The Sacred Vine by Mrs Merriel Shepo (Advent Press, 1957) is a work of extraordinary literary and theological research purporting to prove all stories, whether from myth, religion, the biographies of the famous and even the lives of fictional characters, ultimately derive from the life of Jesus Christ as recorded in The Gospels.

The first part of The Sacred Vine constructs the life of Christ from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, ancient papyri texts then recently discovered at Khirbet Qumran in Israel, the Gnostic Gospels, and the Apocrypha. It then examines the lives of some three hundred real and fictional individuals from the Buddha, through Louis XVI of France, to Pinocchio, and attempts to show how the key events in the life of Jesus are echoed in the lives of these individuals. Majestic in its scope and ambition, The Sacred Vine reveals patterns of narrative many have overlooked but ultimately it fails to prove the life of Jesus is the fons et origo for every story ever told and many of its conclusions are, frankly, bizarre. Nevertheless, Mrs Merriel Shepo’s concluding statement,

We are all Jesus; chosen by God, scourged, denied and crucified by man, we shall all sit at His right hand in heaven,

is, in your editor’s opinion, one of the great closing lines in modern academic literature.

Among the lives of the fictional characters examined by Mrs Merriel Shepo is Bheathain Somhairle, the hero of This Iron Race, and, although her conclusions are flawed, her depiction of Bheathain’s character and story is intriguing. She begins with his birth, noting his cursemark immediately set him apart from others, and then compares an early attempt on his life with the Massacre of the Innocents, described in Matthew 2:16–18. Later, once he is on the Isle of Skye, Mrs Shepo notes the man Bheathain calls his father is not his birth father as Joseph is not the birth father of Jesus, and when we first meet Bheathain he is, as Jesus is so often portrayed, a shepherd rescuing a lamb. Bheathain, as we have seen, rejects Màiri Mulcahy’s claim he has acquired the gift of Grace and Mrs Shepo compares this with an event in the little known Infancy Gospel of James, an apocryphal second century text purporting to relate the childhood of Jesus.

As Bheathain discovers, children are cruel to those who are different from them, and the infant Jesus suffered likewise. Eventually, unable to bear it any longer, Jesus reacts to the taunts and beats a boy to death with a stone. Regretting his wickedness, Jesus prays to God and begs release from the burden of being His son. Instead, God reveals to Jesus how to use his gifts to good purpose, beginning with restoring the life of the boy he murdered. Bheathain will also ultimately learn to use his gift for the benefit of others.

Another parallel between Bheathain’s story and Jesus is Bheathain’s relationship with Màiri Mulcahy. This, as you may guess, Mrs Shepo compares to the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, as depicted in the gnostic text, the Gospel of Nicodemus. However, at this point we must cease comparisons or risk revealing too much of Bheathain’s future and spoiling the tale.

The Sacred Vine is an enlightening and entertaining read: who would ever have thought of comparing Pinocchio with Jesus Christ? The one crucified upon a wooden cross, the other whose burden, or cross, it is to be made of wood; both the ‘sons’ of woodworkers; both reborn after death, Pinocchio as a real boy and Jesus as the resurrected Christ; and both one part of a trinity, the roles of The Father and the Holy Ghost taken in Pinocchio’s story by Geppetto and the Fairy with Turquoise Hair. Moreover, in attempting to prove the unprovable The Sacred Vine touches on a great truth. Jesus’ story is not the template for all other narratives; rather, it follows a pattern common to all narratives, whether from myth, fiction, or history, and reveals the mythic in the flesh and blood of real people and real events.

Thus, Bheathain’s story does not lie in the shadow of Jesus Christ but follows a universal pattern much, much older, perhaps dating back to the first story ever told. Humans are, above all, storytellers and the story is how we make sense of the world.

There is a lost and lonely glen
Whose tale I shall proclaim
It lies outside the ken of men
And Brigadoon’s its name

The opening stanzas show an idealised medieval Scotland unchanged by several hundred years of our history and in the fifth stanza a young newly engaged couple from our world, Peter Cavendish and Susan Orne, stumble on Brigadoon during one of its rare appearances. Initially, there is comic confusion between the nineteenth century sensibilities of Peter and Susan and the archaic-seeming Brigadoon, but the village begins to work its charm on the young couple and presently Peter falls in love with Fiona, a maiden of the village, breaks his engagement with Susan and declares he will remain in Brigadoon forever. Susan, meanwhile, has fallen in love with the mysterious Laird of Brigadoon, but at the last she cannot bear to be parted from Edenborough’s pairties and courts and lichty streets, and returns to our world alone. In the penultimate stanza we learn how she did not find happiness in our world and regretted leaving Brigadoon and in the last stanza when Susan is dying of old age a doorway opens between the worlds and she returns, youthful once more, to marry the laird.

It was not a wholly original concept, having much in common with Germelshausen, a German novel of 1860 by Friedrich Gerstäcker, itself based on a folktale.

The name Brigadoon probably derives from Brig o’ Doon, a supposedly haunted bridge over the River Doon in Ayrshire, but the village’s mysterious appearances and the rule a human may only enter under special condition and no native of the village can ever leave, identify both Brigadoon and Germelshausen as ‘Elfhame’, or Faerieland. Elfhame, the land of the elves, appears in numerous Scottish ballads, including the well known ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ and ‘Childe Rowland’. Elfhame may also be the mysterious land ruled by the lamed Fisher King in Arthurian legend. The correlation between Brigadoon and Elfhame is confirmed by the attributes and character of the Laird of Brigadoon who rules the village and is responsible for its suspension out of time. Although never named, reference to his magickal powers, such as speaking to animals and possession of a cloak of invisibility whereby he eavesdrops on the conversation of the incomers to the village, tells us the Laird of Brigadoon is Oberion, King of Faerie, and places ‘Lays of Brigadoon’ firmly within the tradition of journeys to the otherworld.

