Sabrina Darnowsky

When I first started writing my biography of the nineteenth-century Quaker minister Murray Shipley, I wanted to review some of the historical biographies and non-fiction that we have on our bookshelves, specifically from a craft perspective. When writing about past events, how much can an author dramatize without straying too far afield?

The answer to that question seemed to vary by author. David McCullough’s 1776 begins this way:

On the afternoon of Thursday, October 26, 1775, His Royal Majesty George III, King of England, rode in royal splendor from St. James’s Palace to the Palace of Westminster, there to address the opening of Parliament on the increasingly distressing issue of war in America.

The day was cool, but clear skies and sunshine, a rarity in London, brightened everything, and the royal cavalcade, spruced and polished, shone to perfection. In an age that had given England such rousing patriotic songs as “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia,” in a nation that adored ritual and gorgeous pageantry, it was a scene hardly to be improved upon.

An estimated 60,000 people had turned out.

It’s a wonderful scene, but when I looked at the Notes, the only thing cited was the fact that about 60,000 people had turned out; that had come from an article in the London Public Advertiser. Now, it’s my understanding that statements that are common knowledge or can be readily verified don’t have to be cited. For example, it’s easy enough to search the Internet and find out that George III did in fact address Parliament on October 26, 1775, regarding the situation in America. St. James Palace was the official seat of the court, although the royal family resided elsewhere, so how did McCullough know that George began his journey from there? And while anyone who has been to London is familiar with its occasionally dreary weather, how did McCullough know that this particular day was cool, sunny, and clear? Perhaps the London Public Advertiser included all these details, and McCullough simply chose to cite only the crowd size.

In contrast, here’s how Jon Meacham began the Prologue to Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power:

He woke at first light. Lean and loose-limbed, Thomas Jefferson tossed back the sheets in his rooms at Conrad and McMunn’s boardinghouse on Capital Hill, swung his long legs out of bed, and plunged his feet into a basin of cold water—a lifelong habit he believed good for his health.

Meacham’s Notes cite numerous letters mentioning the fact that Jefferson was an early riser. He references multiple sources describing Jefferson’s physical attributes, as well as his habit of staying at Conrad and McMunn’s, and of bathing his feet in cold water every day. Practically every detail is backed up. Now, there is still some speculation here (for example, Meacham assumes Jefferson was sleeping under the covers rather than on top of them), but Meacham makes a strong evidential case for his narrative—stronger, it seems, than McCullough’s.

These different approaches to describing historical events leave me unsure how to write about the death of Murray’s first wife, Hannah, while giving birth to their ninth child. From family correspondence, I know that the preceding birth a little more than a year earlier occurred at home, and that labor took only about thirty minutes. From Hannah’s death certificate I know that the cause of her death was uterine hemorrhage, and that her brother, William H. Taylor, was her attending physician. I know from the newspaper announcement of her death that it occurred on a Sunday morning.

Sooo . . . how much can I speculate when describing this traumatic event? Can I assume this delivery also took place at home? Did Murray go to worship that morning in blissful ignorance, or stay home because his wife had already gone into labor? It seems reasonable to mention common features of childbirth such as contractions and pain, and certainly with a hemorrhage there would have been a great deal of blood. Did Hannah have a midwife? Was William called to her bedside when it was clear that something was going terribly wrong? Is it sufficient for me to include a lot of “perhaps” and “it may well have been” when conjecturing about how it all played out? Where are the boundaries in creative non-fiction?