Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells

In Smithfield, London, near the top of Shoe Lane, where poor Chatterton’s bones lie in a pauper’s grave, there stands an old inn, which had stood for nearly a century before Dr Johnson began spending long evenings there in 1760. Lord Nelson was said to take a table near the hearth now and then when he wasn’t at sea, and rumour has it that Nelson’s severed arm floated in double-refined brandy in an immense, sealed jar on a shelf above the taps. The jar (if the rumour had any truth in it) had disappeared long before the current proprietor, William Billson, bought the old edifice in 1862 and renamed it the Half Toad in honour of a whimsical ship’s figurehead that he had brought back from the West Indies, and which looks out onto Fingal Street today from its sacred perch above the inn’s arched door with its window of leaded, bull’s-eye glass. Billson is something of a street-corner historian, if you will, and as much a remnant of the previous age as is the inn itself.

I found myself staying at the Half Toad some few years back in the late autumn. I had a medical practice in Elm Grove, Southsea, but had left it in the capable hands of a locum. In truth, I had begun to grow weary of doctoring. I had once again taken up the pen and had come up to London to meet with an editor at The Graphic, hopeful that the sale of my newest literary endeavour might pay for the holiday, which was also to be a photographic expedition. (My literary endeavours paid for little in those days. It would be some time yet before I turned to the writing of crime stories and my fortunes would change. There is a certain wonderful freedom in being young and at the beginning of a literary career, when one’s “fortunes” are small but sometimes glorious.) The balance of my week in London was to be spent carrying out photographic experiments in Smithfield. I had brought along an ingenious portable darkroom and chemical laboratory contrived by Professor Cosmo Innes at the University of Edinburgh. Billson allowed me to quarter the thing in the inn’s storage room, which had an alley entrance to facilitate deliveries.

As for the editor at The Graphic, I’ll tell you plainly that he declined to purchase the piece, proclaiming it merely tedious, and so it paid for nothing at all. In a fit of pique I burnt the manuscript in the hearth at the Half Toad, perhaps wisely it seems to me now, since I had a waning attachment to it—an account of an indeed tedious voyage I had taken along the African coast in that ill-fated steamship Mayumba.

Still and all, I was happy to be in London. The Half Toad, as I said, is a cheerful relic of a bygone age. Oak wainscot panels the walls of the taproom, the oak a deep brown and with a lustre that only time and the elements can produce. The elements that constitute the weather of a good taproom—pipe smoke, wood smoke from the split beams burning in the hearth, smoke from the coals in the open oven where pheasants and joints of beef turn on spits, the heady smell of spirits and spilled ale, puddings boiling in the copper—influence the rich colour of the plastered walls and the wooden wainscot, just as the ocean wind and the fall rains influence the rough exterior of an old house in the Hebrides.

On the walls of the inn hang paintings of sailing ships—Spanish galleons, English sloops and frigates—each heavily framed in a style long past the fashion. The mild glow of gas lamps provides illumination, the lamps lit religiously at three o’clock in the afternoon by Lars Hopeful, the tapboy. On days when fog obscures the Smithfield streets, the taproom lamps burn through the day and into the evening, casting over the tables “a warm domestic radiance fit to eat by,” to quote Stevenson, who knew what he was about when he wrote on the subject of illumination.

To the right of the hearth, above the long mantel, hang two views of old Smithfield, taken from etchings by Hogarth that were rendered in 1732, or so says the date on the print, written in faded ink beneath the artist’s signature. One of the prints is a repellent portrayal of a gang of coiners being boiled to death in oil; the second a depiction of tilting, tumbledown houses beetling over Shoe Lane, with the workhouse and its graveyard at the dead end, such as it was in those old days, although perhaps it’s false to use that term, since the world was newer then.

