toynbee on historical novels

I'd like to share these observations by Arnold J. Toynbee on historical novels, via David Derrick’s Toynbee Convector:

It is difficult to achieve success in writing “historical” plays and novels, i.e. plays and novels in which the social background is not that of the writer or of the public for whom he is writing.  The effort to resuscitate an alien social background seldom produces effects that do not seem either shoddy or laboured.  The reason is that social facts, when presented as a setting for personal relations, must be sketched in with a touch which is at the same time light and sure;  and this touch is difficult to achieve except when the artist is portraying social facts with which he is intimately acquainted at first hand.

[however…] read on

With today's proliferation of historical novels, the question arises:  Does the above still hold true, and if so, to what extent?

Postscript:  This may be an awkward way to pose this question.  Maybe the observation is more true than ever, given today’s tendency towards “political correctness”?

Comments

[bingley]

Yes, the requisite lightness of touch is hard to achieve, but it's not impossible. It's a problem that historical fiction shares with SF and fantasy -- the dreaded 'information dump', where the author has to get across information which the characters should know but the reader doesn't.

Of course, historical fiction says as much about the time in which it was written as it does about the time it is supposed to be about. Dickens's historical fiction is obviously based on a Victorian view of the past. Mary Renault's and Ellis Peter's novels are starting to feel a bit dated.

Whether consciously 'politically correct' or not, no doubt a lot of historical fiction is based on false assumptions of what ideas characters in the past share with us -- it is only when the contemporary ideas expressed are ones we disagree with or the historical novelist is being unusually clumsy that we notice.

Although of course there is a lot of trash being published, I would say generally standards in historical fiction are higher nowadays than in the 1930s when Toynbee was writing, if only because so much of their readership now depends on people who are interested in and knowledgeable about the period. I think genre fiction in the 1930s was much less respectable and so a knowledgeable audience wouldn't be caught dead reading historical fiction.