‘Lays of Brigadoon’ is of particular interest to us for a number of reasons:

It is common today for authors to keep their readers waiting years, even decades, for new works, but demand from readers in the nineteenth century was rapacious and they would have lost patience at such dilatoriness. Earlier in his career MacGregor excelled at satisfying this demand, maintaining an average of one novel every ten months for eighteen years, but the four year gap between publication of Edmund Pevensie and ‘Lays of Brigadoon’ left MacGregor and his publisher uncertain whether he still had an audience.

In form and tone, ‘Lays of Brigadoon’ was a return to MacGregor’s early minstrel poems and although a backward step in terms of the development of poetry, the combination of minstrelsy and the quasi-medieval setting met with broadly positive reviews. The lightness of tone also disguised the content of the poem, which was darker and more visceral than anything he had written before. We cannot conclude ‘Lays of Brigadoon’ was a deliberate exploration of the limits of public taste, but its acceptance by his publisher and readers (albeit sales were slow) surely encouraged MacGregor to continue and deepen his exploration of the darker and more physical side of human nature in This Iron Race.

A second aspect that ‘Lays of Brigadoon’ shares with Acts of the Servant is the dominant role given to magick. However, I suspect MacGregor failed to appreciate that while traditional Scottish poetry had its share of bogarts, kelpies, hags, washerwomen, glaistigs, brown-men-of-the-moor, and other other-worldly beings and magickal places, the Scottish novel was predominantly realist in subject and what was acceptable in poetry may not, and in the event was not, be acceptable in prose.

A second aspect ‘Lays of Brigadoon’ shares with This Iron Race is the dominant role given to magick. However, MacGregor failed to appreciate traditional Scottish poetry has its share of otherworldly beings and magick, whereas the Scottish novel was predominantly realist in subject and what was acceptable in poetry may not be, and in the event would not be, acceptable in prose.

Reading ‘Lays of Brigadoon’ alongside the first draft of This Iron Race, book one, reveals a continuum in MacGregor’s study of the darker, less seemly side of human nature, and a harking back to his earliest literary endeavours. For that alone, regardless of the merits of ‘Lays of Brigadoon’ as an independent work, it should interest any reader of This Iron Race.

An anonymous piece in the fall 1864 issue of the Edenborough Review welcomed MacGregor’s return to writing and then lambasted volume one of This Iron Race for:

…the remorseless misery of its leading characters, of whom there are so many the reader might be forgiven to understand he is to act as their shepherd and herd them into order, engenders a sense of despair out of keeping with an activity chiefly undertaken for pleasure. What is MacGregor trying to tell us in his earnest new voice? Are we each entirely alone, whether from choice, vocation, or misfortune? Is there no joy in company or are we islands, distant one from another? The wonder is not MacGregor spent two years cloistered in his abbey but that on rejoining society he should give us such a parade of unhappiness. It is as though a castaway newly removed from his desert strand has neither a good or a kind word for anyone.

Employing the then infant science of textual analytics, Dr Claude Crabtree, in The Wizard of the North (King James University Press, 1930) concluded this unenthusiastic review was penned by MacGregor himself out of pique at the bastardisation wrought on the novel by his publishers.

Although not expert in textual analytics we cannot agree with Dr Crabtree; MacGregor had a family to support and no matter how frustrated he was with Beresford and Lucas, the first volume of This Iron Race had to sell, and critical reports in the Edenborough Review would hardly assist.

Leaving aside authorship of the review, it does make a serious point; all the main characters in volume one, and in the successive volumes, are to some degree set apart from those around them and this separation is a source of unhappiness. Psychologists would properly term this ‘alienation’ for the true source of each character’s isolation is the perception they are unlike those around them and must carry their burden alone or suffer from those perceiving them to be different, for example: Captain Wolfe; or their difference defies description, as Eolhwynne tells Lord MacDonald.

Alienation in particular is at the heart of Bheathain’s circumstances and explains his hostile reaction to Màiri informing him he is acquiring the gift of Grace. Already stigmatised by the mark on his face he can only see Grace as a second cause for people to disassociate from him.

Lord MacDonald also suffers from alienation but here the cause is his position in society. The finances of his estate depend on good governance, and he feels responsible to his clansmen—two forces not easily reconciled. Murdo Dixon ably assists him, but Dixon is primarily his servant and not someone with whom he can fully share his burden. Those with whom MacDonald might share it, namely Sir David Mackenzie and the Commission Men, have a very different attitude to the care of an estate and he cannot take any comfort from them.

Paavo Jukola has, although he is almost certainly unaware of it, chosen alienation for he is a spy for the Hanseatic League, which, he erroneously believes, supports his hostility toward Russia. His alienation may have a moral standing, for he believes he deceives for a higher purpose, but his acceptance of a continuing role in the league after Danneberg has explained their true position to him, shows Jukola actively thrives on his sense of alienation.

Initially, Sir David Mackenzie may seem the exception to the alienation of other characters, but this is a misreading. Although surrounded by his loving wife and family, his concern for them, expressed in the finery of his household, comes from depopulating his estates and alienating those who look to him for care.

There is one exception among the major characters. Màiri Mulcahy has not chosen or had reason to be alienated from those around her. Freed of the isolation clearsight brought her, she initially continues her isolation by setting up home on Haelda’s Island but now recognises she wants acceptance and a position where she can be of greater use to those around her. Chief among the people she seeks acceptance from is Bheathain Somhairle, provided he can meet her reasonable conditions.

