Here you can find a copy of the Historical Notes that accompany The Doctrines of Fire, A Treatise of Air, The Chronicles of Earth, and A Codex of Metal.
Caution: These historical notes are featured at the end of each book, so therefore may contain spoilers.
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THE DOCTRINES OF FIRE
Some of this actually happened. No, seriously.
The personal and ideological conflict between John Brown and William Cullen was very real—though arguably it never got as bad as depicted in my story! The trajectory of their friendship and the events that catalysed its rupture happened much the way I portrayed them here, though the timeline of said events has been massaged slightly in the interest of plot. The eminently readable biography by Guenter B Risse, Explaining Brunonianism: A Biography of Edinburgh’s Master of Conviviality (2020) brings together the sometimes-contradictory accounts of John Brown’s life.
Robert Anderson is the foremost expert on Joseph Black, and his edited Correspondence of Joseph Black contains illuminating footnotes and contextualisation to his letters. The appendix contains Black’s household accounts, informing me which teas he kept in stock. Today Black is celebrated as a chemist, but in his own time he may have been seen more as a physician. He certainly kept a small but active practice throughout his life. Many of Black’s letters are kept at the University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections—they are written in this luscious dark ink.
The Cullen Project is an effort led by the University of Glasgow to digitise Cullen’s voluminous medical correspondence. William Cullen and the eighteenth century world (1990) also shines a light on Cullen’s teaching and medical research.
Andrew Duncan Senior: Physician of the Enlightenment (2010) examines the principled career of Duncan, and casually pointed out that he was a long-time participant in the Beggar’s Benison. To the best of my knowledge, the Beggars didn’t conduct secret orgies on Tuesday nights…but with a few internet searches you can see for yourself what they got up to in their regular meetings! Just don’t use your work computer. The Beggar’s Benison (2001) by David Stevenson does a good job of separating fact from salacious fiction.
For a scholarly overview of the Georgian era, Penelope Corfield’s The Georgians (2022) proved helpful. Her 2017 paper From Hat Honor to the Handshake: Changing Styles of Communication in the Eighteenth Century delved into the thorny issue of handshakes versus bowing versus hat tipping.
Digging into the details of Georgian life involved A New and Easy Method of Cookery (1755) by Elizabeth Cleland, which was more vegetarian-friendly than I expected, and A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788) for some insults that deserve to return to popular usage.
Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh 1660–1760 (1994) by RA Houston summarises the political and social forces at work during the decades Edinburgh transformed from squalid medieval town…to squalid capital of the Enlightenment.
The history of the University of Edinburgh and the ‘Tounis College’ can be found in Building knowledge: An architectural history of the University of Edinburgh (2017).
Descriptions of Monro’s old and new anatomy theatre layouts were found in the article The Academy of St Luke, Edinburgh – at work c.1737 by Joe Rock. By 1779, Black was running out of space to hold his classes and forced to share space with other professors while his new laboratory was being built. However, Monro had almost certainly moved out of his old basement anatomy theatre by this point to the new extension. You have to admit, it makes a good setting, though.
A Guide for Gentlemen studying at the University of Edinburgh (1792) tells us what courses students took, and the recommended order of classes. The Diaries of Sylas Neville (1950) and letters of Samuel Bard (available online), give us insight into daily lives of medical students and their relationships with Cullen, Black, Monro, Brown and Duncan. Neville was rather shocked when Black sang at a medical society dinner.
Although much of Doctrines of Fire is based on historical research, my goal is to tell an entertaining story, with interesting characters. The Doctrines shouldn’t be taken as an accurate depiction of events and real historical figures, and I hope experts of the period will forgive any errors—stylistic or careless—contained herein.
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A TREATISE OF AIR
Some of this actually happened. Sort of.
In 1794 a woman called Mrs Elizabeth Fulhame published An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous. In it, she described over a decade’s painstaking chemical research developing metallic fabrics dyes. Thanks to her observations, she was able to describe the act of catalysis—water speeding up a chemical reaction without itself being consumed—forty years before it was “discovered” and named by Bergus. A few of her metallic salts proved to be light sensitive, and she was credited by William Herschel as laying the groundwork for photography.
Despite these achievements, for all we know of the real woman, Elizabeth Fulhame may have been a magic-wielding, horse-stealing crime fighter. We know more about her husband Thomas—a medical student at the University of Edinburgh—than the chemistry pioneer herself. We don’t know her maiden name, when she married Thomas Fulhame, or even if she was Irish. Her fiery, feminist Essay is all we have of her voice.
I created this fictionalised heroine from the bones of the historical record. We know Thomas Fulham(e) came from Navan in Meath county, where he had a complicated relationship with his brother Patrick. We know Thomas enjoyed unusual stature with Joseph Black: he took Black’s chemistry course several years in a row, and Black’s correspondence shows Thomas carrying out business on Black’s behalf in London, and Black recommending Thomas’ own chemical projects to his government contacts. Reaction to Elizabeth the chemist was mixed even in her own time: it is clear from the introduction to her Essay that she corresponded with and was encouraged by numerous philosophers, even though her husband considered her goals “improbable.” Some reviewers lauded her Essay, some found it more titillating than edifying, and others called it “frivolous and womanish.” It is guesswork on my part that Black supported her…though I’ll note he was one of the few men in Britain to acquire a lump of platina (platinum), and Elizabeth recorded trying platina as one of her metallic dyes. Given that she was the wife of a not-very-successful doctor, I’m not sure she could have afforded to buy the metal on her own.
