I was researching a different book – later abandoned – and wanted to feature a character with a disability. A bit of googling and up popped Jeffrey Hudson’s Wikipedia entry. He drew me in immediately, as someone who’d had a difficult hand in life and made the best of it, and I knew I wanted to try to tell his story.
But The Smallest Man isn’t Jeffrey Hudson’s story?
No. Originally I intended to fictionalise the real story, and for Jeffrey to be the main character, but the problem I discovered was that real life, however dramatic, doesn’t usually have the right shape for a novel – it meanders about instead of heading towards a conclusion, there are boring bits, and too many characters come in and out, especially in a life as colourful as Jeffrey’s.
The other thing was, his name really got in the way – it sounded to me like an accountant from Pinner (no offence to accountants from Pinner!) and made it really difficult to shape the character I wanted him to be. It was only when I decided to create a character inspired by Jeffrey, and came up with the name Nat Davy, that he started to come to life for me.
How did you decide what real history to include, and what to make up?
Obviously, the main historical background had to be correct. But because Nat tells the story himself, I felt I could leave out certain details that wouldn’t have been important to him, so if you were to read a textbook on the Civil War, there would be events in there that don’t appear here. In particular, the run-up to the war involves an enormous amount of political manoeuvring between the king and Parliament that really wouldn’t make good fiction – and that I genuinely believe Jeffrey Hudson himself wouldn’t mention if you bumped into him in the Red Lion in Oakham and he told you his life story.
In terms of making up events, my rule was that I could include things that aren’t documented as happening, but that feasibly could have happened. So for example, there was a rumour of a kidnap plot against the queen during the journey down to Oxford, and certainly the Parliamentarians would have been able to get the king to do anything if they’d captured her. There’s no evidence that there actually was an attempt, but there’s no evidence that there wasn’t either. Not everyone will agree with that approach – I know some people like their historical fiction to be purely dramatised fact – but my priority was to write a good story, not a history textbook.
Did you talk to people with dwarfism as part of your research?
No, I didn’t. I read some books by people with dwarfism, to get a sense of the practical difficulties Nat might face, but he lives in a very different time to ours, and so his experience would be very different to that of anyone I could talk to today. Also, Nat’s feelings about his dwarfism are Nat’s – it’s not an attempt to say, ‘This is what it’s like to have dwarfism,’ because as with any disability, each person’s experience of it, and attitude to it, will be different.
Having said that, I hope that spending some time inside Nat’s head might make people think twice about staring at someone with dwarfism, or any visible disability, or making jokes about it – we may have come a long way since the days of the freak show and the court dwarf but, as anyone who has a visible disability knows, not nearly as far as you might hope.
Do you have a favourite character?
Well, Nat, of course – I lived with him for so long, and we went through a lot of ups and downs together, so he feels quite real to me and I missed him when the book was finished. But also Arabella – she’s based on a very good friend of mine, Angharad Rhys (not the actress), and as soon as I realised that’s who she was, she was easy to write, which as an author, you’re very grateful for!
About the Author
Author photo © Owen Boyd
Frances Quinn grew up in London and read English at King’s College, Cambridge, realising too late that the course would require more than lying around reading novels for three years. After snatching a degree from the jaws of laziness, she became a journalist, writing for magazines including Prima, Good Housekeeping, She, Woman’s Weekly and Ideal Home, and later branched out into copywriting, producing words for everything from Waitrose pizza packaging to the EasyJet in-flight brochure.
She lives in Brighton, with her husband and two Tonkinese cats.
Follow her on Twitter @franquinn
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First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2021
Copyright © Frances Quinn, 2021
The right of Frances Quinn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-9340-8
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-9341-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-9342-2
Audio ISBN: 978-1-4711-9596-9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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