Scottish book of the week

This is a meticulously researched nonfiction work from an historical novelist intrigued by her own family history

– in particular, the murder of her greatgreat uncle outside a pub in Leeds on Christmas Night, 1881.

Author Catherine Czerkawska knew very little about this traumatic event, but as she investigated, what she found is a damning indictment on Victorian society and “morals”, for its treatment of the poor, vulnerable and dispossessed.

There are two narratives to this book. The author’s own family story, and the attitudes of the time to the Irish (and Scottish), that are eye-watering in their casual cruelty, racism and prejudice. It is revelatory, I’d suggest even to those who believe they know of the deprivations migrants suffered in newly-industrialised regional England in the late 1800s.

But, let’s start with the murder. A silly quarrel in a pub late on Christmas Day, between two poor, illiterate labourers, saw John Manley stabbed in the neck by John Ross. He bled to death in minutes, witnessed by his horrified younger sister, Elizabeth.

In her research Catherine Czerkawska discovers the suffering spread far wider, fashioned as it was within a desperate clutch of human misery.

The starving, destitute Irish who were driven by famine and poverty from their own lands lived in total squalor in England, the shocking overcrowding and lack of sanitation, coupled with a hostile reception is horrific, and eerily prescient if you look at events unfolding today.

The immigrants were in an impossible situation. Forced to work or starve, their filthy surroundings earned the disgust of the English middle class (and the likes of Engels, whose words are particularly repugnant).

In short, they were blamed for their situation, it being seen as a product of their worthlessness – certainly not as something the good and decent of society allowed to happen and even profited from.

While this book is not light reading, it is easy to read; a clear, clean style of writing coupled with an assiduous vocabulary. A playwright as well as a novelist, the author was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize for The Curiosity Cabinet, which was serialised on BBC radio.

This is an intensely personal book, which at times is its curse as well as its blessing. The author spends much time on conjecture, on whatifs, imagining people’s situations, and at times this distracts from rather than adds to the narrative.

But her historical research is excellent, and she brings 19th Century Glasgow and Leeds to life, along with an inevitable comparison to the increasingly alarming times in which we live in the 21st Century.

Review by Gillian Lord. 7/10