Mad Miss Mimic
Page 21
In 1874 an English doctor named C. R. Alder Wright discovered a new way of processing morphine that made its effects much quicker and more powerful. Dr. Wright published his findings in a pharmaceutical journal but did not pursue the manufacture or marketing of the drug. Twenty years later, the Bayer company (mainly known nowadays for Aspirin) patented the compound, called diacetylemorphine, under a name that captured its “heroic” effects: Heroin. Heroin was sold across Europe and the U.S. as a cough remedy and pain reliever. It was even prescribed as a cure for morphia addiction! It took many years for the medical world to grasp just how dangerous and addictive heroin actually was. Faced with increasing reports of overdose and withdrawal sickness, Bayer quietly pulled heroin off the shelves in 1913.
That initial 1874 discovery of what would later become heroin is the sort of historical detail that novelists adore. I knew right away that my Dr. Dewhurst would be experimenting with morphine derivatives and testing them out on “patients” like Hattie and Daisy who had nowhere else to go. Whether doctors actually used orphans and paupers for medical experiments is uncertain—if they did, they certainly didn’t keep records!—but codes of medical ethics were a lot looser and less rigorously enforced in the Victorian period than they are today.
Dr. Dewhurst doesn’t call his new wonder drug “heroin,” of course, but I couldn’t resist sneaking the name into the novel somewhere, so I christened Mr. Thornfax’s new clipper ship the Heroine.
STUTTERING (AND MIMICRY)
Stuttering is a speech disorder that affects 5 percent of the world’s population in childhood and 1 percent in adulthood. This means that in 80 percent of cases a stutter spontaneously resolves by adolescence. While physical in origin (a “locking” reflex in the vocal cords), stuttering is made worse by stress, including stressful speaking situations. Singing, reciting poetry, and imitating other people’s speech (e.g., acting in a play or performing stand-up comedy) is known to temporarily relieve or eliminate stuttering. The fact that Leo’s ability to mimic voices also allows her to speak stutter-free is therefore medically plausible even if I did make it up.
My portrayal of Leo’s suffering under various “therapies” for her stutter is not an exaggeration. In the 1800s treatments for stuttering ranged from surgical removal of part or all of the tongue, to electrical shock and other “punishment” therapies, to regular doses of laudanum or morphine for the stutterer’s “nerves.” Leo’s love for opera and poetry and her eventual path to “finding her voice” was inspired by the work of a contemporary poet whose work I greatly admire named Jordan Scott. Jordan grew up with a stutter, and his book Blert explores what he calls the “poetics of stuttering.” You can hear him read aloud from this book online in the film Flub and Utter (links under “For Further Reading” below).
EXPLOSIVES, TERROR, AND CRIME
Nitroglycerin was developed in Sweden by Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize. He set up a laboratory on a barge in the middle of a lake after an explosion at his first workspace killed his younger brother. Nobel patented the blasting cap in 1864 and dynamite in 1867. In my story Mr. Watts more or less copies Nobel’s recipe for dynamite: he stabilizes the nitroglycerin by mixing it with clay, forming it into sticks, and attaching it to a blast cap. The timer Tom Rampling makes from a pocket watch would not have been impossible from an historical standpoint: after all, the first adjustable mechanical alarm clock was patented in 1847 in France.
The Black Glove and its terror attacks are products of my imagination, not of history. Britain’s first direct experience of terrorism was the Irish-American bombing campaign of 1881–85, after which the Explosives Act was passed in an attempt to control the possession and sale of dynamite. Mr. Thornfax’s plot to monopolize the opium market wouldn’t have worked in real life, either. Although various proposals to restrict or ban addictive drugs were debated in Parliament throughout the late 1800s, both opium and cocaine were still legal in Britain at the start of World War I.
Leo gets into serious trouble when she wanders into the wrong neighbourhood. London in the 1870s housed a massive underclass of desperately poor citizens crowded into slums and forced to survive on begging, prostitution, and larceny. Criminal gangs like Mr. Sears’s and Mrs. Clampitt’s in my story offered some shelter and protection to orphans and street children in exchange for the spoils of their thievery. (Punishments for children were slightly less severe than for adults.) The prevalence of petty crime in “rookeries” like Spitalfields and Seven Dials is evident in the long list of Victorian slang terms for different types of thieves, including roughs, mobbers, fingersmiths, sneakthieves, cutpurses, hoisters, house-breakers, snide-pitchers, toy-getters, duffmen, welshers, skittle-sharps, magsmen, busters, screwsmen, and pocket-pickers.
FOR FURTHER READING
Brown, G. I. The Big Bang: A History of Explosives. Stroud, U.K.: Sutton, 1998.
Dormandy, Thomas. Opium: Reality’s Dark Dream. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Kelly, Jack. Gunpowder. Alchemy, Bombards and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive That Changed the World. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Lavid, Nathan. Understanding Stuttering. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
Parssinen, Terry M. Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society 1820–1930. Philadelphia: ISHI, 1983.
Scott, Jordan. Blert (poems). Toronto: Coach House Books, 2008; Flub and Utter (film). www.flubandutter.nfb.ca/#/flubandutter; Stutter Featuring Jordan Scott (film). www.vimeo.com/7384677.
White, Jerry. London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God.’ London: Jonathan Cape, 2007.
Finally, if you’d like to read more fiction with words like slumduggered in it, I highly recommend anything by Charles Dickens, and especially Oliver Twist.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to all the readers of this book in its various drafts for their feedback and encouragement—particularly to editor Melanie Little; to my agent, Monica Pacheco; to my parents, Bart and Marianne Henstra; and to Lynne Missen, Brittany Lavery, Sandra Tooze, Chandra Wohleber, and Vikki VanSickle at Penguin Random House Canada. To those who cheered me along with good writing company, especially Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Suzanne Alyssa Andrew, and Heidi Reimer. To the staunchest supporters of my early writing efforts, including Mary Tangelder, Stan Kaethler, Jessica Westhead, and Jennifer Burwell. To my sons, Rowan and Marlow Vander Kooy, for promising to read the book even though it “looks pretty girly” and to give all their friends free copies. And to Neil Vander Kooy: my first reader, my first listener, my first everything.
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First published 2015
Cover design: Grace Cheong
Cover photography: James Ransom / Offset
Copyright © Sarah Henstra, 2015
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