1960s

The 1960s are a period of movement and professional change in the novel’s retrospective account of Mortimer Cropper and Beatrice Nest. Cropper follows Randolph Henry Ash’s routes across Iceland and publishes his research; Nest teaches students through changing decades and makes a small book about the domestic lives of writers’ wives the basis of an academic career.

Cropper’s Icelandic Expeditions

Cropper’s research is built not only from documents but from following Ash through the landscapes associated with his work. He had first retraced Ash’s 1859 walking tour of the North Yorkshire Moors and coast, combining solitary walking with amateur marine biology, and returned to the route in 1949. Later he travelled to Amsterdam and The Hague, and walked in Ash’s tracks in Iceland, observing geysers and circles of boiling mud.

The Icelandic journeys connected geography with poetry. Cropper considered the landscape alongside Ragnarök, Ash’s epic of Victorian doubt and despair, and Ask to Embla, a sequence of enigmatic love lyrics published in 1872 but written much earlier. He published his biography, The Great Ventriloquist, in 1969, after undertaking Ash’s major journeys. His title came from one of Ash’s teasing monologues of self-revelation or self-parody.

A Scholarly Rivalry over Evidence

Cropper’s fieldwork also enters the professional rivalry with James Blackadder. Blackadder wrote that Cropper’s discoveries about the Icelandic landscape gave him no reason to revise his note on Ask to Embla III. Cropper, who had travelled extensively in Ash’s footsteps, had expected Blackadder to dismiss his observations; he regarded Blackadder’s attention to them as characteristically slow, arriving only as Blackadder worked through the scholarly edition.

The contrast is between scholarship grounded in travel and scholarship pursued at a remove. Cropper’s Icelandic observations, made in the 1960s, were one part of a much broader effort to reconstruct Ash’s movements. His later account of the Fountain at Fontaine de Vaucluse similarly drew on a journey that retraced Randolph and Ellen Ash’s 1848 wedding trip. In the novel’s portrait, place is not merely background to literary study: it becomes evidence Cropper seeks to inhabit and bring back into print.

Beatrice Nest’s Teaching and Book

For Beatrice Nest, the decade belongs to a longer period of teaching and intellectual work. At Professor Bengtsson’s urging, she compared Ellen Ash’s wifely qualities with those of Jane Carlyle, Lady Tennyson, and Mrs Humphry Ward. Bengtsson required evidence of her suitability for a post; over two years, Nest wrote Helpmeets, a small book about the daily lives of wives of genius. It earned her an assistant lectureship, bringing pleasure as well as fear.

Nest’s classes followed literary form and changing ideas about women. She discussed the sonnet, the lyric, and women’s changing image with students whose styles marked the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies. The novel remembers these as good days, setting the energy of the classroom against the bad days that came later and preceded her early retirement.

A Decade Seen in Retrospect

The 1960s do not form a single, continuous present in the narrative. Cropper’s work is recounted retrospectively through his journeys and the publications that followed them; Nest’s teaching history is likewise compressed into a view across several decades. This difference in scale places the decade between the specific labor of field research and the longer institutional life of teaching.

The two trajectories also complicate what counts as scholarly achievement. Cropper makes Ash’s travels part of his biographical method, while Nest’s work begins with the domestic lives of writers’ wives, a subject that yields no doctoral thesis but secures her a lectureship. Together their stories make the period a measure of how literary knowledge is produced: through travel and observation, but also through attention to lives and forms of labor that conventional accounts can leave at the margins.