Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

  In Jacques Belasis’s Instructions Mr Segundus read a very different explanation. Three centuries before Martin Pale set foot in Cold Henry’s castle Cold Henry had had another human visitor, an English magician even greater than Pale – Ralph Stokesey – who had left behind him a pair of boots. The boots, said Belasis, were old, which is probably why Stokesey did not take them with him, but their presence in the castle caused great consternation to all its fairy-inhabitants who held English magicians in great veneration. In particular Cold Henry was in a pickle because he feared that in some devious, incomprehensible way, Christian morality might hold him responsible for the loss of the boots. So he was trying to rid himself of the terrible objects by passing them on to Pale who did not want them.

  2 The Old Starre Inn

  1 The conquerors of Imperial Rome may have been honoured with wreaths of laurel leaves; lovers and fortune’s favourites have, we are told, roses strewn in their paths; but English magicians were always only ever given common ivy.

  2 The great church at York is both a cathedral (meaning the church where the throne of the bishop or archbishop is housed) and a minster (meaning a church founded by a missionary in ancient times). It has borne both these names at different periods. In earlier centuries it was more usually called the Minster, but nowadays the people of York prefer the term Cathedral as one which elevates their church above those of the nearby towns of Ripon and Beverley. Ripon and Beverley have minsters, but no cathedrals.

  3 The stones of York

  1 The well-known ballad “The Raven King” describes just such an abduction.

  Not long, not long my father said

  Not long shall you be ours

  The Raven King knows all too well

  Which are the fairest flowers

  The priest was all too worldly

  Though he prayed and rang his bell

  The Raven King three candles lit

  The priest said it was well

  Her arms were all too feeble

  Though she claimed to love me so

  The Raven King stretched out his hand

  She sighed and let me go

  This land is all too shallow

  It is painted on the sky

  And trembles like the wind-shook rain

  When the Raven King goes by

  For always and for always

  I pray remember me

  Upon the moors, beneath the stars

  With the King’s wild company

  2 The example cited by Mr Honeyfoot was of a murder that had taken place in 1279 in the grim moor town of Alston. The body of a young boy was found in the churchyard hanging from a thorn-tree that stood before the church-door. Above the door was a statue of the Virgin and Child. So the people of Alston sent to Newcastle, to the Castle of the Raven King and the Raven King sent two magicians to make the Virgin and the Jesus-Child speak and say how they had seen a stranger kill the boy, but for what reason they did not know. And after that, whenever a stranger came to the town, the people of Alston would drag him before the church-door and ask “Is this him?” but always the Virgin and Child replied that it was not. Beneath the Virgin’s feet were a lion and a dragon who curled around each other in a most puzzling manner and bit each other’s necks. These creatures had been carved by someone who had never seen a lion or a dragon, but who had seen a great many dogs and sheep and something of the character of a dog and a sheep had got into his carving. Whenever some poor fellow was brought before the Virgin and Child to be examined the lion and the dragon would cease biting each other and look up like the Virgin’s strange watchdogs and the lion would bark and the dragon would bleat angrily.

  Years went by and the townspeople who remembered the boy were all dead, and the likelihood was that the murderer was too. But the Virgin and Child had somehow got into the habit of speaking and whenever some unfortunate stranger passed within the compass of their gaze they would still turn their stone heads and say, “It is not him.” And Alston acquired the reputation of an eerie place and people would not go there if they could help it.

  3 To aid his better understanding of Mr Norrell’s character and of Mr Norrell’s magical powers Mr Segundus wrote a careful description of the visit to Hurtfew Abbey. Unfortunately he found his memory on this point peculiarly unclear. Whenever he returned to read what he had written he discovered that he now remembered things differently. Each time he began by crossing out words and phrases and putting in new ones, and he ended by re-writing completely. After four or five months he was obliged to admit to himself that he no longer knew what Mr Honeyfoot had said to Mr Norrell, or what Mr Norrell had said in reply, or what he – Mr Segundus – had seen in the house. He concluded that to attempt to write any thing upon the subject was futile, and he threw what he had written into the fire.