I’ll reveal to you that the account I am about to relate occurred in the time of the illumination of London by electricity. A portion of Smithfield—the environs of Fingal Street and Shoe Lane—was to be honoured with this modern boon, the insulated wire already planted beneath the cobbles, ready to carry along its copper boulevards the promise of a glittering future. Lamplighters still tramped the streets of Smithfield on the day that I arrived at the inn, just as Lars Hopeful made his circuit around the interior of the Half Toad, but their day was passing away forever and would be a mere memory by the time I departed once again for Southsea. Still and all, there was an air of excitement generated by this modern notion of self-made stars, the great city garishly illuminated on the instant by a sleepy electrician depressing a lever. The actual depressing of the lever had been postponed in Smithfield several times, however, which meant only that it was imminent.

My goal was to photograph nighttime Smithfield in its final gaslit days, using the now-outmoded collodion, wet-plate method—a chemical wash painted onto glass photographic plates, the lengthy exposure increasing the clarity of the image, if indeed I got any image at all in the gaslight. It would be necessary to develop the photographs immediately, before the chemicals dried on the plates, hence the portable darkroom. And so I left the inn at one o’clock of a Saturday morning, trundling my barrow like a costermonger. Snug within the barrow lay the darkroom with its red lamp, along with chemical salts and liquid chemicals—the developing spirits, fixatives, washes—that were premeasured within glass beakers. Metal trays stood in racks; glass plates and plate holders with dark slides waited in niches. The collodion itself—guncotton and ether—must be mixed with the salts and poured carefully onto the photographic plate with both haste and care, then the plate must be laid in a sensitizing bath of silver nitrate. I had altered the chemical content of the bath with various additives to slow the liquid’s drying on the plate. I sought to increase exposure time that way, if only for a minute or two, and I had some hope of interesting results.

A half-moon rode above St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, the sky clear and starry around it, the air unseasonably warm—an auspicious night to be abroad, it seemed to me. I pushed my barrow up Shoe Lane in its modern guise to the site of the old Shoe Lane Workhouse, long since torn down, where I set about my activities across from the recently built Yeoman Public House, with its vast window of plate glass and its brass fittings. The new incandescent bulbs had been installed months ago—half a dozen along the lane, all of them dark and awaiting their chance for supremacy over the several gas lamps. The portable darkroom was open for business, so to say, as soon as I raised the tin panel on the side of my barrow, bent out the arms that supported the black-painted canvas tent, and switched on the red-tinted lamp, a modified Geissler tube illuminated by the power of a Ruhmkorff induction coil.

I prepared four glass plates in succession, loading them into the plate holders and then into the camera, exposing, removing, and developing each of them before carefully fixing the images with an odious solution of potassium cyanide. All of this took the better part of an hour, the bells of St. Bartholomew the Great tolling twice just as the fourth glass plate was dry. The moon had climbed higher into the sky now and shone on the cobbles in the street. The shop fronts and houses still lay in deep shadow except where they were illuminated by the gas lamps, which cast circles of soft light along the sidewalk. I wanted particularly to get the effect of the gaslight against the darkness around it, to see what I could see, as the sailor put it. I knew it was a tall order because the very business of photography wanted plentiful light. A full moon might have helped, but I hadn’t time to wait; the next full moon would look down upon a Shoe Lane illuminated by Joseph Swan’s incandescent bulbs.

I prepared and inserted another plate, adjusted the angle of the camera, peered through the lens, and removed the dark slide, surprised to see a pale orb of ivory-tinted light hovering in the air before the public house, very dim, as if someone were shining a lantern through a dirty window. The plate, of course, was already developing, and I didn’t dare remove my head from beneath the black drape for fear of spoiling the image. I was certain that the orb hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Was it mere gaslight, I wondered, shifted by a trick of reflection? The ground below it was dark, as if its light were absorbed immediately into the blackness around it. Indeed, the orb seemed to be haloed by a dark aura. I stood hunched over for long minutes staring at it in something like disbelief. This phenomenon, I’ll reveal, was what I had hoped for but scarcely expected—what had drawn me to Smithfield, with its colourful, bloody history and ancient crimes, and where Chatterton’s restless ghost, bearing traces of arsenic in its molecules, allegedly still haunted the midnight streets. The very atmosphere seemed to me to be heavy with the spirits of times past.

