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.
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