  5 Drawlight

  1 He had once found himself in a room with Lady Bessborough’s long-haired white cat. He happened to be dressed in an immaculate black coat and trousers, and was therefore thoroughly alarmed by the cat’s stalking round and round and making motions as if it proposed to sit upon him. He waited until he believed himself to be unobserved, then he picked it up, opened a window and tossed it out. Despite falling three storeys to the ground, the cat survived, but one of its legs was never quite right afterwards and it always evinced the greatest dislike to gentlemen in black clothes.

  2 Merlin is presumed to have been imprisoned in a hawthorn tree by the sorceress, Nimue.

  3 Mr Lascelles exaggerates. The Raven King’s kingdoms were never more than three in number.

  4 Tubbs versus Starhouse: a famous case brought before the Quarter Sessions at Nottingham a few years ago.

  A Nottinghamshire man called Tubbs wished very much to see a fairy and, from thinking of fairies day and night, and from reading all sorts of odd books about them, he took it into his head that his coachman was a fairy.

  The coachman (whose name was Jack Starhouse) was dark and tall and scarcely ever said a word which discomfited his fellow-servants and made them think him proud. He had only recently entered Mr Tubbs’s household, and said that previously he had been coachman to an old man called Browne at a place called Coldmicklehill in the north. He had one great talent: he could make any creature love him. The horses were always very willing when he had the reins and never cross or fidgety at all, and he could command cats in a way that the people of Nottinghamshire had never seen before. He had a whispering way of talking to them; any cat he spoke to would stay quite still with an expression of faint surprize on its face as if it had never heard such good sense in all its life nor ever expected to again. He could also make them dance. The cats that belonged to Mr Tubbs’s household were as grave and mindful of their dignity as any other set of cats, but Jack Starhouse could make them dance wild dances, leaping about upon their hind legs and casting themselves from side to side. This he did by strange sighs and whistlings and hissings.

  One of the other servants observed that if only cats had been good for any thing – which they were not – then all this might have had some point to it. But Starhouse’s wonderful mastery was not useful, nor did it entertain his fellow-servants; it only made them uncomfortable.

  Whether it were this or his handsome face with the eyes a little too wide apart that made Mr Tubbs so certain he was a fairy I do not know, but Mr Tubbs began to make inquiries about the coachman in secret.

  One day Mr Tubbs called Starhouse to his study. Mr Tubbs said that he had learnt that Mr Browne was very ill – had been ill for all the time Starhouse had claimed to work for him – and had not gone out for years and years. So Mr Tubbs was curious to know what he had needed a coachman for.

  For a little while Jack Starhouse said nothing. Then he admitted that he had not been in Mr Browne’s employ. He said he had worked for another family in the neighbourhood. He had worked hard, it had been a good place, he had been happy; but the other servants had not liked him, he did not know why, it had happened to him before. One of the other serva
nts (a woman) had told lies about him and he had been dismissed. He had seen Mr Browne once years ago. He said he was very sorry that he had lied to Mr Tubbs, but he had not known what else to do.

  Mr Tubbs explained that there was no need to invent further stories. He knew that Starhouse was a fairy and said he was not to fear; he would not betray him; he only wished to talk to him about his home and people.

  At first Starhouse did not at all understand what Mr Tubbs meant, and when finally he did understand, it was in vain that he protested that he was a human being and an Englishman, Mr Tubbs did not believe him.

  After this, whatever Starhouse was doing, wherever he went, he would find Mr Tubbs waiting for him with a hundred questions about fairies and Faerie. Starhouse was made so unhappy by this treatment (though Mr Tubbs was always kind and courteous), that he was obliged to give up his place. While yet unemployed, he met with a man in an ale-house in Southwell who persuaded him to bring an action against his former master for defamation of character. In a famous ruling Jack Starhouse became the first man to be declared human under English law.

