The Origins of This Iron Race

Following the death in childbirth of his first wife, Lady Madeleine, in October 1858, MacGregor abandoned a part-completed novel, The Young Man of Lochnagar, and retired from Edenborough society. For two years he wrote only his personal journal and a series of ‘Black Books’, all of which he subsequently destroyed and whose content can only be guessed at from the vague, cryptic notes in his journals. Friends and public believed the Bard of Tweeddale permanently silenced.

Today, with the evidence of his journal, we can diagnose MacGregor with clinical depression. Unfortunately, the condition was then unknown and while close friends were supportive, many, including his own father, thought his grief excessive to the point of impropriety. Death in childbirth was not uncommon, a fact MacGregor was of course aware of, however he argued that the fact it was common did not render it any less tragic and he deeply resented others seeking to interfere in his grief, an anger that would find expression when he finally returned to prose.

Throughout this period MacGregor wrote nothing for publication but he was far from inactive. He read philosophy and the classics, approaching both in a mood of fresh enquiry. We might assume he was attempting to fathom some meaning or purpose to Madeleine’s death, but MacGregor refutes this, revealing in his journal a man keenly aware of his condition and seeking purpose not to his wife’s death but to his own life. Nevertheless, an entry for June 18^th 1860 shows there were times he came close to despair:

Each day I rise and in the usual round of necessities and pleasantries, think myself perfectly occupied until, upon retiring, fatigued from my day, I find in sum I have achieved entirely nothing. Is this my life now?

The underlining is in the original.

This life of “entirely nothing” changed at New Year 1861, when, against his “better judgement”, as he later wrote, MacGregor was persuaded by his friend Sir Charles Palliser to attend the Hogmanay Ball at Edenborough Castle and there was introduced to the recently widowed Lady Helena Northwood. She had lost her husband to typhoid fever a year before and in her company MacGregor found an understanding of loss and an appreciation, hitherto missing, of what might still be attainable. Mutual friends had long suspected the two were suited, and were proven right as 1861 became, as MacGregor would write in his memoirs, an “annus mirabilis”, when his companionship with Lady Helena quickly turned from mutual affection to love. After a brief engagement, the pair married in the August at Tron Church, Edenborough and shortly before Christmas of that same year Lady Helena informed him she was with child.

Though delighted by news  Lady Helena was with child, we can understand, given the circumstances of his first wife’s death, if MacGregor harboured fears of tragedy striking twice. As previously stated, complications surrounding childbirth were a common cause of female mortality at that date and there is evidence from MacGregor’s journal that on this occasion he sought reassurance all would be well. Presumably, this came from one of the many spaewives operating from illicit booths in the Edenborough Closes, though MacGregor leaves us no name or clear location for the woman in his journal. At that date, it was illegal under Scottish law for unlicensed spaewives to practise and, in this specific case the answers MacGregor sought could only have come by methods contrary to the spaewives’ code. MacGregor’s omission of the spaewife’s name or whereabouts may have been as much to protect her as to protect his own reputation, though it would find an echo in the exchanges between Lord MacDonald and Eolhwynne in Chapter four of This Iron Race, book one.

Presumably content with whatever reassurances the spaewife offered, that very evening, 27^th December 1861, or so his journal tells us, MacGregor took up his pen in earnest, though whether creative inspiration seized him, or he was driven by the realisation he must now support his wife and family, he neglects to say. Most probably, one was the father of the other.

On one matter, the evidence is clear, for he expresses it many times both in his journal and in private correspondence. Having experienced extremes of tragedy and joy, MacGregor recognised that his earlier works and those of his contemporaries were too concerned with propriety and decorum when describing the physical expression of human emotion. A journal entry for February 7^th 1862, shortly after he began work on the novel, reveals his thoughts:

…it is permissible for a writer to depict the basest emotions such as fear, hatred and lust, provided they be expressed with noble words. That whereof he may not speak, are those physical effects manifest in any man or woman in the throes of such emotions, for they are considered too shocking in print and too coarse on the tongue. We may write plainly that a man loves with his heart, but not that he desires with his body. We may state that a man is killed but not describe the physicality of his agonies and suffering. Instead we must obfuscate and conceal that which it is in the very nature of all emotions to seek the physical expression of: the business of being fully alive in the moment.

