This blog is a product of my love of history.  I have been astonished by its rapid success and know that many readers of the blog have been previously uninterested in history, but enjoy what they find here.  For me, understanding history and the movement of humanity through time is fundamental to my understanding of life around me.  As Chris Wild, aka @theretronaut so accurately put it during our serious meeting/babble-session last week, 'No one has ever lived in the past.  Everyone has only ever lived now.  Technology may alter our lives, but the fundamental human experience remains the same.'  So, I was thinking about how to express this on the blog, and came up with the Harlot's Progress blogcasts.  Their popularity has been amazing (5000 dowloads in two days).  Hogarth's work is an almost unique combination of real people, real Georgian London, celebrity, comedy and fantasy.  Most of his plates (as opposed to his portraits) are like social train-wrecks, which I think is what makes their appeal so enduring.  However, when using new software and social media, trying to find the 'history' category on the pick-list is often difficult, if not simply absent.  The popularity of the Hogarth blogcasts proves that the interest is out there, and that perhaps it is the popular perception of history that's at fault.

I started thinking about my own love of history, where it came from and what fuels it still, and I thought I'd try and write a post on it.  One thing I can tell you is that it didn't come from: lessons, although it did start in school, sort of.  As a child at little school, everybody got a Christmas present chosen by the vicar's wife; mine was a book.  My ungrateful ten-year old heart sank.  First of all, this was the biggest book I had ever seen.  Second, it wasn't about Narnia. On the back it said it was about King Arthur.  Well, I knew all about that: Arthur didn't exist, it was all made up, even if there had been a king called Arthur or something, once.  And I'd seen that film about Camelot with the girl from the Cosby Show.  But no, it turned out to be about a boy not much older than me living in an Orcadian castle in the Dark Ages.  Then he fell through a hole in time and aged five years in the space of a few minutes.  How cool is that to a ten year old?  Then he went to England and got involved in serious Dark Age politics and wars and fell in love, but she was married and in the end he got his skull smashed in during a battle, took about three weeks to die and I cried.  If you've never read any Gillian Bradshaw I suggest you do so instantly, if not sooner.  (A lot of her stuff is out of print, but you can buy it on the internet)

I decided to read all the historical fiction I could get, related to the history we had to study at the time.  At big school, this meant a serious devotion to Sharon Penman, amongst others.  I read that massive book on Richard IIIrd even though I knew, I bloody well knew he would die in the end.  I was reading a book that cast Richard as a real person, a dark, smart whippet of a man who loved his wife and their son who died young, and also how much he loved the golden brother who continued to let him down.  During this time I was going to lessons that cast Richard as the rancid hunchback who murdered his nephews.  I started to see a difference between the history I was being taught at school, and the human reality of what might have happened 700 years ago.  Let's face it, history isn't like AND gates or cosine, it doesn't fail to 'work' if the numbers don't add up - it just requires that you sit down and think on it some more.  So I did.

When we moved onto Tudor history, Elizabeth Ist became my heroine and she still is.  Forget the stuff about puffed-sleeves, Armadas, ginger wigs and black teeth: when she was fifteen she spoke six languages, played at least two musical instruments proficiently, had an affair with her step-mother's husband, weaseled her way out of a treason charge and whilst in the Tower forged a life-long bond with Robin Dudley that would continue to fascinate people five hundred years later.  My own reading included Derek Wilson's excellent biography of Dudley, as well as Edith Sitwell's books on Henry and Elizabeth.  These books were rooted in fact, but held their subjects in such awe that admiration made them fantastic and enthralling.  (I also read mucky 'biographies' of Catherine the Great during my A-levels.  All in the name of research, obviously. *cough cough*)  Again the line between historical fact and the excitement of fiction became blurred.  Then I got really really bored by the Poor Laws and the Corn Laws and the Chartists, and....sorry I just nodded off there for a second.
 
I read Anglo-Saxon Literature at University (which is history as well, because you can't read one without knowing the other).  One of the best-known A-S poems is The Seafarer.  It focusses on the trauma of social exclusion, bringing the natural world of the Dark Ages vividly to life.  Ezra Pound proclaimed The Seafarer contained 'the English national chemical', and he's right.  Beyond Beowulf, the 'exile' poems, Wulf and Eadwacer (Ed-waht-cher) most people grind to a halt with Anglo-Saxon but one of the best and most neglected is The Ruin.  The Ruin represents the birth of historiography in English literature: an 8thC Anglo-Saxon poet looks at the ruins of the Roman town of Aquae Sulis and wonders about the people who lived there, and their experience of life.  Aquae Sulis is Bath, by the way: a poet sat in Bath over 1000 years ago and wrote an open letter to a people he realised to be unknowable through the separation of time, yet only just beyond his grasp. 

Now that I spend all my time in another century, I don't read a great deal of historical fiction.  Professionally, it's important that I don't look beyond the textual or physical evidence in front of me.  If I draw a conclusion I have to be able to back it up, or at the very least be able to explain why I believe something to be true so sloppy research or risible stereotyping squeak my pips.  The best historical fiction taps into the human experience of the period in which it is set and draws the reader in, trapping them there by making them want to stay.  It can be sex, power, intrigue, war or basic human experience, but it is immediate and tangible.  Recently I've started to revisit some of the books that first got me hooked on history (and some new ones including Caroline Rance's excellent, if gory Kill-Grief, about gin addiction and I'm very much looking forward to Essie Fox's Somnabulist, set in 19thC Whitechapel), but I'd like to hear your suggestions for the books, images, films or stories that have inspired you to learn more about history.  If you write historical fiction I'd love to know which books/films got you hooked and what emphasis you place on historical accuracy when you are writing.