Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

  3 “It was odd that so wealthy a man – for Lord Portishead counted large portions of England among his possessions – should have been so very self-effacing, but such was the case. He was besides a devoted husband and the father of ten children. Mr Strange told me that to see Lord Portishead play with his children was the most delightful thing in the world. And indeed he was a little like a child himself. For all his great learning he could no more recognize evil than he could spontaneously understand Chinese. He was the gentlest lord in all of the British aristocracy.”

  The Life of Jonathan Strange by John Segundus, pub. John Murray, London, 1820.

  4 The Friends of English Magic was first published in February 1808 and was an immediate success. By 1812 Norrell and Lascelles were boasting of a circulation in excess of 13,000, though how reliable this figure may be is uncertain.

  From 1808 until 1810 the editor was nominally Lord Portishead but there is little doubt that both Mr Norrell and Lascelles interfered a great deal. There was a certain amount of disagreement between Norrell and Lascelles as to the general aims of the periodical. Mr Norrell wished The Friends of English Magic first to impress upon the British Public the great importance of English modern magic, secondly to correct erroneous views of magical history and thirdly to vilify those magicians and classes of magicians whom he hated. He did not desire to explain the procedures of English magic within its pages – in other words he had no intention of making it in the least informative. Lord Portishead, whose admiration of Mr Norrell knew no bounds, considered it his first duty as editor to follow Norrell’s numerous instructions. As a result the early issues of The Friends of English Magic are rather dull and often puzzling – full of odd omissions, contradictions and evasions. Lascelles, on the other hand, understood very well how the periodical might be used to gain support for the revival of English magic and he was anxious to make it lighter in tone. He grew more and more irritated at Portishead’s cautious approach. He manoeuvred and from 1810 he and Lord Portishead were joint editors.

  John Murray was the publisher of The Friends of English Magic until early 1815 when he and Norrell quarrelled. Deprived of Norrell’s support, Murray was obliged to sell the periodical to Thomas Norton Longman, another publisher. In 1816 Murray and Strange planned to set up a rival periodical to The Friends of English Magic, entitled The Famulus, but only one issue was ever published.

  13 The magician of Threadneedle-street

  1 The Raven King was traditionally held to have possessed three kingdoms: one in England, one in Faerie and one, a strange country on the far side of Hell.

  2 Thomas Lanchester, Treatise concerning the Language of Birds, Chapter 6.

  14 Heart-break Farm

  1 Eventually, both lawsuits were decided in favour of Laurence Strange’s son.

  2 Upon the contrary Laurence Strange congratulated himself on avoiding paying for the boy’s food and clothes for months at a time. So may a love of money make an intelligent man small-minded and ridiculous.

  3 Strange’s biographer, John Segundus, observed on several occasions how Strange preferred the society of clever women to that of men. Life of Jonathan Strange, pub. John Murray, London, 1820.

  18 Sir Walter consults gentlemen in several professions

  1 This theory was first expounded by a Cornish magician called Meraud in the twelfth century and there were many variants. In its most extreme form it involves the belief that any one who has been cured, saved or raised to life by magic is no longer subject to God and His Church, though they may owe all sorts of allegiance to the magician or fairy who has helped them.

  Meraud was arrested and brought before Stephen, King of Southern England, and his bishops at a Council in Winchester. Meraud was branded, beaten and stripped half-naked. Then he was cast out. The bishops ordered that no one should help him. Meraud tried to walk from Winchester to Newcastle, where the Raven King’s castle was. He died on the way.

  The Northern English belief that certain sorts of murderers belong not to God or to the Devil but to the Raven King is another form of the Meraudian Heresy.

  2 Three Perfectible States of Being by William Pantler, pub. Henry Lintot, London, 1735. The three perfectible beings are angels, men and fairies.

  3 It is clear from this remark that Mr Norrell did not yet comprehend how highly the Ministers in general regarded him nor how eager they were to make use of him in the war.

  19 The Peep-O’Day-Boys

  1 The London home of the Prince of Wales in Pall Mall.

  20 The unlikely milliner

  1 Robert Banks Jenkinson, Lord Hawkesbury (1770–1828). On the death of his father in December 1808 he became the Earl of Liverpool. For the next nine years he would prove to be one of Mr Norrell’s most steady supporters.

  21 The cards of Marseilles

  1 The King was a most loving and devoted father to his six daughters, but his affection was such that it led him to act almost as if he were their jailer. He could not bear the thought that any of them might marry and leave him. They were required to lead lives of quite intolerable dullness with the ill-tempered Queen at Windsor Castle. Out of the six only one contrived to get married before she was forty.