In coming to this opinion, MacGregor refers in his journal to a number of religious, scientific, magickal and philosophical works that formed his reading matter in the months following his wife’s death. Initially these included the Greek Classics and medieval religious works, but increasingly he favoured works of natural philosophy, particularly drawn from the collections of the Edenborough Speculative Society and Lunden’s Royal Society. These challenged the accepted, Biblical, account of the earth’s origin and history and man’s elevated place in the natural order, and, though MacGregor did not entertain the atheist teachings of Jeremiah Pole and the École Français, he began to reappraise orthodox religious teaching on the division between body and soul.

Religious philosophy regarded man as divided between the soul and the flesh: The one seeking spiritual love, the other driven by base desires. The desires of the soul were fit to be sung and rhymed and depicted in art but those of the flesh attracted shame and could not be publicly shown or spoken of. Using his experiences of the previous two years to guide him, MacGregor came to believe that sorrow and happiness were equally rooted in the soul and in the flesh and expressed themselves equally in both.

Disturbed by this insight, MacGregor sought answers in the works of natural philosophers, two of whom especially influenced him: The Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, who he knew personally through the Speculative Society, and the Danish naturalist, Carl Davinius. The former challenged Biblical notions concerning the age and origin of the earth and the other, in On the Mutability of Species by means of Natural Variation implied that man was not distinct from the animal kingdom, as a literal reading of the Book of Genesis would suggest, but shared common ancestor with the Great Apes, and by extension with all the natural world.

From this, MacGregor deduced that the physical form of man and woman was as much part of God’s creation as their soul and therefore there could be no moral reason why a writer should not depict them as physical beings on the page.

It would appear,

he wrote on March 21^st 1858,

I must depict men and women, in totus: corpus et animus, et anima, body, spirit and soul as one, if I am to be true to their nature, whether that nature be God-given or not.

Again, the underlining is in the original.

Beginning with the first book of This Iron Race, MacGregor sought to close the gap between the real thoughts and actions of men and women, and their expression in fiction. Today we call this ‘naturalism,’ but too often it has been labelled pornography and ‘filth’ by opponents who believed fiction should only depict the seemly side of human nature. Unfortunately, MacGregor was writing many decades before Modernist writers like L. H. Durrants, Victoria Wolfe, and Asher Hughes championed honesty of expression, and when MacGregor handed Beresford & Lucas the draft copy for This Iron Race in October 1863, both men were appalled. Sir Sidney Beresford, perhaps mindful of his public position, even threatened to burn the manuscript if MacGregor did not immediately remove it from their offices. Fortunately, John Lucas, the more pragmatic of the partners, reminded MacGregor of his duty to provide for his new family and suggested the work might be acceptable with certain changes. At first, MacGregor resisted, believing he was pioneering a new form of literature; however, Lady Helena persuaded him of a better course: complying with his publisher’s demands, while retaining the original text against such time when publication in unexpurgated form would be possible.

Perhaps mindful that Lady Helena was then expecting their second child and royalties from his earlier works were unlikely to grow, MacGregor agreed.

MacGregor’s desire to challenge literary convention in matters of taste and decency was not the only difficulty This Iron Race gave its would-be publishers: the novel’s subject matter and setting were also contentious.

Historically, writers, MacGregor included, had sought to portray the subject of kingship and politics either through the prism of the ancient past or through some other medium, such as the parochial church or provincial society. In such settings, a writer might portray the use and abuse of power and the tyrannous effect it has on the less fortunate without obviously drawing attention to the real seat of power, the king, government, and the church politic. MacGregor eschewed this device and depicted the King of Anglia and his court in a contemporary world. MacGregor assured his publisher that King Edmund bore no relation to King Charles VII, or Prince Malcolm and Lord Egan to any other living men, but Sir Sidney and Lucas were unconvinced and MacGregor was obliged to make considerable changes; effectively turning the Earl of Northumberland into an outright villain seeking power for himself rather than acting to safeguard the throne. Even then, only a few weeks before its publication a nervous Sir Sidney insisted MacGregor take out an advertisement in the Edenborough Review assuring his readership that This Iron Race was entirely a work of fiction and no criticism of King Charles VII or the institution of monarchy or any other living gentlemen or body politic should be construed. Curiously, neither partner expressed any concern regarding MacGregor’s depiction of either the Russian and Spanish Royal Houses or the Hanseatic Company!

