G.A. Henty wrote about a hundred books with the same protagonist. He did not, to be clear, write a series of that length; his longest series is three books long, and indeed he only wrote three series to my memory. No, the simple fact is that when you read the vast majority of Henty’s works, you quickly realize that each protagonist has the same essential characteristics, worldview, and temperament, as well as similar aptitudes and analogous skills. Some diverge a little more from the mold, but overall once you know the protagonist of one book- say, The Dragon and the Raven–¹ you’ve got a firm grasp on 90+ other protagonists. Do not take this as an attack on Henty. The man wrote what he wanted to write, and he wrote it well; he just didn’t bother to vary his protagonist much (indeed, several other character archetypes are observable, including the side-kick and the romantic interest).

The more puzzling part of G.A. Henty, to an author’s eye, is the character of that constant protagonist. Put simply, Henty’s protagonists don’t have flaws worth noting. They are, almost to the man, Victorian gentlemen and Christians (Christians whose doctrine is entirely assumed and acted, barely ever mentioned, let alone debated), even the ones who grew up in ancient Egypt (which Henty has odd ideas about) or Carthage (Henty does whitewash Hannibal Barca). Upon this basis, then, we’d assume they are all a bunch of Mary Sues.² We’d expect the Henty protagonist to be boring, uninteresting, and unlikable, like other Mary Sues. Certainly, for some, he will be. Further, we’d expect the story to collapse under the weight of this problem- and yet, as my experience reading over a hundred novels³ by Henty will testify, Henty’s stories are engaging and enjoyable, if not particularly deep, assuming you have a taste for tales of adventure and derring-do.

Similarities First

Before we consider why Henty’s characters and stories work, we should establish what his character do share with the Mary Sue archetype, both as it is defined in popular conception and as I defined it here. The central similarity, of course, is that Henty’s protagonists don’t tend to have noticeable flaws. As a result, character arcs, particularly for the protagonist, are awfully scarce on the ground. As for exceptions, Through Russian Snows features a fairly obvious character arc, urging the reader to develop the capacity to say ‘no’ to stupid challenges; some of his non-military history works also, if I remember rightly, include character arc elements. The rule, though, is that the character exits with roughly the same character and worldview he entered (roughly), and even Through Russian Snows is fairly close to this standard, with its arc being fairly surface-level and uncomplicated (as well as quite explicit; Henty’s not into subtext).

The second trait here is indisputably a part of both the popular conception of Mary Sues and Henty’s standard protagonist: competence. Henty’s characters are exceptional in their capacity and skill for military matters and related topics- combat, evasion, and infiltration/ exfiltration, to name the most common. Want to run a guerrilla campaign in the 1500s Caribbean? Obviously the protagonist of Under Drake’s Flag is prepared.⁴ Want to train an elite force of hoplite-inspired heavy infantry in Anglo-Saxon Britain? The protagonist of The Dragon and the Raven is ready. Need to take down a mock castle in a wargame with the aid of a band of martially inclined trade-apprentices? Walter Somers of Saint George for England⁵ does just this, before having any actual military experience. As we’ll see, this competence isn’t actually the super-competence of the standard Mary Sue, but it is suggestive.

The central similarity that could be alleged to my more specific definition of a Mary Sue in the linked article is the fact that the Henty protagonist has an element of wish fulfillment to him. He is an ideal, presented to young men who should rightly desire what Henty portrays: solid virtue, physical application, industry and ingenuity, enterprise, and the rest. Henty’s protagonists are men to be admired, a man’s man, without many of the vices which plague the greats of history.⁶ Note, however, that while the Henty protagonist is a paragon, he is not a vessel to be inhabited. The impulse of a Henty character is not to fulfil the masculine urges of the reader, as a Mary Sue aims to, but to train and foster those urges towards actual application to real life. This is a crucial difference which renders this similarity not only void but an actual difference.