Why might MacGregor have chosen to give his reader so many characters alienated from those around them? There are two possibilities, though they are supportive rather than competing.

Firstly, the subtext of This Iron Race is acceptance and toleration, most obviously of those with Grace.

Secondly, MacGregor began This Iron Race after enduring two years of isolation at Arbinger Abbey following the death of Lady Madeleine MacGregor. Though his isolation was, one presumes voluntary, it was also a response to grief and despair, and perhaps the belief he was unworthy of good company. His journal makes it clear he took some of the blame for Madeleine’s death on himself as he was aware of her unhappiness at Arbinger and believed he had failed in his duty as a husband and father-to-be.

Grief especially isolates us because the grief-stricken believe no one can fully understand their loss. This was confirmed for MacGregor by his own father’s brusque (though well-intentioned) advice to,

get over it swiftly or lose all position in society,

as quoted by MacGregor in his journal. Thus, MacGregor chose to depict alienation as a plea for the toleration of magick and those who practise it and because he knew how terrible it could be.

If your editor may speak of his own circumstances, he has some personal experience of MacGregor’s motivations. No blame attaches for the death of his father, the poet, Thomas Warbrook, but he is cruelly aware he has not lived up to his father’s expectations or those who expected him to follow his father’s illustrious career. Comparison with one’s father’s work always inspires gloom and, of course, one misses his company and advice dreadfully. Your editor is also father to his own son, Gerald, yet there lie more degrees of separation. It is not that we do not get on, but Gerald is so distant. Presently he is working for some charity in Sumatra. Quite literally, we must turn half the globe to find him. Of his ex-wife, Edith, your editor shall say nothing. In his cups but honouring the near completion of work on volume one, he has opened a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Sometimes we wonder if all we have for company is Tam MacGregor and that damn fool Hendryk van Zelden.

And the cats of course. Though Boris and Tusker are probably next door at Mrs Pumphrey’s; she spoils them dreadfully.

The function of the Emigration Commission is largely presented by the three characters. Essentially, the majority of landowners welcomed their inspections as the commissioners could award funds from the public purse for improvements to land and industries, such as fishing, while justifying, in the landlord’s opinion, the clearance of land for sheep. A landowner in the good books of an Emigration Commission could believe he ran a well-ordered estate even as he sent his tenants overseas. Naturally, the tenants took the opposite view of Commission Men, and it was not unknown for their progress to be sabotaged. The most notorious incident came in 1850 when a mob of evicted Campbells ambushed three Emigration Commissioners in Glencoe, overturning their carriage and bludgeoning two of them to death. The third commissioner escaped on horseback, along with the coachmen, and was later able to identify five of the ringleaders who were tried and hanged at Inveraray Castle, alongside a coachman who had colluded with the attackers. Another two-dozen Campbells were found guilty of obstructing the king’s highway and deported to Van Diemen’s Land.

The rule of three refers to MacGregor’s fondness for using a trio of characters to create a strong dynamic. An example in the First Prologue is the scene between Captain Wolfe and Warders Pengallow and Thomas which quickly established Wolfe’s character and his relationship with the men under him and the same can be said of the scene in chapter one between Bheathain Somhairle, his grandfather and Tòrmod M’Neis at the Staffin Inn. In those examples the three characters take centre stage, whereas the Commission Men act within a larger group. Their function in this scene is to bring the wider world, as seen by the privileged, into the domesticity of Sir David’s dining room and thereby prefigure the later scene between Sir David and Adam Shaw which shows the world through the eyes of the dispossessed.

Some critics have argued these repeated groups of three (we shall find many other examples) are a veiled reference to the three branches of magick, while others maintain it is based on the concept of soul, spirit and body. A few have even suggested it draws on a proto-Freudian triumvirate of ego, superego, and id, and it is true these trios often contain a mediator, or ego figure, such as Tòrmod in chapter one who intervenes between Bheathain and his grandfather, and in this chapter Lord Dundee censures the intemperate bishop.

In my opinion, this over-complicates matters. There is no need to see some allegorical purpose for three characters, rather than two or four, when narrative purpose answer perfectly well. Two characters in a scene, as in life, are more likely to adopt polarised positions without either expecting the other to alter their view, leading to stasis. Three characters allow more possibilities where one can act as mediator between opposing views, two may take a common position against a third, or two opposing arguments can sway a neutral party. Thus, three characters offer greater complexity and the possibility of change or development in character and therefore narrative.

A negative effect of the ‘rule of three’ in literature is individual characters can appear too stylised, resulting in a loss of nuance and humanity, as is the case with MacGregor’s Bishop of Stirling. As stated previously, MacGregor substantially rewrote the bishop’s dialogue to make him less of a mouthpiece for the clearances and more of a human being, but he is still too obviously the villain of the piece. A further criticism is the focus on the bishop largely exculpates Lord Dundee and Sir Gordon when both are equally culpable while expressing their opinions less harshly. Arguably, greater subtlety could be had in the discussion but only, in my view, by increasing the number of characters so a range of views might be expressed. This would raise two problems: firstly, Commission Men only ever surveyed in parties of two or three; secondly, a large number of characters risks too many discordant voices and the loss of the central idea.

In this instance, as the focus is on Sir David and, to a lesser extent on Lord MacDonald, the lack of depth in the bishop’s portrayal is tolerable because he functions primarily as a prompt for Sir David’s thoughts and conscience rather than as a character in his own right.

MacGregor would revisit the theme of the Clearances later in This Iron Race and this image serves as a timely reminder of the human cost of the Commission Men’s deliberations.

Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) in This Iron Race

Wenn eine andere Generation den Menschen aus unsern empfindsamen Schriften restituieren sollte, so werden sie glauben es sei ein Herz mit Testikeln gewesen. Ein Herz mit einem Hodensack

Thus wrote Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the German physicist and satirist, of Sturm und Drang in 1776-1779 (Schriften und Briefe, pub. Zweitausendeins 1968–72).

Lichtenberg is critical, even dismissive of Sturm und Drang, but as he unwittingly provides a near perfect description of Bheathain Somhairle’s character it deserves quoting in translation:

If another and later species comes to reconstruct the human being from the evidence of our sentimental writings, they will conclude it to have been a heart with testicles.

Sturm und Drang—the meaning is storm and stress—was primarily a literary movement originating in 1770s Germany. Though it existed for only a dozen years until its abandonment by Goethe and Schiller, Sturm und Drang shattered the rationalism imposed by enlightenment thinking and heralded an era of literature that emphasised human emotion and individual perception and promoted anti-aristocratism and the natural world. Weimar Classicism, which succeeded Sturm und Drang, sought to merge this emotionalism with the best of enlightenment rationalism, but in its initial form Sturm und Drang provoked the reader’s emotions rather than their intellect using shock, terror, and the erotic to create a visceral connection between reader and text. In essence, it was an early attempt to achieve in literature what two centuries later came naturally to cinema.

In a social context, Sturm und Drang was part of a growing recognition of the primacy of the individual after the collapse of medieval feudalism and rise, albeit in limited form, of the democratic principle. Although primarily a literary movement, it influenced several pre-Romantic artists including Caspar Wolf and Henry Fuseli. It also had a limited effect on a number of notable composers, including Haydn, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, and Mozart.

As we have seen, the first volume of This Iron Race has much in common with the Sturm und Drang movement. The focus on individual perception is almost unwavering; characters are ruled at least as much by their emotions as by rationality; and nature, in the guise of fog, Bheathain’s rainswept hillside, and the sunset on St Catherine’s Hill is not a mere backcloth but accentuates or influences the action. The evidence is clear; under the influence of Goethe and Schiller’s early works, MacGregor believed Sturm und Drang was a means of being truthful to the human condition while not offending public taste. Alas, he was only half correct.

For our purposes, any story where the principal motivation is revenge or hatred can be classed as Sturm und Drang because such responses are particular to the individual. Stories where the motivation is power or wealth are not because such motivations are shared by many, even if not all act on them. Thus, the Second Prologue is a clear expression of Sturm und Drang: motivated by revenge, the unnamed character acts while her rational mind is suspended and though she will regret her actions her,

act was irredeemable as murder.

Repeatedly we have seen characters acting in haste; first Captain Wolfe’s irrational behaviour, then Bheathain Somhairle’s impulsiveness, and now the unnamed ‘Lady of Remorse’. Other characters in later volumes of This Iron Race will also reveal their irrationality and impulsiveness, but we must leave them to their time and place rather than bring premature revelations.

This brings us to another aspect of Sturm und Drang expressed in This Iron Race: the focus on individual perception. We experience the novel through the eyes and other senses of the characters and are privy only to their unique perspective. For example: in chapter one we only see the view of Staffin Bay and its environs at the moment Bheathain observes it. The bay was there all the time, as was the sea beyond and the mountain above, but until Bheathain glanced homeward he had been preoccupied and taken no notice of his wider surroundings.

There are various literary terms to describe this focus on a character’s perceptions, but in effect we only see, hear, taste, touch and feel (both physically and emotionally) what the characters experience when they experience it with little mediation or comment from the author. The character stands, or falls, without the author passing judgement upon them, albeit the Curse, the unseen narrator, often does pass comment.

The third aspect of Sturm und Drang is its exaltation of nature, and this chapter shows it exceptionally well in the description of the sunset over the city. We also saw it in the previous chapter when Bheathain stood upon the hillside and again when he gathered seaweed.

Both Bheathain and the unnamed character of the second prologue are isolated in a landscape over which they have no sway. Indeed, Bheathain cannot even stay warm and dry! In contrast, Enlightenment art and literature portrayed man in command of a benign nature. Nature that was not biddable or benign, exemplified by The Alps crossed by northern Europeans embarking on the Grand Tour of Italy, excited terror and loathing and many travellers over the high passes drew down the blinds on their carriage windows to avoid the fearsome sights.

It took a paradigm shift before we appreciated that mountains possessed a beauty inextricably linked to the terror they instilled: a beauty we would call exhilarating. In short, provided any real danger was controlled, we enjoyed being afraid and Sturm und Drang exploited this pleasurable fear.

Understanding the connection between Sturm und Drang and This Iron Race reveals MacGregor’s desire to give free expression to human emotion was not sui generis but part of a wider movement freeing itself from the rationalism imposed by the enlightenment. Alas for MacGregor, those in the vanguard of an artistic or literary movement rarely prosper in their lifetimes.

Apart from providing useful activity for MacGregor’s hero (he would have objected to describing Bheathain thus, but it is useful shorthand for the principal character) the lost lamb is a metaphor for Bheathain’s circumstances, as revealed in an authorial aside:

Only an amber touchpiece around his neck, his tobacco and tinderbox, along with the strand of hemp and the iron for the tackits in the soles of his worn-out shoes came from off-island.

And half of himself, though he did not know it.

Thus, we know what Bheathain does not: he is not wholly a native of the island. What his true origin might be is hinted at in the scene with Tammas M’Neis, but the key point is Bheathain is not who he supposes himself to be.

