My mother had almost forgotten her request of Sir Jocelyn, when, three months after their meeting in the carriage, Jack walked free, halfway through his ten-year sentence, much to his surprise. She gave him Damage’s Bindery: he approached new clients, and proved capable, unlike my mother, of steering a course through the con-men and undesirables of the industry. It may not have been the straightest course, but it was the soundest, and kept him closer to the right side of the law than she had ever been.
It may surprise the reader to discover that he and Pansy got married, but it made perfect sense to them and us all. Their affection for each other is greater than between most married couples; her barrenness is no obstacle to someone of his proclivities. They offer mutual love, support and comfort, as do my mother and Sylvia to each other. Neither of them quite got over the men they loved but could not have, and devoted their future to themselves and their children. My mother always disagreed with Dr Acton that women are not victim to sexual urges, but she declared (rather loudly as age superseded decorum) that she would rather have no one than an unsatisfactory lover, and that this was a view she had come to as a result of her late husband, her soldier lover and a thousand pornographic books.
Sir Jocelyn Knightley died in Africa, some time between the 8th and the 14th of April, 1867. Information, and his obituaries in The Times and the Daily Telegraph were vague, and to this day we still receive rumours of his demise. So far it has been mooted that he fell into the Victoria Falls, got poisoned by a local chieftain, caught one or more of the sleeping sicknesses, marsh-fever, yellow jack, bilharzia and malaria, was stabbed by a loose woman in a city, that it was deliberate, that it was accidental, that it was suicide, and that it was murder. We shall never know the truth, but it was a suitably mysterious ending of which he would have been proud. Africa swam in his bloodstream, and it claimed him in the end.
Sir Jocelyn left Nathaniel his, or rather Sylvia’s, entire fortune. The property in Berkeley-square was sold, and Christie’s was entrusted with the sale of most of the furnishings, and all the scientific equipment. Sylvia chose, however, to donate his book collection to the British Library, who were possibly too confounded by its contents to refuse. She never found any female body parts pickled in glass jars, and neither did my mother receive a shrivelled scrotum in the post from Africa, much to her relief.
Shortly after, we were to leave behind Jack and Pansy in Lambeth, and set up home in Gravesend, with Sylvia and Nathaniel too, in a small but elegant Georgian townhouse with a large garden. Rumours spread quickly, but having weathered the malicious gossip of Ivy-street, this mere tittle-tattle was nothing but amusing. Of course, the fact they were from London gave them something of a shady patina anyway, as if sapphism, or tribadism, or whatever you want to call it, was de rigeur anywhere north of Clapham. The talk did not bother them. Nathaniel and I both went to the local school, where Sylvia and my mother helped out a few days a week. My mother further eroded our neighbours’ fears once she offered to rebind the old text books handed down by the boys’ public school up the road. She was also happy, too, to do the odd re-bind for those who asked, and it was a constructive way of making new acquaintances, but she did not set herself up seriously.
But the first time somebody brought her a family Bible, she realised that the Song of Solomon still held memories for her, both good and bad. The local vicar told her once in the queue at the butcher’s that he considered it to be the height of obscenity. My mother, smiling sweetly, asked for half a pound of kidneys, and never enquired whether he had come across Archdeacon Favourbrook, or the Reverend Harold Oswald, during his early ecclesiastical training in London.
And so to her journal, the book of MOIV BIBLL. After her last entry in it, it was left for many years. But my mother was always one to know how to make a buck from a book, as the Americans would say, and, when the Society of Women in the Bookbinding Trades wrote to her regarding the need to establish a Bookbinders’ Benevolent Fund, she wondered at the possibility of sending it out into the world to raise some money. In the end, we decided to split the proceeds between the Benevolent Fund and the Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic of London, an establishment in which I have been fortunate enough never to set foot. My mother always said that if my kidnap and subsequent rescue hadn’t brought a fit on, then nothing ever would again; and she was right. The nursery rhymes were my idea. Read into them what you will; they are my gift to you.
When she signed her publishing contract shortly before her death, we travelled together to London. The motorcar drove us down the Strand – the new, improved Strand, that is – straight through where Holywell-street used to be, and we admired the curves of the new Aldwych, then, round Trafalgar-square and onwards towards Regent-street; where my mother remembered there had been only one department store, Messrs Farmer and Rogers, where Din had portered, and now there were many. ‘Liberty,’ my mother read from the lettering above the door. ‘Liberty & Co.’ But the traffic did not allow us to linger at this peculiar monument; she was unable to spy into its windows to ascertain what type of freedom it might offer – and at what price – within.