The glowing orb began slowly to rotate counterclockwise, a solid aura of black night around it. After the five minutes had passed, I ducked out from under the drape, surprised to see that the orb had utterly disappeared. I fancied that I could make out the dark aura when I looked at it out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t be certain. The image on the plate would be the only certainty. Once again I developed the plate and fixed the image, after which I made haste to prepare another. I shifted the camera toward the empty graveyard this time before slipping out the dark slide and looking through the lens. Three orbs of varying brightness were visible. Almost immediately, two others appeared, some small distance beyond the three. I could now hear what sounded distinctly like muttering in the air around me—perhaps my imagination, which, as you can imagine, was in a heightened state—but there was nothing to be seen minutes later when I had the opportunity to search for its source: the street was deserted, the buildings shuttered. I heard distant footsteps, and a man came into view from the direction of Fingal Street, then shortly disappeared again.

The muttering had faded for a moment, as if temporarily hidden by the sound of footsteps or blown away on the freshening breeze, but then it started up again, more various now, punctuated by laughter and what sounded like sobbing or people crying out—not voices engaged in conversation, mind you, but a rabble of voices overlaid, at cross-purposes, but originating where? Not in my mind, certainly, unless I had run mad. It seemed to me that a door on eternity had been opened, and I was hearing the long-silent voices of old Smithfield through countless speaking tubes. I’ll reveal that I was convinced—had been convinced from the moment I saw the first of the orbs—that the glowing spheres were supernatural, what are commonly called spirit lights. I mean to say that the nighttime lane was literally haunted. I continued to expose plates and fix the images, hastily now, abandoning my usual methodical and exacting standards.

It was well past two in the morning when I grew weary of my experiment. The sky was no longer clear, and the dew was beginning to fall. I determined to return tomorrow night at the same hour. So, putting away my camera and tripod, I closed up my darkroom and made my way back to the Half Toad, where I stowed the barrow. I let myself in through the front door, carrying the box of exposed plates with me to my room along with a basket of bread and cheese and two bottles of ale. I had no thought of sleep, but only of discovering what I had captured on the photographic plates. I lit the Argand lamp that stood on the broad wooden desk and held the first of my developed plates up before it.

What I saw was disheartening. In the darkness, or perhaps by some error committed in my haste, I had apparently botched the entire business, for the negative images were marred by a geometry of seemingly random lines. I had gotten the effect of a palimpsest, if you will, and I could think of no means of eradicating competing images without destroying them all. The orbs were visible on the plates, but that was my only bit of good fortune. The entire series was similarly spoiled, as if I had foolishly brought along already-exposed plates and had laid on new images over the old, although how the older images could have survived the several chemical baths was a mystery. It came to me that the chemicals I had contrived to increase exposure time might have created this effect of multiple images, perhaps through crystallization, although I wasn’t enough of a chemist to understand how.

In my anger I determined to return to Shoe Lane at once. The long day had turned into a series of defeats, and I was unhappy when I considered it, although mostly with myself and with a measure left over for the Fates. Abruptly I recalled pitching my manuscript into the fire in the taproom yesterday afternoon, and the anger was tinged with shame. Anger is seldom a useful emotion, and the more self-righteous the anger, the less useful it is. St. Bartholomew’s bell was once again tolling the hour, and the sound of it was wearying. I ate the bread and cheese, drank the last of my bottled ale, turned out the lamp, and went to bed.

I awoke late in the morning to a dark day with precious little to fill it, given that my mind was looking forward to midnight once again. I lit the lamp, contemplating the long hours ahead, and considered picking up The Pickwick Papers, which lay half-read on the desk. But the book held even less interest for me today than it had yesterday when I was similarly distracted. The desire to kill time is a criminal offence since we have little enough of it on this earth, but I very much wished to murder twelve hours of it in order to be about my business.

