It is Mr Gradgrind in 'Hard Times' who says: “NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life... Stick to Facts, sir!”
Ironically, Charles Dickens was quite a fan of facts himself - like many authors who start out as journalists, he was engaged with social and political life and the zeitgeist, and in many ways facts were his inspiration. But he knew they had limitations. 'Hard Times' is a novel which seeks to expose the ills of the education system, and of the industrial machine economy of the Victorian age, and to do this Dickens deploys factual information to dramatic effect. This is a society, he suggests, in which the imagination has been suppressed and the human spirit is being crushed. He uses hyperbole and exaggeration, but he is still using a factual framework.
Facts were useful to Dickens, but they did not constrain him. Most of his novels were written in the recent past, as were those of George Eliot and Jane Austen. But one of his best loved novels, 'A Tale of Two Cities' dramatises the French Revolution. And what the reader remembers is the character of Sydney Carton, his doomed love and his final words before going to the guillotine: 'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known..' Do we care that there is no historical evidence that an Englishman named Sydney Carton was executed in the cause of true love during the French Revolution? No, we don't. (Well, I don't, please feel free to comment if you find the plot of this novel annoying.)
Writing historical fiction means that you need to develop a sophisticated attitude to facts. You need them, but you also need an engaging narrative, a plot, coherent themes, characters who readers can engage with. Though we are adept at making the past into a series of myths and stories, it is of itself both chaotic and filled with far too many facts to pack into even the longest novel - Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' is a veritable compendium of arcane facts, but even he had to miss some information out. And his story is a well-constructed thriller.
If you find facts daunting, it is a good idea to a. find a period or social group about which (or whom) relatively little is known or b. to write about the more distant part or c. to write alternate history and mix fact and fantasy. Gaps are just as useful as facts.