I once asked my mother about her own demons, but she said they were paved over like the relentlessness of architecture after this visit to London. I did not believe her. Do we not hold on to our demons, for comfort? Do we not need them, in order to cushion ourselves against the worse demons of others, in this strange and unpredictable world? Gas may have long given way to electricity on these streets, in these establishments, but I defy even the most fervent metropolitan developer to say that it has brought about the triumph of light over dark. One depends on the perpetual presence of the other, just like the trade in pornography.
My mother must have known, better than most, that all the abolition of Holywell-street would achieve was the migration of a handful of pornographers into other premises, and an easier thoroughfare for vehicles and pedestrians to navigate. She died shortly after our visit, in the summer of last year, at a time when pornography had become no longer the privilege of the wealthy, but available from barrows in every market. And although her eyes were failing, she knew that she had seen it all.
Lucinda Damage, Dartford, Kent, 1902
Afterword
While all characters and events in this book are fictional, I have taken several real examples as inspiration.
The London Anthropological Society, which shared many members with the Royal Geographic Society, was at the forefront of Britain’s imperial ventures. Its inner circle was the so-called ‘Cannibal Club’, and its members, amongst others, were Sir Richard Burton, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Sir James Plaisted Wilde (Lord Penzance), General John Studholme Hodgson, and Charles Duncan Cameron. It was overwhelmingly Tory and reactionary, and supported research and enquiry into outdated scientific practices and behaviours devoted to securing their place in the world. They were also the most prolific producers and consumers of pornography. At three guineas a volume, and involving arcane, unmecha-nised methods of printing and binding, pornography was not for the working class in the 1860s.
The pornographer Frederick Hankey owned several volumes of pornography bound in human skin. Richard Burton promised him that he would bring back a piece of human skin from his trip to Dahomey in 1863 (stripped from ‘une négresse vivante’ so that it would retain its lustre); fortunately, he failed in this mission.1 Monckton Milnes wrote in his commonplace book in 1860: ‘There is no accounting for tastes in superstition. Hankey would like to have a Bible bound with bits of skin stripped off live from the cunts of a hundred little girls and yet he could not be persuaded to try the sensation of f—ing a Muscovy Duck while its head was cut off.’ In the same entry he also mentions Hankey’s ‘extreme desire to see a girl hanged and have the skin of her backside tanned to bind his Justine with’.2
The Ladies’ Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery is based on an admirable organisation that did much good work towards th
e abolition of slavery in America. Frederick Douglass was one of the most high-profile slaves whose freedom was secured by the Society, and there were many fugitive and freed slaves living in the British Isles in the 1850s and 1860s. I by no means wish to suggest that all those involved in the Society were as hypocritical as Sylvia Knightley, but it is fair to say that by the middle of the nineteenth century England was suffering from ‘philanthropy fatigue’, and such endeavours were often sentimental and impractical, a balm to one’s conscience with little call to action. They gave otherwise idle gentlewomen a certain prestige and, quite simply, something to do. However, the American Civil War provided an opportunity for such organisations to regroup and exert a final push on the institution of slavery, and towards the end of the Civil War they made sent significant contributions to the American Freedman’s Aid Movement.3
For nineteenth-century white British attitudes to interracial relationships between black men and white women, and the objectified sexual desire for black men as manifested by Lady Knightley, I recommend Ben Shephard’s Kitty and the Prince (London, Profile, 2003).
Sir Charles Locock, the Queen’s physician accoucheur, and President of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in London, announced his use of potassium bromide to treat patients with epilepsy in 1857, after a presentation by Edward H. Sieveking (my great-great grandfather) at the Society. In 1861, J. Russell Reynolds published a landmark monograph, entitled Epilepsy: Its Symptoms, Treatment, and Relation to Other Convulsive Diseases.
The use of clitoridectomy to treat, amongst other things, dysuria, epilepsy, hysteria, insanity and sterility (which were all believed to have their origins in heightened sexuality) was prescribed and conducted by Dr Isaac Baker Brown during the 1860s, and is mentioned in The Lancet. It was vehemently rejected by much of the medical profession, and Dr Baker Brown was vilified and forced out of the London Gynaecological Society.
Dora’s dream, of a thousand members and one pound a week for women in the bookbinding trades, was shared by Miss Isabel Forsyth, secretary of the Manchester and Salford Society of Women in the Bookbinding and Printing Trades. It was not realised until 1917.
Many of the erotic books mentioned – and quotations therefrom – are genuine; those that I have invented are as true as possible to the spirit of the real thing.
