lady_schrapnell | The Fever and the Flame

Such an unappealing title - this is the 'Special Omnibus Edition' of Mary Hooper's At the Sign of the Sugared Plum and Petals in the Ashes, set in London in 1665 (Great Plague) and 1666 (Great Fire) respectively.

I did a very short review of At the Sign of the Sugared Plum back in August, but didn't say much about it, other than thinking that the fluffy chick-lit-esque girls => fashion+boys element in the beginning was fun enough, but didn't go well with the horrific times portrayed. I did more note-making on my copy of Petals in the Ashes, and wanted to toss around a few thoughts about it here, in hope of interesting input from my flist. This isn't a rant, btw - a few things annoyed me, some seemed silly, but it's not -- well, I've read much worse historical fiction and bits and pieces were good.

As I said about The Sugared Plum, there are a few inaccuracies, of what appear to me to be several different sorts. In many ways, the straight incorrect details are the least interesting, but one of them (linguistic) coincides with what seems to me to be an error of mindset (or two or three), so I'll consider it first. Behind a cut so as not to mess up my flist's friends' pages, but please read if you have any interest in historical fiction. It's long, but you can skim the sections about the book and just give your denomination-of-choice's worth at the end. (I'll even throw in a virtual cup of tea to anyone who reads behind the cut!)

Bit of context: first-person narrator is Hannah who has gone to London to live with her older sister Sarah and help in the small sweetmeat shop the family inherited. Hannah and Sarah leave London at the end of the first book and Sarah stays home (ostensibly to help their mother, really because of her love-interest, 'natch), so Hannah returns with their younger sister Anne to re-open the shop once the Plague is over.

Another day, obtaining some lengths of parchment from Mr Newbery (who asked me if I wanted it to write my Will and said it was wise to do so), I wrote a list of all the sweetmeats that we made, to be advertisements for our goods. This read:

Frosted rose petals
Crystallised violets
Sugared plums
Herb comfits
Sugared angelica
Glacé cherries
Sugared orange peel
Lemon and orange suckets
Violet cakes

[...] I took great pains with the spellings of these items, even though many of our customers would not have known any better and, after getting some coloured inks from Mr Newbery, drew a likeness of the sweetmeat next to its name for those who could not read. I made two copies and nailed one to the wooden shutter to be on show when we were open, and put the other inside on the wall.

(The cut portion is just a sentence about another item they make and why it's not on the list.) I'm sure I'm not the only one to have thought the 'glacé cherries' stuck out badly, and this was warranted; according to the OED, 'glacé' referring to fruits (to mean covered with icing or sugar) wasn't used until 1882. It's an odd mistake, as Hooper had clearly done a lot of research into the types of sweets made and sold at the time, even providing recipes for many. (And I really enjoyed the parts of the book describing the making of the comfits of one sort or another.) As she's using 'period language' for the most part, it has to be counted an error.

But, that word usage isn't the only thing that feels wrong about this passage, and the wrongness is harder to 'prove' than the first example, but I'm sure it's still wrong in some way. It's mostly a question of mindset: why would Hannah have thought of writing a list of what they sell and why would this have provided any kind of advertisement? I know literacy rates were increasing, but there's still the expense of writing materials (Mr Newbery, a neighbour with a 'parchment shop', is unlikely to have given her that for free) and the fact that they were a commodity that people of the very, very small shop-keeper class wouldn't have just had lying around (in The Sugared Plum Hannah says she amused herself one day by finding a stub of pencil and making a list of the sweetmeats they were going to make and the needed ingredients - again, not so much with the likelihood). Add to that the fact that nobody would need a list on the wall of a tiny shop when they could see the things themselves in front of them, and the impulse to make a list to stick on the wall seems extremely unlikely to have been part of Hannah's mindset.

The mistake (or not) about the advertisement I mentioned earlier seems a bit of generic unclear thinking rather than historical fiction-relevant ditto. (They have a painted sign, in case the title of the first book doesn't make that clear, and it's a bit of a mystery how the well-to-do and even aristocratic customers get into their neighbourhood to find the shop anyway.)

This isn't the only example of the type of inaccuracy I've put down to mindset error. Some others amused me a bit, such as Hannah's trying to decide what to wear to meet up with her sweetheart, Tom: '... for I'd changed my dress several times. Though I loved my green taffeta gown best of all, I remembered that Tom had seen this when we'd walked out the previous year, so felt compelled to change into my tabby suit'. Heaven knows, you couldn't possibly let him see you in the same dress twice, Hannah! (Hell, even nowadays you have to be well on the rich side to avoid being seen in the same outfit more than once!)

