The Temptation of Historical Fiction

Dan Allosso

So I’m thinking very seriously about getting to work on my story about a British radical named Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891).  Bradlaugh is the British equivalent of America’s “Great Agnostic,” Robert Ingersoll, only more so.  Unlike Ingersoll, Bradlaugh was extremely political—he was even elected to Parliament and prevented from taking his seat for six

Charles Bradlaugh

years by the conservative opposition because he could not take the religious oath of office.  I’ve been researching him, off and on, since about 2006.  In that time, I’ve tried on the idea of writing a straight biography of Bradlaugh, but Londoner Bryan Niblett recently wrote a very good account of Bradlaugh’s adult years (especially the Parliamentary struggle), called Dare to Stand Alone.  I was thinking of writing the story of Bradlaugh’s youth for a young adult audience.  Bradlaugh was thrown out onto the streets of East London by his parents at age 16 for declaring himself an atheist.  He participated in Chartist riots and got clubbed over the head by the police.  He joined the army and was shipped to Ireland where he had to evict starving peasants from their homes during the famine.  The story of Bradlaugh’s youth is like a set of instructions on “how to make a radical.”

And he lived in very interesting times.  Bradlaugh met everyone!  And this is the part that makes him so attractive as a subject for fiction.  In a biography, I could observe that young Charles and Charles Dickens were at the same Reform demonstration in 1868.  In a novel, I could give them dialog!  Same with many important historical characters: John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, William Gladstone, Karl Marx, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini, Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson—Bradlaugh actually knew all these people!  Rather than simply telling why Marx and Bradlaugh couldn’t stand each other, it might be much more fun to show it.