Flashman. George Fraser MacDonald

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      [He was, by the way, a real person; this I learned only recently. A letter exists from one of Hughes’ Rugby contemporaries which is definite on the point, but tactfully does not identify him. I have sometimes speculated about one boy who was at Rugby in Hughes’ day, and who later became a distinguished soldier and something of a ruffian, but since I haven’t a shred of evidence to back up the speculation, I keep it to myself.]

      What became of him after Rugby seemed to me an obvious question, which probably first occurred to me when I was about nine, and then waited thirty years for an answer. The Army, inevitably, and since Hughes had given me a starting-point by expelling him in the late 1830s, when Lord Cardigan was in full haw-haw, and the Afghan War was impending … just so. I began with no idea of where the story might take me, but with Victorian history to point the way, and that has been my method ever since: choose an incident or campaign, dig into every contemporary source available, letters, diaries, histories, reports, eye-witness, trivia (and fictions, which like the early Punch are mines of detail), find the milestones for Flashy to follow, more or less, get impatient to be writing, and turn him loose with the research incomplete, digging for it as I go and changing course as history dictates or fancy suggests.

      In short, letting history do the work, with an eye open for the unexpected nuggets and coincidences that emerge in the mining process – for example, that the Cabinet were plastered when they took their final resolve on the Crimea, that Pinkerton the detective had been a trade union agitator in the very place where Flashman was stationed in the first book, that Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King had a factual basis, or that Bismarck and Lola Montez were in London in the same week (of 1842, if memory serves, which it often doesn’t: whenever Flashman has been a subject on Mastermind I have invariably scored less than the contestants).

      Visiting the scenes helps; I’d not have missed Little Big Horn, the Borneo jungle rivers, Bent’s Fort, or the scruffy, wonderful Gold Road to Samarkand, for anything. Seeking out is half the fun, which is one reason why I decline all offers of help with research (from America, mostly). But the main reason is that I’m a soloist, giving no hints beforehand, even to publishers, and permitting no editorial interference afterwards. It may be tripe, but it’s my tripe – and I do strongly urge authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children, and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.

      One of the great rewards of writing about my old ruffian has been getting and answering letters, and marvelling at the kindness of readers who take the trouble to let me know they have enjoyed his adventures, or that he has cheered them up, or turned them to history. Sitting on the stairs at 4 a.m. talking to a group of students who have phoned from the American Midwest is as gratifying as learning from a university lecturer that he is using Flashman as a teaching aid. Even those who want to write the books for you, or complain that he’s a racist (of course he is; why should he be different from the rest of humanity?), or insist that he isn’t a coward at all, but just modest, and they’re in love with him, are compensated for by the stalwarts who’ve named pubs after him (in Monte Carlo, and somewhere in South Africa, I’m told), or have formed societies in his honour. They’re out there, believe me, the Gandamack Delopers of Oklahoma, and Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, and the Royal Society of Upper Canada, with appropriate T-shirts.

      I have discovered that when you create – or in my case, adopt and develop – a fictional character, and take him through a series of books, an odd thing happens. He assumes, in a strange way, a life of his own. I don’t mean that he takes you over; far from it, he tends to hive off on his own. At any rate, you find that you’re not just writing about him: you are becoming responsible for him. You’re not just his chronicler: you are also his manager, trainer, and public relations man. It’s your own fault – my own fault – for pretending that he’s real, for presenting his adventures as though they were his memoirs, putting him in historical situations, giving him foot-notes and appendices, and inviting the reader to accept him as a historical character. The result is that about half the letters I get treat him as though he were a person in his own right – of course, people who write to me know that he’s nothing of the sort – well, most of them realise it: I occasionally get indignant letters from people complaining that they can’t find him in the Army List or the D.N.B., but nearly all of them know he’s fiction, and when they pretend that he isn’t, they’re just playing the game. I started it, so I can’t complain.

      When Hughes axed Flashman from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, brutally and suddenly (on page 170, if I remember rightly), it seemed a pretty callous act to abandon him with all his sins upon him, just at the stage of adolescence when a young fellow needs all the help and understanding he can get. So I adopted him, not from any charitable motives, but because I realised that there was good stuff in the lad, and that with proper care and guidance something could be made out of him.

      And I have to say that with all his faults (what am I saying, because of his faults) young Flashy has justified the faith I showed in him. Over the years he and I have gone through several campaigns and assorted adventures, and I can say unhesitatingly that coward, scoundrel, toady, lecher and dissembler though he may be, he is a good man to go into the jungle with.

      George MacDonald Fraser

       EXPLANATORY NOTE

      The great mass of manuscript known as the Flashman Papers was discovered during a sale of household furniture at Ashby, Leicestershire, in 1965. The papers were subsequently claimed by Mr Paget Morrison, of Durban, South Africa, the nearest known living relative of their author.

      A point of major literary interest about the papers is that they clearly identify Flashman, the school bully of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, with the celebrated Victorian soldier of the same name. The papers are, in fact, Harry Flashman’s personal memoirs from the day of his expulsion from Rugby School in the late 1830s to the early years of the present century. He appears to have written them some time between 1900 and 1905, when he must have been over eighty. It is possible that he dictated them.

      The papers, which had apparently lain untouched for fifty years, in a tea chest, until they were found in the Ashby saleroom, were carefully wrapped in oilskin covers. From correspondence found in the first packet, it is evident that their original discovery by his relatives in 1915 after the great soldier’s death caused considerable consternation; they seem to have been unanimously against publication of their kinsman’s autobiography – one can readily understand why – and the only wonder is that the manuscript was not destroyed.

      Fortunately, it was preserved, and what follows is the content of the first packet, covering Flashman’s early adventures. I have no reason to doubt that it is a completely truthful account; where Flashman touches on historical fact he is almost invariably accurate, and readers can judge whether he is to be believed or not on more personal matters.

      Mr Paget Morrison, knowing of my interest in this and related subjects, asked me to edit the papers. Beyond correcting some minor spelling errors, however, there has been no editing to do. Flashman had a better sense of narrative than I have, and I have confined myself to the addition of a few historical notes.

      The quotation from Tom Brown’s Schooldays was pasted to the top page of the first packet; it had evidently been cut from the original edition of 1856.

      G.M.F.

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