Pandora(113)

Author’s Note





Pandora started off as a fleeting idea which had no link in its inception to any historic event. I knew I wanted to write a piece of fiction set in my favourite period of history, the Georgian era. I knew I wanted to have a jewellery designer as my heroine, and Hermes the magpie came to life fully formed in my mind. But I also knew I wanted to explore the myth of Pandora’s Box, for no other reason than that it felt like a good idea at the time.

The notion that Pandora’s Box was not, in fact, an actual box as the Dutch philosopher Erasmus claimed was food for thought, and so I set to researching what it might have been instead. Results threw up the suggestion of a jar, a vase, a pithos – ultimately, I was looking at Grecian pottery. But how to fit Grecian pottery into a novel set in Georgian London?

I have always worked best using a historical event as an anchor, and so I began to look for one which would link my initial ideas. Imagine my elation when I came across a section of a letter written by an unnamed eyewitness, featured in Volume 1 of the British periodical Naval News, dated December 1798. It detailed the sinking of HMS Colossus, a naval warship which had been carrying a large part of the diplomat William Hamilton’s treasured collection of Greek pottery on board. An extract of the letter can be viewed on my website www.susanstokeschapman.com.

For Dora’s knowledge of jewellery I found Georgian Jewellery 1714–1830 by Ginny Redington and Olivia Collings invaluable. For the myth of Pandora, I am indebted to Stephen Fry’s Mythos, and Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol by Dora and Erwin Panofsky. For recreating Georgian London I referred extensively to The Secret History of Georgian London by Dan Cruickshank, Georgian London: Into the Streets by Lucy Inglis and Dr Johnson’s London by Liza Picard. When writing Edward’s bookbinding scenes I referred to the Guild of Theophilus and their brilliant online resources.

The Society of Antiquaries is still a thriving establishment today and Visions of Antiquity: The Society of Antiquaries of London 1707–2007, published directly by the Society, considerably aided my research. Other useful sources included A History of the Society of Antiquaries by Joan Evans, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Rosemary Sweet, and the essays compiled within London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820, edited by Susanna Avery-Quash and Christian Huemer.

However, as is inevitable with historical fiction, I have taken liberties with certain facts. Edward would not have been able to make a living from writing papers for the Society alone, nor would he have been able to pay Dora for the sketches she drew for him; while the Society did employ and pay draughtsmen to produce detailed drawings of objects for publication, they did not pay its Fellows for producing papers, nor did they fund excavations until many years later. As for dating archaeological finds, eighteenth-century antiquarians would have relied on relative dating based mainly on the typology of an object, i.e. its shape, style, decoration, etc. (which is the method Edward used when cataloguing the Blake collection). Relative dating does include other techniques; the most commonly used is soil stratigraphy analysis. The first practical large-scale application of stratigraphy was by geologist William Smith in the 1790s and early 1800s, but stratigraphic excavation didn’t become a standard part of archaeological study until the 1920s. It is unlikely stratigraphic analysis would have been carried out by members of the Society or their counterparts in the 1790s but because it is not impossible, I chose to apply the methods here. Further, Richard Gough only served as director of the Society of Antiquaries from 1771 to 1791. However, Gough’s sentiments favouring British antiquarianism over the glorified and overdone Mediterranean were necessary for Edward’s story arc and so I decided to keep Gough in place for this reason. I should also note that Hamilton and his wife Emma (along with her lover Horatio Nelson) did not return to England from Italy until 1801, but I plead creative licence by bringing their return forward to match the narrative’s timeline.

A smaller liberty came in the form of Matthew Coombe’s recovery of the crate from the seabed at the beginning of the novel. In the late eighteenth century, German mechanic Karl Heinrich Klingert created a device which was the first to be called a ‘diving suit’. This suit consisted of a jacket and trousers made of waterproof leather, a helmet with a porthole, and a metal front. It was linked to a turret with an air reservoir, and a lantern which worked underwater. Klingert’s designs, however, were never put into practice despite their detailed descriptions published in two of his books in 1797 and 1822 respectively. An account of the diving suit can be found in Description of a Diving Machine, an excellent publication incorporating both of Klingert’s works, printed in 2002 by the Historical Diving Society.





Acknowledgements





At least 75,000 words of this novel were written during the 2020 Covid pandemic. While this period was extremely dark for many of us, it did allow me the free time many writers crave to put pen to page and so in that sense I am thankful for those strange and often, for me, very lonely months. It taught me discipline of a different kind – I wrote differently, I researched differently, and I do wonder if Pandora would have become the novel it has if not for those differences. Even so, I could not have written any of it without the support of many and so I list them here, as best I’m able, though for anyone I have missed I can only apologise and blame a rather fraught and hectic mind after such a whirlwind publication journey.