The other aspect of This Iron Race that caused difficulties between MacGregor and his publisher was its depiction of spaewifery and the magick arts. This criticism came chiefly from Lucas and cut not only to MacGregor’s theme but also to the core of the narrative. Spaewifery and the magick arts in general, were then deeply unpopular in Scotland and Anglia and denounced by the established church of both countries. Unfortunately for MacGregor, John Lucas was a leading benefactor of the Church of Scotland and in his view, This Iron Race contained far too much magick and magick of a most pernicious kind: magick employed for good.

Here MacGregor was obliged to make what were perhaps the least satisfactory changes to his text, distorting the balance between good and evil for while the abuse of magick by Graciana A’Guirre largely survived the gentler portrayal of spaewifery in the hands of Eolhwynne, and to a lesser extent Màiri Mulcahy, was drastically reduced.

Altogether, MacGregor had more difficulties with his publisher concerning This Iron Race that on his eighteen previous works combined, and yet modern reader will find it difficult to imagine what the fuss was about, for by our standards This Iron Race is innocuous. To understand how it would have fared in 1861 we have only the reaction of Sir Sidney Beresford and John Lucas, so it may be useful to examine the two gentlemen in more detail.

Sir Sidney is by far the better known. Liberal (Whig) Member for Edenborough South from 1854 to his death in 1877, we have copious personal correspondence together with the official parliamentary record. Conscientious but uninspiring, might sum his political career, for though his attendance record at the House was exemplary he made only three speeches, none of great effect. Liberal, we should recall, meant something rather different in the mid-nineteenth century than it does now and Sir Sidney was no upholder of social freedoms or campaigner for individual rights. Liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century was more akin to libertarianism: the right of a man to manage and prosecute his trade and affairs without constraints, restrictive practices or excessive taxation. Sir Sidney’s sympathies lay with the trade and merchant classes, while those of a Tory disposition lay with the church, judiciary and landed gentry. The political battle of the nineteenth century was between Liberal proponents of change and Tory guardians of the existing order. Neither party concerned itself with the poor and destitute, believing they must look to God and their own industriousness to improve their lot. In this, Sir Sidney was typical and all three of his speeches concerned the rights and freedoms of Edenborough’s merchantmen to practise their business without parliamentary restraints.

His publishing partner, John Lucas, was typical of those whom Liberal policy sought to assist. The son of an indigent and alcoholic boat-builder in Leith, he had risen by his own skill and efforts to become the proprietor of the Crosshaven Ironworks and had considerable investments in coalmining. Unfortunately, almost all his personal and business correspondence was lost in a fire in 1897, and for many years he has been regarded as a typical hard-nosed businessman and the probable inspiration for MacGregor’s Robert Lockhart, whom we meet in Chapter Two of This Iron Race, book one. Recently however, a chance discovery in the Edenborough Records Office reveals a happier view of the man. The Factory Act of 1863 (of which Sir Sidney had been a staunch opponent) required annual inspection of all manufactories employing over fifty people and a log kept of all accidents resulting in maiming or death. Lodged in the Official Records Office, the inspection records for the Crosshaven Ironworks have survived and reveal Lucas’s company had throughout the 1860s one of the best safety records in all of Scotland and was often praised for the care it took in its employee’s welfare.

If MacGregor did not base Robert Lockhart on Lucas, we certainly have evidence he took his frustrations with his publishers onto the page in other areas. Comparing the original manuscript with the 1865 edition, we note the Hanseatic Hall in Edenborough was located in Lawnmarket in the former, but in the published version, it relocates to Canongate, suspiciously close to Beresford & Lucas’ premises. Furthermore, MacGregor’s depiction of the bumbling Otto von Danneberg does bear close resemblance to Sir Sidney. As neither of these two changes were forced on MacGregor or detract from the story (if anything von Danneberg as we know him is an improvement on the character MacGregor originally described) I have retained them from the 1865 edition.

Following rejection of the manuscript in 1863, MacGregor engaged in repeated bouts of revision to create an acceptable version for his publisher. That this took almost a year may surprise us, but, having seen the volume of correspondence between Canongate and Arbinger, it is perhaps remarkable the work survived at all. Inevitably, MacGregor’s story suffered in the process and publication of the first volume of This Iron Race in July 1864 received only a muted response from critics and readers.

Undeterred, MacGregor continued work on the second novel in the sequence, Works of the Master but choosing to disregard what a lesser writer might regard as ‘lessons learned’ he continued to write in his new ‘natural’ style, as he termed it, resulting in a fresh bout of disagreement between MacGregor and his publishers. This time, however, he had foreseen difficulties and the required revisions took only three months. This proved rather more successful with the public than its predecessor, and the third and final book, Devices & Executions, followed in 1868.

