Any novelist approaching a publisher with an idea for a series of stories centred around a cowardly, bullying racist, who is also a serial philanderer, would nowadays be very quickly shown the door. Yet George MacDonald Fraser achieved celebrity and surprising academic respect for just such a series, which consisted of 12 books published between 1969 and 2005.
The series is based on two literary devices: first, that its chief protagonist, Sir Harry Flashman, is the bullying villain of Thomas Hughes’ pious 1857 moral tale Tom Brown’s School Days; second, that the stories are in fact drawn from a set of unpublished papers discovered in a tea chest after lying hidden for 50 years. This allows the author to pose as the ‘editor’, and to insert a multitude of scholarly footnotes. So successful was this device that the first novel, Flashman, was assumed by nearly a third of American reviewers to be an authentic set of military memoirs.
The subsequent novels were equally successful. They are stirring, rip-roaring adventure tales, based on detailed and accurate research on the colonial wars and adventures of the mid- to late 19th century, and they deliver biting satirical attacks on some of the most cherished heroes of this period.
The 22nd Indo-Pacific Prehistory Congress