Not Lost but Gone Before
KENT BARKER
There is endless fascination in using real historical figures as the inspiration for works of fiction. Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet are just two distinguished recent examples.
Hastings certainly has plenty of characters in its past, fighting for resurrection. A number who are apparently determined to make their way on to the pages of a modern novel are from the smuggling days of the early Georgian period – the first half of the 18th century.
Robertsbridge author Guy Radlett credits a review in this paper, of a biography I wrote some years ago as the inspiration for his new work Jemmy. James Collier – Jemmy – was the son of John Collier, one of the town’s most prominent citizens, and mayor in 1719,1722 and 1730. Historically Jemmy studied law at Cambridge and practised in London before his early death in 1747, aged just 26. Fictitiously, Radlett has him infatuated with an Italian dancer at Covent Garden Theatre before disappearing, to the consternation of his family.
Alongside Jemmy’s story, the author pens what he describes as a ‘non-linear narrative’ of the ‘Fall and rise of Mr Thomas Carswell’. The actual Carswell was a Riding Officer with the revenue services, combatting smuggling in Sussex and Kent. He was shot and killed in 1740, after a notorious altercation with members of the Hawkhurst gang at Silverhill near Hurst Green. He was generally considered an upright citizen of Hastings, mayor in 1734 and a friend of John Collier. The beginning of Radlett’s new novel has him as a disgraced drunkard propping up the bar of the Stag Inn.
There is, of course, nothing wrong in a historical novel with a fictional fleshing out of the sparse biographies of those who have gone before. Indeed, it’s perhaps inevitable that a writer will wonder at the unrecorded, fuller life of those from the past. The danger is that, if you do know something of them, you may feel the modern author has taken undue liberties with those known facts.
This, I rather felt, was the case with the otherwise excellent recent novel Winchelsea by Alex Preston. Here he used another character I had researched, the smuggler Gabriel Tompkins, but radically altered the recorded facts about his life and death. One was left wondering why he had not simply created an entirely fictional character in the first place? Radlett’s work, on the other hand, seems more rooted in fact and provides detailed expositions of the political climate of the time.
The upside of this intermingling of historical fact and modern fiction is that it may entice the reader into a world they knew little or nothing about. And for those who have put in many dusty hours in the archives, any fresh interest in those about whom we have become so passionate can only be a good thing.
Jemmy; or the Rise and Fall of Mr Thomas Carswell by Guy Radlett is available at via [email protected]. Mr Hastings, a biography of John Collier by Kent Barker is available from the Hastings Local History Group.
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