“It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should
seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a
story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It
is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.” – Peter Ackroyd
As
a new convert to the writing of historical fiction I am fascinated by writers
like Ackroyd who have made it their life’s work, and I wholeheartedly agree
with his assessment.
Born
on this date in 1949, Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist
and critic. He has written some of the
best biographical pieces on luminaries like William Blake, Charles Dickens and
T.S. Eliot. But his historical
novels have earned the most acclaim, including the Somerset Maugham Award and
two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of his work (36 nonfiction
books; 18 novels and 3 books of poetry), and the depth of his research.
It was his 1982 novel The Great
Fire of London, a reworking of Dickens’ Little Dorrit (a terrific example, by the way, of the “serial” writing style
that first made Dickens popular) that put Ackroyd on the writing map. The book set the stage
for a long sequence of novels dealing with the complex
interaction of time and space and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of
place.”
Peter Ackroyd -- his newest book is 
a biography of Alfred Hitchcock
And while he has written over 50
books, that is not where his true “writing love” lies.
“I don’t think I ever read a novel
until I was 26 or 27,” he said. “I wanted
to be a poet … (and) had no interest in fiction or biography and precious
little interest in history. But those
three elements in my life have become the most important.” As
a new fan of his work, I must add “thankfully so.”
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