Interview: Kate Williams, historian and author of The Pleasures of Men

Published on Saturday 21 January 2012 00:00

Historian Kate Williams tells David Robinson why the credit crunch informs her debut novel about a serial killer in early Victorian London

KATE Williams is the kind of woman who makes other women jealous, and quite a lot of men too. She has been doing this for quite a while now. At her state school in Birmingham, there would have been those who resented her just for getting to Oxford. At Oxford, there would have been fellow-students envious of the fact that, as a scholarship winner, she could wear the long, barrister-like scholar’s gown. After Oxford, there would have been other historians peeved at the ease with which her biographies of Emma Hamilton and the young Queen Victoria outsold their own offerings. Finally, there would have been all those other writers who, for all their hours in front of the computer screen, somehow never managed to conjure up a £1 million deal for their first two historical novels.

And if none of that is fair, there’s one thing about Kate Williams they would find even more enraging. As well as all of the above, she is preposterously pretty.

TV can’t get enough of her and, judging by the listings of her small-screen appearances on her website, vice versa. She is the social historian on Restoration Houses, and last year popped up on the small screen giving the historical perspective on royal weddings and as a expert on everything from Robert Lovelace (on Faulks on Fiction) to the history of pies (with Alan Titchmarsh).

Her debut novel, The Pleasures of Men, is set in 1840, largely inside the fearful mind of 19-year-old Catherine Sorgeiul, who lives with her uncle in a house in Spitalfields which he has filled with masks, skulls and swords from his trading voyages around the world. She is not, we soon realise, the most reliable or rational of narrators: mention is made of her time in an institution called Lavenderfields. Then there has been an attachment of some kind to one of her servants, and there is every sign of massive repressed tension when her hugely condescending relatives visit from across town.

Yet there is one thing that obsessed Catherine: the grotesque serial murders committed by a man who comes to be known as the Man of Crows because of his habit of ripping open his victims’ ribcages and stuffing their hair into their mouths to resemble a beak. Gradually, she is convinced, she can sense what it is like to be him and can almost imagine where he is most likely to strike next.

What is intriguing about The Pleasures of Men is the extent to which Williams has left behind the historian’s nit-picking search for objectivity and given free rein to her inventiveness. This is a novel as crowded with sensation as a Victorian parlour was with furniture. For Catherine – bored, listless, starved of affection, locked away in her uncle’s house – even just imagining the handiwork of the Man of Crows somehow frees her imagination. Somehow, she can just see what it must be like being one of his victims, one of those working women he follows from the bustling streets to the dark empty alleyways, can see it so clearly that she can almost – almost – see him in her mind’s eye. Out in those thronged streets, she feels alive. Frightened to death, but alive. “My skin was sparking, my eyes sheened with newness. Every part of me was alive and begging to be felt.”

That is one of those occasions – there are many in the novel – when the reader isn’t sure if Catherine is actually out in the street or there only in her imagination. That is deliberate: the historical novel, Williams insists, should be every bit as open to experimentation as any other form, and she was trying to make the fragmentation of Catherine’s psyche mirror the various ways in which certainties of early Victorian society were breaking down.

“Obviously with hindsight, the Great Exhibition isn’t too far away and Britain will be triumphant and all of that,” she says, “but in 1840 that’s not the way it seemed. There’s no safety net for everyone, life expectancy was 30 – and that goes right across the classes – there was cholera, typhoid. This is the start of the Hungry Forties, there’s a recession, and poverty is pretty much all-encompassing. In a moment, you could fall into poverty and it was absolute. You would be starving, there would be no health benefits. So when people talk about Victorian values, this is what they actually were: there was an extreme free economy, which meant that the rich could treat their servants as they wanted and cast them off as they wanted without giving them a reference.”

She talks quickly, making her points in quick succession. This is the TV historian at work, always dragging the past back into the present, making it relevant (“when people talk about Victorian values…”) spelling out simply what life was actually like back then. But it isn’t just that she sees the present in the past: when it came to starting to write the book, it worked the other way round too.

She began writing The Pleasures of Men, she explains, in Paris not London – indeed, if she had been in London, the whole thing might not have worked, because she has lived there (right now, at the Angel) for nearly all her adult life, and she knows it too well. But Paris was different. In 2008, she had finished her book Becoming Queen about the young Queen Victoria and was starting to research one on Josephine Bonaparte. She had rented a flat by the Seine and worked in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale by day.

“I was on my own. It was a very hot summer. And I just started wandering along the streets at night. They were much more deserted than London, and they seemed to me to look more like they would have done in the 19th century. I became increasingly disorientated, and I started to imagine someone similarly lost over 100 years ago.

“Soon the voice of Catherine came into my head and then that of the Man of Crows. And so every evening I was writing non-stop in cafes. The story had completely possessed me, so even though I was in Paris I was writing obsessively about East London. I had done some TV work on Jack the Ripper and Spitalfields so I had that in my head already.”

These scenes in which Catherine was wandering the streets of London, she said, “just flowed”. They must have done because they seem to have impelled her career in another direction. She had tried her hand at fiction while still at Oxford, but the results were forever consigned to the bottom drawer. But now, writing about a period which she already knew, about which she had already done the research, her fiction seemed both freer and more purposeful. There were things she wanted to say about the 1840s, things that most of us get wrong about that time in British history, even though events in the present seemed to be swinging back into alignment with it.

“It was the credit crunch when I started writing this book in 2008. Banks were crashing and the boom was bursting and I thought the London of the Hungry Forties had a lot of parallels with what was happening now. It’s around this time that Disraeli was pointing out that Britain was separating into two nations, the rich and the poor – and that was true then and it is again now.”

She admits that in the novel she might have exaggerated the extent of the influx of crime into prosperous areas more than she would have done had she been writing as a historian. However, then as now, it’s perception of crime that counts, and the fear of crime and poverty among the middle classes remained higher than the crime figures themselves would warrant.

The hard times of 1840, she adds, were harder in another respect: whereas we have grown accustomed to the resilience of industrial capitalism, the Victorians were much more afraid. If they went under, the world would not only lose its moral policeman, but even the middle classes could find themselves in the workhouse.

She would, she resolved, try to make sure that some of that early Victorian uncertainty found its way into the novel. In 2009 she revolved to give her book a further boost by taking a creative writing MA at Royal Holloway University, London. There she was taught, among others, by former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion. She submitted five extracts from The Pleasures of Men as her coursework.

Needless to say, she passed with flying colours. In fact, she was so successful that these days she is even teaching the course herself. Now why am I not the slightest bit surprised by that?

• The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams is published by Michael Joseph, price £12.99

Logged in as:

Comment here. Start typing your comment here:

Post comment

Please adhere to our Community guidelines

Your view

Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.