I compelled myself to examine one of the photographic plates from the box on the table. Strangely, the image on the glass was at least partly unfamiliar to me, which was both confounding and implausible. My first thought was that I had somehow neglected to look at this particular plate last night, but then I discovered that the other plates were similarly altered. The dark auras that had haloed the ghost orbs had stretched vertically, and although it might certainly have been my imagination, they seemed to have taken on the semblance of shrouded human figures. The Shoe Lane backdrops had resolved themselves into crosshatched patterns of lines, but the lines seemed to outline semidistinct buildings, if you will. I easily recognised the fairly solid Yeoman Public House, with its illuminated gas lamp, but beneath it there stood the ghost of yet another building, the Yeoman superimposed over it. Beneath that was a third structure, again a mere geometry of shapes, but certainly a building, and beneath that—or so it seemed to me—perhaps another: the entire plate was a stratification of competing images. For a long time I stood considering what it was I had captured, so to speak, on the surface of those glass plates.

I descended the stairs, taking the first of the plates with me. The lamps were already lit in the taproom, the fire burning in the hearth, Lars Hopeful swabbing the floor. I found William Billson pickling an immense salmon in the kitchen, and I watched him work for a moment, considering my words as he went about his business, dumping parsley and borage, salt and peppercorns, into a vast poacher, which was already on the boil. He laid the salmon atop it and moved the poacher to the back of the stove, wiping his hands on his apron.

“Coffee, Mr Doyle?” he asked, picking up the pot and pouring a cup before I’d had time to answer.

I took it from him gratefully. “You’ve been living hereabouts for some years, I believe, William?” I asked, knowing the answer well enough, but hoping to draw him out.

“Since I was a young lad, sir, when my father brought us to Smithfield—West Smithfield, we called it—from up toward Manchester. I don’t know the date. Must be coming on sixty years now.” He poked at the salmon in the poacher with his finger, indifferent to the hot liquid.

“That it was, sir. All the streets and lanes we called by something fanciful—Goose Alley, Duck Lane, Cow Cross Street. Some folks still call them so, but there hasn’t been a cow crossed through Smithfield for more than thirty years. Truth to tell, it could be right filthy in those old days, with the streets packed with animals around the old livestock market. The stink on a summer afternoon would bring tears to your eyes. When I came home from the West Indies, I scarcely knew it, for the changes.”

He shrugged. “Not so to say improved. Cleaner, leastways. But it’s what they like to call progress, no matter what William Billson thinks of it. My dad had passed away as well. He’d been sick with a canker—what the doctors call gangrene—and he suffered a great deal, or so I was told, me having been away at sea. His dying was a sort of progress, too, I suppose. No human animal should suffer that way, and his death was a blessing. And yet I can’t say that his death improved anything. A man remembers what was good in the world when something goes out of it, and mainly he regrets its passing, although perhaps I speak for myself. They say it’s best not to look back.”

He reached into the poacher now and drew the salmon out with his hands, laying it on the long block beside the stove to cool. “What’s that, then, Mr Doyle?” he asked, nodding at the photographic plate. “You’ve had some luck?”

“I don’t entirely know what I’ve got, Bill. I’ve come downstairs after your opinion. Last night, when I returned from my outing, I thought that I had spoiled my photographic plates, but now I’m not so certain. I was in Shoe Lane when I took this photograph, looking straight on at the Yeoman Public House, trying to get a glimpse of things in the gaslight.”

Billson took the plate from me and studied it, but he shook his head at what he saw. “The Yeoman’s naught but a tied house, owned by one of the big breweries. That’s progress again, or so they’ll tell you. I’m old-fashioned. I have no opinion of being told what I must be or what I must do. Henrietta serves that function well enough. I’m tied to her, you see. She’s off visiting her sister in Cliffe, and the place seems half-empty to me.”

