Tag Archives: Daughter of Time

Tey’s “The Daughter of Time”

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Josephine Tey’s historical fiction novel “The Daughter of Time” is an intricately woven story that, while sometimes incredible, blends reality with fiction seamlessly. Tey tells the story of a bedridden cop (Grant) who decides to unravel the mystery behind Richard III, one of England’s most notorious criminals. Tey’s background in history allowed for her to incorporate many of the methods in research used by historians. What I found most interesting in this novel was Grant’s insistence on the ignorance and stupidity of historians. Do his thoughts on the subject mirror Tey’s? or is she simply creating a character?

After reading this novel, I understand why some people are suspect of history. For all we know, everything we learned in history class was a lie schemed up by biased individuals for political or personal gain. Tey terms this type of history “tonypandy.” The methods used by Grant and his research assistant in uncovering the mystery of Richard III correspond with the methods used by diligent historians. By researching a source to discover where it got its story from, Grant was able to learn that all the stories about Richard III killing his two young nephews came from one historian, who would personally lose everything if Richard III was allowed to continue in his rule.

One quote that I found correctly summed up the basic plot line of the book came towards the end: “It [the story of Richard III as a horrible villain] is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing” (Tey 104). Through the example of the Richard III story, Tey proves the importance of a historian to be diligent and not to simply take everything they hear for fact. It is by being meticulous in one’s research that a historian can be sure they did everything correctly.

False Accusations

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After reading Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time, I now realize how important primary sources are to a historian, more general history itself.  The book starts out with Alan Grant, a policeman, staring at a ceiling, in bed, in a hospital.  There is only so much the mind can create with just a blank ceiling.  After months of refusing to read books, his friend Marta brings him a stack of portraits of prominent figure in past centuries.  He goes through several of these portraits until he comes across the portrait of Richard III.  For some reason the facial expressions and other aspects of this portrait cannot leave Grant’s thoughts.  He eagerly decides to learn more about Richard III and the infamous accusations of the murderer of his two nephews.

Throughout the book, Tey establishes the importance of primary sources.  Although school textbooks, well known authors such as Sir Thomas More, say one thing, the facts may not be factual.  It puzzles me how such thing could be possible.  Only declaring history a few weeks back, I still have a lot to learn.  I was one who depended on text books and online websites (not Wikipedia as taught in grade school), not utilizing the primary sources that are available at public libraries, churches, government buildings, etc.

This book and the understanding of primary sources has definitely overlapped with my work in the archives.  It has given me a greater reason to believe in the importance for researching primary sources.  Although it may be difficult to piece together because there are so many articles and separate pieces, it is important for a true historian to be able to piece the information together.  One must not always depend on the information readily available and already pieced together because, like Tey depicted in The Daughter or Time, not all common knowledge is reliable.

“Truth is the daughter of time”

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Josephine Tey presents an enthralling historical mystery that envelops the minds of policeman Grant who is bedridden and bored in a hospital, and the American student,  Brent Carradine who is in pursuit of a worthwhile occupation. Tey’s novel begins simply, where a portrait inspires Grant to ask questions about the history surrounding Richard III’s reign and his villainous legacy. The process which he uses begins with asking his friends who visit him and the nurses who attend to him in the hospital about what they know. He reads two school textbooks and then asks for other historical works, from apparently legitimate historians. Through his investigations and police-like thinking and methodologies, in collaboration with Carradine, they uncover historical inconsistencies and “breaks” within the story.

I was thoroughly confused reading this novel, and it was difficult to keep track of all of the different actors, their motives, who they were related to and how, what dynastic titles they had and who was next in line to become king. The details of history, as Tey shows, are extremely important and primary sources, staying within the “account books” vs accounts of people are important to finding the truth. Grant’s position throughout the novel is similar to Tuchman, where she believes that historians must stay within the discipline of the facts. This is problematic though, because what constitutes facts? Often, as we saw with the discussion of John Dickinson’s birthday in class the other day, or in Thomas More’s history, historians base their writings off other historians accounts, without questioning it. So, detailed investigative work, using primary sources and questioning others interpretations of history is essential to telling a more truthful or accurate story.

 

After much time has passed, truth is birthed.

