Open Writing

I originally planned to write a series of articles on different aspects of 17th-century life, before then presenting the core of my work. However, after watching "The Da Vinci Code" it occurred to me that there is a better way to do it.

My material might mean more to you if I share the story of my hunt for evidence, with all its frustrations, dead ends and little victories.

Let's start at the very beginning.

I was 24 years old when I enrolled as a PhD student. I had visited archives and read quite a few history books but I was still very inexperienced. I could not believe that I was capable of doing what I had signed up for, and I didn't dare to think beyond the end of the year.

In the first months I struggled to find a subject for study. Some students begin PhDs with a set title or topic to cover, but others, like me, have to identify their own questions before they can look for answers.

A PhD is often described as an original contribution to knowledge. I naively thought this meant that I could only research something that no one else had ever looked at. I didn't realize that PhDs can also be reexaminations of well trodden territory.

After two and a half months of reading I went to London thinking that I had found my question. It was just before Christmas. The decorations were up in the shops and the weather was piercingly cold.

Much to my embarrassment I picked up a bad cough that made it difficult to be quiet in the hushed silence of the research rooms. It contributed to the feeling that I was an awkward child lost among adult scholars. I didn't really know what I was doing, and I was almost too afraid to ask the research room assistants for help.

I thought I would study the reputations of the mistresses of Charles II, so I went to the prints and drawings department at the British Museum.

I was admitted into a high-ceilinged old fashioned room. The walls were lined with books and file boxes containing thousands of prints and drawings. The atmosphere was positively Victorian.

Researchers sat at large wooden desks supervised by assistants, who answered questions, fetched books and boxes, and no doubt kept an eye out for thieves.

I was led to a seat next to a dark-haired girl in a floral dress. She was making notes about a Renaissance drawing propped on the stand in front of her. I couldn't identify the picture but I was sure it was by a famous artist.

Despite the British museum's collection of prints and drawings being one of the most important in the world, efforts to catalogue it on a computer database have only just begun.

When I was doing my PhD visitors had to rely on the knowledge of the assistants, or look up prints and drawings on index cards, many of which were written in a semi-legible nineteenth-century hand.

I told a kindly old fellow in a tweed jacket what I was looking for and he came back with a file box of satirical prints from the reign of Charles II. I examined them, awed by their age and still worried because I didn't know what I was hoping to find.

Several boxes later I left the museum none the wiser. Somehow the mistresses of Charles II didn't seem right after all. (I was giving up too easily, but with hindsight I can say thank goodness for that!) I trudged past the stone lions flanking the back entrance of the museum thinking that I would never find a proper subject for my PhD.

I didn't know that the next day I would make a decision that would put me on the path to the finished thesis.

I went to visit the Museum of London, an excellent institution that should be on every tourist's itinerary. I wanted to ask the curators if they had any artefacts depicting the mistresses of Charles II.

I spoke to a woman on the internal telephone and she told me there was nothing. I couldn't believe it. Surely there was something! I consoled myself with a wander around the displays. My cough had become painful in the cruel winter wind and I didn't feel at all well.

The museum galleries were themed into periods of London history. I went from the Romans to the medieval times, then the 16th century and into my own era of interest, the 17th-century Stuart period.

What I saw on display in the Stuart section sent me scrabbling in my handbag for a notebook and pen. I knew that the objects I was looking at were far more interesting than the mistresses of Charles II.

They were ceramic mugs commemorating Charles II's restoration to the throne in 1660 and his marriage in 1662.

I wanted to know why they were made and who had bought them. Were 17th-century Englishmen and women just like us? Did they buy commemorative souvenirs at royal weddings and coronations?

It was a fascinating thought that later developed in an unexpected direction to form the central argument of my thesis. I had been looking for a question and now in London it had found me.

I went home that Christmas feeling much more confident about my PhD. At last I had something to study.

If there is a moral in this story it is that for historians there are few ready made mysteries waiting to be solved. Finding the right question to ask can be as difficult as locating the answer.