‘Orphaned Heroes’ appear in many mythologies from the Greek, Theseus, to Romulus and Remus of Rome, and in the Hebrew account of Moses. Often, the Orphaned Hero is not truly orphaned but is lost or abandoned or disinherited or banished by his or (rarely) her parents.

In Arthurian legend Arthur is sired by Uther Pendragon on Igraine, the widow of King Mark of Cornwall, their liaison having been arranged by Merlin. As part of Merlin’s bargain with Uther, the newborn Arthur is taken away and raised in ignorance of his birthright. Years pass: Uther grows old, and Arthur grows into a young man. Then, all changes: Uther dies, and Arthur enters Camelot, proves his inheritance by drawing the sword from the stone, and is revealed by Merlin as the son of Uther.

Arthur is the orphaned hero with a happy ending. Much less happy is the tale of Oedipus, son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes. Learning of a prophecy that his son will grow up to kill him, Laius binds the newborn Oedipus hand and foot and abandons him on a mountain to die. He is discovered by shepherds and eventually adopted by King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth who raise him as their own. However, fate cannot be thwarted and learning of the prophecy and fearing he is to kill his father, who he believes is King Polybus, Oedipus leaves Corinth for Thebes. There he kills King Laius in combat and to compound matters marries his widowed mother.

We must thank Hugo Ouellet of L’Académie de les Contes des Fées en Français for bringing your editor’s attention to what may be the strangest variant of the orphaned hero motif: the medieval French tale, Knight of the Swan, later adapted for the opera ‘Lohengrin’ by Richard Wagner. In Knight of the Swan a lord discovers a swan maiden or fairy in an enchanted forest and marries her. She bears him six sons and a daughter, each born with a golden chain about their neck, but her wicked mother-in-law steals the children away and replaces them with dogs. The lord blames his wife for their disappearance and punishes her, at which point the boys’ chains fall away and they are transformed into swans. Eventually, their sister, who alone retained human form, exposes the mother-in-law, the swan maiden is redeemed, and the boys return to human form, save one whose chain was melted down. Trapped in swan-form, he draws the boat of the Swan Knight tasked with rescuing damsels in distress.

Lying in the mysterious zone between myth and fiction are fairy tales where the orphaned, abandoned, and lost, appear more frequently than their parented fellows, reflecting a time when bereavement from plague, famine, and violent death was common-place. Among the famous names are Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White, each respectively orphaned, stolen, abandoned, and sentenced to death by a wicked stepmother. Curiously, fairy tales ignore stepfathers who are surely just as numerous and potentially malevolent.

By MacGregor’s time the orphaned hero was a popular literary trope from romantic poetry like ‘Little Orphan Nell’ by Gilbert Worthy to the penny dreadfuls sold by newsstands at railway stations. Among the latter is one of your editor’s favourites, Caroline Ramsden’s Miss Wetherby Expects. In summary: Jane Wetherby grows up believing her parents are the Reverend and Mrs Wetherby in the Suffolk village of Little Grebe. On her twenty-first, when she comes of age, she learns Mrs Wetherby is in fact her nurse and her real mother, Ophelia, the Reverend’s first wife, is locked up in the belfry where she has been confined ever since the birth of the bastard consequence of her affair with Spurge, the undergardener. This child, named Peter Anmery and raised in Owen Grubb’s brutal orphanage, is now apprenticed to the pharmacist in Great Grebe where Jane buys her father’s indigestion powders. On meeting, Peter and Jane are instantly smitten, believing each is the other’s soulmate and wholly unaware they are half-siblings. A secret courtship follows until Peter promises to call on Jane’s father to ask her hand in marriage. At the novel’s climax, Spurge, still in love with Ophelia and returned from the Antipodes where he has made his fortune in sheep farming, discovers Ophelia’s fate and returns to Little Grebe to rescue her. Alas, she has been driven mad by the ringing of the church bells and attacks Spurge, overturning a lantern and setting fire to the belfry at the very moment Peter Anmery, who is of course unaware he is their son, calls on the rectory. Hearing the cries from the church tower, he braves the flames to rescue Spurge but on attempting to save Ophelia, she clasps him to her breast as the belfry floor gives way. She dies instantly while Peter Anmary lives long enough to learn Spurge is his father and Ophelia his mother and his beloved Jane his half-sister, before perishing from the effects of the fall and, one always imagines, excessive plot revelations.

Spurge then confronts the Reverend Wetherby who confesses all. Jane is distraught at their deception and at the death of her beloved Peter and makes a speech which so impresses Spurge he offers her the fortune he had intended sharing with Ophelia and his son. Freed of her deceiving father and stepmother, Jane founds the Little Grebe School for Lost Children and opens a Haberdashers shop for her own employment.

Miss Wetherby Expects always has your editor laughing uproariously at all the wrong moments and you will be relieved to know MacGregor’s plot bears no resemblance to it, though it demonstrates MacGregor’s readers would have been familiar with the motif of the orphaned hero.

Dr Claude Crabtree was the first to apply Marx’s ‘Theory of Alienation’ to This Iron Race. Dr Crabtree was a member of the Communist Party from 1921 until his suicide in 1948 shortly after the Russian invasion of Poland. While accepting he had the courage of his convictions and the decency to know when he was betrayed, much of Dr Crabtree’s analysis of This Iron Race is biased. However, it has gained considerable traction in certain left-wing Oxford institutions so we must counter it as best we can.

We shall take the obvious point first: Marx’s Theory of Alienation was written in 1844, when he was still a young man, but did not appear in print until 1927, half a century after MacGregor’s death. It follows whatever connection This Iron Race may have with Marx’s Theory of Alienation there was no direct influence. It is true MacGregor read Marx’s Communist Manifesto shortly after its publication in Germany in 1848 and acquired a copy in translation for his library at Arbinger; however, despite recognising many of the same ills in society, MacGregor was not sympathetic to Marx’s theories, as proven by the criticisms MacGregor wrote in his copy of the Manifesto.

