A recent phone conversation with the kniedzw:

Me: “When you come home and find that the gin bottle’s been opened, I just want you to know it’s all in the line of duty.”
Him, knowing I don’t drink: “What????”

Though, as I admitted, for the full period effect I really ought to spike it with turpentine or sulfuric acid.

(By recommendation of fjm.)

I stopped on page 145 for a very good reason: I’m saving the next hundred pages or so for when I start work on the Victorian book.

Winder’s purpose here is to approach immigration into Britain not as a topic to be organized by theme, but as a narrative to be organized chronologically. This makes him absolutely perfect for my use, because I don’t have to spend a lot of effort winnowing out the details that post-date my period; I just stop reading. He begins with the earliest settlements of the island and proceeds from there, addressing waves of immigration as they come, occasionally backtracking a little bit to talk about the pioneers of a particular group before they showed up in larger numbers, but overall taking everything in general order.

He also addresses something I must admit I sometimes fall prey to, despite my awareness of history: the tendency to view “Britishness” (or “Englishness,” and he does track the difference between those concepts) as some kind of natural, native-bred thing, only recently disturbed by foreigners in real numbers. Even though I know about the Flemings and the Huguenots; even though I know there were Africans present at least as early as the sixteenth century; even though I got annoyed at Lisa Goldstein’s The Alchemist’s Door for its assertion that you only ever heard people speaking English on the streets of Elizabethan London . . . all of that slips so easily beneath the surface of my thoughts. Sure, I come from a country peopled largely by recent immigrants and their descendants, but Britain’s different, right? Well, yes — the scale isn’t quite the same. But when Winder points out that thirteen thousand Poor Palatines (German refugees) showed up in the summer of 1709, or that British ships hired Lascars (Indians) in large numbers and then abandoned them upon making port in London, it rapidly becomes apparent that Britain has long been more cosmopolitan than you might think.

And given that one of my goals with the Onyx Court series is to gradually open it up to the presence of the larger world, it’s very useful to know which groups became significant presences at what points in the timeline. I don’t think I’m likely to have scenes terribly far afield — Berkshire and the Channel are probably as far as I’ll go — because this is meant to be a London-based story, but I can talk about the people in London. (Fortunately, that’s precisely where the vast majority of the immigrants ended up, at least for the first couple of generations.)

Since Winder’s trying to cover twenty-five thousand years in 480 pages, his pace is necessarily brisk. (Though by page 29, we’re already up to the Norman Conquest.) This is an overview, not an in-depth exploration of any group or individual. Fortunately, the “Select Bibliography” gives you nine pages of sources to follow up with. And I appreciate Winder’s attempts to put the different groups in context with one another where appropriate; the reception of the Poor Palatines, for example, was strongly shaped by the previous experience of the Huguenots. He also doesn’t stop at characterizing the immigrants by the countries they came from: he touches on the questions of religion, economic class, and other points of demography. From a survey kind of book like this, that’s about all you can ask for.

As with Kit Marlowe and MNC, Isaac Newton is the guy I had to read a lot about in order to decide I’m not going to do as much with him as I thought.

Newton, of course, is already long dead by the time this novel begins. But he, or at least his work, is vitally important to a bunch of the events that lead up to the novel, so I needed to read at least one biography of him to decide how to integrate him. The answer is, not the way I thought I would; his religious views are just waaaaaaay the hell too incompatible with the fae for there to have been any kind of deliberate collusion there. What they got from him, they did in secret.

But anyway, this book. If I was going to read only one biography, this was a good one, within the context of my specific purposes. White’s mission here, aside from writing a biography, is to integrate Newton’s alchemy with his other work; building on Dobbs’ research, he tries to establish that things like the alchemical notion of active principles or the physical appearance of the star regulus of antimony helped him to the epiphanies involved in (say) his theory of gravitation. I don’t think he entirely succeeds at this, but I mean that in more of a narrative sense; it felt like if that were true, then you should be able to spot it more pervasively in Newton’s work. On the other hand, human beings rarely obey the laws of narrative, so.

Since alchemy and the transition to proper science are a major part of what I’m looking at, though, this biography’s focus was useful to me. Its flaw on that front, I think, is that White seems incapable of fully understanding why alchemy was something smart men could spend time on; that failure of empathy is probably linked in with his purpose, when you get down to it, justifying Newton’s alchemy on the basis that it led to Newton’s real science. Aside from that, though, this book was pretty much exactly what I needed: a detailed (yet readable) chronology of the guy’s life, in the context of his personality.

Which, as it turns out, was that of “borderline megalomaniacal jackass.” Okay, that’s a little unfair, but man — I’d heard Newton was a jerk. I didn’t realize how true it was. He had a terrible time acknowledging his debts to other people’s work, or the possibility that they might have had an idea before he did, which possibly arose because of his bizarre semi-conception of himself as a Christ figure. I’m oversimplifying here, but it seems the whole “born on Christmas Day after his father’s death” thing left Newton with a very idiosyncratic notion of God and his relationship to same, linking in with his anti-trinitarianism and so on. Anyway, if you want to know more about that, read The Religion of Isaac Newton by Frank E. Manuel, which I read before I picked up this book (probably a bad idea).

So. Readable biography of Newton plus some discussion of alchemy. If that’s useful to you, have at it.