The Essex Serpent (33 page)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am indebted to a number of books for having opened the door to a Victorian age so like our own I am almost persuaded I remember it.

Matthew Sweet’s
Inventing the Victorians
(2002) challenges notions of a prudish era enslaved by religion and incomprehensible manners; rather, he shows us a nineteenth century of department stores, big brands, sexual appetites and a fascination for the strange.

An obscure book by an anonymous Essex rector,
Man’s Age in the World According to Holy Scripture and Science
(1865), suggests a clergy that did not see faith and reason as mutually exclusive. It amuses me to think of it on William Ransome’s shelves.

In
Victorian Homes
(1974) David Rubinstein collates contemporary accounts of housing crises, venal landlords, intolerable rents and political chicanery; they would not look out of place in tomorrow’s newspapers.
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London
(1883) was compiled by Rev. Andrew Mearns, and is readily available online. It draws spurious parallels between poverty and lack of moral virtue that may strike the reader as familiar from modern political rhetoric.

Those in the habit of picturing the Victorian woman as forever succumbing to fits of the vapours under the gaze of a bewhiskered husband can do no better than to read Rachel Holmes’s biography of Eleanor Marx (2013). In its preface the author says: ‘Feminism began in the 1870s, not the 1970s.’

In researching the treatment of tuberculosis – and in particular its effects on the mind – I am grateful to Helen Bynum, both in correspondence and in her book
Spitting Blood
(2012). Meanwhile Richard Barnett’s
The Sick Rose
(2014) shows the troubling beauty that can be found in sickness and suffering.

Roy Porter’s majestic work
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present
(1999), his overview of surgical history
Blood and Guts
(2003), and Peter Jones’s
A Surgical Revolution
(2007), have all been invaluable in framing the mind and work of Dr Luke Garrett. Inaccuracies and elisions in the medical aspects of this novel – as in all others – are of course mine alone.

The nature of Stella Ransome’s
spes pthisica
was profoundly influenced by Maggie Nelson’s
Bluets
, an exquisite meditation on desire and suffering, filtered through a lens of blue.

Strange News Out of Essex
, the pamphlet alerting villagers at Henham-on-the-Mount to the presence of the Essex Serpent, is real. You may see both the 1669 original and Miller Christy’s 1885 facsimile at the British Library; a copy of the facsimile is also held in the library at Saffron Walden, Essex, where it was first printed. The titles of each of this book’s four parts are taken from the text of the pamphlet.

Mary Anning’s ‘sea-dragons’ are displayed in London’s Natural History Museum.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and most loving thanks to my dear Rob, whose company is an inexhaustible supply of interest and charm, and who first told me about the legend of the Essex Serpent.

I’m profoundly grateful, as ever, to Hannah Westland and Jenny Hewson for their wisdom and support, and for their uncanny habit of knowing my mind better than I do: to work with them is a privilege and joy. My thanks also to Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, Flora Willis, Ruth Petrie, Emily Berry, Zoe Waldie and Lexie Hamblin, all of whom have done so much for me, and for this book.

Thank you to my family, who’ve been so kind to me, particularly to Ethan and Amelie, dauntless travellers through time and space. Thanks also to my three smallest muses: Dotty, Mary and Alice.

Thank you to Louisa Yates, my first reader and my tutor; to Helen Bynum, who was kind enough to advise me on aspects of TB; and to Helen Macdonald, for her guidance on matters floral and avian. Much of this book was drafted at Gladstone’s Library, where I think a piece of my shadow lives always at the same desk: thank you to all my friends there, particularly Peter Francis.

For their patience, friendship and wisdom, my love and thanks to Michelle Woolfenden, Tom Woolfenden, Sally Roe, Sally Craythorne, Holly O’Neill, Anna Mouser, Jon Windeatt, Ben Johncock, Ellie Eaton, Kate Jones and Stephen Crowe. I am endlessly grateful for the kindness and support shown to me by writers, many of whom I have admired for years: thank you especially to Sarah Waters, John Burnside, Sophie Hannah, Melissa Harrison, Katherine Angel and Vanessa Gebbie. To the women of the FOC, who were the first ever to hear me read from this book: my love.

I could not have written this book without the support of the Arts Council, and am profoundly grateful for their assistance, and for that of Sam Ruddock and Chris Gribble at the Norwich Writers’ Centre.