First, we must describe Marx’s Theory of Alienation as it is unlikely to be familiar to many readers. Essentially, in an industrial society the majority of workers are alienated from their own labour: that is, there is no natural connection between labour and livelihood, such as exists in an agrarian society where food production is the primary employment. Instead of acquiring through labour the means to sustain himself, the worker is paid in money. This he exchanges for the material goods he needs to live, or rather, survive, since in Marx’s view the necessity of labour means the individual is no longer a free man but a waged slave without an independent life of his own. Moreover, at no point does the employed man own the thing he makes, either in a legal, moral, or artisanal sense, or receive its full value in his wage. Rather, it remains the property of the owner of the land, machinery, or materials with which he works. Your editor confesses sympathy with this aspect of Marx’s theory, though it is rather more pertinent today than in Marx’s time. One cannot imagine, for example, the staff at a call centre or a supermarket enjoy rich and satisfying employment compared to the farmer or woodsman working on the land; however, I believe Dr Crabtree was mistaken to see much of Marx’s Theory of Alienation in This Iron Race.

The principal conflict for the characters in This Iron Race is not concerned with their employment; rather, the character’s natural abilities or inclinations conflict with their expected role in society. Thus, Captain Wolfe, Bheathain Somhairle, Lord MacDonald, Sir David Mackenzie, and Paavo Jukola are in some degree conflicted between what they are or wish to be and what society requires of them. Only Eolhwynne and, to a lesser extent, Màiri Mulcahy, have reconciled their nature with their role in society. At this point we must recall Marx’s famous maxim From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, for several of the characters in This Iron Race are unwilling to use their abilities and therefore do not have what they need. However, as in a number of cases these abilities are supernatural in nature, they hardly fall within Marxist Theory which regards magick, along with religion, as “the opiate of the people”.

There is, however, one character in This Iron Race to whom Marx’s Theory of Alienation applies very well: the admirable Uilleam M’Illathain, the last kelp gatherer of Staffin Bay. Rather than using kelp to manure the land, M’Illathain burns it to make soda ash, a substance used in glassworks and soap manufactories. He has no direct use for soda ash—it is in fact toxic—nor does he own what he produces since the greater share of its value goes first to the estate and then to agents who broker it to industry.

The kelp industry was a major source of employment and profit in the Highlands and Islands during the Napoleonic Wars, but the end of the war brought access to better sources of soda ash overseas and the value of kelp dropped by a quarter in the following decades, bringing mass unemployment to coastal communities. It seems likely M’Illathain personifies MacGregor’s oft-stated criticism of the management of highland estates, but we cannot conclude MacGregor was sympathetic to Marxism. After all, one can acknowledge society’s ills without seeking to overthrow the established order and nothing in MacGregor’s writing indicates he harboured revolutionary ideals. Rather, he wished the existing order had more compassion and took it upon himself to indicate where it was most needed.

The parallels between the fictional life MacGregor created for Lord MacDonald and recent events in his own life cannot be overlooked. Certainly, MacGregor was very aware of them and writing in the fall 1865 edition of the Edenborough Review he was at pains to report that while he and Lord MacDonald had much in common the fictional character was “the better man”.

To sum up the key similarities:

• Both men are recently married to second wives after a period of widowhood.
• Clara MacDonald is expecting a child, as, at the time of writing, was Lady MacGregor.
• The duties of both men take them away from their wives: Lord MacDonald to Winchester to attend a funeral, MacGregor to his writing desk to earn a living.
• There is one other parallel which MacGregor confessed to in his journals but to include it here would be premature. We shall refer to it in due course.

Against this there are numerous dissimilarities:

• MacDonald has a son from his first wife. MacGregor’s son died in the same tragedy as his wife.
• MacDonald’s new wife is young and inexperienced. Lady Helena was a widow in her middle-thirties when she married MacGregor.
• MacDonald’s separation from his wife is total, but of short duration. MacGregor’s separation from Lady MacGregor was partial (both shared the same household) but arguably permanent since he continued working until his death.

In The Wizard of the North (King James University Press, 1930), Dr Crabtree notes the parallels between MacGregor and MacDonald fall well short of proving MacGregor made him his simulacrum. Notably, outside the marital and domestic arena their circumstances and obligations are quite different. However, the tone of Dr Crabtree’s argument is questionable. In particular, his opinion,

for the female of the species a good marriage is the main event of life while for the male it is always an accessory,

 is dated and, as proved by his reaction to the death of Lady Madeleine, did not accord with MacGregor’s views on marriage. Sadly, it probably reflects Dr Crabtree’s unconventional marriage to the actress and socialite Liberty Pearl, as revealed in her autobiography Shadows on the Sky, (Partridge Press, 1956), though as his ex-wife would tell you your editor is no expert on marital relations.

What I believe demonstrable is MacGregor drew on his experience of grief and its aftermath to describe MacDonald’s lingering grief for his first wife and cautious embrace of Lady Clara. It is as though MacDonald is reluctant to accept the possibility of happiness and thus holds Clara at a distance, both emotionally and literally as he leaves her to attend Prince William’s funeral. The same caution is revealed in MacGregor’s journals where, even as his relations with Helena Northwood blossomed, he became increasingly protective of his grief for Madeleine and even ordered the construction of a shrine for her in the grounds of Arbinger Abbey.

