Katherine Sturtevant

In Restoration London, sixteen-year-old Meg Moore is something of an anomaly. Unlike other girls her age, Meg pores over books. She spends long hours conversing with the famous authors and poets who visit her father's bookstore, and even writes her own stories, laboring over every word until her hand is black with ink. Without warning, however, Meg comes to learn exactly how powerful words can be. The day her best friend's brother Edward sets sail for Italy, Meg scoffs at his attempts at romance by answering him with a thoughtless jest. Soon news travels to London that Edward's ship has been captured and he has been sold as a slave in North Africa--and Meg cannot shake the thought that her cruel words are the cause. Now Meg must use her fiery language to bring Edward home, imploring her fellow Londoners to give all that they can to buy Edward's freedom. But once Meg learns to direct the power behind her words, will she be able to undo the damage she has caused, and write freely the stories that she longs to put on paper?

On December 14, 2002--which happened to be my birthday--I read a review of a book by Linda Colley titled Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850. The book was divided into two sections, one of which dealt with the captivity experience of Britons who were seized by Barbary pirates and held for ransom in North Africa. I knew nothing about this piece of history and was immediately fascinated. I knew at once that I had to use this tremendously exciting material. The book was not yet available, but I put in an order and began thinking about what kind of story I could tell against this background.

At first I had no intention of making it a sequel to At the Sign of the Star. I thought instead of a new character who would help to collect her father's ransom, or her brother's. When Captives arrived I began reading it at once, and was quickly intrigued by the fact that so many ransomed and escaped captives had told their stories upon their return to British soil, sometimes by relating them to a more literate person who did the writing. Naturally I thought of Meg and her love of words! And I was especially interested in exploring the blend of truth and invention that would have been involved in writing down this sort of story.

Today the line between fiction and non-fiction is very clear. If a writer calls a book a memoir and puts things into it that aren't true, as one author did recently, it generates a lot of controversy. Sometimes it's the other way around; an author will write a novel which is a barely disguised version of real events. Many authors like to experiment by crossing the boundaries of their genres, but readers aren't always enthusiastic when they do so.

In Restoration London, the line between fact and fiction wasn't so clear. A catalog of titles published during this time categorized books by type under headings such as Divinity, Physick, Poetry and Plays, Law, and so forth. Under the heading History we find books such as An Impartial Account of the Tryal of Lord Cornwallis and A True declaration of the Treasons practiced by William Parry, L.L.D. against Q. Elizabeth, with his Tryal, Conviction and Execution for the same. But under the same heading we also find the titles Royal Loves, or the Unhappy Prince. A Novel, together with The English Monsieur. A Comical Novel: Wherein his Travels, Amours, and other passages of his life, no less strange than delightful, are faithfully set down by an impartial hand. This last title seems to promise both that the story is fiction and that it isn't. Even the titles that seem to be clearly non-fiction actually had a lot of invention in them. The movement to demand documented sources when writing about history was relatively new, and many writers still invented speeches and illustrative incidents for historical figures.

The French romances Meg likes to read were usually about people who actually lived in previous centuries, but the stories always ended happily and the characters were always virtuous. Though based on real people, the romances weren't realistic. Other narratives began by insisting their stories were absolutely true, often including an account of how the manuscript came to be in the hands of its "editor." These narratives went on to tell stories that were completely invented but had characters whose actions were very true-to-life. Which of these kinds of stories was more "true"? In a way, both were a mix of fact and fiction.

Readers of the time were often uncertain about whether the narratives they read were true or false. Narratives that called themselves "News" added to the confusion. News could be real, invented, or a combination of the two. Narratives that were supposed to have been written by criminals, often on the eve of their executions, were an extremely popular form of News. Some of these were probably "as told to" stories which were a mix of fact and fiction.

When News began to be used to criticize the government and to shape public opinion, the government sought ways to limit it. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the law came to define "seditious libel" as saying things that were injurious and untrue about the government. From then on, News had to be true.

In an effort to limit the distribution of critical News, the government passed The Stamp Act of 1724. This Act taxed News, which was true, but didn't tax printed narratives that were untrue. Some printers of newspapers kept their costs low by printing a short News section and a longer literary section. Did the passage of the Stamp Act encourage people to draw a clearer line between fiction and non-fiction? It's possible.