They drive up to Stowe’s “bad weather entrance” and step “bone-dry straight into an underground cavern.” It’s a place whose corridors are all “stony white” and lined with ghoulish statues and “racks of guns…. For one of her characters is a man named Andrew Bogle, born enslaved on the Hope Estate, a man whose labor, like that of his parents, paid for a part of that extravagant house.īogle is “Taken off the Country” in 1826 and brought to England as a page by Edward Tichborne, the plantation’s overseer, who one rainy day takes him along on a visit to his employer. It’s still cited in law schools, but within that story Smith found an even bigger one, a nugget of narrative that begins in Jamaica and takes her on to Stowe. 2 It is a historical novel, the kind of book that she suggests she’s spent her career avoiding, and it concerns the notorious case of the Tichborne Claimant, a Victorian scandal about class and money and a supposed long-lost heir. Smith’s characteristically expansive new novel, The Fraud, works by indirection, and it takes her a while to approach the subject that in a recent New Yorker essay she says got her going. Or as Zadie Smith once wrote in these pages, “The only thing I ever learned about slavery during my British education was that ‘we’ ended it.” It was a history as hidden as that ha-ha itself, and allowed one to gaze across that green and pleasant land in “perfect oblivion.” 1 Hidden until one knows where to look for its enormity Stowe’s ha-ha runs for miles. Still, such facts about the source of so much British wealth have not, until lately, found much space in the national consciousness. None of that should surprise us, not if we’ve read Mansfield Park, in which Sir Thomas Bertram’s English fortune depends on his ownership of Antiguan slaves. At the same time his nephew, the owner of Stowe and by then a duke, fought against abolition and used the profits of the Hope Estate, a Jamaican sugar plantation, to help fund a series of elaborate architectural fancies. In the early nineteenth century a member of the family worked in Parliament for the trade’s suppression. The Temples first got rich on sheep, but a recent report by the National Trust, which now owns and manages the property, suggests that Cobham may also have profited from the trade in people. What I didn’t see, know, or read about was the connection this place had to slavery. At Stowe I saw a real one, and I remember it because my daughter asked about it. I knew about such things already, for a ha-ha figures in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. But the only thing that sticks in my mind is the ha-ha, the hidden fence that was designed to preserve an unbroken view, an illusion of pastoral, even as it kept the animals in the surrounding park from straying into the gardens. That was a kind of joke, “Temple” being the family name of the first Viscount Cobham, who called this eighteenth-century landscape into being. The house was closed, that much I know, but we’d come for the gardens, and today a few keystrokes give me some images I recognize: a footbridge we crossed, a series of so-called temples at which we lingered. I don’t remember much about our day at Stowe, whether it was rainy or dry, where we parked, what the road from Oxford was like.
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