 

-Eddie

The Daughter of Time

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The Daughter of Time, written by Josephine Tey, is Tey’s explanation of how to do history and historical research, as well as the problems faced by historians. The protagonist, Alan, endeavors to solve the mystery of Richard III’s death and the murder of his two nephews. Throughout the book Tey utilizes Alan’s profession as a policeman at Scotland Yard to illustrate the process of historical research through the lens of a detective’s investigative process. Initially Alan acquires a portrait of Richard III and it was interesting to read the characters variety of actions and perceptions of the man in the portrait prior to their knowledge of it being Richard III. The characters would describe the figure as being afflicted by “poliomyelitis” or a liver condition but upon learning it was Richard III they would describe the painting as a “portrait of a murderer”. Relating to our discussion of how to do history, it is interesting to see how preconceived notions can affect a person’s opinion or retelling of a historical event.

Initially Alan consults high school textbooks and contemporary accounts concerning Richard III and his nephews. One of the books was written by John Morton, a “trusted” historian of Richard’s life, who declared Richard was a calculating murderer whose sole concern was his throne. After learning more about John Morton, Alan discovers Morton was Henry VII’s(the ruler who succeeded Richard) Archbishop of Canterbury and an enemy of Richard III’s who had plotted an uprising against him. Morton also stood to gain through propagating the story in order to help legitimize Henry VII as the new ruler, and therefore increase his own chances of social mobility. Therefore Alan discovers that while doing history it is important to consider who the writer is and the possible biases which could affect their narration of events.

As Alan progresses in his research he rejects all “accounts” of the events written during the reign of Henry VII and the writings of any historians of the time given the bias he had already encountered with his prior sources. Alan moves on to primary sources from the time of Richard III which included personal letters and Parliamentary reports. From the new sources he encountered, which were less likely to have politically motivated bias, Alan sees a kinder and more caring side of Richard III, as well as the fallacies within the “history” of the murders of the two princes by the orders of Richard III.

The Daughter of Time

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The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey, is a novel that describes Tey’s definition of history. Throughout the novel, the murder of Richard II’s nephews. This horrendous event is speculated about through the main character, Detective Grant. He is eager to find out the truth, but he comes to learn that what he thinks is the truth is hearsay. Hearsay and the stories about what happened are all questions and rumors. Grant reads Sir Thomas More’s account of Richard II, only to realize later that that story was just another version of the same story he had been hearing. Grant discusses his struggles with the other characters about finding out the truth. This is significant to us, the readers, because as we learn to write about history, it is important to find the whole truth, not simply the parts we hear most often. We had one example of this in the archives when we were debating John Dickinson’s birthday, and that although maybe 70% of sources said his birthday was November 8, the truth was that it was on November 2.

Discussing ones ideas with others around them is a good way to get new information that one may not have received already, or to confirm information one might have. Exchanging ideas is what happens with Detective Grant and Brent Carradine, they use each others ideas and knowledge of what they have researched and heard to uncover the truth about the murders of Richard II’s nephews. At one point of the novel, there is a conversation between Grant and Carradine about the point that Grant really wants to find a “contemporary account of events…not what someone heard-tell about the events that happened”. (Tey pg. 93) This statement is directly related to ‘how to do history’ because it tells the reader, and/or informs the scholar that primary sources are the best way to find accurate information on the topic at hand. Tey’s point in writing this novel was not only to tell a story of a detective and his assistant looking for details of an old crime, but rather the process they go through to find the information. Grant starts out just listening to old stories from people in the town, to getting a research assistant to help him separate folk-lore tales from possible accurate depictions. Next, the share the details they find with one another to see what matches up, and to show that asking questions and sharing information is the best way to go about conducting research. Finally, they use what information they have collected to build their case, however now Grant and Carradine are not sure if it was Richard II or his hired hand who killed Richards two nephews.

Tey: History is Made By Those Who Follow

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Tey attempts to portray Richard III in a positive light, I am a befuddled as to her avenue of approach. She uses the novel as a format from which she can critique prior histories of Richard without actually establishing a solid thesis. By not establishing a thesis, Tey is able to use a train of thoughts in an attempt to demonstrate Richard as he truly was. While this works wonderfully for an attempt at solving out a “conspiracy theory”, this does nothing to create an actual fact-based historical argument.

