I’ve just been rereading Winston Graham’s Poldark novels, set in Cornwall during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and memorably filmed by the BBC in the seventies. Sadly, despite our shared surname, Winston Graham is no relation of mine.
As a teenager I was smitten by Poldark: the dashing men galloping over cliff tops between shipwrecks, daring raids on prisons, and romantic encounters with women in daringly cut bodices. But there was so much more in the series: real historical understanding of the period and of how people related to one another.
Now I’m returning to the full series of twelve novels with a writer’s eye and rediscovering just how good they are, particularly the first seven novels. I’m addicted and I’m delighted about my addiction. My subconscious has latched on to something it badly needs. I own many books on the craft of novel-writing, but I learn most from compulsive rereading of someone else’s novels. But while I’m feeding my addiction and trying to learn from a master writer, I’m also musing on this point: what is it about particular historical people or periods that draws us to them?
Winston Graham wrote the first of the series, Ross Poldark, in 1945 and it’s the story of a soldier returning to his home, having spent time in America as a prisoner of war. It’s impossible not to see the parallels between Ross’s return from the American War of Independence and the period in which the novel was written. Ross struggles to regain the things he left behind to go to war: home, livelihood, love, just as returning soldiers in 1945 struggled to adapt to bombed and disrupted homes and lost family and friends. I actually wrote a novel, Jubilee, with a returning POW who can’t reintegrate to a quiet life on a family farm. It was a challenge to convey that sense of dislocation and alienation. I wish I’d thought to re-read Ross Poldark first.
Fast forward a little and I’m now reading Winston Graham’s middle Poldark novels, written in the seventies. The Four Swans is essentially a novel about four very different marriages. The protagonist in each of the marriages act out some of the hottest debates of the seventies: women’s rights, the nature of an equal marriage, what happens when a partner is attracted by a third party, whether there can be rape in marriage. We may be reading about Georgian Cornwall but the observations are doubly interesting when simultaneously applied to the landscape of marriage in the late twentieth century.
Very occasionally I wonder whether anachronisms have crept into the books. A mauve dress is described; I believe the dye was a Victorian invention. A character talks about a ‘week end’, a term probably unfamiliar to the late Georgians. Occasionally the dialogue doesn't sound exactly of its time. But it’s the mark of a great novelist that none of these things matter: the essence of eighteenth-century Cornwall, its remoteness (at least three days away from London) its reliance on mining, fishing and agriculture, the fear of invasion by the French, the start of the Industrial Revolution and the early sparks of the Romantic movement, they’re all there.
I’d forgotten how much of the industrial life of Cornwall in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is in the books. Family fortunes ebb and flow as mines are closed or reopened or as fresh lodes are discovered. The miners work in dangerous and unpleasant conditions: fatal accidents are common. But they can do well, far better than farm labourers. When the economy slumps and the miners are laid off they don’t behave like saints: a number take to armed robbery and over-enthusiastic plundering of shipwrecks. As Winston Graham wrote on through the seventies he was entering a period of increasingly strident industrial stand-offs between the unions and various governments. Perhaps some anxiety about this failure to find a balance between workers’ rights and industrial efficiency transferred itself to the books. Ross Poldark is a ‘good’ employer: he tries to provide work in his mines as long as he possibly can, to the point of bankruptcy. But he doesn’t scruple to deal firmly with any challenge to his authority: sacking drunken and unruly servants and threatening homelessness to antisocial tenants. At the same time, he turns a blind eye to minor misdemeanours. He is the attractively humane face of capitalism and in great contrast to his arch-enemy, George Warleggan, with his compulsion to own and control everything and everyone.
I find myself returning my own work-in-progress, a novel partly set in the thirties and eighties and looking at it for the freshness I’ve found in these favourite historical novels. If I don’t find it, I will have failed.
This new book concerns itself inter alia with Kindertransport children. I’ve realized that the novel is actually the fourth I’ve written that contains refugee or migrant characters of some kind. Perhaps I’m writing about one of the big dilemmas for our country at the moment: how to be humane and enlightened, yet realistic when it comes to making and enforcing immigration policy; how to retain the prized parts of national and regional identity while welcoming newcomers. I’m an immigrant’s daughter myself and I’m possibly also writing about a part of my family history that I don’t consciously think about very much.
It’s not a new dilemma. Going back to the Poldark novels, I recall how Winston Graham describes the career of the incomer doctor, Dwight Enys, who painstakingly builds up the trust of the locals over a period of years, surviving an affair with a miner’s wife and a dental operation that goes badly wrong, resulting in death. Dwight isn’t ‘foreign’ in terms of being non-British, but he faces many of the issues of the immigrant in establishing himself in a community.
So, whether it’s eighteenth-century Cornwall, or seventeenth-century France, Thomas Cromwell or Charlemagne, my question is: what is it about particular periods of history, or historical characters, that draws us to them? And what do those choices say about ourselves as readers and writers?