This curious construction of granite and wrought iron survived the loss of so much of the Arbinger Estate to the Edenborough orbital relief road and subsequent industrial development but it has lately fallen into disrepair and its future is uncertain. The Abbey gardens remain open to the public but while there are plans to turn part of the abbey into a museum dedicated to Tamburlaine MacGregor (yours truly is a trustee of the fundraising committee) it is presently occupied by the Dorothy Parkin Foundation for the Insane and admittance to the public is by appointment only.

A tapestry showed two men beside a river; one standing in fine armour and the other dressed in rags and sitting before an overturned wine barrel. Trees loomed behind them, and she had the impression something hid among them.

This Iron Race, book two

Many years ago, when I lived in the city of Bath I was a regular visitor to Dyrham Park. It has a rather fine deer park and a house built in the Georgian style popular in the decades following the Glorious Deliverance and independence from Denmark. It has the curious distinction of having two fronts and no back, much like so many in government, but owing here to the changing fortunes of the region as at one time it faced the village of Dyrham and later faced toward the Bath Road when that city became a fashionable spa town. 

That is not why I mention it here; rather, in one of its rooms is a tapestry of a wooded dell wherein an old man sits inside a wine barrel as soldiers approach. Are his hours numbered? No: for this is the famous encounter between Alexander the Great and the hermit-philosopher, pricker of vanity, and bone-conjuror, Diogenes. The description in MacGregor’s text is unmistakably this famous meeting, and yet the tapestry might show any other scene or not be described at all, and it would make no difference to the narrative. Therefore, we should ask why MacGregor shows us Alexander meeting Diogenes.

For once the dependable, if eccentric, Dr Claude Crabtree is of no use in the matter as he had a particular blind spot regarding Greece and Greek scholarship. Quite why is something of an enigma wrapped in scurrilous gossip. It is a matter of record that during the Great European War the then Lieutenant Crabtree was briefly stationed in Athens—there was a fear Germany would attempt to annexe the oil fields in Bulgaria—and, with little in the way of soldierly duties to attend, he took to wandering the slopes of the Acropolis. At this point in the story gossip takes over for supposedly a patrol of Greek soldiers found him drunk on grappa and in a compromising position with a goat, or possibly a goatherd depending on which version one hears. Ignoring his protestations that he was teaching the goat—or goatherd—to sing, the soldiers beat him soundly and arrested him for indecency. Owing to complicated local politics it was six months before the English authorities managed to extricate him from jail after which he was discharged from the army as morally unfit for duty. His revenge, ineffectual though it was, was to ignore or traduce any supposed assumptions about Greek scholarship and cultural achievement; though I believe he remained fluent in Greek for the rest of his life. I suspect it was this self-induced blind spot that led him to ignore the significance of the tapestry, and so I must speculate without his assistance.

Diogenes is a pauper, albeit self-made since he was certainly the son of a rich man—a coinmaker of Sinope (Sinop in modern-day Turkey)—and a despiser of power, wealth, and fame who even mocked Plato’s claim that man is nought but a featherless biped by plucking a chicken and asking if it was not then a man. Yet Diogenes’ aestheticism drew admirers: it was said that he threw away his only possession, a drinking bowl, after witnessing a man drink from his cupped hands, and he was thought able to see through the material veil to greater truths.

Thus, we understand why Alexander would seek Diogenes’ opinion but alas, we have no definitive account of what was said. In one version Diogenes casts his tell-bones and when Alexander inquires he claims he looked for the bones of Alexander’s father but found only those of a slave. In another account Alexander asks what he might do for Diogenes and the philosopher asks him to stand out of his light. In yet another Alexander offers Diogenes anything he desires and Diogenes asks only for things Alexander cannot possibly give, such as causing the sun to set upon his command.

The subtext is clear: Diogenes requires nothing of Alexander, other than to be left alone, and Alexander has no comprehension of the truths Diogenes could offer him. One is a philosopher-hermit who has nothing and wants for nothing and the other is the conqueror of the known world who laments that there is no more world for him to conquer. And yet, had Alexander the wit to ask Diogenes the right question he might have avoided the heartache of losing his lover, Hephaestion, and an early death. The tapestry therefore represents a famous meeting between exponents of magick and military prowess and while Alexander is blind and deaf to what Diogenes may offer I think MacGregor is suggesting that his failure is one of comprehension, not desire.

The true error, MacGregor hints, would be if those in power were indifferent to magick.

as recorded in the collections of King James University

Stretching the definition of the word, one might describe the critical reception to volume one as ‘mixed’, but in truth most reviews were negative and where it was not negative response was muted. Most critics took pains to distinguish between the work, which they did not like, and MacGregor who still commanded respect as the author of Edmund Pevensie and remained a favourite of the king. However, a number speculated whether MacGregor had been lastingly deranged by his grief for Lady Madeleine and if it would be preferable for his long silence to continue. Hardly any thought to consider the first volume of This Iron Race in the light of ‘Lays of Brigadoon’, MacGregor’s first published work following the death of Lady Madeleine. Grantley Borset of The Daily Sketch was one of the few to do so:

Some three years ago when I reviewed ‘Lays of Brigadoon’ I wrote that beneath its superficial charm there lurked within the township of Brigadoon a baleful presence quite at odds with Christian piety. When word of this new work, a novel, came to our notice one hoped the charm would remain and the world of magick exposed in Brigadoon would return to the ancient fastness where it belongs. Alas, with publication of the first volume of This Iron Race what was charm is now grimness and despair and magick is loosed upon the present in all its antique awfulness.

