19th century

The nineteenth century in Possession is not merely a backdrop: it is a world encountered through inherited objects, family testimony, literary works, and incomplete archives. Its history reaches the present through the competing acts of preservation and interpretation, while the lives of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte remain partly legible through the records left behind.

Material History and Family Inheritance

Mortimer Cropper recalls childhood in a household where objects made the past tangible. His father, a Harvard-trained theologian whose periods of depression prevented him from pursuing a profession, spent his more lucid days cataloguing the family treasures. The system eluded him; chronology would have been simple, but his mind did not tend toward simplicity. He invited his son to regard the collection as history held in the hand.

Among those objects were portraits and signed photographs of nineteenth-century figures, including works by Richmond and Watts and photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron. Many had been presented to or solicited by Cropper’s great-grandmother, Priscilla Penn Cropper. They later formed the nucleus of the Stant Collection’s portrait section at Robert Dale Owen University, where Mortimer became chairman. The collection therefore links domestic memory to institutional scholarship: objects that once shaped a child’s imagination become the basis of an organized public archive.

Priscilla’s life also connects the nineteenth century’s reform movements to the Croppers’ material fortunes. A Maine-born daughter of abolitionists who had housed escaped enslaved people, she spoke for women’s emancipation and participated in other movements. She believed in mesmeric healing and spiritualist experiments, and hosted the visionary Andrew Wilson, who claimed to converse with the spirits of Swedenborg, Descartes, and Bacon. Her patent medicine, Priscilla Penn’s Regenerating Powders, made her fortune; that fortune built Everblest House. The family’s prosperity thus grew out of a mixture of reformist conviction, spiritual experimentation, and commercial success.

Movements, Migration, and Memory

Family history preserves the uncertain beginnings of the Cropper settlement in New Mexico. Mortimer D. Cropper lost a Palladian mansion in Mississippi during the American Civil War; his son Sharman travelled north in search of a living. According to family legend, Sharman joined Priscilla’s following after hearing her address an open-air meeting on Fourierist principles, including the pursuit of free passion and pleasure. In 1868 he came to New Mexico with a group attempting to found a phalanstery. Some members had previously belonged to splinter communities associated with Robert Owen and his son Robert Dale Owen.

The account is explicit about the limits of this inheritance: whether Sharman was moved by conviction or opportunity is unknown. The nineteenth century therefore arrives not as a settled chronology but as a blend of documented lives, family legend, and gaps that interpretation cannot close. The uncertainty matters because the same tension between evidence and inference shapes the later recovery of Ash’s life.

Ash’s Life in the Historical Record

Cropper’s scholarship turns Ash’s nineteenth-century journeys into a route that can be followed and compared with the poet’s writing. He retraced Ash’s 1859 walking tour of the North Yorkshire Moors and coast, including its amateur marine study, and later followed him to Amsterdam, The Hague, and Iceland. There Cropper considered the landscapes associated with Ragnarök, a poem of Victorian doubt and despair, and Ask to Embla, a sequence of love lyrics published in 1872 but written much earlier, possibly during Ash’s courtship of Ellen Best.

Cropper also reconstructed Ash and Ellen’s 1848 wedding journey. Their route had taken them across the Channel, on to Paris, by railway to Lyon, and down the Rhône to Aix-en-Provence. By retracing it, Cropper made travel itself part of his biographical method: the poet’s itinerary became a material record against which poems and recollections could be read. His earlier travels had also taken him to the Breton coast, where the geography of Ash’s life extended beyond the better-known journeys.

Marriage, Evidence, and Interpretation

The surviving record of Ash and Ellen’s courtship is fragmentary. Ellen’s sister Patience appears to have been involved in the loss of some letters after Ellen’s death, leaving only a few documents. Those that remain suggest that Ellen was not flirting with Ash, though her affections were not deeply engaged at first. Religious doubts about Ragnarök and concerns about Ash’s ability to support a wife complicated the courtship; Ellen also faced the circumstance of seeing her younger sisters make marriages while she remained unmarried.

The account distinguishes evidence from speculation about the marriage. Ash’s poetry displays knowledge of sensuality, but no surviving record establishes an early affair or later misconduct; as far as the evidence shows, he remained a devoted suitor. Ellen described him as considerate, a statement the narrator presents as open to interpretation rather than proof of an uncomplicated private life. The historical portrait consequently depends not only on what survives but on how cautiously the gaps are read. Nineteenth-century lives emerge through objects, poems, travel records, and a small number of letters, with uncertainty remaining part of the history rather than a defect that can simply be repaired.