The Temptation of Historical Fiction
Dan Allosso So I’m thinking very seriously about getting to work on my story about a British radical named Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891). Bradlaugh is the British equivalent of America’s “Great Agnostic,” Robert Ingersoll, only more so. Unlike Ingersoll, Bradlaugh was extremely political—he was even elected to Parliament and prevented from taking his seat for six Charles Bradlaugh years by the conservative opposition because he could not take the religious oath of office. I’ve been researching him, off and on, since about 2006. In that time, I’ve tried on the idea of writing a straight biography of Bradlaugh, but Londoner Bryan Niblett recently wrote a very good account of Bradlaugh’s adult years (especially the Parliamentary struggle), called Dare to Stand Alone . I was thinking of writing the story of Bradlaugh’s youth for a young adult audience. Bradlaugh was thrown out onto the streets of East London by his parents at age 16 for declaring himself ...