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Caroline Shenton

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The Loneliness of the Longdistance Narrative Historian

30 August 2010 By Caroline Shenton

 

After my nine-day marathon of writing, and a bit of work over the Bank Holiday weekend, I have now jogged past the 75,000 word milepost.   I am very pleased with  progress, but the first three and a half chapters are still just a series of half-digested chunks of narrative and references which is annoying.  One liberating triumph however, was to combine the former chapters 3 and 4 (now chapter 3), and chapters 5 and 6 (now chapter 4).  There was no way I was going to get those four smaller chapters up to 5,000 words each, so I cut the gordian knot and now feel FREEEEEEEEEE of the obligation to pad them out with meaningless stuffing.  Last week, on a practical expedition, I went into the Jewel Tower at Westminster (left) to refresh my memory of the location where the acts of Parliament were located during the fire.  The Jewel Tower is one of the few surviving parts of the medieval Palace of Westminster, built in 1365.  Should really also take a trip (all of one minute across the road) to St Margaret’s church where many of the evacuated books and records ended up, and also need to go to the Tate Britain (10 min walk) to check out the Turner watercolours of the fire.  

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Filed Under: Historic Westminster, Writing and Researching

About Caroline Shenton

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 and Mary Beard called it 'microhistory at its absolute best' while Dan Jones considered it 'glorious'. Its acclaimed sequel, Mr Barryís War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as 'a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful'. During 2017 Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone's Library.

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About Caroline

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013. Read More…

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