1 Fawn Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton, Eland, London, 1986, pp. 220, 239
2 Richard Monckton Milnes, Houghton Commonplace Books, Trinity College, Cambridge, p. 212, quoted in Ian Gibson, The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee, Faber and Faber, London, 2001, p. 31
3 See Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians, Leicester UP, Leicester, 1978
Acknowledgements
My thanks to: Anna Balcombe, Emma Cameron, Tara Crewe, Professor Mirjam Foot, Peter Harvey, Dr Maria Iacovou, Eliza Kentridge, Dr Jeremy Krikler, Robert Priseman, Paul Rumsey, Ally Seabrook, Boris Starling, David and Judy Starling, Mike Trim, Guy and Robina Taplin, Jane Wilson; Arzu Tahsin, Holly Roberts and their team at Bloomsbury; my wonderful agent Stephanie Cabot and her team at the Gernert Company.
A complete bibliography of works consulted during the writing of this book would be lengthy and dull, but I must credit Judith Flander’s excellent and exhaustive book The Victorian House, (HarperCollins, London, 2003) for informing much of the backdrop of everyday life throughout the story, and Lynda Nead’s provocative Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005), which introduced me to Holywell Street and the pornographic industry.
Lee Jackson’s ever-growing www.victorianlondon.org is a masterful compilation of primary sources, which held so many answers to my questions about the minutiae of living in London in 1860 that at times I found myself consulting it daily. I would also like to thank Malcolm Shifrind for his fine Victorian Turkish Bath Project, at www.victorianturkishbath.org, and the online expertise of the VICTORIA and SHARP lists, especially Ruth Croft, Michel Faber, Sheldon Goldfarb, Ellen Jordan, Patrick Leary, Jan Marsh, Sally Mitchell, Heather Morton and Michael Wolff.
Finally, I must mention Jeni Bate and Karen Jefferies, without whom my children would have been much less happy while this book was being written.
A Note on the Author
by Boris Starling
Four days after finishing The Journal of Dora Damage, my sister Bee (as Belinda was universally known) was admitted to hospital for a long-scheduled operation to remove a cyst from her bile duct.
The operation initially seemed a success, but in the small hours of the following morning her hepatic artery burst, sending her into cardiac arrest.
The surgeons saved her life on that occasion, but she never left hospital again. Seven weeks and two further operations later, Bee died of septic shock. She was thirty-four, and married with two young children.
We held a memorial service for her a fortnight later, on a bittersweet late summer day of swirling emotions. The lovely funeral director who watched over Bee’s coffin was, physically if not in personality, an absolute dead ringer for Mrs Eeles. Bee would have been tickled pink.
Several hundred people packed a small country church to say their farewells to Bee; and of all the readings during the service, the one about which people talked most afterwards was the prologue of this book.
‘Before we are born,’ it says, ‘St Bartholomew, patron saint of bookbinders, presents our soul with a choice of two books’: a gold-tooled one whose beauty fades under the drudgery of the proscriptive, pre-ordained fate therein; and a plain, rough tome which gradually flowers into a masterpiece as its blank pages are filled in by a soul who lives life according to its own dictates.
There is no doubt as to which of St Bartholomew’s two books Bee’s soul chose.
Her story was truly one of free will and personal inspiration. She was bottled sunshine, a woman of vital, vibrant, amazing energy; a bright, shining star, a creature of the light, a joy-giver and life-enhancer who lit up the lives of all those who knew her. She loved people not just for their qualities, but for their imperfections and their differences.
Bee was no saint, and would have hated to have been remembered as one. Her wit could be scabrous. She didn’t suffer fools, because she, fiercely independent and ferociously intelligent, expected as much from others as she did from herself. She didn’t indulge those she felt had let her down; she was quite prepared to jettison friendships she felt were no longer so. And she could be difficult, as can most people who are worth knowing.
Above all, she was that rarest of creatures; someone true to herself, for good and for bad.
For those who knew and loved her, Bee lives on in a myriad of ways, one of which is the book you have just finished. She would have been thrilled that you have read her novel; even more thrilled if you enjoyed it, of course, but equally prepared to have debated its shortcomings with you if you didn’t.
The Journal of Dora Damage was a labour of love. All first novels are personal, to a large extent; how much more so this one, when there can be no more after it? There is so much of Bee in Dora, but never more so than when she says, at the end of the prologue, that this book ‘conceals the contents of my heart, as clearly as if I had cut it open with a scalpel for the anatomists to read’.
February 2007
Belinda Starling lived in Wivenhoe, Essex with her husband and children and died in August 2006.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this book is set in Linotype Sabon, named after the type founder, Jacques Sabon. It was designed by Jan Tschichold and jointly developed by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel, in response to a need for a typeface to be available in identical form for mechanical hot-metal composition and hand composition using foundry type.
Tschichold based his design for Sabon roman on a font engraved by Garamond, and Sabon italic on a font by Granjon. It was first used in 1966 and has proved an enduring modern classic.
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Belinda Starling, The Journal of Dora Damage
The Journal of Dora Damage Page 44