“And thank God for all that,” I told him. “The Half Toad is as near to perfect as an inn can be this side of Heaven. My best wishes to Henrietta when she returns. But I was wondering about the laid-over images beneath the Yeoman, as it were. Do you make anything of them?”

He studied the plate for a long minute, then shrugged. “What I make of it don’t stand to reason, sir.”

“All right. I’d say this here looks like the old workhouse, or the ghost of it, which stood where the Yeoman stands, thereabouts. And this light standing before it is a haunt, to my mind—a corpse candle, some call them. I’ve seen them wandering the old streets now and then when I was out late.”

“That’s the way I see best, Mr Doyle. Not everyone sees them, though, only a few of us that’s been here for a time.”

“But you can’t have seen the workhouse, Bill, not unless you’re as old as Moses.”

“That’s so. It was gone years before we came down from Manchester, but Mr Hogarth did a fair representation there on the taproom wall.”

“Of course he did,” I nearly shouted, and went straightaway into the taproom, where luncheon was just then setting up. I hurried across to the hearth and studied the Hogarth depiction of Shoe Lane as it had been, and I saw straight off what Billson had seen on the photographic plate, although, as he said, the thing was patently impossible: it was the outline—the indistinct image—of the west end of the Shoe Lane Workhouse, sure enough, with the windows in place and an arch of some sort alongside. I stood staring at it in perfect silence, holding the glass plate near the etching, trying to cipher out the meaning of the phenomenon, how it had come to pass. But once again there was no explanation aside from madness, which would require that William Billson were as mad as I. I couldn’t vouch for myself, but Billson was perhaps the sanest man I knew. My earlier suspicion that the photographic plates were in some way defective was no longer a possibility. I knew very well what I was seeing, and I knew very well that I couldn’t be seeing it.

I hastened upstairs to my room, where I examined each of the plates in turn. All had developed similarly, it seemed to me, and by developed, I mean that over the course of the morning they had gone on developing, even though I had fixed the images on the plates many hours ago. Indeed, they were apparently fixed at the moment. I descended the stairs again and found Billson cutting his salmon into filets and laying them into a large earthenware crock. He poured the cooled cooking liquid over the top and added a handful of pickling spices before putting on the lid.

“Was I right?” he asked. I acknowledged that he was. He stood for a moment as if considering. “It’s a time of change, Mr Doyle,” he said at last. “The world and everything in it is moving on. As long as Henrietta and I have breath in us, the Half Toad will linger behind. We don’t have it in us to keep up with the world, nor the desire neither. Lord knows what will happen to the old inn when we’re gone. I’m main happy that I won’t live to see it.”

His words filled me with nostalgia in the old sense of the term—a mournful cognizance of things passing away, myself included. In a rush of emotion I decided that I would be happy to remain at the Half Toad forever and let the modern world carry on as it pleased. I would watch it through the window—catch glimpses of it now and then when the door opened onto Fingal Street.

But of course I could not. I took a late breakfast of boiled eggs, kippers, and cheese into the taproom and set it on Lord Nelson’s table before ascending the stairs yet again to fetch Pickwick, which now seemed unutterably vital to me. In my childhood I had inhabited the tail end of the Pickwickian world, which would soon, alas, exist only in the pages of the book that I took with me now down the stairs. In my sentimental mood I badly wanted to return to that world, at least for a time. I sat reading by the hearth throughout the afternoon and evening, now and then contemplating Hogarth, taking my supper there, no longer anxious to kill time, but rather to resurrect it. I didn’t look again at the photographic plates upstairs, although I was sorely tempted. As time drew on, the streets grew inordinately full of people, and those who entered the Half Toad were fairly bursting with the news that the new incandescent lamps were to be electrified that very night.

