he, at the end of the book raises questions that verge on the edge of judgement:

“Essentially conventional in so many ways, Collins was at the same time a complex and enigmatic man.  His written legacy, despite some tantalising revelations, offers few answers to the questions his life provokes.  How could a man so attentive to minute detail in his public duties be so negligent of his own financial affairs?  By what circuitous route did the man who aspired to ascend the pulpit come to find himself reviled as a lecherer and an adulterer?  Why did a mind so receptive and alive with curiosity become so dulled and inactive?  How could a man so blessed with so many natural charms fail to find enduring love and companionship? Did Collins himself, for all his introspection have any insight into his actions?  The exhumation of  [Collins coffin in ]1925 removed some of the mysteries surrounding Collins’s death.  It offered no explanation of the profound mysteries of his life.” (p. 308)

I find it frustrating when an author raises the very questions you want answered, but draws back from actually risking an answer to them.  Currey’s conception of his role as historian constrains him from venturing his own response, informed by his research, to these questions.  He should not be so cautious.  He has read the documentation: he has spent years with this man; he is qualified to venture a judgement.

In fact, I’d add a couple of other questions.  Why was he so unsuccessful in negotiating the patronage networks that all colonial civil servants had to manage?  How exceptional or commonplace was his relationship with the various convict women he had relationships with over his time in New South Wales?  What was the public response to these relationships?

Inga Clendinnen in her Dancing with Strangers is less squeamish about speculating and judging David Collins as one of her informants.   After reading his published journal about his time with the First Fleet she characterizes its author as ” the Master of Plod” (ouch!).  She describes him as a man “susceptible” to liaisons with convict women.  She notes that Collins is

…a perfect representative of the moral and material economy of European culture.  It was these assumptions he brought to his analysis of the convict condition, and which he initially brought to the encounter with the very different culture and economy of the nomad people of Australia…. But as the slow years pass we watch David Collins ripen into an absorbed observer of native conduct, and a man capable of recognizing, indeed of honouring, a quite different way of being.” (p. 55, 56)

In reading this book, I found myself thinking of James Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land which, like Clendinnen’s book, carves out a small what-if lacuna of time where the dispossession which certainly, inevitably and inexorably occurred was not yet deepened with violence and bloodshed. I found myself wondering if Collins’ insecurity and unsteadiness in his own authority did not hold the seeds of the 1803 failure in Port Phillip, thus averting an alternative history of Port Phillip as another convict outpost of New South Wales.  Boyce’s book about Van Diemen’s Land describes a benign environment: Collins saw it as hostile.  Boyce sees plenty and food sufficiency: Collins sees starvation and abandonment.

Although Currey doesn’t say so, the  David Collins I drew from his biography was a flawed man, who failed to achieve the hopes he had for himself.  He was impotent in using patronage to his ends; his career sputtered then died out; in an environment where many others prospered financially he ended up almost penniless;  he displayed poor judgement in relation to importing cattle from Bengal at huge expense; he failed to settle an area which just over thirty years later sprang into activity; despite his cheerful exhortations and assessments to some of his correspondents, his world view was essentially pessimistic.