As I grew older, I began to turn to historical novels. I suppose the historian’s basic impulse is to find out what the past was really like. Whether by nature or nurture, I have always had this impulse. I cannot walk down Fifth Avenue without wondering how the street and the people on it would have looked a hundred years ago.

My father had preserved his store of Henty books, and I soon became as absorbed in Henty as he had been. But my case was more peculiar. After all, Henty, who died in 1902, was still producing when my father was a boy. When I started reading him, he had been dead for a quarter of a century, and he carried the stigmata of a Victorian imperialist in a time of debunking and disillusion. Yet such knowledge as I have about ancient Egypt (The Cat of the Bubastes), the Venetian Republic (The Lion of St. Mark’s), India (half a dozen Henty books), the rise of the Dutch republic (By Pike and Dyke), the struggle for Chilean independence (With Cochrane the Dauntless), the Franco-Prussian War (The Young Franc-Tireurs), the Boxer Rebellion (With the Allies to Pekin), and much else came initially from Henty.

He also provoked thought about history. A sturdy Tory, Henty wrote about the American Revolution from the viewpoint of the Loyalists (True to the Old Flag) and the Civil War from the viewpoint of the Confederates (*With Lee in Virginia). One received a new slant on what had seemed historical veritíes, nor was one corrupted thereby. And even Henty had his subtexts. *With Lee in Virginia overtly supported the slave system, but his rebellious slaves were as brave and manly as his Confederate heroes.

Another interesting point: the critic George Steiner has pointed out that the great British nineteenth-century novelists ignored the British nineteenth-century wars. Stendahl wrote about the Napoleonic Wars; so did Tolstoy. Except for Waterloo’s cameo appearance in Vanity Fair, nineteenth century war hardly existed in the serious English novel. Jane Austen, Dickens, the Bröntes, George Eliot, Trollope—no battle scenes. As the Henty scholar Dennis Butts observes, if you want to find out what it was like to be in the Crimean War, you have to turn to G. A. Henty.

Through the years I have collected the names of people who have declared a debt to Henty: the Raelaisian novelist Henry Miller ("my favorite author…I must have read every blessed one before I was fourteen. Today…I can pick up any book of his and get the same fascinating pleasure I did as a boy"); the non-Rabelaisian novelist Graham Greene ("I particularly like the dull historical parts),; the conservative billionaire J. Paul Getty, who read Henty all his life; the iconoclastic radical historian A.J.P. Taylor ("They were my favourites…he taught me more history than anyone else"); General George C. Marshall (who visited Tunisia in 1943 and told General Eisenhower, as they inspected the ruins, that he knew about Hannibal from Henty’s *The Young Carthaginian); Admiral Elmo Zumwalt ("they taught me more about history than more academic texts, and were key in motivating me for a life of adventure"); the conservative senator Richard B. Russell ("He was sort of an old-time royalist, but he really knew how to advance his heroes quickly); the liberal senator Ernest Gruening; the actor Elliott Nugent; the historian Samuel Eliot Morison and the historian and Socialist Kenneth Wiggins Porter; Harold Gray, the reactionary begetter of Daddy Warbucks and Little Orphan Annie; my English contemporary and friend, the historian and founder of the Liberal Democrats, Roy Jenkins.

Not that Henty can be revived today. In the fast-forwarding tempo of modern life, he is a lost cause. Or perhaps I am wrong? The Economist on December 11, 1999, reports that Henty’s books are being reissued by the Lost Classics Book Company of Lake Wales, Florida, and PrestonSpeed Books in Mill Hall, Pennsylvania, and that a complete edition is available on CD-ROM.

Anyway, thanks for the memory.

*Published by Lost Classics Book Company