James Gibbs

It is a particular pleasure to me that this paper gives me an opportunity to declare the real sentiments of gratitude and respect with which I am, dear professor, your most dutiful and most obliged humble student… from the dedication, with liberties, Book of Architecture by James Gibbs.

 Figure 1 The architecture of James Gibbs (figure 1) came to represent both church and country. His work was widely disseminated thanks to copies of his text Book of Architecture published in 1728. The book provided a catalog of plans, sections, elevations, and details that could be copied in parts in whole. Gibbs’ architecture represented a social convention that was brought to the British colonies in North America and replicated in the vernacular. We have examples of this at St. Michael Church in Charleston, South Carolina and Mount Airy by John Ariss in Richmond County, Virginia. Book of Architecture is also the ancestor of Asher Benjamin’s books The Country Builder’s Assistant, The American Builder’s Companion, and The Rudiment of Architecture, which enabled the settlers American West to replicate familiar architecture in remote places. The goal of this paper is an analysis of how Gibbs’ visual vocabulary is translated in North America. As part of this, the paper will look at his work in England, specifically St. Martin-in-the-Field, and how his book came to North America. We begin this examination with St. Michael Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
 Figure 2 St. Michael Church in Charleston, South Carolina (1752-61, figure 2), built in the 1680s, was the site of the first Anglican Church south of Virginia. Originally a small wooden church, it was erected for the new town of Charles Town (later Charleston) for the families of the Church of England and named St. Philip1. By 1727, the town had outgrown the original building and a larger space replaced it, however, in 1835 it was destroyed in a fire. In 1751, once again the congregation outgrew the church and the General Assembly authorized a new church to be built on the old site and re-sanctified it St. Michael’s.2 The cornerstone was laid in 1752 and the church opened for worship in 1761. St. Michael reflects a fusion of both Andrea Palladio and Sir Christopher Wren and is reminiscent of St. Martin-in-the Fields (1721-26) by James Gibbs (1682-1754).
 Figure 3 By the early eighteenth century, St. Martin-in-the-Fields (figure 3) was a rambling, shapeless building, which the parishioners were not proud of, in need of a long overdue rehabilitation. The congregation’s intention wanted to remake the church as one of London’s most fashionable places of worship.3 Through an Act of Parliament, the worshippers appointed Commissioners to execute the project. On August 17, 1720, led by Sir Christopher Wren, Gibbs took the Commissioners on a tour of parish churches.4 In November of that year, King James II appointed Gibbs surveyor and on March 19, 1722 the Bishop of Salisbury laid the foundation stone on behalf of the King. St. Martin was one of three churches begun and completed within five years of each other with variations on the same design. St. Martin shared with the Oxford Chapel (St. Peter’s, Vere Street) in London and the church of All Hallows in Derby, now a cathedral of being from the architectural ancestry.5 Work on St. Martin began in 1721 and its consecration in 1726 marked the completion of the trio.
 Figure 4 These were not Gibbs’ first forays into ecclesiastical design. In 1713 Gibbs was recommended by the Earl Oxford to take over surveyorship from William Dickinson under The New Churches Act. Gibbs was formally appointed and begun St. Mary-le-Strand in 1714. St. Mary was Gibbs’ first known buildings. His efforts at St. Mary casts doubt that this was his first serious effort at being known as a church architect. Contemporary with St. Mary were Gibbs’ drawings at Oxford included two separate designs for a church supposedly on Great George Street.6 This suggests that Gibbs beginning to consider ecclesiastic work. If this is true, then the drawings were intended for St. George, Hanover Square (figure 4). Therefore the drawings would have been made as early as 1711 when Parliament passed an Act for building of fifty new churches in the cities of Westminster and London.7 However, the problem with this theory is according to church’s official website, the architect of record was John James, Christopher Wren’s assistant. Further, construction is contemporary with that of St. Martin and Old North Church in Boston. Nonetheless, whatever disappointment Gibbs may have harbored over being passed over for the St. George’s commission was assuaged by his success with the previously mentioned churches.
The most significant aspect of St. Martin is that it became the pattern for which all Anglican churches were modeled.8 Its design became the model for rendering the Anglican liturgy. The design had more universal application than any of the work by Hawksmoor or Thomas Archer and was easy to reproduce either in parts or as a whole. For example, if should an architect be called upon to build a church in the English countryside but instructed to keep the tower, he could use the chancel and nave of St. Martin as his model. However, if finances were an issue, then the steeple could be copied as embellishment for many other churches. Further, its London location insured that the church attracted the widest attention from visiting architects.
 Figure 5 The concept for St. Martin is based in Roman antiquity, specifically, the Pantheon. The Pantheon was a building that Gibbs would have been familiar with from his time in Rome as a student at the Accademia di S. Luca. If we look at plate eight of Book of Architecture (figure 5) we see one of the first plans of St. Martin. Originally, Gibbs designed St. Martin as a spacious circular space, recalling the great Roman building. The ground plan presents a circular space with a Roman portico on the west side with a tapering steeple, a u-shaped altar niche on the north side, and a circular colonnade in the interior. A later version, illustrated in plate thirteen (figure 6), presents a similar plan but the altar side is a larger rectangular space instead of u-shaped. The first plan was approved by the Commissioners but later rejected on the grounds of expense. The planning is suitable to the rites of an “auditory”9 church, in line with Anglican liturgy, which placed emphasis on the spoken word rather than visual experience of the Catholic Church.