The First Difference: Competence

Speaking of differences (though we’ll only have time for one today), let’s start with that there Impressive Competence. A few big points distinguish it from the Mary Sue variety of competence. To start with, Henty’s protagonists work for their competence. Walter Somers may not have ever engaged in a military campaign when he wins the mock siege, but he does have an impressive amount of training under his belt: blacksmith work (muscles), regular training, training from the soldiers who pass through his guardian’s smithy, participation in the (quite violent) semi-recreational brawls of the London apprentices, a combat tournament (which he had won the day before), and a daring rescue which involved hand to hand with experienced brigands. Notably, he has trained so intensely that he explicitly didn’t have time for much besides working, training, eating, and sleeping for several years.

This pattern holds true for the rest of Henty’s protagonists, if not always so dramatically. Henty’s protagonists don’t come into the world knowing exactly how to fight; they learn it the same way everybody else does, just with a lot more discipline and dedication than most (and an extra serving of aptitude). To some extent, this experience likely reflects Henty’s own childhood, as he went from being notably sickly to being a war correspondent for certain British military campaigns in Africa.

Some of their skill in tactics and espionage does fall outside of this pattern, but two factors counteract here. First, the prerequisites for success in these areas, as obtained by Henty’s protagonists, are a nimble mind, a decisive temperament, and a heaping load of bravery. Their ability may not be based off of long practice, but everybody’s got to start somewhere, and we can see how they come to their conclusions. They’re ingenious and sometimes based off of practical information the reader is not familiar with, but they are far from improbable.

Second, many of the protagonists make direct reference to the source Henty actually used to inspire many of their exploits: history. In The Dragon and the Raven, Edmund does not come up with his heavy infantry formation out of thin air; he explicitly calls back to Greek hoplites from Thebes (not an impossible bit of knowledge for an Englishman of the era, so far as I’m aware). This mirrors in many ways Henty’s own method of devising means and methods: he applied his mind and experience to an ever expanding knowledge of history, built on intensive research (he did a lot of research). Indeed, he alleged that at one point he was forced to take a break from writing because he found himself plotting how to break into the Tower of London and was afraid he’d wake up half-way through an infiltration.⁷

The next big element which distinguishes Henty’s protagonists from the Mary Sue is their limitations. Henty protagonists are very good at what they’ve worked to be good at, and they have an exceptional intuition for tactics, in/exfiltration, and the like. Outside of this, however, and the rare capability to be polite and level-headed, they are just normal. Where a Mary Sue is often hyper-competent at everything- or at least at everything the author thinks is ‘neat’-, the Henty protagonist has certain clear competencies, and that’s it. Does he want to be good at dancing? He’s going to have to have worked on dancing specifically, as in A Jacobite Exile.

His competency even in his core areas, too, is different in quality from a Mary Sue’s competency. The standard MS is The Best Ever at his/ her special skills- the best swordfighter in centuries (everybody says so!), the best pilot in the quadrant, the best singer in the city. Henty protagonists, meanwhile, are only very skillful. Walter Somers is above average, but he’s not actually the best swordsman around, unless we limit his competition to specific groups, and certainly not by a wide margin. He’s a subject matter expert, not a divine entity. The same goes for other character’s competencies: they are good, but far from unbeatable.

Most importantly, the world does not bend to the whim of their competencies. Walter Somers is a good commander, but when the enemy brings an overwhelming force he evaluates the situation and is forced to surrender. A Mary Sue will typically be capable of the impossible because the world warps to allow it. Henty’s protagonists, meanwhile, work within an inflexible world as men among men. Note too that Henty incorporates a lot of actual history into his stories; as a result, while the characters are central to their personal plot-lines, the events of the world around them are not theirs to decide; they are a part of history, not its determiners. Walter Somers does not decide Crecy, though he performs admirably there, and Drake gets around the world by the normal method, not because Henty gave him a super-navigator at the helm. This keeps the protagonist in check and to scale.

