Book of Ages (41 page)

Austen’s “History” consisted of thirteen perfectly dunderheaded character sketches of the crowned heads of England. Of Henry V: “During his reign,
Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for.” Of the
Duke of Somerset: “He was beheaded, of which he might with reason have been proud, had he known that such was the death of Mary Queen of Scotland; but as it was impossible that he should be conscious of what had never happened, it does not appear that he felt particularly delighted with the manner of it.” As for Lady Jane, the Nine Days’ Queen, “an amiable young woman, & famous for reading Greek while other people were hunting”: “Whether she really understood that language or whether such a study proceeded only from an excess of vanity for which I believe she was always rather remarkable, is uncertain.”
³

Austen had a thing or two to say about women as readers of histories written by men, not just in her fake history, but in her
fiction. In
Northanger Abbey,
Austen’s heroine confesses that she finds history both boring and impossible to credit: “It tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.”
⁴
In Austen, history written by men is, to women readers, fiction.

“All histories are against you,” Captain Harville insists, in
Perusasion,
when Anne Elliot claims that women are more constant than men. “But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

“Men have had every advantage to us in telling their own story,” Anne answers, insisting. “I will not allow books to prove anything.”
⁵

Fiction was Austen’s answer to history, to
biography, to the memoirs of great men. But it wasn’t only Austen’s answer; it was the eighteenth century’s answer: fiction, not history, could tell the stories of ordinary lives, something that’s necessary because there’s more to the past than the march of monarchs. “There have been as great Souls unknown to fame as any of the most famous,” Benjamin Franklin once wrote. No one, Jane Franklin Mecom knew, was worthless, not even “the most Insignificant creature on Earth.”
⁶
Fiction is the history of the obscure.

Novels like Austen’s didn’t only critique history; they
were
history. In the eighteenth century, when the novel was born, novelists called their books “histories,” smack on their title pages.
⁷
In the preface to
Robinson Crusoe,
Daniel Defoe wrote, “The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.” But of course Defoe was not the editor of a journal kept by a man named Crusoe; there was no journal. Defoe made it up. Of what Defoe meant by this imposture, one critic wrote, “I know not; unless you would have us think, that the Manner of your telling a Lie will make it a Truth.”
⁸
Samuel Richardson, too, insisted that he was merely the editor of Pamela’s letters; the letters themselves, he claimed, were real: genuine historical documents. That this was a lie doesn’t mean it was a hoax; Richardson wanted his novels to be read with “Historical Faith,” since, he believed, they contained a kind of truth, the kind of truth you can find in poetry: the truth of the possible, the truth of what it means to be human.
⁹
The truth of fiction was its intimacy. A novel, as Defoe put it, was a “private History,” a history of private life. In
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
(1759–67),
Laurence Sterne implied that his book was a history “of what passes in a man’s own mind.” No one was more brash about this than
Henry Fielding. It is “our Business to relate Facts as they are,” Fielding told his readers, classing himself among “historical writers who do not draw their materials from records” but, rather, from “the vast authentic Doomsday-Book of Nature.” In his 1749
History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,
he included a chapter called “Of Those Who Lawfully May, and of Those Who May Not, Write Such Histories as This.” Fielding insisted that what flowed from his pen was “true history”; fiction was what historians wrote.
¹⁰

Fielding was not without his critics. “A new Sect of Biographers (founded
by Mr.
Fielding
)” was much lamented by one, who in 1751 attempted “to put a Stop to the unbounded Liberties the Historians of this comic Stamp might otherwise indulge themselves.”
¹¹
Novelists really had founded a new kind of biography, a new kind of history: there was history based in fact (whose truth is founded in documentary evidence) and history based in fiction (whose truth is founded in human nature). Novelists believed the second was truer than the first. “Dismiss me from the falsehood and impossibility of history, and deliver me over to the reality of romance,”
William Godwin pleaded in “Of History and Romance.” (In 1794, Godwin titled his first novel
Things as They Are.
) There is and never can be any such thing as “genuine history,” Godwin insisted: “Nothing is more uncertain, more contradictory, more unsatisfying, than the evidence of facts.” Every history is incomplete; every historian has a point of view; every historian relies on what is unreliable: documents written by people who were not under oath and cannot be cross-examined. (That is to say, every historian is, like Jane Austen’s historian, “Partial, Prejudiced, & Ignorant.”) Before his imperfect sources, the historian is powerless: “He must take what they choose to tell; the broken fragments, and the scattered ruins of evidence.” He could decide merely to reproduce his sources, to offer a list of facts, “but this is in reality no history. He that knows only on what day the Bastille was taken, and on what spot Louis XVI perished, knows nothing.”