  22 The Knight of Wands

  1 It appears that Strange did not abandon the notion of a poetical career easily. In The Life of Jonathan Strange, pub. John Murray, London, 1820, John Segundus describes how, having been disappointed in his search for a poet, Strange decided to write the poems himself. “Things went very well upon the first day; from breakfast to dinner he sat in his dressing gown at the little writing table in his dressing room and scribbled very fast upon several dozen sheets of quarto. He was very delighted with everything he wrote and so was his valet, who was a literary man himself and who gave advice upon the knotty questions of metaphor and rhetoric, and who ran about gathering up the papers as they flew about the room and putting them in order and then running downstairs to read the most exhilarating parts to his friend, the under-gardener. It really was astonishing how quickly Strange wrote; indeed the valet declared that when he put his hand close to Strange’s head he could feel a heat coming off it because of the immense creative energies within. On the second day Strange sat down to write another fifty or so pages and immediately got into difficulties because he could not think of a rhyme for “ ‘let love suffice’. ‘Sunk in vice’ was not promising; ‘a pair of mice’ was nonsense, and ‘what’s the price?’ merely vulgar. He struggled for an hour, could think of nothing, went for a ride to loosen his brains and never looked at his poem again.”

  2 A village five or six miles from Strange’s home.

  3 Mr Norrell appears to have adapted it from a description of a Lancashire spell in Peter Watershippe’s Death’s Library (1448).

  23 The Shadow House

  1 Some scholars (Jonathan Strange among them) have argued that Maria Absalom knew exactly what she was about when she permitted her house to go to rack and ruin. It is their contention that Miss Absalom did what she did in accordance with the commonly-held belief that all ruined buildings belong to the Raven King. This presumably would account for the fact that the magic at the Shadow House appeared to grow stronger after the house fell into ruin.

  “All of Man’s works, all his cities, all his empires, all his monuments will one day crumble to dust. Even the houses of my own dear readers must – though it be for just one day, one hour – be ruined and become houses where the stones are mortared with moonlight, windowed with starlight and furnished with the dusty wind. It is said that in that day, in that hour, our houses become the possessions of the Raven King. Though we bewail the end of English magic and say it is long gone from us and inquire of each other how it was possible that we came to lose something so precious, let us not forget that it also waits for us at England’s end and one day we will no more be able to escape the Raven King than, in this present Age, we can bring him back.” The History and Practice of English Magic by Jonathan Strange, pub. John Murray, London, 1816.


  2 When people talk of “the Other Lands”, they generally have in mind Faerie, or some such other vague notion. For the purposes of general conversation such definitions do very well, but a magician must learn to be more precise. It is well known that the Raven King ruled three kingdoms: the first was the Kingdom of Northern England that encompassed Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and part of Nottinghamshire. The other two were called “the King’s Other Lands”. One was part of Faerie and the other was commonly supposed to be a country on the far side of Hell, sometimes called “the Bitter Lands”. The King’s enemies said that he leased it from Lucifer.

  3 Paris Ormskirk (1496–1587), a schoolmaster from the village of Clerkenwell near London. He wrote several treatises on magic. Though no very original thinker, he was a diligent worker who set himself the task of assembling and sifting through all the spells of summoning he could find, to try to uncover one reliable version. This took him twelve years, during which time his little house on Clerkenwell-green filled up with thousands of small pieces of paper with spells written on them. Mrs Ormskirk was not best pleased, and she, poor woman, became the original of the magician’s wife in stock comedies and second-rate novels – a strident, scolding, unhappy person.

  The spell that Ormskirk eventually produced became very popular and was widely used in his own century and the two following ones; but, until Jonathan Strange made his own alterations to the spell and brought forth Maria Absalom into his own dream and Mr Segundus’s, I never heard of any one who had the least success with it – perhaps for the reasons that Jonathan Strange gives.

  4 Mr Segundus’s good sense seems to have deserted him at this point. Charles Hether-Gray (1712–89) was another historio-magician who published a famous spell of summoning. His spell and Ormskirk’s are equally bad; there is not a pin to chuse between them.

  5 In mediaeval times conjuring the dead was a well-known sort of magic and there seems to have been a consensus that a dead magician was both the easiest spirit to raise and the most worth talking to.

  6 There have been very few magicians who did not learn magic from another practitioner. The Raven King was not the first British magician. There had been others before him – notably the seventh-century half-man, half-demon, Merlin – but at the time the Raven King came into England there were none. Little enough is known about the Raven King’s early years, but it is reasonable to suppose that he learnt both magic and kingship at the court of a King of Faerie. Early magicians in mediaeval England learnt their art at the court of the Raven King and these magicians trained others.

  One exception may be the Nottinghamshire magician, Thomas Godbless (1105?–82). Most of his life is entirely obscure to us. He certainly spent some time with the Raven King, but this seems to have been late in his life when he had already been a magician for years. He is perhaps one example that a magician may be self-created – as of course were both Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange.

  24 Another magician

  1 The Modern Magician was one of several magical periodicals set up following the first appearance of The Friends of English Magic in 1808. Though not appointed by Mr Norrell, the editors of these periodicals never dreamt of deviating from orthodox magical opinion as laid down by Mr Norrell.

