When choosing his curriculum as an undergraduate at Cambridge Ackroyd tried to avoid fiction to such a degree that, as he told an interviewer: ‘I don't think I even read a novel till I was 26 or 27’. Although, in a later interview, he softened this statement, admitting that he had written a thesis on James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the fact remains that he was not seriously interested in fiction until 1973, when he became the youngest literary editor ever employed by the Spectator. Ackroyd then started reading fiction with the same voracity with which he had been reading poetry and literary theory at Cambridge and Yale. In 1978 he beganwriting Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag, the History of an Obsession (1979) and was gathering material for his first biography, Ezra Pound and his World (1980). In keeping with his belief that all kinds of writing are simply the free play of language, Ackroyd sees his evolution from poetry to biography and fiction writing as complementary aspects of the same endeavour: ‘I do not see any great disjunction, or any great hiatus between the poetry and the fiction. For me they are part of the same process. Similarly the biographies. I don't think of biographies and fictions as being separate activities.’

As the subtitle makes clear, in Dressing Up Ackroyd sets out to investigate the origins, evolution and diverse degrees of acceptance or rejection by different cultures of a recurrent phenomenon whose roots go back to the dawn of mankind and is traceable in widely divergent types of civilization. Dressing Up is a well documented, fully illustrated survey of transvestism and drag which already shows the young writer's interest in the comic possibilities cross-dressing offers the performing arts in general and pantomime in particular. This topic will find its more complex expression in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), but all his fiction may be said to evince with greater or lesser intensity a clear interest in transvestism and drag, reflected, for example, in the construction of grotesque and ludicrous gay or lesbian secondary characters or of heterosexual characters related to the world of music hall.