Tey does do a solid job, however, on the explanation on how history is shaped and why it is shaped in the ways that we see today. If Richard III was as benevolent as Tey establishes, the Tudor’s depiction of Richard as a murderous tyrant reverberates across a common thread in history: people are what those who follow portray them as. While children for the past hundred years or so have learned that George Washington was an excellent general or  Abraham Lincoln believed in the need for equality between white men and enslaved blacks, it is only because we who have followed in the footsteps of these men have painted them to be that way.

I must admit, having read the various pieces of historical fiction lying around in AHEC’s gift shop, that Tey presents her take on history in an interesting way. By using the detective figure, she can use police methodology to create an interesting chain of thought to “solve” what truly happened. But by using this, Tey also creates her biggest fault; deductive reasoning. With Grant trying to solve history as if it were a crime, his method of reasoning goes against even the basic historical principles. By creating history based on what he thinks must have happened in the missing spaces rather than using the documents to prove what happened in the spaces, Tey through Grant takes what may or may not have been a possible position on Richard III and ruins all of her credibility. But as a historical novel? Tey manages to deliver a solid reading experience sure to intrigue even those with no interest in Medieval England.

The Usual Suspect

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Carl Becker would be rather proud of Detective Grant—rather than a bespectacled academic pondering a weighty tome, the historian hero of Daughter of Time is a gruff, battered, longtime veteran of Scotland Yard who by his own admission gave little and less thought to history after his schooling. However, he finds himself unraveling a mystery of a rather different sort when a portrait of Richard III makes him question everything he thought he knew about the key.

Grant’s attempts to discover the truth behind Richard are quite interesting, demonstrating many historian’s techniques and thought processes, all from his hospital bed, with the aid of his American friend Brent. So too does he demonstrate the pitfalls of historical accounts relying on one another, with the case of More’s inaccurate portrayal of Richard being used by everyone else after him and thus tainting the truth of the man.

And another [case of Tonypandy] bites the dust

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How does a bedridden cop crack one of the biggest mysteries in English history? Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time illuminates what it means to “do” history. When the protagonist Detective Grant becomes intrigued with a portrait of Richard III and the horrendous crime the medieval monarch is supposed to have committed, he sets out to uncover what really happened.

From http://www.guardian.co.uk.

Grant soon finds that modern sources are unable to adequately explain how or why Richard III might’ve murdered his two young nephews. In fact, while they portray a sinister and calculating king they also acknowledge his many admirable qualities and achievements; it is this apparent contradiction that spurs Grant to dig deeper.

The detective is scandalized to find out that Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, a contemporary account and the definitive history of the period, is nothing but a regurgitation of another’s story; More was only a boy during Richard’s reign. Interrogating sources is an important part of a historian’s work. We must seek to contextualize documents and not simply take them at face value. The questions we are currently asking in our archive assignment are a good guide: Who created the document and when? Who is the intended audience? What is the intended purpose of the document? Etc.

Grant is finally able to get his hands on some primary sources with the help of his sidekick-researcher Brent Carradine. Little by little, he pieces together the puzzle of the past. In some cases, what sources don’t say is as important as what they do say: in Henry Tudor’s Bill of Attainder against Richard, the new monarch makes no mention whatsoever of his predecessor’s crime.

Another notable aspect of Grant’s historical journey is that he talks with his companions and colleagues, much like a historian might dialogue with her peers. He shows us the importance of reasoning out loud and bouncing your ideas off of others.

In the end, Grant outlines the evidence he has amassed and builds his case. The driving question guiding the detective’s research: who had the profile and the motives to dispose of the princes? Was it the long-accused Richard III or his successor the usurping Henry VII who killed Edward’s two sons? For Grant, the facts just didn’t stack up against Richard. He is widely-reported as having been a level-headed, just, and merciful king. Henry, on the other hand, was power hungry and crafty. We can almost never know exactly how history happened, but we can make informed theories about the past based on the evidence we have. Using the evidence and his knowledge of human nature, Grant busts the case of how a malicious rumor came to be accepted as truth.