Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds

A Review Canonbury House by Susannah Reynolds And Mary Queen Of Scots by George W.M. Reynolds Review by R.E. Prindle As you can tell by my attribution of Canonbury House to Susannah Reynolds, Georges wife I’m making a claim that needs explaining. Let me establish my grounds for such a claim by reviewing circumstances of the couple at the time. ‘Canonbury House was written from 11 July 1857-1 May 1858, first published in the Reynolds Miscellany in parts. At the time the Reynolds were living in the resort town of Ramsgate in Georges home shire, Kent. They had removed from London in 1854. Susannah died in Ramsgate during 1858. From those facts I surmise that Susannah was ill, suffering from a wasting disease. Further, my guess is that she was suffering from breast cancer. You may think that’s a leap. Consider, George was a breast fetishist, quite clearly shown in all his writing. He was first magnitude. He writes marvelous descriptions of the female breast, they are frequent and quite detailed. On a few occasions he mentions breasts disfigured by cancers. Unless he was unfaithful to Susannah, which I can’t conceive, where else would he have seen them? Hence, I don’t think it is a great leap to think Susannah so suffered. She died early, only forty four years old assuming she was George’s age, perhaps one or two years younger than her husband. She may have been only sixteen when she married an eighteen year old George. Is female characters are quite frequently sixteen. As Georges work really required him to be in London, the move to Ramsgate probably to make Susannah’s last year more comfortable points to a wasting disease such as breast cancer. At that time, according to Guy Dicks and his biography of his relative, Georges publisher, John Dicks, the two partners were each pulling down a hundred pounds a week from their business, so that at least at fifty two hundred pounds a year, the Reynolds were prosperous enough to live comfortably and, indeed, George bought a substantial free standing house in Ramsgate. However George was yet to finish volume four of the ‘Mysteries of the Court of London’ which work shows definite signs of divided attention. Thus between making frequent trips to London and tending to his beloved Susannah his writing was definitely affected. Now, Susannah herself was a novelist with some few titles to her credit including her novel ‘Gretna Green.’ One may assume that with greater leisure in Ramsgate she sought to create her Magnum Opus. I have a slight acquaintance with Gretna Green in an unreadable OCR copy so I can form no adequate opinion on her earlier work although I do have a readable first edition of her Canonbury House. That novel is acceptable work although inferior to Georges if only compared to his last work Mary, Queen of Scots published a year after ‘Canonbury House.’ Therefor, comparing hi work before and after ‘Canonbury House’ it isn’t likely that he wrote it. As a key ingredient of his work hers contains no description of women’s breasts, not even those of Queen Mary. As stated earlier the book took nearly a year to write, thirty installments in the Miscellany. My copy of the published book by John Dicks has notes on he fly leaf from a former owner as well as those that appear to be from a book seller. There is a penciled and erased signature from Arthur Reynolds, perhaps one of Georges sons. There is a full page faint erased text that might be made readable by electronic means. A strong hand with a good pencil has written ‘First thus 1870- complete in 30 penny parts.’ As the installments were published in the Miscellany there shouldn’t be 30 penny parts unless there was a second publication by Dicks. Between 1857-58 and 1870 and also issued separately in 7 parts. So, quite a publishing history. Perhaps a bereaved Reynolds did his best to make it a seller or perhaps Queen Elizabeth was still hot copy. John Dicks, who controlled the publishing schedule of Reynolds massive output apparently held back the book release until 1870. It was his habit to date publications only on the initial issue. The novel is relatively short at 237 double columned pages. Small print. Now, the last novel of Georges was an incident in the live of Mary Queen of Scots making it a companion piece to Susannah’. It follows Susannah’s plan fairly closely. Comparatively, Georges style is more fluent and the story is better constructed so that is impossible to think both novels came from the same hand. I think it fairly obvious that Canonbury House must have been written by a failing Susannah. Perhaps Mary, Queen of Scots was Georges love letter to his beloved and deceased wife. He was desolated. He never remarried. Canonbury House is a sort of mystery of which Queen Elizabeth is the central character. I’m all spoilers here but you will probably never see a copy of the book. No problem. The story hinges on the maternity of a off-central character, the beauteous Ada Arundel. No one knew who her parents were but she had always lived in the household of the richest commoner in England, the honourable Richard Spencer currently the Mayor of the City of London. A substantial fellow, the Mayor of the City of London. The Mayor of the City of London isn’t the mayor of the geographical city but of the Square Mile of the financial district. The rest of London is all suburbs. The Mayor of the City is independent of the Crown. It is subordinate to Parliament. Spencer is not a noble but a man of business. Still, he is the Mayor of the City and the richest commoner of England. Once the mysteries are cleared up after the reading of the book one can go on and reflect about some of the deeper meanings of the story. The point is that Queen Elizabeth would never be seen dead in this commoner’s house except for the circumstances and Spencer’s position. The subtext here seems to be that Elizabeth was known as the virgin queen but she was not. Susannah seems to take great pleasure in exposing Elizabeth, except its just her private joke at this point. Elizabeth had an illegitimate daughter which means that she was a fallen woman no better than any other fallen woman. According to Susannah the secret began when her child was given to family that had just given birth to a still born and they agreed to take Elizabeth’s child and raise it as their own. It is now thirty years on and we are not give any information on Ada’s birth. The queen has been longing to learn what happened to her child. She has no hint that she is sitting across from her daughter not does Ada know she is looking at her long lost mother. If we readers had known this the story would have taken quite a different turn. Perhaps for a better story. Susannah then wrote the novel without a hint of the true situation keeping it as a surprise. Without being critical, it is Susannah’s story, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to reverse the situation and make Ada’s maternity apparent from the start then basing the story on Elizabeth’s discovery. Now, all novels are necessarily auto-biographical. In Georges case he suffered from logorrhea. Out of his millions of words one can easily determine the defining events of his life as he works them through a few of his repeating themes. As Susannah is leading us into a situation in which the result is that the queen isn’t any better than she should be, her case is no different than she should be. Her case is no different than the tens o thousands, hundreds of thousands of ordinary women who suffered the consequences of fallen women. And that might lead to single woman who fell- that is Susannah herself. The only possible proof is in the pudding, that is the novel, ‘Canonbury House.’ Susannah’s history prior to her marriage isn’t known, however George consistently portrayed the fallen women, always in a sympathetic manner, who were seduced to their ruin, her greatest treasure stolen. As far as we can conjecture Susannah Pierson was still with her father when she met George. Her age at that time was probably sixteen, George being eighteen. Most of George’s heroines in his novels are sixteen. The loveliness of the sixteen year old stands out in all his novels. In his novel ‘The Youthful Impostor’, written in 1932, rewritten and published in 1935, looking back a few years to an early friendship, his protagonist, Crawford, meets a shady character named Pearson, a man of the world in France, possibly Calais, not clear, given the similarity of names that Pearson represented the father of Susannah Pierson. The names are too similar to be coincidental. Pearson appears to be some high class grifter who was very wise, as in wiseguy and familiar with all the petty cheats and scams that only a fellow grifter would know. He and Crawford are in a French gambling hell and the two watch a grifter clean out a mark. Task done he gets up to leave. As he does Pearson tells Crawford ‘Watch this.’ He then approaches the grifter whispering a few words in his ear, the grifter, the grifter then follows him to his table and lays down half of his take and casually strolls away. Crawford is dumbfounded. Pearson explains: If a grifter sees another working a mark, to keep his silence the other grifter must pay out half, which is what happened. Crawford’s, that is Reynolds eyes are opened. That’s what it means to be a man of the world. As Crawford was on the way to Paris in company with Pickwick and his friends as well as the grifter Augustus Crashem and a man who was a gendarme closely resembling Pearson in appearance and manner, the Gendarme who will turn out to be the friendly Dumont watches with a know eye but does nothing as Crashem works his scam. Perhaps he tapped Crashem for half.. Pearson and his daughter associating as they must with a shady crowd if is possible if not probable that a cute fourteen or fifteen year old girl might have been seduced and ruined which seared her soul causing total anguish that expiated itself in slandering a dead Queen Elizabethl by revealing something she knew or thought she knew thereby purifying her soul as she lay dying. The poor girl and the privileged girl were the same. ‘Canonbury House’ wasn’t Susannah’s only novel; she wrote four or five others. A batch of kids, running the household, helping George with his novels, writing her own as well as a cookbook, what a woman. No wonder George treasured her. I have a wretched OCR copy of her novel ‘Gretna Green’ that might be a little revealing. From the title I thought it might have been a biographical novel about a woman named Gretna Green, but study led me to a different conclusion. As it was, in the eighteenth century young lords were marrying common girls that infuriated their parents so in 1745 a law was passed making any such marriages invalid. That was only an impediment not a blockade. Enterprising souls in Scotland living in a small town called Gretna Green analyzed the situation then some fellow, blacksmiths and such got themselves ordained as ministers and began marrying the young swains and their commoner girlfriends, the marriages were legal in England. Thus the roads leading to Gretna Green were well traveled. As the parents were on the alert ready to prevent such alliances, there was often a mad dash for the Scottish border by the young lovers closely followed by the parents or their agents to prevent such a folly. Whoever got there first won the race. If the young lovers won the race they got married; if the parents the ecclesiastic blacksmiths went empty handed. Such is life. Now, if opportunity was created for a blacksmith who had a limited number of horses to shoe, that law and its resultant Gretna Green created opportunities or aspiring novelists as well. Susannah put that shoe on and wrote Gretna Green. What is the relationship of Gretna Green to Canonsbury House? You can be that those young lovers didn’t wait for the knot to be tied before they consummated the marriage; hence the young ladies who had given away their greatest treasure were technically ruined women before that marriage. If the parents won the race the technicality was removed. The girls were ruined. Thus Susannah could portray several ruined young ladies by which she could possibly relive her own tragedy. Gretna Green was apparently pretty racy for the time because it aroused a fair reaction. It was even suggested that perhaps she knew of that which she spoke. George complained about this abuse of his wife but it is not known whether he received satisfaction. I rather suspect that Susannah got a fair amount of satisfaction by exposing the Virgin Queen. The resolution then of Susannah’s Canonbury House. How did Ada Arundel react to learning who her mother was and that mother being the Queen of England who embraced her as her long lost daughter? Rather a tragic ending. Ada was so overjoyed that she burst a blood vessel in her brain and died from the joy that was so overwhelming. Let us hope that Susannah felt redeemed if my speculation is correct. Having finished reading the novel and looking back at the beginning one appreciates the irony that in Canonbury House mother and daughter are looking at each other not realizing that they are seeing their heart’s desire. One might think that there should have been enough familial resemblance between the Queen and Ada to create suspicion. But, in a spiteful admission Susannah mentions that Elizabeth had never been a handsome woman and that Ada was stunningly beautiful so no surprise there. I don’t know how contemporaries would have read the novel or what their reaction might have been. I don’t know whether Susannah maliciously invented the story or had heard some rumor, in any event Ada died so that the evidence disappeared. I don’t feel it necessary to detail the development of the novel as it was fairly pedestrian while Susannah was not at her peak for health reasons.