Churchill's ambition, from the first moment that he felt the literary impulse, was to write a historical novel. Annapolis had fired his imagination. "Seeing those old houses," he once said, "which used to be the scenes of the gayest and happiest social life before the Revolution--they look as if the people had just gone out of them--and reading the history of the town as it used to be, interested me greatly in a certain aspect of the life of the colonial planters, which had not, it seemed to me, been fully and truthfully expressed in a novel. What I wanted to do in 'Richard Carvel' was to give a picture of the life of colonial Maryland and Virginia, with special reference to Annapolis, and to contrast the people who made it with the corresponding element in England. One of the things I wanted to bring out strongly was that, although the leading men in business, in professional life, and in politics, in both Maryland and London, came from the same stock, a few generations back, politically, the British had sunk into a state of gross corruption and degradation, while the Americans were men of the highest integrity and the cleanest motives, mindful of their legal and moral debt to Great Britain, but resolute not to endure more than a certain amount of injustice."
And how do you suppose Mr. Churchill prepared for the big task of writing a historical novel? He has answered the question himself:
"By visiting all the places concerned in the story, and by reading biographies, histories, memoirs, letters, old newspapers--in fact, everything which could give me an insight into the life of those days, or into the character of the people like John Paul Jones and Charles Fox, whom I desired to introduce. Of course I read a great deal too much; a great many books gave me no direct help and added nothing to what I had already learned; but I have no doubt that all this reading counted in the way of letting me into the spirit and the atmosphere and the ideas and the business methods and the modes of life and thought of those days. Of course, I took voluminous notes, and had no end of trouble to keep them arranged so that I could use them, in spite of the effort I made to keep notes on costumes in one volume, manners and customs in another, unusual words and turns of expression in another, incidents in another, character in another, history in another and so on."