H’s Code

: Historical fiction writing as an act of translation

Abstract

This creative writing PhD consists of two parts: a historical fiction novel, H’s Code, and an accompanying critical commentary. The novel is based on the life of my great-grandfather William Stuart Hamilton, a writer of telegraph code, who was sent to Broadmoor for a violent attack. In a reciprocal act of wordlessness, his family never wrote to or visited him again, despite him writing numerous letters asking them to do so.
My research led me to understand my role – turning a life marked by a failure to communicate into a written form which would – as being more akin to a translator than a writer. Thus, the critical commentary explores my creative methodology and the resulting novel through the lens of translation. I trace my personal interaction with the source text of the archive, and account for my decision that historical fiction was the genre most suited to my communicative purpose. I argue that ideas of translation can usefully contribute to contemporary debates about historical fiction’s obligation to the archive. I demonstrate how, through my translation of William’s life into a work of fiction, I have sought both to explain
how his failure to communicate occurred and how this was guided by the historical record. In this way, my translation of his life reflects my purpose for his previously silenced and uncommunicable story: that it might be met with understanding by a new audience. I conclude that the writer of historical fiction and the translator have much in common, utilising their linguistic and cultural fluency to transform the seemingly incomprehensible into the comprehensible with their crucial and expert intervention.

Thesis embargoed. Available: 30/11/2030

Date of Award	Nov 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Amanda Hodgkinson (Supervisor)