I’ve been fond of William Harrison Ainsworth for a long time but it’s been a while since I last read one. He fits autumn wonderfully, the longer nights lend themselves to his lengthy, melodramatic form of storytelling. There’s also his choice of subject matter; deception, murder and frequently supernatural happenings that hang nicely with the gloomy season.
Old Saint Paul’s has a lot to recommend it, a tale set in London during some of its most gruesome history, 1665-66, plague and fire. With the inevitable addition of crossed love, criminality and other possible nuttiness, I was excited to begin it.
Ainsworth usually knows how to start a story, Jack Shepherd’s race down the Thames during the Great Storm is exciting and Auriol has one of the most balls-to-the-wall crazy and gripping openings involving severed heads, sudden grandfathers and the elixir of life. Old Saint Paul’s is a little more subdued, we are introduced to an upstanding London grocer and his family. His apprentice is in love with his daughter and, if following the Hogarth’s good apprentice progress, expects to marry her at some point. Unfortunately, she is also desired by others and a young rake has been suspiciously injured in their shop and is now in private rooms with her. This looks like it’s going to escalate further but then… plague! The grocer’s son is struck down.
Then….plague! Is a frequent occurrence in this book set during the great 1665 plague outbreak. Not that it’s surprising, but Ainsworth does seem to pull the trick out when he isn’t sure where to go or wants to throw in a moment of surprise and fear. The plague is a strange thing in the book, at times it seems to be instant death, with people noticing it and instantly dying. For others it seems to take longer, or to drive them to mad actions, like swimming the width of the Thames. It’s treated like an instant death sentence but a third of the characters survive a bout of plague, the hero, Leonard Holt, survives it twice.
It’s clear that Ainsworth is borrowing a lot from Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Stories of people going crazy and purposefully infecting as many people as possible come from there, as well as stories about the grass growing in London streets. He says he gets the idea of the grocer barricading his house for months to become a fortress against the disease comes from Due preparations against the plague, both in soul and body. I found this plot line about a family holed up and waiting it out to be one of the most interesting. It’s also very interesting that he wrote this book before the link between plague, rats and fleas was properly known, so the transition of the illness is till described in terms of miasmas and bad air.
One of the influences of Defoe on the book is the character of Judith, the plague nurse. There’s a lot in talk in Journal of the Plague Year about nurses, how the literature at the time castigated them for hastening the end of their patients and stealing their valuables, but Defoe felt they did a good job. Judith is one of these bad nurses, she carries around pustule scrapings on a needle so she can give plague to people who get in her way. She uses the plague to steal and create hordes, which are often stolen from her. Mostly she’s bad because she revels in the plague, as does her accomplice, Chowles the coffin maker. These two have a grizzly ending, killed by a tidal wave of molten lead while hiding in the belly of the cathedral.
I think Ainsworth was trying to do for the old cathedral what Victor Hugo did for the Notre Dame. Both books contain lengthy descriptions of the architecture, using the gothic building to give a gothic air to the stories themselves. The big difference is that Notre Dame in Hugo’s book is a symbol of age and permanence, the machinations of the characters have no impact on the building which stood before the events in the book and will stand long after. Old Saint Paul’s is a structure with a time limit, it doesn’t even survive the events of the book, burnt down by the fire. As such, it’s not a symbol of permanence, but of the old, rotten order to be destroyed and rebuilt anew, the last image being of Wren’s finished building.
I learnt some interesting things about the building. One was of St Faith’s, which was a parish subsumed by the cathedral but held separately in the bowels of the building. Remnants of Saint Faith’s still exist under the current cathedral. Both our criminal and hero characters in the book find themselves retreating into St Faith’s and the crypts beneath. These crypts now have a very pleasant cafe, bookshop and free toilets. Something else I learned was that Saint Pauls also served as an indoor market and meeting place, with items, including food and drink, sold up the nave. I did some elaborate googling to check this, as I know a number of Ainsworth’s inventions have become folk knowledge, but his one was true. What is not true is that the building became a huge plague hospital, that is an Ainsworth invention, but it is a striking image, and fits his picture of Saint Paul’s as a symbol of the sick society that needs to be burnt down for a true godly society to exist.
Much of the book is about this sick society, one in which the rich can prey on the poorer, especially on their women. The rot sets in at the top, with Charles II portrayed as irreverent and lascivious but is most seen in the actions of the Earl of Rochester and Paul Parravicin. The first, a historic character, spends much of the book after the grocer’s daughter, Amabel. His frequent attempts to inveigle his way into her company become almost comic, especially as he frequents increasingly ludicrous disguises, at one point he’s disguised as a man called Gregory Swindlehurst… can we trust a man called that? He’s accompanied by Major Pillichody, a cowardly braggart whose distinctive manner of speech and one eye draws the reader to the disguises, even if the characters are too stupid to notice. Interestingly, one of Rochester’s disguises is as a quack medicine man, something he really did.
The Jeremiah calling on the plague and fire of London is a man called Solomon Eagle, who lives in the upper parts of the cathedral and frequently wears a lit brazier on his head, which made me think of Arthur Brown (from The Crazy World of..). Not only does he prophecy London’s sickness and burning, but he helps start the great fire of London with Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker who confessed to starting it with grenades. During the fire, Charles II grows up and becomes a proper leader to his people and Rochester risks his life to save others, while those who don’t reform (like Judith and Chowles) are burnt away, along with the old, corrupt church.
Old Saint Paul’s is not Ainsworth’s best. The overall theming, the sickness of London and the purifying fire are interesting and there are a few stand out moments, the chapter where a group of people perform a wild Danse Macabre is a striking moment but it’s poorly plotted and the characters are weak. Ainsworth isn’t the best creator of character, and Pillichody is quite funny, Judith and Chowles are boo-hiss evil, but Leonard Holt, the grocer, even the Earl of Rochester are rather dull. What’s more, in the great Ainsworth books he can rely on his great talent for set-pieces and striking visuals to carry the book along, but this just gets muddled. There’s too much back and forward with the Rochester/Amabel/Holt plots, too many people catch the plague and then survive it, there’s too much wandering about. (Naturally ‘the pretty little village of Willesden gets a call out).
There’s also a plot thread featuring Holt, Paul Parravicin, a mysterious man, a girl called Nissi and a blind piper which isn’t very interesting and relies on a grand secret which is teased and put off so many times it becomes irritating, and then isn’t all that revelatory after all.
Not that I didn’t enjoy this at all, I enjoyed it fine but I’ve read Ainsworth books that reached higher levels and I thought a book set in the time of plague and fire would reach those.
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