Introductory Remarks

The trigger for this series of notes was a reference I happened across to a pamphlet entitled “Tempters and Tempted” published in 1856. This appears to have been something of a diatribe against Newport as a hotbed of vice and depravity capable of corrupting the innocent young soldiers barracked at the time at Parkhurst Barracks. Whilst I still haven’t been able to track down a copy of the pamphlet, it did set me on a trail, and an idea for a two part telling that starts with the rebuilding of St Thomas’ Church in Newport in the Isle of Wight, and ends with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

A note on the method

This set of notes also represents another step in the evolution of a method I am working on for turning reports of historical accounts into traditionally told tales.

The process is built around the basis that “a story is what’s left when the facts are forgotten”. As a source of facts, I am turning to contemporaneous, historical newspaper reports, reports that provided a first draft of history of particular events. These are collated and grouped and imagined to inform the snippets of conversation that folk of the time might have had about particular events.

The collection of contemporaneous material is deliberately biassed. It is not necessarily my intention to give a fair characterisation of Newport in the 1850s. Instead, the search lenses I used were biassed by in terms of “finding more” and chasing down rat-holes on very particular topics (essentially deep-diving on very particular aspects of life at that time, and in that place).

In amassing and grouping these “facts”, I get a sense of the time, the place and the story.

And from the mass of detail, I try to tease out a tale as one might tease out a nylon thread that forms as a layer where a solution containing hexanedioyl chloride floats on an aqueous solution of hexane-1,6-diamine. That may sound like gobbledygook, but if you’ve ever seen it, you will know exactly what I am talking about!