  But this curious episode ended unhappily for both Tubbs and Starhouse. Tubbs was punished for his harmless ambition to see a fairy by being made an object of ridicule everywhere. Unflattering caricatures of him were printed in the London, Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield papers, and neighbours with whom he had been on terms of the greatest goodwill and intimacy for years declined to know him any more. While Starhouse quickly discovered that no one wished to employ a coachman who had brought an action against his master; he was forced to accept work of a most degrading nature and very soon fell into great poverty.

  The case of Tubbs versus Starhouse is interesting not least because it serves as an illustration of the widely-held belief that fairies have not left England completely. Many Englishmen and women think that we are surrounded by fairies every day of our lives. Some are invisible and some masquerade as Christians and may in fact be known to us. Scholars have debated the matter for centuries but without reaching any conclusion.

  5 Simon Bloodworth’s fairy-servant came to him quite out of the blue offering his services and saying he wished to be known as “Buckler”. As every English schoolchild nowadays can tell you, Bloodworth would have done better to have inquired further and to have probed a little deeper into who, precisely, Buckler was, and why, exactly, he had come out of Faerie with no other aim than to become the servant of a third-rate English magician.

  Buckler was very quick at all sorts of magic and Bloodworth’s business in the little wool-town of Bradford on Avon grew and prospered. Only once did Buckler cause any sort of difficulty when, in a sudden fit of rage, he destroyed a little book belonging to Lord Lovel’s chaplain.

  The longer Buckler remained with Bloodworth the stronger he became and the first thing that Buckler did when he became stronger was to change his appearance: his dusty rags became a suit of good clothes; a rusty pair of scissars that he had stolen from a locksmith in the town became a sword; his thin, piebald fox-face became a pale and handsome human one; and he grew very suddenly two or three feet taller. This, he was quick to impress on Mrs Bloodworth and her daughters, was his true appearance – the other merely being an enchantment he had been under.

  On a fine May morning in 1310 when Bloodworth was away from home Mrs Bloodworth discovered a tall cupboard standing in the corner of her kitchen where no cupboard had ever been before. When she asked Buckler about it, he said immediately that it was a magical cupboard and that he had brought it there. He said that he had always thought that it was a pity that magic was not more commonly used in England; he said it pained him to see Mrs Bloodworth and her daughters washing and sweeping and cooking and cleaning from dawn to dusk when they ought, in his opinion, to be sitting on cushions in jewel–spangled gowns eating comfits. This, thought Mrs Bloodworth, was very good sense. Buckler said how he had often reproved her husband for his failure to make Mrs Bloodworth’s life pleasant and easy, but Bloodworth had not paid him any attention. Mrs Bloodworth said that she was not a bit surprized.

  Buckler said that if she stepped inside the cupboard she would find herself in a magical place where she could learn spells that would make any work finished in an instant, make her appear beautiful in the eyes of all who beheld her, make large piles of gold appear whenever she wished it, make her husband obey her in all things, etc., etc.

  How many spells were there? asked Mrs Bloodworth.

  About three, thought Buckler.

  Were they hard to learn?

  Oh no! Very easy.

  Would it take long?

  No, not long, she would be back in time for Mass.

  Seventeen people entered Buckler’s cupboard that morning and were never seen again in England; among them were Mrs Bloodworth, her two youngest daughters, her two maids and two manservants, Mrs Bloodworth’s uncle and six neighbours. Only Margaret Bloodworth, Bloodworth’s eldest daughter, refused to go.

  The Raven King sent two magicians from Newcastle to investigate the matter and it is from their written accounts that we have this tale. The chief witness was Margaret who told how, on his return, “my poor father went purposely into the cupboard to try if he could rescue them, tho’ I begged him not to. He has not come out again.”

