Beautiful Lies
Page 47
Stead was also largely responsible for the downfall in sexual scandals not only of Charles Parnell but of Sir Charles Dilke, another Liberal politician. Both were supposedly on ‘his side’, but Stead showed no qualms about their destruction; his Puritan moral code allowed for no shades of grey. Later he worked to bring down the homosexual dramatist (and friend of Gabriela Cunninghame Grahame) Oscar Wilde. It was not a climate in which one was safe harbouring secrets. In his article Adams quotes a letter written by one of Carrie’s sisters after her death which underlined the fear of her family that the truth about Gabriela would be revealed. ‘I shall watch the papers,’ she wrote in 1906, ‘for I am certain in spite of all the story will come out . . . what I want to find out is what name he registered her death in – if other than Papa and Mama’s he can be charged with perjury.’ The scandal that would have resulted from such a discovery would not only have destroyed Robert’s political career, it would have meant social disgrace, not only for Gabriela and Robert but for both of their families. At a time when respectability was critical to a family’s social, financial and professional standing, such a loss of reputation might well have proved disastrous.
In my novel Maribel is not a writer, or not with any success. She is a photographer. Photography drew me in part because of its metaphorical significance, its ability to create illusions that seem real, and partly because the rapid development of photographic technology in the 1880s propelled the camera to the forefront of contemporary culture. While artists argued heatedly about whether photography could be considered a legitimate artistic form, the majority of Victorians regarded the camera as a scientific instrument, incapable of dissembling. As the pace of scientific discovery accelerated, psychology was also advancing with rapid strides, and hypnotic experiments were revealing previously unimagined complexities in human consciousness. There was, among many, a growing fascination with the occult. Spiritualist mediums promised communication with the spirits of the dead. Though some were sceptical, many took comfort from the idea that, in an increasingly secular world, it might be possible to prove the existence of God. In 1882 a group of scientifically-minded scholars, clergymen and public figures, among them a professor of physics from the Royal College of Science in Dublin, established the Society for Psychical Research, its stated objective to conduct organised scholarly research into human experiences that challenged conventional scientific models. One of their earliest experiments concerned the use of photographic images to capture the spirits of the dead, thereby proving beyond doubt the existence of the life everlasting.
It was some time before the Society abandoned its attempts and accepted the impossibility of proof. One might argue that it hardly mattered. Cynics and atheists dismissed the pictures as frauds; the faithful had no need of evidence. Perhaps our own stories are the same. During the writing of this novel I have come to question the nature of true stories, of history, of memory. Perhaps, like Maribel, we are all the composites of our own fantasies. Perhaps, in the end, it matters less what is true, but what we are determined to believe.
Acknowledgements
I OWE A HUGE debt to all the writers and scholars whose knowledge and wisdom have provided the foundations for this novel. I cannot possibly hope to do justice to them all here but I must extend special thanks to A. N. Wilson for his brilliant history, The Victorians, which is as entertaining as it is erudite. Jerry White’s London in the Nineteenth Century proved another indispensable resource, while contemporary memoirs and biographies provided wonderful first-person witness accounts of events in the book, among them London Letters and Some Others by George W. Smalley and RDB’s Diary 1887–1914 by R. D. Blumenfeld, both memoirs of American journalists in London, and Reminiscences and Reflexions of a Mid to Late Victorian by the British Socialist philosopher Ernest Belfort Bax. Annie Besant, An Autobiography was also a source of fascinating contemporary detail.
A range of more specialised histories provided me with an understanding of the particular world occupied by Edward and Maribel Campbell Lowe. I was ably served by a number of political histories, notably Socialists, Liberals and Labour by Paul Thompson, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867–1974 by James Hinton, and the riveting The World That Never Was by Alex Butterworth. Two books in particular provided unparalleled access to the world of Victorian newspapers: Alan J. Lee’s The Origins of the Popular Press in England 1855–1914 and Lucy Brown’s Victorian News and Newspapers. The website attackingthedevil.co.uk also proved a treasure trove of original contemporary sources pertaining to W. T. Stead and to the emergence of the New Journalism in the 1880s. The murky history of spirit photography was elucidated by two particularly helpful studies, 100 Years of Spirit Photography by Tom Patterson and Photographing the Invisible by James Coates.
For information about Buffalo Bill and the London tour of his Wild West show I relied heavily on Alan Gallop’s terrific Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West with its wealth of contemporary photographs and press cuttings, and on ‘Your Fathers, The Ghosts’: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Scotland by Tom F. Cunningham. More general context was provided by such histories as Don Russell’s The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, and Sarah Blackstone’s excellent Buckskins, Bullets and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Black Elk Speaks, as told through John G. Neihardt by Black Elk, offered a privileged glimpse into the Indian perspective on the period by one of the medicine men of the Oglala Sioux who travelled to England with Colonel Cody in 1887.
It was thanks to Hostiles? The Lakota Ghost Dance and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West by Sam Maddra that I gained my first introduction to Robert Cunninghame Graham. His impassioned letters, written about the plight of the Indians to the Daily Graphic, led me to a number of books about the Scottish Socialist MP, most usefully Don Roberto by A. F. Tschiffley and Cunninghame Graham; a critical biography by Cedric Watts and Laurence Davies. Most importantly they steered me to the article that would prove to be the inspiration for this novel, Jad Adams’s ‘Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: Deception and Achievement in the 1890s’, published in 2007 in the journal English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. I would like to extend my thanks to him, and to all the other historians upon whom I have depended so heavily during the writing of this novel.
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