 Figure 6
When completed, St Martin-in-the-Fields, though built by James Gibbs, was a fusion of the classicism of Andrea Palladio and Sir Christopher Wren. The church is composed of a long rectangular box containing the auditorium; down the length is a colonnade of Classical orders supporting the side galleries and a longitude vault in the ceiling.10 On the exterior the spire follows the Wrenian language of freely composed Classical elements. However the relationship between the tower and the auditorium presents a new invention inspired by Palladianism11. While Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor, Wren’s pupil, followed Gothic form by placing the tower on the outside, on the hand, Gibbs placed the spire inside on the west end so that it grew out of the church.12 This new arrangement combined familiar tradition with new tastes and became the prototype for subsequent Anglican churches for the next century. When colonists saw the engravings in Book of Architecture (1728), they widely adapted the plan.
At the time of St. Martin’s construction, English architecture was under going a major shift in form. This change reflected the newly acquired personal freedoms in England and its emergence as a world power. During the first half of the eighteenth century, under the reign of Queen Anne and George I of Hanover, England enjoyed unparalleled social stability. During this era, power moved down the social ranks and there was a growth in personal freedoms, earning England the admiration of social reformers on the continent.13 Also, England became a world power with colonial mercantile enterprises in North America, parts of Asia, and Africa and through its defeat of Louis XIV at the beginning of the century.14 In the 1720s and 1730s, before the last gasp of the English Baroque as seen the work of Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh could make its way across the Atlantic or find its way down to the buildings of the middle classes, the tastemakers abruptly changed directions. Anglo Palladians, the new arbiters of taste,15 attacked the more flamboyant Baroque, opting for more austere Classical designs in the manner of Palladio and his English progenitor Inigo Jones.16 So what accounted for the dramatic change?
Other than general European cultural changes, the fate of the English Baroque got caught up with English politics. James II was quite determined to return Catholicism and rebuild an absolutist monarchy one hundred years after the Restoration. As a result, a political party with Puritan sympathies arose in opposition of what it perceived as the “…evil trinity of Catholicism, James’ Stuart dynasty, and absolutism.”17 This party, known as the Whigs, looked for a new national style devoid of any of these associations, finding it in the work Palladio and Jones. The irony is the austere Classicism was the preferred visual vocabulary of James I, the founder of the Stuart dynasty. Regardless, the Whigs argued its merits on the grounds of “its objective truth and freedom from individual fancy.”18 The clean lines and proportions suited the period because it was a style with clear rules.
While the variations of the work of James Gibbs could be found in every part of the British Empire from the mother country to South Africa and Australia, important examples of the transmission of his work are in the North American colonies. Gibbs became known in the American colonies through one of his associates John Smibert.19 In 1728, Smibert accompanied George Berkeley, the future Bishop of Cloyne, for the proposed launching of a college in Bermuda. When the plans fell through, Smibert remained in America, settling in Boston, Massachusetts where he worked until his death in 1751. After Gibbs’ death, his close confidant Cosmo Alexander also migrated to America where he possibly could have kept Gibbs’ name in the forefront as an architect worth imitating.20 However the most important factor in keeping James Gibbs’ name on tip of the colonists’ tongues were Book of Architecture (1728) and the equally influential Rules for Drawing.
 Figure 7 Book of Architecture (figure 7) became the pattern book from which colonists could select plans, elevations, and details for their houses and churches. This allowed the colonists to reproduce the social conventions of eighteenth century England in the vernacular form. More important, Book of Architecture is the ancestor of Asher Benjamin’s books The Country Builder’s Assistant (1797), The American Builder’s Companion (1806-27), and The Rudiment of Architecture (1814). Here, too, the ability of individuals, settlers on the American western frontier, to replicate the norms of the society they left but in a more rudimentary fashion. While Book of Architecture offers descriptive illustrations, Benjamin’s books provided instructions on how to replicate the Gibbsian and Federalist designs. Both Book of Architecture and the Benjamin books were factors in preventing new communities from creating separate identities from the motherlands.21 They slavish attempts to recreate the place they left prevented the colonists in the eighteenth century and the Western settlers in the nineteenth century from establishing a special place with characteristics unique to the land.22
Copies of Book of Architecture began circulating through the colonies a few years after its publication. Together with other books on architecture and construction, Gibbs’ book became part of a growing library available to builders. Further, architects, including John Ariss, went to England to study up close the work of the master. Ariss visited England around 1750. John Ariss was primarily known for his residential work but also took on ecclesiastic commissions. Ariss was born in Albany Virginia around 1725 and traveled to England in his twenties.23 Upon his return, he took up residence at Bushfield in Westmoreland County Virginia, placing an advertisement in the Maryland Gazette announcing, “lately from Britain,”24 and he could produce buildings “either of the ancient [Baroque?] or modern [Pallaidian?] order of Gibbs’ architect.”25 Ariss’ residential work tended to follow Palladian motifs with their lower roof pitches, quoins, rustication, and the frequent introduction of the Serliana.26 Most of all, they aimed for greater axial emphasis with a central pavilion with a crowning temple façade prominently visible on the front elevation.27 This style was less pretentious than their English counterparts because it made less use of stone (owing to a lack of material availability and skilled masons) and exterior pilasters.28 One example of his work is Mount Airy in Richmond County, Virginia (1758-62 figure 8).
