Gallery of the Past: Writing Historical Fiction with 19th Century Photography in Canada and Australia

Abstract

This thesis, consisting of a novel and dissertation, explores the writing of historical fiction, and the use of photography as research in visualising the several settings that the characters inhabit. As the novel is set in the late 19th century, the conventions of Victorian-era photography came to the forefront of the research. The story sees two fictional brothers leave their home on Vancouver Island in Canada, each traveling alone, and each with a different weight on his heart. They find themselves in towns with very real, and very documented, histories, and this is where my research into photography began. Joseph Richard, the younger brother, finds work in the town of Yale, on the Fraser River in British Columbia during the early days of the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Yale was a boomtown and major depot during railway construction, and there are many photographs from the 1880s to chronicle its buildings and denizens, its remote and wild surroundings, its place in history.