The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey

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In her novel The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey looks at how history can be misconstrued through the more convenient reinterpretation of the person in power, and as such, can become part of our common understanding, not being true knowledge at all, but simply hearsay. In The Daughter of Time Josephine claims that 40 million school books can’t be wrong but then goes on to argue that the traditional view of Richard III as a power obsessed, blood thirsty monster is fiction made credible by Thomas More and given authenticity by William Shakespeare. Inspector Alan Grant looks into the murder of the princes in the tower out of boredom. Tey uses Grant to critique the way history is delivered to the public and the ability of historians to shape facts to present the argument they believe.

As the inspector begins to investigate the murders of the boys he collects history books that he believes will give him insight into Richard III and his horrible crime. The first history book he comes upon is a historical reader which bears “the same relation to history as Stories from the Bible bears to Holy Writ.” This book explains the tale of the princes in the tower using short paragraphs and full page illustrations which teaches an important moral, but adds no insight to the real story of Richard III. The second text he uses to investigate the crime is a proper school history book. The first realization he comes to while reading this book is that all school history books seem to separate history into easy to digest sections associated by the different reigns that never intersect or overlap. The second realization is that Richard III must have had a towering personality to have made himself “one of the best-known rulers” in two thousand years o...

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...e was also writing in Tudor England and seemed to have openly dislike Richard III. In other portions of his writing he describes Richard as an unattractive deformed man who was born with a full set of teeth. He writes that he had a “sour countenance , which seemed to savour of mischief, and utter evidently craft and deceit.”

References

Dominic Mancini,. “The Usurpation of Richard III” in Richard III A Source Book, Keith Dockray (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1997)

Sir Thomas More, “The History of King Richard III” in Richard III A Source Book, Keith Dockray (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1997)

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995)

Polydore Vergil, “Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History” in Richard III A Source Book, Keith Dockray (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1997)

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