 Figure 8 Mount Airy is a virtual reproduction of the typical Gibbs façade. It is entirely possible that Ariss was referring to plate fifty-eight (figure 9) of the Gibbs book for the main building. It mimics the tonal values of a Gibbs drawing with different colored stone and borrows the plan with outbuildings from another Gibbs plate.29 This plan was widely copied throughout the south because of its coherent organization. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Vassall (Longfellow) House (1759) presents a good example of Gibbs being translated into more vernacular form. Instead of brick masonry, as at Mount Airy, the unknown architect translates a Gibbs façade into clapboard. The characteristic pedimented central pavilion gains more emphasis with pilasters on either side. The pilasters reappear at the corners unifying the front elevation of the house and continuing the Baroque preference for elaborate decoration instead of Palladian purity.30 The Baroque feeling continues with the use of broken entablatures over the pilasters and the way the windows and cornices crowd each other.31
 Figure 9
The preference for the currant fashion of architecture was a reflection of the growing wealth of the southern colonies. Domestic architecture began as crude one-room cabins whose sole purpose was fulfill the basic need of shelter. This later evolved into brick farmhouses but the image of the Neo-Classical plantation that has come down through time was a nineteenth century invention. The early Virginians had no quarrels with the king, country, or church. The colonists originated from Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, the Cotswold Hills, and East Anglia and consisted of a diverse group of peers, artisans, merchants, and professional men.32 Since they were mainly men of means, they could afford to acquire books such as Gibbs’ tome and hire builders to recreate what they saw. More so, the one-crop economy and the introduction of slave labor meant that the Southern colonies developed an aristocratic class. As such, they began to take on the trappings of the landed aristocracy in the mother country.
The impact of James Gibbs’ visual vocabulary is seen in churches along the east coast. This is evident in churches from South Carolina through the New England states. Colonies such as Massachusetts and South Carolina were declared crown colonies 1691 and 1719, respectively, and as such Anglicanism became the primary religion. Therefore, the churches built in these colonies reflected the liturgical requirements of a liturgy where preaching played a central role. In Anglican rites, the central focus is on the pulpit from which the clergy delivered the weekly sermons. The pulpit were often reading desks combined with clerk chairs into triple deckers placed at the center of the nave.33 The pulpit is placed in the center of the nave closer to the East blocking the view of the altar to a certain extent. However, this was less disruptive to the congregation and clergy because the nave and chancel were often considered two separate spaces. Extant examples of this arrangement are seen in later examples such as King’s Norton, Leicester (1757-75) and St. John’s Chichester (1812-13).34 Further, variations of this arrangement were used in the installation of a tall pulpit at East Burleigh, Devon placed above the Communion table and at St. Leeds (1793) or placing it behind the altar with a clerk’s desk facing the front row at All Saints Newcastle 1786-96.
Further, the Anglican churches and the Puritan Meetinghouses closely resembled one another. Both employed the same domestic metaphor, carried through to the design of the building as well as size, material, and decoration. In particular, the Anglican churches, especially of the Virginia, claimed the church as the domain of the elite. These were often state-run churches where the elite sat closer to the altar or in private galleries secluded from the rest of the parishioners35. We can find a parallel to the seating arrangement of the Meetinghouses in New England where Puritan elite sat in private boxes on the main floor while the lower ranks sat in the galleries above. This type of arrangement often paralleled New England town planning where the homes of the well to do were often sited near the church and the more common folks were placed further and further away from the center of town, the church. The point of this layout was that the wealthy were blessed by the divine, and therefore more holy.
In terms of liturgical accoutrements, the textiles, communion tables and silver all replicated items that could be found in colonial mansions. As means of reinforcing the connection between the wealthy and church/meetinghouse the donors would have their names or coats of arms engraved on the items that were supposedly Christ’s household furnishings.36 The connection between the ritual sphere and the domestic sphere of the Virginia upper classes drove home the point that the social order was divinely ordained. This metaphor had biblical origins, alluded to by seventeenth century Massachusetts diarist Samuel Sewall who wrote, “House not made with hands, which God for many Thousands of year has been storing the richest furniture…[a]. Magnificent Convenient Palace, everyway fitted and furnished.”37 The Mormons subsequently use this metaphor in the nineteenth century who fitted their temples in the same fashion as the most elegant houses.
To conclude, the architecture of James Gibbs had impact beyond England thanks to the dissemination of Book of Architecture. This text allowed colonists all over the British Empire to imitate the social conventions of the motherland in the vernacular. We have examples in the work of John Ariss at Mount Airy and the houses of worship throughout the East Coast. Also, Book of Architecture was the inspiration for Asher Benjamin’s series of books and the planning of communities across the American West. The lasting impact of James Gibbs’ work is it became a style that could be easily adapted to suit different locales and symbol for a church and country.


