The final trait to consider, already hinted at, is how they win. Henty’s protagonists win because they legitimately do a better job than the other guy, because they apply their smarts with diehard grit and bravery. A distinguishing element of a Mary Sue is that the reader gets the impression that the Mary Sue wins because the author decided they were going to win, come hell or high water, because the author tore up the rules of reality so his wish fulfillment fantasy would triumph. Not so in Henty. The personal victories of the character come because of demonstrated and applied capability, in the protagonist and their allies. Somers’s second-to-last victory over his nemesis, in Saint George for England, is won because of a rationally chained together string of events wherein he manages just enough to alarm his wife, who, deathly ill at the time, manages just enough to alert his sidekick, who gathers together allies to win the day. It may be a bad situation and a long shot, but it’s grit and perseverance and human skill that gets them through, not the author shaping the world.

An element to remember here is the role of virtue. Because the victory comes by hard-fought virtue, the reader connects with the character. Henty’s characters don’t have a deep, introspective psychology, but they act the part of men with bravery and decisiveness, and the reader rejoices because he sees virtue rewarded, as he intuitively knows is right.⁸

As noted earlier, Henty’s characters do live in the midst of big historical events. They are, in fact, often simultaneously present at these events and not very decisive to them (though often they play a decisive auxiliary role, the sort that may or may not earn its player a name in the history books, but will definitely be recorded as something like ‘messenger’ or ‘and 5 accompanying knights…’). While this might be Deus ex Machina if these events were the main plot, they are not. The battles of the Hundred Years War and its politics are the setting for Walter’s story, not the plot, and the same goes for Harry in In the Reign of Terror with the French Revolution and Wulf in Wulf the Saxon with the two Harolds.

Conclusion

This topic is far from exhausted as next week’s article will demonstrate. For now, consider what we can learn from this dissection. On the one hand, we can learn precisely where the boundaries of the Mary Sue archetype lie and thus how to avoid it without losing the good things it apes. On the other hand, we can learn much for writing that difficult archetype, the paragon or paladin, call him what you will. If you intend to write a character like Superman (particularly if you aren’t interested in going deep into philosophy or psychology for your story’s character element), understanding Henty’s protagonist is a salutary step indeed, a lesson in how from somebody who demonstrably knew what he was doing.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – My first Henty book and an excellent read.

2 – A whole swathe of Mary Sue derived terms has been produced by the internet, including some tailored to males, but the plain jane term will here be used as being the least confusing.

3 – To my knowledge, I’ve read all of his fiction, though not his nonfiction war correspondence.

4 – This segment of the book is one of my favorite Henty sequences. Under Drake’s Flag also has the most boring segment of a Henty novel I remember reading- several pages which are essentially a log book of dates and locations for Drake’s voyage.

5 – This is the book I read to refresh myself on Henty, hence I remember his name. Also, I should note that the ‘no prior military experience’ statement is true of all three examples in this paragraph.

6 – If you’re a staunch tea-totaler or anti-tobacco person, you won’t get much sympathy from Henty, but accusing his protagonists of drunkenness, excess, or addiction would be absurd, so anybody without an unusual antipathy to those substances should have little issue. Possibly it could be asserted that racism appears in a few of his characters, though not unless you’re really looking for it; the only part I can remember being close to outright objectionable is from the very end of his novel set in the Haitian revolt against France, and even that statement is easily interpreted as being, well, not quite racist, if definitely phrased in a way to get you hung in modern society.

Oh, and some of them, as appropriate to the era, are Catholic, cosmetically at least. Some people may have more problem with this than others.

7 – I derive my biographical information from the biography written by contemporary and acquaintance George Manville Fenn. Admittedly I first and last read this biography around a decade ago.

8 – Incidentally, the society which dislikes to see virtue rewarded is a very sick society, desperately ill at soul. In this analysis, importantly, ‘virtue’ can be mixed with vice- diligence with pride, decisiveness with cruelty- but the healthy culture enjoys seeing the admirable rewarded and the vicious rewarded.