Insufficient Woe: Sense and Sensibility in Writing Nineteenth-Century History

In Kyrie, a cycle of poems about the global flu epidemic of 1918-1919, Ellen Bryant Voigt wonders why we insist on picking at the past. Why do we "have to go back, go back,/to that awful time, upstream, scavenging/the human wreckage, what happened or what we did/or failed to do? Why drag us back to the ditch?," Voigt asks. "Have you no regard for oblivion? . . . Don't you people have sufficient woe?" ¹

Few historians consider the poet's questions, let alone try to answer them. We know why we do what we do. History is a formal discipline that shapes inquiries into the nature of lost worlds, how they changed, or did not change, over time. If in part we seek the origins of our own worlds, we do so with a respect for the distinctiveness of the past shaped by the emotional detachment central to our identity as professional historians. In general, we think about the past more than we empathize with dead people. We argue about economies, politics, and ideologies; we rarely consider irrationality, impulse, or ignorance. Seeking to fit everything into neat interpretive categories, we construct narratives that bring order to the whole in ways that would make no sense to the people whose lives we arrange into patterns. We try to explain religion, for example, without ascribing much credit to the idea that people simply have faith. ²

Unlike historians, who fret that negotiating the line between literature and history will destroy the sanctity of their discipline, self-proclaimed historical novelists seem quite comfortable with the idea that "novel" is a noun and "historical" a modifier. They know they make things up, and they know that historians, by definition (as recent controversies have reminded us), cannot do that. Thomas Mallon admits that the "available documentation" about Henry and Clara Rathbone, the unfortunate couple whose lives were forever scarred by a chance invitation to attend the theater on an April night in 1865 with the President of the United States and Mrs. Lincoln,

amounts in the end to no more than a scaffold, and the reader should know that I have taken liberal advantage of the elbow room between the scaffold's girders and joists. The narrative that follows is a work of inference, speculation, and outright invention. Nouns always trump adjectives, and in the phrase 'historical fiction' it is important to remember which of the two words is which. ³

Mallon, Gore Vidal, Patrick O'Brian, and, most brilliantly, Ian McEwan exploit their self-consciousness about not being historians to think formally about what they are doing and how they do it. Perhaps we might repay the compliment. Perhaps historians might learn from people who ask different questions, employ different methods, write in different genres, and above all, have different sensibilities. Perhaps we might benefit from thinking through the implications of Mark Carnes's contention that "[h]istorians need the novelist's guidance on the workings of the emotions and imagination" as much as "[n]ovelists need the historian's discipline to anchor the imagination to fact." ⁴

It is no news that academic historians are primarily interested in argument. Our preferred form of expression is the monograph, in which we ask a question, offer a thesis, and pile on evidence to persuade our readers of its plausibility. Because we tend to talk to each other, the most revealing parts of a monograph are generally the preface, the acknowledgements, and the notes. Most monographs are successful to the extent that they achieve their author's goal of transmitting an argument with evidence to her or his peers. If many readers find them tedious, it is not because they are poorly written but because the structure of the genre itself makes them inaccessible to all but the cognoscenti.

It is also no news that novelists are far more...