Or when they're staying in a great house in a strange position (neither guest nor servant), waiting to be able to return to London: 'We had a fireplace in our room and a weekly allowance of coal, and so spent a deal of time there either trying to improve our reading (there was a large library, though with monstrous dull books)... ' Hmm - and where is she supposed to have seen so many books more to her reading taste? Her mother and father are said to be barely able to read and her life has been home and then to the shop in London, where they have no books.

Last one arises from a discussion between Sarah and Hannah about whether Sarah should stay to help their mother who's about to have a baby - their sister Anne is two years younger than Hannah, and Sarah has said she's no use because she's 'just a lazy flibbertigibbet'. 'I laughed, but it was true, for Anne's head was stuffed with games and fashions and fol-de-rols. Further, as she had not bothered overmuch with school, she could barely read or scribe her name.' Ack. (Let's leave aside the internal illogic of this, as Hannah went to London precisely because her head was stuffed with fashions and boys - fol-de-rols if ever there were any! - and why her father wouldn't just punish Anne and make her help their mother sufficiently, I can't quite see.) The 'scribe' is irritating and pretty definitely incorrect also, but again, it's the whole mindset that seems badly off. If there was a village school to which all the children - boys and girls - were sent, is the schoolmaster really have been likely to let some of the girls spend their days reading fashion magazines under the desks instead of - uh, whoops, make that - gossiping instead of learning to read and write?

All of these examples were chosen for a reason though, and I think it's possible to see one belief/assumption underlying them all, which leaves me skating on the very thin ice of authorial intention, but I'm going to try anyway. You can think at the extreme ends of the spectrum either that the past is a different country and we can never understand the mentality of people out of living memory or that human nature is the same and people are people regardless of the different times. Or of course you can inhabit the vast virtual space between the two. Writers of historical fiction need to think this one through, and probably this is going to be one of the elements that goes into making 'good' historical fiction (I'll come back to that scare quote). These two books feel very much as if Hooper were assuming at some level, that young girls have always been the same, and always will be the same, and the ones today will like reading quite detailed historical fiction fine, as long as the interests and reactions of the heroine are just like their own. Leading to 'OMG - I can't wear that skirt - I wore that last month!', and 'Eww - those books are, like, totally boring!' Okay, that's probably unnecessarily nasty, but the exaggeration is for a reason.

A couple of thoughts and questions: 1) Does it matter? And if so (my answer is a resounding 'yes', btw), why? If most of the historical details of the events in London in 1665 and 1666 are accurate - which they are - does it make any difference - does it make it in some way 'worse' historical fiction - if there are what I consider to be mindset errors (especially as I'm anything but an expert on the 17th century)? Another if so: is it an essentially aesthetic thing or does it matter because there is a type of didactic responsibility when writing historical fiction (especially for children or teens)? I'm asking this about this book, because it doesn't have the noxious kind of error seen in I, Coriander, which is always erroneous in a direction supporting the author's bias. *

I realise I'm making a big assumption of my own - that authors of historical fiction can make good attempts to portray characters who are individuals but credibly of their time and that it's possible to recognise 'good' attempts; Rosemary Sutcliff and Karen Cushman are two I think do this really well. And that such authors ought to do so, as importantly. Are these assumptions ones that others share?

2) If the (generally acknowledged) appeal of these books relates at least in part to the 'lots of period detail (... informative and engaging' - back cover quote from the Observer), did she really need to add the chick-litty (supposed) appeal too? It's hard not to judge things like appeal solely from one's own reading and reading to one's children, but I know we (the girls and I) are not unique in loving Cynthia Harnett's The Wool-Pack or Rosemary Sutcliff or Karen Cushman (not writing when I was a child, obviously, but discovered and read to the girls). I know the appeal of these kinds of books for me was learning - in fictional form, almost always - about life in other times. And in these books, to the best of my understanding, the authors are equally careful with 'mindset' details as with the other types of historical detail. Again, I'm wondering (for now - I may well come back to these questions - definitely in a much shorter post!) whether this is shared by my fellow historical fiction fans.

Comments?

fjm - I couldn't find your entry about I, Coriander, and would like to give a link to it if you don't mind.