Bibliography
Gerlenter, Mark, A History of American Architecture: Buildings in Their Cultural and Technological Context, Hanover and London, University Press of New England, 1999

Gibbs, James, Book of Architecture, Mineola, Dover Publications, 1728, 2008

Little, Bryan, The Life and Work of James Gibbs 1682-1754, London, England, B.T. Batsford LTD, 1955

Morris, Morris Early American Architecture From The First Colonial Settlements to The National Period, Toronto, Ontario, Oxford University Press, 1952, 352 http://books.google.com (Accessed November 24, 2010)

Stillman, Damie “Church Architecture in Neo-classical England,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 38, No. 2 May, 1979, pp 103-119, http://www.jstor.org (Accessed October 28, 2010)

Upton, Dell Architecture in the United States, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998

Internet Sources

St. Michael’s: An Historical Overview, http://www.stmicaelschurch.net/about-us/history, (accessed November 10, 2010)

The Reverend Prebendary William Atkins, MA, FSA, Rector of St. George’s (1955-2000), http://www.stgeorgeshanoversquare.org/history, (accessed November 4, 2010)

Images

James Gibbs indianetzone.com

St. Michael Charleston, South Carolina fineartamerica.com

St. Martin-in-the-Field barnubu.co.uk

Mount Airy viriginiaplaces.org

Book of Architecture tower.com

St. George Hanover Square stgeorgeshanoversquare.org

Plates 8, 13, 58 Book of Architecture

Things are picking up

Yes dear readers I have returned from the ether. Having gone back to work has kept me hopping all day. However, this new job is not so cumbersome that I can't take a few minutes and catch up on my reading.

