Flemington and Tales from Angus by Violet Jacob

Author:Violet Jacob [Violet Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847675422
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2009-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Violet Jacob herself remarks his apparently somewhat humourless, prim nature, but notes shrewdly: ‘But under all this must have lain some sharp contradictory streak like the crack of light through a split panel which had made him the first Laird of Dun since the days of the Superintendant to venture to rebel against the overwhelming Presbyterian tradition that had held the family’.12 There is here, perhaps, one clue as to the possible derivation of some of the numerous conflicts and dualities that haunt the novel.

The character of James Logie, David’s brother in the novel, also seems inspired by the character of David Erskine’s real-life elder brother, James (not younger as in the novel), a man of action, who fought all over Europe, not only with the Jacobites, but with Marlborough at Blenheim (and thus on different sides). Jacob had to use more imagination here than with David, for only a few bare facts are known of James, that suggest an adventurous, reckless character: he was always short of money and was disinherited by his family.13 Portraits of both men hang in the House of Dun, and Violet Jacob must have grown up with these images. Perhaps it is from seeing these and other family portraits that she conceived also the idea of making Flemington himself a portrait painter; but then again, she herself was a gifted artist, and there is, arguably, much of Violet Jacob herself in the young protagonist of the novel.

Other elements in Flemington are based on historical events. The taking of the Government sloop in the novel, as Violet Jacob remarks in her prefatory note, is drawn from a true incident, which she recounts in The Lairds of Dun; 14 only a few details have been altered. The original vessel was called ‘The Hazard’, not ‘The Venture’, as it becomes in the novel, and although James Erskine was one of the protagonists along with a man called David Ferrier, the real-life James was at the time of the events actually seventy-four and not thirty-seven, illustrating how much imaginative transformation has taken place.

Violet Jacob denies that the novel is ‘historical’, ‘none of the principal people in it being historic characters’,15 and it is true that she is not primarily interested in recreating past incidents or characters. Her TLS reviewer commented that Flemington is ‘in fact little concerned with history, save as the background to the action’. In this sense she is unlike novelists such as Galt or Scott, who revelled, amongst other things, in the minutiae of the past for their own sake. But clearly the novel does make use of history, and it is perhaps Jacob’s deep knowledge of, and involvement with, places, events and people that lends the novel some of its emotional power and air of veracity.

Yet if Flemington draws on the Scottish past, it is equally rooted in literature. Among the most important influences is that of Walter Scott, whose poetic works still line the shelves at the House of Dun. Several of the characters in Jacob’s novels echo figures from Scott’s fiction.

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