Drawing Inspiration From the Victorian Greats
The Victorian era offers a rich and varied panoply of historic figures. For novelists who set their stories in late-19th century England, the lives of the Victorian Greats are a wonderful source of background and scene-setting material that can add color, context, and realism. But that is far from all. My experience suggests that a deeper examination of the lives and achievements of the Greats can motivate stories and improve literary technique.
(How Charles Dickens’ Death and Last Novel Inspired My Own Writing.)
In this article, I show how this second, more searching approach influenced my writing. Specifically, I share how two of the Greats, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, sparked ideas for the plot of one of my books and provided guidance on literary technique for another.
Let me begin with England’s foremost scientist of the time. Almost everyone is familiar with thoroughness in assembling as much evidence as possible before releasing his revolutionary idea. He spent five years aboard HMS Beagle collecting specimens throughout the Galapagos archipelago, and then another 23 years conducting experiments and compiling observations before he felt his life’s work was ready for public scrutiny.
Since this surface-level information is widely known, it can be advantageously used as background to set time and place. Delving more deeply, however, I found other aspects of the great man’s life, that triggered two ideas in my mind for the plot of Fatally Inferior, my second novel.
One arose from the uproar that greeted the publication of The Origin of Species on November 24, 1859. Darwin was bombarded with scathing reviews in academic journals, blistering editorials in the leading newspapers, and crude cartoons in the cheaper broadsheets. This avalanche of disgust and hatred led me to imagine a more malicious assault on the scientist. Was this an idea I could use in my novel? Indeed, it was. I explored several possibilities, finally settling on the abduction of a Darwin family member and a ransom demand—the kidnap-victim would die unless Darwin retracted his theory in a letter to The Times.
The other had to do with the blood relationship between Darwin and his wife, Emma. They were first cousins. They had a common grandfather in the person of Josiah Wedgewood. In the 19th century, the offspring of marriages between such close relatives were thought to suffer loss of vigor and infertility. This fear weighed heavily on both husband and wife, and brought to mind an image of a couple desperate for a grandchild only to be cruelly robbed of a happy old age spent in the blissful company of their grandchildren by a vile act of revenge. I was soon picturing a scene in which Emma Darwin is forced to witness the horrific death of the couple’s only grandchild.
Charles Darwin makes only a few fleeting appearances in Fatally Inferior, but the furor created by his theory and the consequences of his marriage to his first cousin, motivate and structure my entire story. My more in-depth examination of Darwin’s life had added grist to my literary mill well beyond simply fleshing out the backdrop.
I had a similar happy experience with my first novel, Immortalised to Death. In this instance, the inspiration sprang from the writings of the foremost novelist of his time. Everyone has at least some familiarity with the better-known of Dickens’s 14 major novels such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and A Tale of Two Cities, and, of course, his much-loved novella, The Christmas Carol. And everyone knows one or more of his vast array of larger-than-life characters like Scrooge, Uriah Heep, or Tiny Tim.
I, like many other authors, have drawn freely on this marvelous and expansive palette of Dickensian material for scene-setting and description. A more intensive exploration of his work, however, led me to two story-writing techniques that resolved issues I had encountered in drafting Immortalised to Death. One was a device frequently used by Dickens; the other, specific to David Copperfield.
The premise for Immortalised to Death is that Dickens is murdered to prevent him completing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his last and, sadly, unfinished novel. My protagonist must discover how he intended the novel to end in order to learn why he had to die and by whose hand. My reading of his novels revealed how the master storyteller delighted in using something mentioned in passing early in a story to deliver that last-page surprise so loved by readers… and authors. For example, that the lady in the portrait on display in Mr. Brownlow’s house seen by Oliver in chapter 12 is his mother, only emerges in the 49th of Oliver Twist’s 52 chapters. Could this story-telling device be used to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood?
There is only one past incident in The Mystery of Edwin Drood that fits the bill—a fatal boating accident that occurs several years before the story’s main action. Drawing on this incident, I finally saw a way to account for the central thesis of Dickens’s story, namely, the sinister John Jasper’s mad infatuation with the delightful Miss Rosa Bud, Edwin Drood’s fiancée, and at the same time provide my protagonist with the key insight that allows him to figure out how Dickens intended his novel to unfold.
The other technique that proved helpful to me was used by Dickens in David Copperfield. Dickens grew up in poverty and was so ashamed of his upbringing he never mentioned it. But he still wanted some way of telling his life story. So, what did he do? He spoke about his boyhood through David Copperfield. Thus, Dickens was sent to work in a shoe-blacking factory, David to a warehouse to label bottles; Dickens visited his father in the Marshalsea Prison, David went to see Mr. Micawber in the debtor’s prison; and so on.
I make use of this device by having one of the characters in my protagonist’s concocted ending to The Mystery of Edwin Drood be a surrogate for the adult Dickens, just as David Copperfield was a surrogate for the young Dickens. It is this character who reveals the secret that leads to Dickens’s murder. Making an effort to go beyond a superficial knowledge of Charles Dickens’s writings yielded a critical input to Immortalised to Death.
In sum, then, my two novels benefitted significantly from my deeper appreciation of the life of Charles Darwin and the writings of Charles Dickens. The Victorian era, however, produced many other Greats such as Florence Nightingale, Benjamin Disraeli, and John Stuart Mill to name but a few, and their lives and achievements surely constitute a veritable treasure trove of inspiration and guidance, there for the taking.
Check out Lyn Squire’s Fatally Inferior here:
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