This is the complete text of MacGregor’s preface to the first edition of This Iron Race, book one, and while it will be familiar to many readers, I believe it worthy of study. In particular, I draw attention to those passages where MacGregor refers to the protracted delay in publication owing to the extensive revisions his publisher forced upon him and his regrets at not being able to write as he believed he ought. The sense of words unsaid is palpable in these passages.

Nevil Warbrook

Preface to the first edition

I have kept my reader in long suspense since this work was first announced three years past in the pages of ‘lays of Brigadoon’. Much has occurred in those years, but rest assured, all has been done to present as pleasing a work as my penmanship allows.

Despite, or in truth in consequence of, those three years, much is, and I trust my publishers will allow me this, not as I would wish it; however, I am obliged to write within my times and within the expectations of my readership, while not, I trust, stinting on novelty and surprise. Thus, Acts of the Servant, as it is presented here, is not wholly the work I envisaged all those years ago, yet must stand for that work until such times when this writer, or perhaps any writer, may express the human heart as it truly is and not as others would have it be.

But speak of the work, I hear you pray. In answer, let me state that Acts of the Servant is from its opening words a work of fancy, yet a work in which much is true and but few things altered from the fact. The principal fancy must be accounted that my fictional Anglia is under the sovereignty of good, kind, dutiful King Edmund III, son of Edgar, and his Royal Seat is not Lunden but that more ancient citadel, Winchester whence, in my fancy, the monarchy returned following the Glorious Deliverance of 1648.

Naturally, it should be noted that good, kind, dutiful King Edmund shares those qualities but no others with our dear sovereign, King Charles VII, and nor should the reader draw parallel between any other named character in this narrative and any person of living flesh or recent memory. In this respect, my humble work is fiction and nothing more.

Furthermore, in our present time, Tsar Nicholas shows no desire for war in the Baltic and there, as of late in the Black Sea, peace reigns between nations. Nor is the once mighty Hanseatic League contemplating, so far as we are aware, one last terrible throw of the dice to avert its slow decline, and thus the wider events I have portrayed in this novel and intend to portray in its successors must also, I trust, remain fictions.

And yet, I shall draw the line here and say the rest is true to the world the writer shares with his reader. I have attempted, to the best my humble ability allows, to be true to human nature and human destiny and equally portray desire, charity, kindness, fellowship and their dark companions, enmity, misanthropy, cruelty, and that curious human predisposition to think the worst of those who we believe to be different from ourselves.

Unlike the greater number of my other fictions, Acts of the Servant is set in recent times and not in the strange and distant past. Our age is, perhaps uniquely so, an age of great change, where established ways no longer fit their purpose, if indeed such purpose is still required and where son may not expect to follow in his father’s footsteps for the father’s footsteps were imprinted on a very different earth from that which lies beneath the feet of his son.

Hesiod, writing in Works and Days, claimed man had lived through five ages: a Golden Age, a Silver Age, and a Bronze Age, followed by an Age of Heroes when lived Ajax, Achilles, and Odysseus, and ending in his own time with an Iron Age “when men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them.”

Hesiod’s scheme had no equal, until, within the lifetime of your author, Christian Thomsen, a Danish antiquarian, formulated a new hierarchy of ages based, not on Hesiod’s a priori reasoning, but upon the progression in man’s expertise and knowledge observed in the workmanship of the primitive tools and implements with which ancient man furnished and improved his circumstance. These tools, Thomsen saw, varied in nature and in form and by close study of the context in which they were found and by comparison one with another, he concluded that man has lived through three ages, each of which he named according to the material that chiefly furnished his tools, naming them thus:  stone, bronze, and finally, iron.

By either reckoning, our age is the age of iron and our only dilemma is whether to follow Hesiod and believe we have fallen, or Thomsen and believe we have risen from a more primitive past. Yet neither scheme quite answers our present circumstance, for both Hesiod and Thomsen date the beginnings of the Iron Age to the millennium before Christ and, plain as the page before you, our world no more resembles the world of the Bible than a chariot does a railroad locomotive. For this reason, I plead we must find a new name for our modern times, and claim, taking my cue from Hesiod, that man now dwells in an Iron Race.