Two real events depicted in this book have been brought closer together than they occurred in reality. The first British air balloon flight did take place in Edinburgh in August 1784. Its pilot James Tytler was every bit as complicated and extraordinary as I’ve depicted him here, and he also failed to achieve widespread recognition for his accomplishments.
Several years later, the Board of Trades asked Black to evaluate a lucrative turkey red dyeing procedure smuggled off the Continent by an opportunistic Frenchman. Moreau is a fictionalised version of the real individual. Black’s chemical consultancy work took up a lot of his time throughout his teaching career, and Adam Smith was one of his closest friends.
Ramsay Gardens remains a striking feature on the Edinburgh skyline, though its brightly-coloured houses are a remake and extension of the original buildings that sat on this site in the 18th century. The original Ramsay Lodge had one less floor, making Thomas’ escape slightly more plausible. I relied on watercolours and sketches from the Edinburgh Capital Collections to imagine how the building would look in the 1780s.
Lastly, the grocer-cum-locksmith “Georgie” made a second attempt to break into the Excise Office in 1788…only this time he and his crew weren’t so lucky. George Smith is less well-known today than the gang’s ringleader Deacon William Brodie, whose duplicitous life as a gambler, thief and reputable townsperson inspired RL Stevenson to write The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Through such tales, legends are made.
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THE CHRONICLES OF EARTH
Some of this actually happened. Unfortunately.
On the 7th March 1785, Joseph Black surprised the Edinburgh scientific community by presenting the first half of a geological paper to the Royal Society on behalf of James Hutton. We don’t know why Hutton did not present the paper himself: could it have been nerves? An unexpected illness? The historical record is silent. Fortunately, as you now know, by the time of the next meeting in April Hutton was able to present the concluding half of his paper. That was my jumping-off point into the life of James Hutton and the accompanying What Ifs?
The Man Who Found Time by Jack Repcheck is a phenomenal biography of Hutton and distillation of the Enlightenment forces that shaped him. A more concise, pop science, treatment of Hutton’s theories can be found in A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The chapter on Hutton I consider one of the funniest pieces of science writing I’ve come across, and it probably sparked my interest in the eccentric geologist when I first read it in my teens. As a novelist, I think about this line from Bryson a lot: “Encouraged by his friends to expand his theory, in the touching hope that he might somehow stumble onto clarity in a more expansive format, Hutton spent the next ten years preparing his magnum opus.” Isn’t that what all authors hope for?
The other real historical figure who inserts himself into the story is Dr James Graham: arguably, the world’s first sex therapist. Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed by Lydia Syson recounts his trans-Atlantic medical career and subsequent evolution into celebrity and quack theories. Electrical demonstrations were a popular form of entertainment at the time. He’s a man very much of the Georgian era.
Panmure House and St Cecilia’s Hall are still in operation today, in much the same capacities they occupied in the eighteenth century. While Adam’s Smith home is not preserved as a historical site, I was fortunate to look inside during an annual Edinburgh Open Doors Day. Hutton is memorialised by ‘Hutton’s Section’ at the edge of Salisbury Crags where he studied rock formations, and a memorial garden in Pleasance where his house once stood.
If you head out of Edinburgh and past Haddington one weekend (like I did) you won’t find “Grangemore estate”…but you might come across Amsfield Walled Garden, once the largest walled garden in Georgian century Britain, now maintained by volunteers. The accompanying Amsfield House was demolished in 1928 and is now the site of a golf course.
Eat the rich, indeed.
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A CODEX OF METAL
Some of this actually happened.
As I’ve said before, Elizabeth Fulhame was a real person, who discovered the principles of catalysis and photography. An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous was published in 1794. The early photographer William Herschel was familiar with her experiments, and credits her work with light-sensitive nitrate salts as underpinning his own. While a plethora of historical information exists concerning Joseph Black and his male contemporaries, we know next to nothing about Elizabeth’s life. We know that she received some acknowledgement for her discoveries during her lifetime—she was made an honorary member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society in 1810—but the scant records we have suggest a tragic, ignominious end for such a pioneer.
My hope in writing these stories is two-fold: that more people learn about Fulhame, and that through fiction I can give her a happier story. The timing of certain real events featured in this story have been massaged to fit the narrative.
That said, the incident with Patrick Fay is not made up. The Case of the Reverend Patrick Fay, now Under Sentence of Death in the New Prison, Written by Himself (1787) spells out Fay’s account of what transpired in Dublin. Fay’s other criminal activities can be found in the public record.
We also know that the Fulhames spent some time in Dublin and London during the period of 1786-89, interspersed with stints in Edinburgh, thanks to references in Black’s correspondence, Fay’s account and Thomas’ name appearing on the Edinburgh tax rolls. We don’t know what prompted the Fulhames to relocate, or where exactly they lived when not in Edinburgh.
Robert Adam’s expansive South Bridge sketches still exist, and I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if it was a mistake for the Town Council to pass them up.
CL Jarvis 