The Human Thread

The longer I write historical fiction, the more I find myself returning to the same question. The circumstances in which people live change enormously, but how much do the people themselves change?

I grew up in a South Wales mining community and now live in North Wales. Between those two places lie much of my own history and, increasingly, the worlds in which I set my fiction. I am interested in the past, but not simply because it is different from the present. What interests me more is what remains recognisable.

I have come to think of that continuity as The Human Thread.

The people who inhabit nineteenth-century Wales lived in circumstances very different from our own. Their expectations were shaped by class, family, religion, work and community in ways that can sometimes seem remote to us. Their choices were constrained by conventions and economic realities that have changed considerably, while their understanding of the mind itself belonged to a different intellectual world.

Yet the emotions beneath those circumstances are immediately familiar. People loved and envied, hoped and feared, sought approval, resented humiliation, protected those they cared about and sometimes deceived themselves about why they behaved as they did. They worried about money and reputation, disappointed their parents, argued with their children and wondered whether the life they were living was the one they wanted.

The circumstances change. Something recognisably human persists within them.

That distinction lies behind much of what I write.

In Unseen Souls, Eliza Turner grows up in the industrial world of nineteenth-century Dowlais, where the circumstances of birth appear to have determined much of what her life can become. Her artistic ability gives her an opportunity to cross boundaries of class and geography, but changing her circumstances does not free her from everything that formed her. The people and places she has known continue to shape what she sees and, eventually, what she chooses to paint.

There is something of my own history in Eliza’s world. My family had connections with Dowlais, my father and grandfather were miners, and I grew up in a South Wales community in which industrial labour remained part of everyday life. The world I knew was not Eliza’s world, but some of the human experiences beneath it were still recognisable.

Professor Owain Morgan approaches the same question from another direction.

Owain is a professor of Mental and Moral Science in late-Victorian North Wales, interested in character, motive and human conduct. When he becomes involved in an investigation, he wants to understand not simply what somebody has done, but what happened before the act itself. What did that person believe? What were they frightened of losing? What pressure were they under, and what did they tell themselves about the choices they were making?

Writing Owain brought me back to questions I had first encountered while studying psychology more than fifty years ago. The theories have changed enormously, but many of the questions have not. How well do we understand ourselves? How much of character is fixed, and how much depends upon circumstance? Why can apparently similar people respond so differently to the same pressure?

History changes the circumstances in which those questions are asked, but it does not make them disappear.

Perhaps that is why I am drawn to historical fiction. I don’t want simply to reconstruct the past or use it as an attractive background for a story. I want to understand what it might have felt like to be an individual living within it.

Large historical events matter, but they are experienced personally. Industrialisation becomes the man walking towards an ironworks before daylight. Social class becomes the young woman entering service in a household where everybody understands her place. Intellectual change becomes a Victorian professor wondering whether the established explanations of human behaviour are sufficient. History happens to individuals before it becomes history.

That is the thread I find myself following.

It connects Dowlais with North Wales, Eliza Turner with Owain Morgan, the people I grew up among with people who lived more than a century before them, and my own experiences with questions I continue to explore through fiction.

The past is not the present, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. Historical circumstances matter precisely because they shape what people believe is possible. But beneath those differences are patterns of behaviour and emotion that remain surprisingly familiar.

The Human Thread is my name for those enduring patterns, and for the way history, character and circumstance meet in individual lives.

It is what I seem to have been writing about all along.