Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (94 page)

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.

Chapter 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 …”

Chapter 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.

Chapter 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.

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.

Chapter 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.

Chapter 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.

Chapter 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.

Chapter 19: The Peep-O’Day-Boys

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

Chapter 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.

Chapter 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.

Chapter 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).

Chapter 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
fter
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.