Borset’s complaint lay against MacGregor’s intentions, rather than his execution, and he was not the only one to charge MacGregor with writing something improper. The Disseminator, the monthly journal of The Society for the Dissemination of Useful Knowledge was especially damning:

We cannot recommend the book in any degree. Though it undoubtedly contains a great deal of knowledge, it is of an archaic and unuseful nature, except when it touches on the practical aspects of highland living. Even then, the portrayal of the supernatural is bound to perturb all but the least sensate reader. We had hoped with publication of this novel the author of Edmund Pevensie would be returned to us, but alas, it is yet further evidence of his unsettled sensibilities.

Gilbert Morrell of The Highland Home Companion, a weekly magazine published in Elgin, was more charitable:

Many in rural districts mourn the loss of the old ways and perhaps it is they for whom Sir Tamburlaine writes in this curious lament for bygone times. However, we must observe that those who mourn the old ways are oftentimes the poorest and least literate of people and we cannot think it altogether wise to write a novel for those who cannot or will not read.

Which might appear unenthusiastic but did address the problem that those most attuned to the old ways—and most likely to feel their abandonment—were among the most impoverished and neglected portion of the populace. Alas, Mr Morrell appears to have missed MacGregor’s intention of bringing their plight to the notice of those able to address their condition.

The Alban Church Recorder was never likely to approve the work, but even so, its review was unusually hostile:

We do not commend this work. It is not the product of a Christian mind and nor should any Christian stain their conscience by reading it. That its author was recently feted in all of Alba is neither here nor there and rather than read his book we advise prayer for his soul.

The Engineer, a periodical devoted, as the name suggests, to mechanical and civil engineering, did not usually review novels but made an exception for the first volume of This Iron Race:

As the late Earl of Rochester discovered when his foxhounds strayed into the path of the Dover Express, progress shall not be obstructed by traditional pursuits. Where the good earl wished only to pursue his fox, Sir Tamburlaine MacGregor’s novel aspires to something more particular, viz, the retention of the Old Ways of sibyls and soothsayers to whom the railway is, if by other means, as inimical as it proved to the earl and his hounds.

Progress is, as the student of history well knows, inevitable, and ‘praise to it’ say us and all who wish for the improvement of mankind. Sir Tamburlaine, however, cautions otherwise and writes: “[for] iron—and you cannot have steam without it—is the ancient enemy of magick and even as the rail burrows our hills and leaps our valleys, we must consider the ill effect its irons have upon those granted with what the French call clairvoyance, [and] the Scots call clearsight.”

The ill effect is undeniable but, in your reviewer’s opinion, it is a necessary price for the betterment of national prosperity and no different in kind from the temporary upset to age-long custom occasioned by the drainage of the fens and enclosure of common lands which deprived a few of their livelihood but brought the populace greater quantity of produce at lower cost.

Perhaps Sir Tamburlaine’s work will find an audience among the nostalgists, but one cannot see a work so backward-looking faring well in these times. One only hopes Sir Tamburlaine’s loss will be less severe than that which befell the Earl of Rochester who, it will be recalled, paid with his head.

The incident described occurred on November 21 in 1858 when the earl attempted to hold up the express near Ashford to allow his hounds to flush out a fox. The earl was decapitated and two of his companions died of their injuries, while four horses and some sixteen hounds perished or had to be destroyed. The fox, it was reported, escaped.

The unusual delay between announcement of the novel in the Edenborough Review and its publication had led to a good deal of curiosity and rumours of disagreement between MacGregor and his publisher which piqued the interest of an anonymous correspondent to The Speculator, the quarterly journal of the Edenborough Speculative Society.

Under the nom de plume of ‘Vesuvius’ he wrote:

If this strange, misshapen work is what Beresford & Lucas has seen fit to print the reader may wonder at the peculiarity of the manuscript they spurned. She may allow for some misshaping to occur during the rewriting of the text—which is the cause of the delay in publication—but not that Sir Tamburlaine, who is, or perhaps we must say ‘was’, among the most prolific and competent and lauded writers of our time, should submit a text so deficient in his publisher’s estimation. None of what left the work unpublishable concerns MacGregor’s craft, for he remains a fine writer whose ear for a well-turned phrase and ability to draw recognisable characters is undimmed. Rather, we very much fear the fault lies in the content which would have brought attention from the Lords Advocates and scandal upon author and publisher.

We shall draw a veil over MacGregor’s purpose in writing a work so improper he surely knew it could not see publication by any reputable publishing house, and regret that while removing the scandalous material the patient died on the surgeon’s table.

Some of the phrasing may suggest ‘Vesuvius’ had read or was at least familiar with the work prior to MacGregor’s revisions but I suspect he was attempting to curry favour with the reader by alluding to knowledge he was not privy to. The only copies of the original text in existence at the time were MacGregor’s first draft and the fair copy seen by his publishers. The publishers were most unlikely to have shown MacGregor’s text to anyone—if you recall, Sir Sidney demanded its removal from their offices—and I cannot think it likely MacGregor would have lent either text to a critic. The identity of ‘Vesuvius’ is unknown, but MacGregor had shown the work to a number of close friends, which included members of the Edenborough Speculative Society.

None of MacGregor’s previous works had received such damning reviews and the effect on sales, particularly to the circulating libraries, was soon felt. MacGregor responded by dashing off a number of essays and articles which were published as Rough Harbour: Observations of Highland Life on October 30, 1864. This received favourable reviews and went some way to allaying his publisher’s concerns. Meanwhile, a new edition of Edmund Pevensie had sold well. With MacGregor’s finances secure and his publishers persuaded, volumes two and three of This Iron Race appeared in the spring of 1865, followed by a new edition of The Saxon Trilogy marking eight-hundredth years since the accession of King Harold II.