Historical Note

In 1865, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the first American poet to achieve true international acclaim, began a Dante translation club in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. The poets James Russell Lowell and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the historian George Washington Greene, and the publisher James T. Fields collaborated with Longfellow to complete the country’s first full-length translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The scholars withstood both literary conservatism, which protected the dominant position of Greek and Latin in academia, and cultural nativism, which sought to limit American literature to homegrown works, a movement stimulated but not always spearheaded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend to Longfellow’s circle. By 1881, Longfellow’s original “Dante Club” had been formalized as the Dante Society of America, with Longfellow, Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton as the organization’s first three presidents.

Although prior to this movement some American intellectuals showed familiarity with Dante, gained mostly from British translations of the Comedy, the general public had remained more or less unexposed to Dante’s poetry. The fact that an Italian text of the Comedy does not appear to have been printed in America until 1867, the same year Longfellow’s translation was published, provides one reflection of the expansion of interest. In its portrayed interpretations of Dante, this novel attempts to remain historically faithful to its featured figures and their contemporaries rather than to our own accustomed readings.

The Dante Club, in some of its language and dialogue, incorporates and adapts portions of the poems, essays, novels, journals, and letters of the Dante Club members and those closest to them. My own visits to the Danteans’ estates and their environs, as well as various city histories, maps, memoirs, and documents further assembled 1865 Boston, Cambridge, and Harvard University. Contemporary accounts, especially the literary memoirs of Annie Fields and William Dean Howells, imparted an indispensable direct window onto the daily lives of the group and find a voice in the narrative texture of the novel, where even passing characters are drawn, whenever possible, from historical personages that could have been present in the events narrated. The character of Pietro Bachi, Harvard’s disgraced Italian instructor, actually represents a composite of Bachi and Antonio Gallenga, another early teacher of Italian in Boston. Two members of the Dante Club, Howells and Norton, greatly informed my perspective through their accounts of the group, although they find only brief occasion to appear in the present story.

The Dante-derived murders themselves have no counterpart in history, but police biographies and city records document a sharp rise in New England’s murder rate immediately following the Civil War, as well as widespread corruption and underhanded partnerships between detectives and professional criminals. Nicholas Rey is a fictional character, but he faces the very real challenges of the first African-American policemen in the nineteenth century, many of whom were veterans of the Civil War and were of mixed racial backgrounds; an overview of their circumstances can be found in W. Marvin Dulaney’s Black Police in America. Benjamin Galvin’s war experience derives from the histories of the 10th and 13th Massachusetts regiments as well as firsthand accounts from other soldiers and from reporters. My exploration of Galvin’s psychological state was especially guided by Eric Dean’s recent study, Shook over Hell, which emphatically demonstrates the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder in Civil War veterans.

Though the intrigue that consumes the characters of the novel is entirely fictitious, one might note an undocumented anecdote from an early biography of the poet James Russell Lowell: On a certain Wednesday evening, it is said, a disquieted Fanny Lowell refused to allow her husband to walk down the street to Longfellow’s Dante Club session until the poet had agreed to bring his hunting rifle along to the meeting, citing as her concern an unspecified crime wave that had reached Cambridge.