Birth of the Historical Novel
One of the earliest examples of historical fiction is China’s 800,000-word Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Written in the 14th century and packed with a thousand characters in 120 chapters, the novel is seventy percent historical fact, with accurate descriptions of social conditions, and thirty percent fiction, encompassing legend, folklore and myth.
The first historical novel in the West was Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), the first of some 30 books-including Rob Roy (1817) and Ivanhoe (1819)-that romanticized and popularized Scottish and English history. He is considered the first historical novelist, the first to view history as a distinct cultural setting with characters locked in social conflict.
Following the French Revolution and Napoleon, when ordinary people entered history and became a vast literate public whose lives provided the subject matter for literature, historical novels reached a peak of popularity throughout Europe in the 19th century.
Honore de Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine (1837), Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities (1859), Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865), and Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) and The Three Musketeers (1884) are all classics of high literary quality.
Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales
Inspired by Scott, James Fenimore Cooper was the father of historical fiction in America. His Leatherstocking Tales comprised five historical novels-The Pioneers (1823), Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841)-that dramatized the conflict between the frontier and advancing civilization.
The Pioneers, the first bestseller in the United States, introduced Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo, a frontiersman known as Leatherstocking, the Pathfinder, the Trapper, Deerslayer, or La Longue Carabine. In The Last of the Mohicans, Natty becomes Hawkeye, who is befriended by Chingachgook and Uncas, idealized, noble Indians.
“Chingachgook, Uncas and Leatherstocking are Cooper’s supreme achievement, one of the glories of American literature,” wrote historian Allan Nevins. “Leatherstocking is… one of the great prize men of world fiction… The cumulative effect of the Leatherstocking Tales is tremendous,… the nearest approach yet to an American epic.”
Cooper, who restrained his fertile imagination with history as a body of facts and yet was no slave to facts, was hailed by Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick (1851), a renowned historical novel based on two real events, as “our national novelist,” and Balzac stated that the character of Leatherstocking will live “as long as literature lasts.”
Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine
Honore de Balzac, the “French Dickens,” was the inheritor of Scott’s style of the historical novel in France. His magnum opus, La Comédie Humaine (1829-48), was an interlinked chain of 100 novels and stories unveiling a panorama of life from 1815-1848, after the fall of Napoleon, who once famously said: “History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
Balzac’s vision of society-in which class, money and ambition are the major factors-was embraced by Hugo, Tolstoy and Dumas, and liberals and conservatives alike. Friedrich Engels, a founder of Marxist theory, wrote that he learned more from Balzac “than all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together.”
However, Henry James, the father of the realistic psychological novel, complained: “The artist of the Comédie Humaine is half-smothered by the historian.” In fact, this American considered historical novels “fatally cheap.” But he also admitted that the “novel, far from being make-believe, competes with life since it records the stuff of history.”
The Triumph of Historical Fiction
Notable modern historical novels include Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931), James Clavell’s Asian Saga (1962-93), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975). Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle (1978) and other books exceed 100 million in worldwide sales.
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