By John Kachuba
A question I am frequently asked is, How accurate must I be when writing about historical characters?
That’s a loaded question. Obviously, if you are writing fiction about historical characters, those characters should be true to their real-life counterparts. But what do I mean by true?
Let’s use an example from The Bottle Conjuror.
William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland 1721 - 1765
Jack and I knew very little about Prince William, Lord Cumberland, the third son of King George II when we began plotting the novel. As we researched Cumberland we discovered, among other things, that the odds of him ever becoming King of England were slim to none; that he was not an accomplished military leader; that his brutal crushing of the Jacobites earned him the sobriquet, “Butcher of Culloden;” and that he loved horseracing and never married. Fine, those true facts about him went into the novel and we believed them to be accurate.
Now here’s where the fictive part of historical fiction comes in. We used the creative license granted to us as fiction writers to speculate on what these facts about Cumberland might reveal about him and what that might mean for his character in The Bottle Conjuror. If he loved horseracing, did he also gamble by playing cards? Did he make bets with other members of the aristocracy? What could we surmise by his lifelong bachelorhood? Did he have affairs? What was his sexual orientation? Did his “pacification” of the Highlands after his defeat of the Jacobites indicate a murderous streak in his character? Did he resent his position in the royal line of succession? If so, how did he demonstrate that resentment?
These were just some of the many questions that could have been asked about Cumberland based on the historical record. How they were answered by us, or how they could have been answered by other writers, was determined solely by the writers’ imaginations.
Fiction. We made it up.
Jack and I created most of the characters in The Bottle Conjuror—Stefan, Lucinda, Cassandra—from whole cloth. They never existed but could have. They are historically accurate in every detail: appearance, speech, thought, and knowledge base. It was important for us to get the details right, which took a lot of research, but because these characters were our inventions, we had much more freedom in how we presented those details than we did when we were writing about Cumberland.
To summarize, accuracy in depicting characters, real or imagined, in historical fiction is crucial to the verisimilitude of the work and, by extension, to the credibility of the writer. It is easier to write imagined characters than it is to write real characters, but both need to be able to stand up to the historical record of the time, the place, and the events, about which you are writing.
Tell us about a historical character you are writing in the comments section below.