  2 Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps the week after that.

  25 The education of a magician

  1 Naturally, Mr Norrell based his syllabus upon the classifications contained in De Generibus Artium Magicarum Anglorum by Francis Sutton-Grove.

  2 Richard Chaston (1620–95). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

  3 The Blue Book: being an attempt to expose the most prevalent lies and common deceptions practised by English magicians upon the King’s subjects and upon each other, by Valentine Munday, pub. 1698.

  4 The story of the Master of Nottingham’s daughter (to which Mr Norrell never returned) is worth recounting and so I set it down here.

  The fair to which the young woman repaired was held on St Matthew’s Feast in Nottingham. She spent a pleasant day, going about among the booths, making purchases of linens, laces and spices. Sometime during the afternoon she happened to turn suddenly to see some Italian tumblers who were behind her and the edge of her cloak flew out and struck a passing goose. This bad-tempered fowl ran at her, flapping its wings and screaming. In her surprize she dropt her father’s ring, which fell into the goose’s open gullet and the goose, in its surprize, swallowed it. But before the Master of Nottingham’s daughter could say or do any thing the gooseherd drove the goose on and both disappeared into the crowd.

  The goose was bought by a man called John Ford who took it back to his house in the village of Fiskerton and the next day his wife, Margaret Ford, killed the goose, plucked it and drew out its innards. In its stomach she found a heavy silver ring set with a crooked piece of yellow amber. She put it down on a table near three hens’ eggs that had been gathered that morning.

  Immediately the eggs began to shake and then to crack open and from each egg something marvellous appeared. From the first egg came a stringed instrument like a viol, except that it had little arms and legs, and played sweet music upon itself with a tiny bow. From the next egg emerged a ship of purest ivory with sails of fine white linen and a set of silver oars. And from the last egg hatched a chick with strange red-and-gold plumage. This last was the only wonder to survive beyond the day. After an hour or two the viol cracked like an eggshell and fell into pieces and by sunset the ivory ship had set sail and rowed away through the air; but the bird grew up and later started a fire which destroyed most of Grantham. During the conflagration it was observed bathing itself in the flames. From this circumstance it was presumed to be a phoenix.

  When Margaret Ford realized that a magic ring had somehow fallen into her possession, she was determined to do magic with it. Unfortunately she was a thoroughly malicious woman, who tyrannized over her gentle husband, and spent long hours pondering how to revenge herself upon her enemies. John Ford held the manor of Fiskerton, and in the months that followed he was loaded with lands and riches by greater lords who feared his wife’s wicked magic.

  Word of the wonders performed by Margaret Ford soon reached Nottingham, where the Master of Nottingham lay in bed waiting to die. So much of his power had gone into the ring that the loss of it had made him first melancholy, then despairing and finally sick. When news of his ring finally came he was too ill to do any thing about it.

  His daughter, on the other hand, was thoroughly sorry for bringing this misfortune on her family and thought it her duty to try and get the ring back; so without telling any one what she intended she set off along the riverbank to the village of Fiskerton.

  She had only got as far as Gunthorpe when she came upon a very dreadful sight. A little wood was burning steadily with fierce flames lapping every part of it. The black bitter smoke made her eyes sting and her throat ache, yet the wood was not consumed by the fire. A low moan issued from the trees as if they cried out at such unnatural torment. The Master’s daughter looked round for someone to explain this wonder to her. A young woodsman, who was passing, told her, “Two weeks ago, Margaret Ford stopt in the wood on the road from Thurgarton. She rested under the shade of its branches, drank from its stream and ate its nuts and berries, but just as she was leaving a root caught her foot and made her fall, and when she rose from the ground a briar was so impertinent as to scratch her arm. So she cast a spell upon the wood and swore it would burn for ever.”

  The Master’s daughter thanked him for the information and walked on for a while. She became thirsty and crouched do
wn to scoop up some water from the river. All at once a woman – or something very like a woman – half-rose out of the water. There were fish-scales all over her body, her skin was as grey and spotted as a trout’s and her hair had become an odd arrangement of spiny grey trout fins. She seemed to glare at the Master’s daughter, but her round cold fish-eyes and stiff fishskin were not well adapted to reproduce human expressions and so it was hard to tell.

  “Oh! I beg your pardon!” said the Master’s daughter, startled.

  The woman opened her mouth, shewing a fish throat and mouth full of ugly fish teeth, but she seemed unable to make a sound. Then she rolled over and plunged back into the water.

  A woman who was washing clothes on the riverbank explained to the Master’s daughter, “That is Joscelin Trent who is so unfortunate as to be the wife of a man that Margaret Ford likes. Out of jealousy Margaret Ford has cast a spell on her and she is forced, poor lady, to spend all her days and nights immersed in the shallows of the river to keep her enchanted skin and flesh from drying out, and as she cannot swim she lives in constant terror of drowning.”

  The Master’s daughter thanked the woman for telling her this.