17th century

The 17th century is the novel’s defining historical setting for the Comprachicos, a wandering association that bought and sold children and altered them for public amusement. It is portrayed not as an isolated age of cruelty but as a period in which the treatment of people as property reached from commercial trades into the calculations of state power. The account also gives the century a charged narrative afterlife: its practices are said to fade from recognition even as their traces persist in law and memory.

The Comprachicos and the commerce in children

The novel describes the Comprachicos as famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the 18th, and unheard of in the 19th. Their name is explained as a Spanish compound meaning child-buyers; they are also called Comprapequeños. The distinction drawn in the text is that they bought and sold children rather than stealing them, making their trade part of a broader commerce in human beings rather than a form of kidnapping.

The narrator places this trade within a society that could treat children as commodities and entertainment. Sellers, the account says, ranged from impoverished fathers to masters disposing of people they held as slaves. It connects the Comprachicos’ business to the larger historical fact of slavery and argues that the century’s polished culture did not prevent its brutality. The contrast is deliberate: refinement and exploitation belong to the same social order.

Court politics and state use

Under the House of Stuart, the Comprachicos are described as having a place at court rather than being universally shunned. The account identifies King James II as a ruler who could use them for reasons of state, particularly when a family or line of inheritance obstructed political interests. In this telling, their ability to make a child unrecognizable offered a means of suppressing an heir without killing him: a person altered in childhood might pass through the world without being recognized as the person he had been.

The novel sets that practice beside other forms of human sale. It recalls the aftermath of the Monmouth rebellion, when people were executed under Jeffreys and their surviving wives and daughters were given by King James II to the queen, who sold them to William Penn. This is presented as part of a larger pattern in which people could be treated as purchasable resources. The parallel broadens the Comprachicos’ story from a history of one trade into an indictment of political and social arrangements that made human beings available to those with power.

Historical memory and the novel’s argument

The narrator presents the Comprachicos as a concealed but legible feature of the past. Their traces, it says, remain in the penal laws of Spain and England, like evidence that can still be discerned amid a confused legal record. The movement from 17th-century notoriety to later oblivion therefore does not mean that the underlying violence has been erased; rather, the account asks readers to recognize its surviving marks and its place in a history of slavery.

The period is also framed through a contrast between apparent civilization and cruelty. The novel calls the century great while describing its mixture of simplicity and ferocity, and places the trade in children within that contradiction. Its historical portrait is openly argumentative: rather than treating the Comprachicos as a bizarre exception, it presents them as an extreme expression of practices and powers that the surrounding society could tolerate or employ.

Knowledge, nature, and the narrator’s method

The book’s account of the century sits within a wider narrative that repeatedly tests explanations against uncertainty. In its discussion of snowstorms, the narrator distinguishes ordinary wind and waves from an invisible force it calls effluvium, and proposes that magnetic action helps explain storms and variations in the sea. These are presented as the narrator’s explanatory claims, not as settled modern science; their function is to make the natural world seem governed by forces that remain only partly understood.

Elsewhere, a speech by Ursus stages a contest between religious authority and empirical judgment: when told that the Bible denies that orpiment is poisonous, he answers that arsenic affirms it. That exchange does not establish a fact about the 17th century, but it echoes the novel’s broader interest in how authority makes claims to knowledge. Alongside its historical portrait of court and commerce, this tension gives the book’s past a double character: human institutions may conceal or authorize harm, while the causes of events in nature and society remain difficult to master.