The World Before Us (48 page)

So how do we begin? We begin with Jane—and not because she is here for us, but because we are also here for her, even though she does the work of conjuring us.

Jane opens her notebook and smooths a new page. She sees the trio tromping through the spool of the woods, and Herschel
cawing
, and Leeson stepping over a thatch of sunlight. Together we watch as Jane imagines a small kindness in a clearing—Leeson taking Nora’s hand—and we laugh because one of us knows that she has it wrong, that his palm was rough and his arm unsteady.

On the first blank page she writes:
The Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics sat along a carriage track most people travelled only once … and then she pauses under the oak tree to consider the fact of it
.

After an hour, Sam trots over and nuzzles her face. Looking up, she can see that it’s getting late, that they ought to get on the road because she is expected at the cottage where Henri is waiting for her and because Lewis is driving up.

“Onward!” we say, because we, too, have been daydreaming. So we try to pick up where we think we last left off—though memory being what it is, we are not always sure what is yet to come and what has already happened.

“Attendance,” sighs the theologian.

“Here!” we say. “Here,” and “Here,” and “Here.”

And across the road the clock tower strikes six o’clock—a strong brass chord—and a chorus of bells follows.

Acknowledgements

On October 20, 1877, a patient (or patients) at a hospital for convalescent lunatics wandered for eleven or so miles through the woods to make their way to a great man’s door. The great man, in real life, was the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, and his letter to the Governor of Witley Hospital inspired the opening narrative of this novel. I would like to thank David Lord Tennyson for permission to use the contents of Lord Tennyson’s original letter (with the necessary fictional substitutions of name and place) as well as the current keepers of the letter itself: The Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. I would also like to thank Colin Gale at Bethlem Royal Hospital’s Archives and Museum in London. Not only was I allowed generous access to the hospital’s rare and wholly compelling Victorian archives, but that access allowed me to put together Tennyson’s letter (which did not mention his visitors by name) with Robert Cowtan, whose casebook I happened upon during my research. Cowtan was a patient at the real-life Witley Hospital—a man known for a belief in his great powers of walking—and it was he who made the real-life epic trek to Tennyson’s house.

I am grateful for the support and funding provided by the following organizations, and grateful for the work of those people within them:
The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council and The Office of Research and Scholarship at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. The University of Edinburgh provided me with a studentship to pursue a PhD involving resonant objects in Victorian writers’ museums and that work has bolstered much of this novel.

Thanks also to The University of Lancaster (UK), Macquarie University (Australia) and Memorial University (Canada) for writer-inresidence positions that contributed directly to the development of this book.

At a point early in the writing of this novel I was invited into the back rooms of the Natural History Museum in London. I remember a lovely woman from the botany department opening an unmarked drawer and announcing very casually that I was looking at a pinecone brought back by Darwin on
The Beagle
. Thank you, Natural History Museum, for that.

Thanks to Mary Jo Anderson, first reader and first enthusiast.

To Claudia Casper, Joel Thomas Hynes and Helen Humphreys for conversations about books and writing, and for their own fine examples.

To Jack Hodgins, Robert Finley, Anosh Irani, Jeanette Lynes and Harry Tournemille for reading bits, pieces or the whole, and for giving advice that mattered.

To Jane Messer for reminding me after a month of studying ferns in the Botanical Gardens in Sydney that a writer of fiction can make a species of fern up.

Thank you, Aisslinn Nosky, for your music.
Merci
, Lindsey Syred.

Thanks to my family, and especially to my mother.

To Kerry Ohana for sustaining me.

To Glenn Hunter, who discovered Robert Cowtan’s life outside of the asylum. Thank you for knowing the names of things, and how those things work, for making me laugh and for twenty-plus years of unflagging belief in the writing process.

Cooper and Juniper exhibited more patience in the years it took to write this book than anyone would have thought two young Border collies could.
Woof
, puppies.

To everyone at Doubleday Canada/Random House of Canada for believing in this book and for ushering it along, especially Kristin Cochrane, Suzanne Brandreth and Ron Eckel, Samantha North, Ashley Dunn and Kelly Hill.

I am grateful to Anna Kelly at Hamish Hamilton in the UK, and Alexis Washam at Hogarth/Crown in the US, for taking the book on with such enthusiasm and for their excellent notes.

Finally, thanks to my editor, Lynn Henry, who made this a better book. I thank her for the depth of her engagement, the breadth of her intelligence, for years of friendship and for her very, very fine heart.

The following resources (textual and historical) should also be acknowledged here:

The Victorian Asylum
by Sarah Rutherford, Oxford: Shire Publications, 2008.

Presumed Curable: An Illustrated Casebook of Victorian Psychiatric Patients in Bethlem Hospital
by Colin Gale and Robert Howard, Petersfield: Wrightson Biomedical Publishing Ltd., 2003.

“A Lunatic Ball” (Chapter V of
Mystic London
) by Maurice Davies, London: Saville, Edwards and Co., 1875.

Rambles by the Ribble
by William Dobson, London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1864.

The glasswork of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka inspired the Vlasak cabinet. The poetry of Hölderlin inspired Samuel Murray’s poems. The writings and estate of the late-Victorian plant hunter Reginald Farrer contributed to my understanding of what George Farrington and Inglewood might have been like.

Ultimately, this book is a work of fiction. For that reason I encourage anyone interested in the real lives and histories of those staying in,
or working in, mental hospitals in the Victorian era to visit the Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum website,
http://www.bethlemheritage.org.uk
, or the Museum itself. The Wellcome Trust,
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk
, is also an excellent resource.

One last influence deserves mention here. In 2003, Harper Perennial Canada published a series of interviews by Eleanor Wachtel. One of them was with the eminent thinker George Steiner. In his interview, Steiner mentioned the role of the remembrancer. He said, “A remembrancer is a human being who knows that to be a human being is to carry within yourself a responsibility, not only to your own present but to the past from which you have come. A remembrancer is a kind of witness through memory.” He ended his talk by suggesting that everyone choose ten names from a memorial wall and that they learn them by heart so that they could recite them to themselves or to others. He suggested we do this “so that someone on this earth remembers.” This idea of remembrance and of saying the names—whether of family, friends or strangers—had a profound effect on me and it has shaped much of my creative and academic work.

The epigraph by John Berger is from
here is where we meet
, London: Bloomsbury, 2005.

The epigraph by George Eliot is from her novel
Adam Bede
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

The epigraph by Anna Robertson Brown is from the published version of her lecture
What Is Worth While?
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, 1893.

The epigraph by T.S. Eliot is from
Four Quartets
in his
Collected Poems 1909–1962
, London: Faber and Faber, 1963.