At ten o’clock, fearing that I would miss the tide if I waited, I took up my coat, went out onto Fingal Street, and fetched my barrow from the storeroom. Gaslight still burned along the street, flying in the face of the rumours. A wind had come up, and the moon hadn’t yet put in an appearance. The throngs were in a festive mood, which somehow made me sullen and melancholy.

“They’re a-going to light the city!” a man said to me. “The lord mayor’s come and is setting up for a speech.” The man was clearly not quite sober, but was also clearly joyous, as if lighting the city were the be-all and end-all of human happiness on earth.

So the hour is nearly upon us, I thought unhappily. I fetched my barrow and set off along Fingal Street, bound for Shoe Lane, privately cursing the throngs that barred the way. Indeed, they were more numerous as I drew closer to my destination. I determined to disregard them, and I set up my camera and darkroom in the graveyard itself, which was nearly empty of living people. A stage was set up in front of the Yeoman, where the lord mayor would speak, but I had no interest in it.

I set about my business, opening up the darkroom and preparing chemicals. During this quarter hour the rest of the lane was going about its business, the lord mayor addressing the throng as the gas lamps were symbolically extinguished, the world growing darker around us. No sooner had I inserted the plate holder with its dark slide into the camera than a great huzzah went up from the crowds, and although it might have been my imagination, in the moment of quiet that followed I heard a buzzing sound, like a hive of angry metal bees, and a sudden blinding glare drove out the darkness. Smithfield was electrified. Indeed, one of the incandescent lamps was fixed on a post above my darkroom, and I and the old graveyard round about me were bathed in its ugly white light.

I stood staring for a moment, listening to the cheering die away. Then I exposed the plate, seeing nothing through the lens but the nearby graves and the weedy ground round about. I determined to give the plate a full five minutes, hoping for the appearance of an orb, but soon people began to stroll among the graves, and the image was spoiled. Defeated, I removed the plate, slipped it back into its niche, methodically stowed my camera and put away the darkroom.

When I returned to the Half Toad, the taproom was empty of patrons. Billson was still up, making things shipshape after the long day, and when he saw me enter, he locked the door behind me, laid two logs onto the burned-down fire, and enlivened the flames with the bellows. He gestured toward the table at which I had spent the day. “Take a dram before you retire, sir, for the sake of old times.”

“If Henrietta was here, she’d make the old joke about you coming apart, sir. She never misses her chance.”

“I sorely wish she were here,” I said. “I’ll be with you in five minutes.”

What I found in my room was nothing and everything. Last night’s photographic plates had gone on developing, as I feared they would. The images had overlaid each other time and again, darkening the plates as they came into focus, until all had been obliterated. It seemed diabolically ironic that I was looking at Smithfield through the ages, successive images following one upon another, perhaps to prehistoric depths, until they compiled into utter blackness. I wondered who or what had been resurrected to put in a brief appearance on the plates before being buried again—Chatterton’s hearse rattling past; the poet Lovelace peering through the bars of the old prison; seven hundred successive years of Bartholomew’s Fair laid out along the banks of the Fleet River (now relegated to a brick-and-mortar sewer); the immolation of the martyrs; Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, hacked to death by the mayor of London himself; Roman Londinium, perhaps, Joseph of Arimathea carrying the Grail along the road to Glastonbury … I set the plate down on the table and descended the stairs once more.

“I’d be happy to take that drink now, Bill,” I said when I reentered the taproom—a statement that was as honest as any I’d ever uttered.

“Did you have more luck, then?” he asked, clearly referring to the photography. He poured neat whiskey into two glasses, and we sat down at the table.

“Well, Mr Doyle,” he said, raising his glass and looking through it at the firelight, “I give you a toast to tomorrow, which is always another day, as my old dad used to tell me.”

“Your father was a sage,” I said, and we clinked our glasses together and drank off the contents.

The street outside had grown quiet aside from the sound of the wind under the eaves; the moon looked out from among tearing clouds, and the familiar stars turned in the sky. The fine weather had vanished, and the north wind scoured the streets and byways of the great and ever-changing city, heralding a change in the seasons.