  Two hundred years later Dr Martin Pale was journeying through Faerie. At the castle of John Hollyshoes (an ancient and powerful fairy-prince) he discovered a human child, about seven or eight years old, very pale and starved-looking. She said her name was Anne Bloodworth and she had been in Faerie, she thought, about two weeks. She had been given work to do washing a great pile of dirty pots. She said she had been washing them steadily since she arrived and when she was finished she would go home to see her parents and sisters. She thought she would be finished in a day or two.

  6 Francis Sutton-Grove (1682—1765), theoretical magician. He wrote two books De Generibus Artium Magicarum Anglorum, 1741, and Prescriptions and Descriptions, 1749. Even Mr Norrell, Sutton-Grove’s greatest (and indeed only) admirer, thought that Prescriptions and Descriptions (wherein he attempted to lay down rules for practical magic) was abominably bad, and Mr Norrell’s pupil, Jonathan Strange, loathed it so much that he tore his copy into pieces and fed it to a tinker’s donkey (see Life of Jonathan Strange by John Segundus, 1820, pub. John Murray).

  De Generibus Artium Magicarum Anglorum was reputed to be the dreariest book in the canon of English magic (which contains many tedious works). It was the first attempt by an Englishman to define the areas of magic that the modern magician ought to study; according to Sutton-Grove these numbered thirty-eight thousand, nine hundred and forty-five and he listed them all under different heads. Sutton-Grove foreshadows the great Mr Norrell in one other way: none of his lists make any mention of the magic traditionally ascribed to birds or wild animals, and Sutton-Grove purposely excludes those kinds of magic for which it is customary to employ fairies, e.g. bringing back the dead.

  7 Duke of Portland, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury 1807—09.

  8 A gentleman with thistle-down hair

  1 “O Fairy. I have great need of your help. This virgin is dead and her family wish her to be returned to life.”

  2 “Here is the dead woman between earth and heaven! Know then, O Fairy, that I have chosen you for this great task because …”

  10 The difficulty of finding employment for a magician

  1 Burlington House in Piccadilly was the London residence of the Duke of Portland, the First Minister of the Treasury (whom many people nowadays like to call the Prime Minister in the French style). It had been erected in an Age when English noblemen were not afraid to rival their Monarch in displays of power and wealth and it had no equal for beauty anywhere in the capital. As for the Duke himself, he was a most respectable old person, but, poor man, he did not accord with any body’s idea of what a Prime Minister ought to be. He was very old and sick. Just at present he lay in a curtained room somewhere in a remote part of the
house, stupefied by laudanum and dying by degrees. He was of no utility whatsoever to his country and not much to his fellow Ministers. The only advantage of his leadership as far as they could see was that it allowed them to use his magnificent house as their meeting-place and to employ his magnificent servants to fetch them any little thing they might fancy out of his cellar. (They generally found that governing Great Britain was a thirsty business.)

  2 William Pitt the Younger (1759—1806). It is very doubtful that we will ever see his like again, for he became Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four and led the country from that day forth, with just one brief interval of three years, until his death.

  12 The Spirit of English Magic urges Mr Norrell to the Aid of Britannia

  1 Four years later during the Peninsular War Mr Norrell’s pupil, Jonathan Strange, had similar criticisms to make about this form of magic.

  2 In this speech Mr Lascelles has managed to combine all Lord Portishead’s books into one. By the time Lord Portishead gave up the study of magic in early 1808 he had published three books: The Life of Jacques Belasis, pub. Longman, London, 1801, The Life of Nicholas Goubert, pub. Longman, London, 1805, and A Child’s History of the Raven King, pub. Longman, London, 1807, engravings by Thomas Bewick. The first two were scholarly discussions of two sixteenth-century magicians. Mr Norrell had no great opinion of them, but he had a particular dislike of A Child’s History. Jonathan Strange, on the other hand, thought this an excellent little book.