In a time of enforced lockdown the urge to get away is irresistible, and life in the islands of Orkney might seem like splendid isolation. But what’s simplicity to a city dweller is just a different kind of complexity for those who live in remote places
It’s a very Victorian story. Harrison Ainsworth got rich writing pot-boiling historical bodice rippers. He was Dickens’ good friend – both were gregarious, energetic, not quite from the top drawer. He lived, scandalously, with a woman not his wife. His star, however, waned so dramatically that – even though he produced 39 novels – I don’t blame you if you’ve never heard of him.
In 1841 he produced Old St Paul’s, a novel about the 1665 plague and the subsequent Fire of London. He certainly did his homework. It’s clear he read Pepys’ Diary, and Defoe’s 1723 Journal of the Plague Year. From Pepys he got the human voice – grumpy, appalled, humane. From Defoe he got journalistic detail – accounts of communal graves, grass growing in deserted city streets, red crosses on infected doors – and social distancing. Defoe notes that “when anyone bought a joint of meat he would not take it off the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks themselves … the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put in a pot of vinegar”.
What’s interesting to us, in our parlous times, is not the antics of Ainsworth’s aristocrats, the Lady Isabellas and Lord Rochesters. Their melodrama seems secondary. No, we warm to the grocer, Mr Bloundel, who loves his family, and proposes to shut them up in his house “for a twelvemonth … as soon as I have laid in a sufficient stock of provisions”. He installs a tank in his cellar to pump water “in which no infected clothes could have been washed”.