Antonina

Antonina or, The Fall of Rome(1850)

Preface

In preparing to compose a fiction founded on history, the writer of
these pages thought it no necessary requisite of such a work that the
principal characters appearing in it should be drawn from the historical
personages of the period. On the contrary, he felt that some very
weighty objections attached to this plan of composition. He knew well
that it obliged a writer to add largely from invention to what was
actually known--to fill in with the colouring of romantic fancy the bare
outline of historic fact--and thus to place the novelist's fiction in
what he could not but consider most unfavourable contrast to the
historian's truth. He was further by no means convinced that any story
in which historical characters supplied the main agents, could be
preserved in its fit unity of design and restrained within its due
limits of development, without some falsification or confusion of
historical dates--a species of poetical licence of which he felt no
disposition to avail himself, as it was his main anxiety to make his
plot invariably arise and proceed out of the great events of the era
exactly in the order in which they occurred.

Influenced, therefore, by these considerations, he thought that by
forming all his principal characters from imagination, he should be able
to mould them as he pleased to the main necessities of the story; to
display them, without any impropriety, as influenced in whatever manner
appeared most strikingly interesting by its minor incidents; and
further, to make them, on all occasions, without trammel or hindrance,
the practical exponents of the spirit of the age, of all the various
historical illustrations of the period, which the Author's researches
among conflicting but equally important authorities had enabled him to
garner up, while, at the same time, the appearance of verisimilitude
necessary to an historical romance might, he imagined, be successfully
preserved by the occasional introduction of the living characters of the
era, in those portions of the plot comprising events with which they had
been remarkably connected.

On this plan the recent work has been produced.

To the fictitious characters alone is committed the task of representing
the spirit of the age. The Roman emperor, Honorius, and the Gothic king,
Alaric, mix but little personally in the business of the story--only
appearing in such events, and acting under such circumstances, as the
records of history strictly authorise; but exact truth in respect to
time, place, and circumstance is observed in every historical event
introduced in the plot, from the period of the march of the Gothic
invaders over the Alps to the close of the first barbarian blockade of
Rome.

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