1848

The year 1848 marks Randolph Henry Ash’s marriage to Ellen Best, the culmination of a courtship that had lasted fifteen years. It also anchors Mortimer Cropper’s later reconstruction of the newlyweds’ journey through France. In the novel’s layered account, the date connects private commitment with the work of biography: the past is approached through surviving letters, remembered landscapes, and the journeys later scholars retrace.

Courtship and Marriage

Ash had loved Ellen for fifteen years before she, or her family, consented to marriage. Ellen’s acceptance came after a period shaped by religious scruples, her father’s concerns about Ash’s ability to support a wife, and her own doubts about the tendencies of Ash’s poem Ragnarök. The surviving courtship letters are described as painfully few, in part because Ellen’s sister Patience had intervened after her death. They suggest that Ellen was not flirting with Ash, but do not show that her affections were deeply engaged at the time.

By the time Ellen accepted him, she was thirty-six, a mature woman devoted to her nephews and nieces. Her younger sisters, Patience and Faith, had made advantageous and happy marriages while Ellen remained unmarried. The account therefore places the wedding against a complicated background of affection, religious conviction, family judgment, and the social circumstances of a woman who had remained single into adulthood.

Ash’s patience is set beside his belief that poetic love could be directed toward a real, embodied woman rather than an allegorical figure. He held that Petrarch’s Laura and Dante’s Beatrice, among other objects of courtly devotion, had been actual women loved in life. In his argument, poetic imagination and love could not be abstracted from the warmth and particularity of an individual. This conviction gives the long wait for Ellen a literary as well as biographical context, without resolving what either spouse felt at the moment of marriage.

The Wedding Journey

In the summer of 1848, Randolph and Ellen travelled from England to France. They crossed the Channel in a storm aboard a packet-boat, continued to Paris by carriage, and then took the railway to Lyon. From Lyon they went down the Rhône by boat to Aix-en-Provence. Their journey was marked by lashing rain.

Cropper later reconstructed the route, following the Ashes by car and arranging passage on a timber cargo-boat for the river journey. His crossing took place in bright sunshine rather than the rain recorded for the original trip. He stayed at the Ashes’ hotel in Aix and retraced their excursions, culminating in a visit to the Fontaine de Vaucluse, where Petrarch had lived in solitude while contemplating his love for Laure de Sade.

The fountain makes the journey more than a sequence of transport links. The novel’s account connects the site to Petrarch, whose sonnets to Laura are thought to have influenced Ash’s poems to Embla, and to Ash’s interest in love as an attachment to particular people. The natural setting thus enters the biographical record as both a place visited by the newlyweds and a landscape later interpreted through literary association.

A Date Reconstructed

Cropper’s account of the 1848 journey turns travel into a method of literary biography. He retraces routes, hotels, and excursions, then uses what he observes to shape his account of Ash. The difference between the couple’s rain-soaked voyage and Cropper’s sunny passage underscores the limits of reconstruction: a later scholar can follow a route and examine a landscape, but does not thereby reproduce the original experience.

The date also appears within the novel’s broader interest in how evidence survives and how much it can establish. Sparse courtship letters offer only a partial view of Ellen and Ash; Cropper’s repeated journeys add places and circumstances, but remain later acts of interpretation. 1848 therefore signifies both a marriage and the beginning of a story that subsequent readers and scholars try to recover without mistaking reconstruction for complete knowledge.