What is the best way to make sense of the past? Horrible Histories? Viking River Cruises? The History Channel? Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum (a man so brilliantly British, it’s been said, he should have an export ban slapped on him), decided to tell the history of the world in a hundred objects — “things”.
In a radio series and follow-up book MacGregror pondered singular objects from the Mummy of Hornedjitef to a Sharia compliant credit card. They contained history as a nut contains a kernel. If, that is, you were enough of a Sherlock to crack them. The 100-object approach was dismissed by some academic critics as voodoo history. But MacGregor delivered the most popular history lesson the nation had received since A JP Taylor’s TV lectures in the 1960s. Both men made the past live.
Riding a rush-hour bus, in 2004, after a day’s research in the archives, Aislinn Hunter was riffling idly through an anthology of Victorian letters she’d picked up in a charity shop. Her eye was caught by an oddity: a letter from the poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, to the governor of Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics in October 1877. The institution, recently established by the Bethlem Royal Hospital (formerly “Bedlam”), was close to the poet’s summer house, in Surrey. Two inmates had gone walkabout through the woods and had called in, uninvited, on the poet, for a spot of tea. Tennyson observed that he would be “very glad if they in any way enjoyed themselves here” but politely made it clear that, all things considered, he would rather not have convalescent lunatics drop by. The handwritten letter is partially reproduced on the cover of Hunter’s novel.
MacGregor might have used this one object as a springboard for thinking about the improvements in the care of the mentally ill in the 19th century. Tom Stoppard might have exploited by the rich comedy of the situation. Hunter is both a distinguished Canadian novelist and an academic historian with an archival specialism in Victorian asylums. Inspired by this one curious letter, she let her novelist’s imagination rip. Neo-Victorian fiction (think Sarah Waters, George Macdonald Fraser, Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White) is a thriving genre. Hunter chose the twin-track model used by AS Byatt in her 1990 Booker prize-winner Possession, braiding contemporary and Victorian narratives into a single thread.
Hunter’s modern heroine, Jane Standen, was, aged 15, minding five-year-old Lily on a late summer walk through some woods close to the now defunct Whitmore Hospital and what had then been the country home of an intrepid Victorian botanic explorer. The child, who was left solely in Jane’s charge, goes missing, and is never found.
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Flashback to 1877. Three inmates from the asylum call in on their eminent neighbour, the botanist, uninvited, for tea. One of them — a girl known only as N — disappears in the woods, never to be found.
Jane’s life can never be the same after Lily’s loss. She gives up a promising career as a cellist to work in the dusty archives of the Chester Museum (based, transparently, on the Sir John Soane’s Museum, in London). It’s a chamber of historical curiosities collected, here there and everywhere, by a Victorian antiquarian. Its random collection offers a history of the world in 10,000 objects.
Twenty years pass. The museum’s holdings are now up for auction. Jane, facing unemployment, goes back to the woods where Lily and N went missing. Swirling round the narrative is a chorus of garrulous asylum ghosts. It all gets a trifle wispy and subplots multiply bafflingly. But the reader is pulled onwards by two suspenseful questions. What happened to Lily and N? Her mission, says Hunter, is to “give the dead back their stories”. She’s done it very well in The World Before Us.
The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter, Hamish Hamilton, 421pp, £16.99 . To buy this book for £13.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134