{"id":25796,"date":"2014-05-17T08:59:54","date_gmt":"2014-05-17T13:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25796"},"modified":"2014-05-24T16:30:28","modified_gmt":"2014-05-24T21:30:28","slug":"the-genesis-of-george-macdonald-frasers-flashman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/05\/17\/the-genesis-of-george-macdonald-frasers-flashman\/","title":{"rendered":"The genesis of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Telegraph<\/em>, Harry Mount<\/a> has the story of how George MacDonald Fraser came to create his most memorable fictional character, Harry Flashman:<\/p>\n

\u201cI had written what might be called an introductory chapter about this boozy old veteran pouring out his soul on Mafeking Night to some anonymous listener; I think, but I\u2019m not sure, that I called the veteran Flashman, having in mind Thomas Hughes\u2019s character. Anyway, I discarded the introduction, which wasn\u2019t good, and it has probably been destroyed, unless it\u2019s in a trunk somewhere,\u201d MacDonald Fraser wrote in the unpublished account.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018How did you get the idea?\u2019 is a question I have been asked ad nauseam<\/em>, and the answer is that I don\u2019t know. I read Tom Brown\u2019s Schooldays<\/em> as a child, and possibly on later occasions; I found Flashman the most striking character in the book, and suspect that Hughes did, too — and probably wrote Flashman out of the story because he realised that, if he didn\u2019t, the deplorable lout would take over the book.”<\/p>\n

\u201cPossibly it was simply boyhood recollection that prompted it. I certainly don\u2019t remember thinking, \u2018Flashman \u2013 eureka!\u2019 Anyway, somewhere around April \u201966, when I was 41 years old, I sat down to write Flashman<\/em>, working in the kitchen after I came home from work in the small hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI began where Hughes had left off, in the style of a memoir; since I knew from internal evidence in Tom Brown<\/em> the date of Flashman\u2019s expulsion from Rugby, and, since I had determined that he was the kind of rotter whose career was bound to lie in the army, various plot points suggested themselves at once — Lord Cardigan, the First Afghan War, etc. But I had no idea, when I started, of any coherent storyline: Flashman would be a cad and a coward, but I would just plunge ahead and see where my imagination took me.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fraser’s Flashman<\/em> and the following books will tell you more about British history in the Victorian era than you’d learn in a proper history undergrad program, but no university course could be as entertaining as Flashman’s recounting of episodes in his own career. One of the books (and in my opinion the weakest) was turned into a movie<\/a>, but it didn’t do well enough at the box office, so no more were made. I doubt that a modern movie could be made, as Flashman has all the vices of “his” era, most of which are now so politically incorrect that no studio would dare touch them.<\/p>\n