I think much of her – I mean my mother – & of how alike we were, & how we were both destroyed by believing it was in our own hands to punish those who had done wrong to us. For myself, I felt impelled by a relentless and misguided sense of fatality, which I interpreted as justifying whatever actions I chose to take. My exile has given me more wisdom. I have been immolated by my former belief in a greater Destiny, urging me ever onwards; but now I have found respite and comfort in a re-acceptance of a sterner faith: that we are all sinners, and must all come to judgment. And in this also: that we should not strive against what we cannot mend.
Of course I think also of my dear girl, whom I shall always love, as you loved my mother. Cruel, cruel! To betray me so, knowing that I loved her above all others for herself alone. Yet though she has tormented me almost beyond endurance, I cannot withhold my forgiveness from her. She will inherit what should have been mine, as I have heard; but she has lost more than she will ever gain; and, like me, she will be required to answer for what she has done.
I live here with few comforts, but enough for my simple needs. My only companion is a one-eyed cat, of superlative hideousness, who appeared on the very first morning of my arrival, and who has not left me since. I have enough of my old humour left to have christened him Jukes.
And so, my dear old Senior Partner, I come at last to what has been occupying me, as a preliminary to asking a final favour of you – if I can trespass on your goodness so far. Since coming here, six months since, I have been writing down all that has happened to me & have accumulated, as a result, a goodly number of large-quarto sheets, purchased for the purpose before I left Mallorca. Yesterday evening, quite late, I laid down my pen at last, and packed all the sheets into a locked wooden box. I now go to meet an English gentleman, a Mr John Lazarus, shipping agent, of Billiter-street, City, who has kindly agreed to deliver the box to you in Canterbury. He knows me by another name, and of course I can count on you not to disabuse him. The key I shall send to you separately.
If you are so minded – as I hope you will be – I would ask you, on receipt, to arrange for the pages to be bound up (I can recommend Mr Riviere, Great Queen-street) & then, if it can be so contrived, for the volume to be placed privily in the Library at Evenwood, where it may be found, or not, at some future date. It is a great deal to ask; but I can ask it of no one else but you.
There is much I would wish to hear about – of people I have known, and how it goes with the world I have left behind; and, most of all, of you, and how you are, and whether your collection prospers, and whether you are quite recovered. I am now a man apart, and can never again put on the life I once knew. But I pray – yes, truly – for your contentment and good health, and great long life, and beg your forgiveness for what I have done.
This, then, is what I have learned, since writing my confession on this final shore:Honour not the malice of thine enemy so much, as to say, thy misery comes from him: Dishonour not the complexion of the times so much, as to say, thy misery comes from them; justifie not the Deity of Fortune so much, as to say, thy misery comes from her; Finde God pleased with thee, and thou hast a hook in the nostrils of every Leviathan.*
I long for sleep, and for soft English rain. But they do not come.
E.G.
*[The following items have been bound in at this point in the manuscript. Ed.]
*[William Howard Russell (1820–1907), The Times’s correspondent in the Crimea. His reports of the conditions suffered by the British Army, and especially by the wounded in the hospital at Scutari, during the winter of 1854–5, scandalized the nation. Ed.]
*[From the small amount of internal evidence, it appears that the narrator may have written this letter from the volcanic island of Lanzarote. Ed.]
*[A passage from Donne’s Sermon XX, on Psalm 38: 3, in Fifty Sermons (1649). Ed.]
Appendix
P. Rainsford Daunt (1819–54) List of Published Works
Given in order of publication. Place of publication is London in all cases.
Ithaca: A Lyrical Drama (Edward Moxon, 1841)The Maid of Minsk: A Poem in Twenty-Two Cantos (Edward Moxon, 1842)The Tartar-King: A Story in XII Cantos (Edward Moxon, 1843)Agrippa; with Other Poems (David Bogue, 1845)The Cave of Merlin: A Poem (Edward Moxon, 1846)The Pharaoh’s Child: A Romance of Ancient Aegypt (Edward Moxon, 1848)‘Memories of Eton’, Saturday Review (10 October 1848)Montezuma: A Drama (Edward Moxon, 1849)The Conquest of Peru: A Dramatic Romance (Edward Moxon, 1850)Scenes of Early Life (Chapman & Hall, 1852)Penelope: A Tragedy, in Verse (Bell & Daldy, 1853)American Sonnets (Longman, Brown, Green & Longman, 1853)Rosa Mundi; and Other Poems (Edward Moxon, 1854)The Heir: A Romance of the Modern (Edward Moxon, 1854)Epimetheus; with other posthumous poems (2 vols., Edward Moxon, 1854 for 1855)The Art of the Epic (John Murray, 1856)
Acknowledgements
The literary and factual sources on which I have drawn are too numerous, too scattered over the years, and, in many cases, too obvious, to list in full. In particular, accounts of mid-Victorian London abound, and I have freely ransacked them. Thirty years ago, when I first began contemplating this novel, such works needed to be consulted in a major copyright library. Now many of them are freely available on the Web – I direct interested readers, for instance, to the excellent Victorian Dictionary site created and maintained by Lee Jackson (www.victorianlondon.org). Indispensable sources of background detail and ambience have of course included Henry Mayhew, whose London Labour and the London Poor of 1851 no one writing or fictionalizing about this period can afford to neglect, but also the less well-known non-fiction works of George Augustus Sala.
Three real places have contributed to the making of Evenwood, Glyver’s cursed obsession: Drayton House, the private home of the Stopford-Sackville family, and Deene Park, the former home of James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan (of Balaclava fame) – both in my own home county of Northamptonshire; and Burghley House, Stamford. The library of – I mean the books collected by – Lord Tansor’s grandfather has been based unashamedly on that of the 2nd Earl Spencer (1758–1834) at Althorp, another of Northamptonshire’s great houses. Residents of East Northamptonshire will also recognize the names of several local places in those of some of the characters – Tansor (a charming village outside Oundle) and Glapthorn (ditto), Glyver’s principal pseudonym, amongst them. Needless to say, the topography of Evenwood and its environs is pure invention, though Lord Tansor’s seat may be envisaged as lying in the north-east corner of Northamptonshire, in the area known as Rockingham Forest.
And so to the most important sources of advice, support, and inspiration: people.