Like Fielding, Godwin believed that the novel was not only another kind of history but “the noblest and most excellent species of history.” History made claims to absolute truth, Godwin observed, but “the reader will be miserably deluded if, while he reads history, he suffers himself to imagine that he is reading facts.” Instead, he is reading the historian’s always partial, prejudiced, and ignorant interpretation of facts. The novelist is the better historian because he
admits
these deficiencies. The novelist, not the historian, Godwin argued, is “the writer of real history.”
¹²

American writers like
Charles Brockden Brown made this argument, too, Brown exploring it both in his novels, especially
Wieland
(1798), and in essays like “The Difference Between History and Romance” (1800).
¹³
History concerns facts, Brown argued, but facts have to be arranged and explained. The historian, then, “is a dealer, not in certainties, but probabilities, and is therefore a romancer.”
¹⁴
Brown went further, arguing that history’s grossest distortion of reality stems not from its false claims to truth but, instead, from its exclusive interest in the great.
¹⁵

In the eighteenth century, history and fiction split. Benjamin Franklin’s life entered the annals of history; lives like his sister’s became the subject of fiction. Histories of great men, novels of little women.

Franklin’s story doesn’t fit neatly on one side of that divide, nor Jane’s on the other. Their lives were messier than that. John Adams found Benjamin Franklin impossible to account for. “His name was familiar to government and people,” Adams wrote Jefferson, “to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and philosophers, as well as to plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a
valet de chamber,
coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him a friend to human kind. When they spoke of him, they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.” Adams knew, though, that a large part of Franklin’s fame, high and low, was a consequence of the eighteenth century’s revolution in
reading and
writing: “Throughout his whole life he courted and was courted by the printers, editors, and correspondents of reviews, magazines, journals, and pamphleteers, and those little busy meddling scribblers that are always buzzing about the press,” Adams fumed. “If a collection could be made of all the Gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the eighteenth century, a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon ‘
le grand Franklin
’ would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever lived.” But there was more behind Franklin’s fame, too: something to do with history itself. Writing his
biography, Adams believed, would require telling the story of an entire century; explaining Franklin would require writing a book of ages. “To develop that complication of causes, which conspired to produce so singular a phenomenon, is far beyond my means or forces,” Adams wrote. “Perhaps it can never be done without a complete history of the
philosophy and
politics of the eighteenth century. Such a work would be one of the most important that ever was written; much more interesting to this and future ages than the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ ”
¹⁶

John Adams was puzzled by the insufficiency of history. As history, the story of a life like Franklin’s is, finally, a mystery, unless it’s told alongside the story of a life like Jane’s. In 1806,
Charles Brockden Brown hinted at this in an essay called “Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature.” Brown, who believed fiction to be truer than history, blamed
historians for blinding readers to the pathos of small lives. “The human character appears diminutive, when compared to those we met with in history,” Brown wrote, “yet am I persuaded that domestic sorrows are not less poignant, and many of our associates are characters not inferior to the elaborate delineations which so much interest in the deceptive page of history.” This, for Brown, was the historian’s darkest deception, the idea that only the great are good: “Popular prejudice assists the illusion, and because we are accustomed to behold public characters occupy a situation in life that few can experience, we are induced to believe that their capacities are more enlarged, their passions more refined, and, in a word, that nature has bestowed on them faculties denied to obscurer men.” This is history’s deceit: “The fascination which thus takes possession of us is, therefore, the artifice of the historian, assisted by those early prejudices of that superiority which we attach to great characters.” But great characters are
not
superior to obscure men, who are, alas, condemned to obscurity by history itself. The solution was to write fiction, Brown decided, but one day, he hoped, it might be possible to write a new kind of history. “If it were possible to read the histories of those who are doomed to have no historian, and to glance into domestic journals as well as into national archives,” Brown wrote, “we should then perceive the unjust prodigality of our sympathy to those few names, which eloquence has adorned with all the seduction of her graces.”
¹⁷

If it were possible to read the histories of those who are doomed to have no historian, we should then perceive the unjust prodigality of our sympathy.
What would it mean to write the history of an age not only from what has been saved but also from what has been lost? What would it mean to write a history concerned not only with the lives of the famous but also with the lives of the obscure? What would it mean to turn the pages of Jane Franklin’s Book of Ages?

CHAPTER XXXIX