Golden Hill
Page 30
I owe thanks to a lot of people. My brother-in-law Jonathan Martin made a vital suggestion about the mechanism of the plot. My father, Peter Spufford, inducted me into early-modern finance. My younger daughter, Theodora, helped with the conversation at the Lovells’ dinner party. My wife, Jessica Martin, put up with Mr Smith and Tabitha as perpetual guests at our dinner table. The gentleman who led me round Iran in 2000 always punctiliously referred to those who ruled his country as ‘Mister Khatami’ and ‘Mister Khamenei’, alerting me for the first time, member that I am of an anti-formal generation, to the comedies of formal naming. Long-ago conversations with Jenny Uglow about Fielding and Hogarth turned out to have been secretly at work in my imagination. Regine Dugardyn briefed me on Sinterklaasavond. Marina Benjamin saved the middle of the story from sagging. Zoe Adjonyoh, Professor Graham Furniss and Dr Kwadwo Osei-Nyame guided me to two accurate sentences in Ashanti Twi, which I then had to alter to fit pre-twentieth century typography. Jacob and Melina Smith lent me and my family their Episcopalian rectory to stay in for a week, up in the open fields and wild pasturelands of 23rd Street, but with easy access to the eighteenth-century city on the 6 train. Shawn Maurer showed me eighteenth-century Boston, and behaved at an early stage of the book’s gestation as if a colonial counterpart to Joseph Andrews or David Simple was not too crazy an idea. At the other end of its composition, my agent, Clare Alexander, and my editor, Julian Loose, backed me uncomplainingly in various acts of stubbornness. In between I wrote most of Mr Smith’s story in CB1, the oldest cybercafé in the English Cambridge. Gabi gave me my billionth cup of Americano free.
The book was kindly read and commented on in draft by Felix Gilman, Claerwen James, Sarah Leipciger, Henry Farrell, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, Elizabeth Knox, Tim Parnell, Oliver Morton and Anne Malcolm.
Thank you all.
Feast of St Michael & All Angels
64 Eliz. II
About the Author
Francis Spufford was born in 1964. He is the author of five highly-praised books of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either ‘bizarre’ or ‘brilliant’, and usually as both. The most recent, Unapologetic, has been translated into three languages; the one before, Red Plenty, into nine. He has been longlisted or shortlisted for prizes in science writing, historical writing, political writing, theological writing, and writing ‘evoking the spirit of place’. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge. This is his first novel.
By the Same Author
I MAY BE SOME TIME
THE CHILD THAT BOOKS BUILT
BACKROOM BOYS
RED PLENTY
UNAPOLOGETIC
Copyright
First published in 2016
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2016
All rights reserved
© Francis Spufford, 2016
Illustrations © Eleanor Crow, after eighteenth-century originals, 2016
Design by Faber
Jacket illustration by Eleanor Crow
The right of Francis Spufford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–28137–4