About “Smithfield”

Lightbulbs have been on my mind recently, what with the government getting set to outlaw incandescent bulbs. By the time you read this they’ll have become extinct, aside from stockpiles squirreled away in the garages and closets of loonies like me who are dedicated to the things and are staving off the coming drought. I’ve tried to be green-minded about it and have bought phenomenally expensive bulbs advertised to last ten years. Turns out they often last about two (I’ve clocked them), and also, the longer they last, the more they tend to cement themselves into the receptacle, so that they won’t unscrew without tearing up the works. Probably it’s the mineral salts afloat in the Southern California air. I was advised (seriously) to unscrew all of them every six months and then to screw them back in again. A doctor once suggested that I do the same thing to my head, but I tend to forget.

The newfangled bulbs are not only expensive, but they cast an ugly white light as opposed to the softer yellow-white light of incandescent bulbs. Cheaper models take about five minutes to fully illuminate. I saw an advertisement recently for a compact fluorescent bulb that mimics an incandescent, but I can’t afford such a thing without taking out a home-equity loan. Someday, when the price comes down, I’ll spring for them. In any event, I like the warmer ambience of the incandescent bulb, and I like unfashionable words such as newfangled. Every once in a while I find someone who knows just what I’m talking about in that regard, but most often my dedication to incandescent bulbs elicits blank stares, something like when people see that I’ve got a houseful of books and helpfully suggest that I might put the whole lot of them onto an electronic reader and haul the paper copies to the dump.

It was a good thirty years ago that I first read and admired Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “A Plea for Gas Lamps.” “Such a light as this,” he wrote of incandescent light, “should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror.” Being artistically dedicated to incandescent light (not having been alive during the halcyon days of gaslight), I had always felt exactly that way about fluorescent lighting—the hideous white light, the flickering, the buzzing of the ballast box—part of the loathsome, utilitarian fixtures of the typical school classroom. No wonder students have a nervous urge to flee. I was building my own lamps back when I read the Stevenson essay, searching out old glass shades and handwrought chain at antique stores. I hung two of them in my office at the university where I teach, which was already equipped with fluorescent lights on the ceiling. “These old lamps have to go,” I was told by a perplexed man from University Services who clearly had me pegged as a crackpot and a radical. “Immediately,” I told him. That was a couple of years ago, and the lamps are still there, but one day soon, I suppose, when I’m asleep at my desk, the door will fly open, I’ll be hosed down with pepper spray, the lamps will be torn out by the roots, and like a character in a Kafka story, I’ll discover that my office actually sits “along the corridors of a lunatic asylum.”

I believe it was in Science magazine that I read an article concerning discoveries made by Israeli scientists studying the physics of the paranormal: it turns out that ghosts (of which my own house has had its share) simply cannot tolerate fluorescent light. It’s well-known that knowledgeable priests can accomplish more with fluorescent light than with holy water if it’s exorcism that they have in mind. Now that I think of it, I was also an avid reader of the Weekly World News for some years. A great deal of what I know about the world can be laid at their interesting doorstep and might account for my having mixed up my sources here.

It seems to me that what Jules Verne called “the harnessing of electricity” has everything to do with the old world’s passing away and the advent of the new. It was one of those tides in the affairs of men, to take some liberties with Shakespeare, and a thoroughly despotic tide at that. I’m attracted to Dickens and Stevenson, among other writers, at least partly because of the gaslight that illuminates their worlds, literally and figuratively. Arthur Conan Doyle looked backward in that regard. I’m also fond of a wood fire in the fireplace rather than cement logs with flames shooting out of a pipe, and I’m fond of a picket fence built of lumber rather than plastic, and I like the smell of old paper when I pull a book down from the shelf and smoke from a bonfire at the beach at night, despite the irritating fact that the smoke will chase you around the fire pit.

I’m not at all fond of the idea that the world as I’ve come to know it is passing away.