In our time, iron girdles our land like the laces on a matron’s corset. Iron ploughshares rut and scour our fields, iron railroads quarter our land, telegraph wires cobweb our skies and iron ships plough our oceans and on our battlefields, iron cannon and iron rifle kill more in one day than Sparta’s army in a whole year of war. As the poet, Philip Lemming wrote; “In our passion for this black gold, The iron foundry ne’er grows cold, But pours and pours and pours again, Into the ever-lasting mould.”

Such is our lust for iron that we forget those among us for whom iron’s is a deadly embrace. Once, to have the gift of clearsight was thought more precious than gold, and kings and emperors sought the guidance of spaers, sibyls and starets at every turn. Those times are gone and few indeed maintain the old customs. And now, as iron threads its way to every corner of our land, those once lauded men and women are threatened to their very lives by iron’s malignant force. I humbly ask that as we garb ourselves in this modern age we do not squeeze the life from that which is far more ancient and more precious still. Let us leave a space in our hearts and in our land for wonder and for magick.

Tamburlaine Bryce MacGregor, Arbinger Abbey, Tweeddale, June 14th 1865

The Restoration of This Iron Race

Following Beresford and Lucas’s rejection of his manuscript for This Iron Race, MacGregor embarked on a lengthy process of revision to produce a new versions that would be both acceptable to his publisher and retain his core intentions. Primarily, MacGregor’s revisions involved the wholesale removal of certain passages and scenes and significant and minor alteration to many others. While the great majority of these alterations are detrimental to MacGregor’s original intentions, there are a number that improve the original and it seems that as he revised the work to satisfy his publisher he also made changes of his own. The production of this revised edition could not therefore be wholly a return to MacGregor’s original manuscript, but a process of discrimination between changes forced upon the author and those made of his own volition. Unfortunately, MacGregor did not distinguish between the two purposes when amending his manuscript and in attempting to create the text that MacGregor would have written had his publisher not interfered, the editor has relied on his own judgement far more than he would wish!

The changes forced on MacGregor were in three main areas. In particular, the freer expression MacGregor sought for emotions, and especially female emotion and sensuality, was almost entirely lost. As history proved, MacGregor was many decades ahead of his time and what he wanted to write would not become permissible in print until the early 1900s. So far have we come since that time, that what impresses now is not MacGregor’s explicitness but his modesty. The curtailment of MacGregor’s depiction of magick, particularly as practised by Eolhwynne, I have previously described. Clearly, his publisher’s interventions here were an attempt to align MacGregor’s work with the Church of Scotland’s hostility toward spaewifery, as expressed in the novel by the Bishop of Stirling when he upbraids Lord MacDonald and Sir David Mackenzie for maintaining spaewives in chapter three of book one. Curiously this scene survived Master Lucas and Sir Sidney’s interventions, but several scenes where Eolhwynne takes centre stage, particularly that where Eolhwynne lays a charm to protect her master and the scene where she provides a love charm for Mrs Pinsker caused a blizzard of exchanges between MacGregor and his publishers. (Though it would be nothing to that concerning a scene in Works of the Master when the Tsar’s starets, Lazarus, takes Eolhwynne’s virginity!) The magick arts are such an integral part of the narrative that it is understandable MacGregor struggled to accommodate his publisher’s changes, and critics noted the apparent imbalance in his depictions of Eolhwynne and Graciana A’Guirre, and reliance on coincidence to move the plot when he felt unable to depict magickal practices. Readers familiar with the standard text should be especially prepared for surprises when revisiting scenes concerning the magick arts, for the differences, both major and subtle, between MacGregor’s original text and the version in the 1864 first edition are nowhere more obvious or more numerous. Today the magick arts are enjoying a long awaited revival – if not yet toleration by the church – and MacGregor’s balanced argument concerning its use and abuse seems entirely proper.

Also lost from the 1864 edition were MacGregor’s footnotes. Not only did these add to the matters described in the text, but provided the work with an ‘authorial voice’. Their loss was not a result of disagreement between MacGregor and his publishers, but the need to reduce printing costs. This edition reinstates MacGregor’s footnotes, together with additions by the editor where thought necessary. The decline in the teaching of languages and the Classics, and the distance of nineteenth century politics and events, means much of the knowledge MacGregor took for granted among his readership can no longer be assumed and it is necessary to aid the modern reader. 

Finally, the editor wishes to thank the MacGregor estate and King James University for their kind assistance, and his agent and publisher for support and encouragement.