So when we last left Mikael Blomqvist and company, things were plodding along. Mr. Blomqvist has since served his sentence for libel thereby paying his debt to society. Imagine that, a country where you can actually go to jail for libel. He has since returned from his "three month uneventful holiday" to investigating the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. Simultaneously, our girl Lisbeth is still in the depth of guardianship, having fallen and taken her revenge on a real sleaze bag of a guardian.

Now things are starting to pick up. In combing through the Hedeby newspaper's photographic archives, our hero makes a startling discovery, which confirms his theory. Blomqvist believes that the key to Harriet's disappearance lay in something that was going that day. Lo and behold, he stumbled on to something. In reviewing the images for a Children's Day parade, Blomqvist discovers pictures of Harriet with a frightened look on her face. Aha, the key to our mystery. Just what that thing is has yet to be discovered. Like Christie's Poirot,Blomqvist is meticulously combing through the evidence searching for and finding hidden clues. I'll have to keep reading to find out.

Stay Tuned.

Hip Deep Into the Story

So I'm now hip into the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and I must say things are getting interesting. There seems to be a connection to Harriet Vanger's disappearance and one of her uncle's connections to Swedish Nazis. Yes Swedish Nazis did exist and you can google this if you want. What that connection is will hopefully be revealed in the third part. In the meantime we have a parallel development. It would seem that our

girl

Lisbeth has a new guardian to look after her affairs. After all, being so sullen and occasionally prone to bursts of violence, in the cause of defending herself, has rendered her by the state mentally incompetent. Therefore, she must have someone to look manage her life. This new guardian, it would seem, has a sadistic streak which he expressed by raping Lisbeth twice before she exacted a measure of punishment in the form of blackmail. So who's the crazy one now?

In the meantime, our hero, Mikael Blomkvist (soon to be played on the big screen by Daniel Craig making the price of a ticket worth it) has been getting comfortable in exile. He has managed to ingratiate himself among the locals of Hedeby and begin a clandestine affair with Cecila Vanger, the head mistress of the local school. All the while, under the cover of writing Henrik Vanger's biography, Blomkvist has been investigating the mysterious Harriet and slowly assembling the suspects. Like Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, he methodically reviews the evidence, examining each piece with exacting detail. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.

A bit of a side note. Stieg Larsson seemed to be a bit obsessed with consumerism because of blatant use of product placement. It would seem that every chapter or two has a reference to an electronic product (Apple), a grocery chain (Konsum), or some other product. Just a thought.

Stay Tuned,
Lenore

Some Thoughts

Some thoughts and observations inspired by The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Author Steig Larsson provides amusing insight into the Swedish mindset regarding certain behaviors. For example, in doctors and social workers' descriptions of Lisbeth Salander's refusals to answer any of their question, the author uses words like

shy

or

retarded

. One supposes that if one were asked rather personal questions about one's sex life or finances by strangers who seem to have made up their minds about you, one would decline to answer also. In describing members of the Vanger family's racist, fascist political leanings the phrase

politically insane

is used. I suppose from this we can begin to make assumptions about the Swedes and the way they deal with what may or may not be considered deviant behavior. In the case of Lisbeth Salander's evaluations, we can say that the social workers, doctors, and advocates have either made up their minds about or they have not tried to find a way to talk to her. As to the fascist leanings of the members of the Vanger family, it almost sounds like the Swedes put their collective heads in the sand and write some one off as insane.

Another observation is related to the prologue. In the prologue of the book, Henrik Vanger receives and exotic pressed and framed flower for his birthday. To the reader this may seem like an unrelated episode, yet later in part one of the story, it is explained that the flower has significance. Without giving too much away, let's just say it's a clue to the mysterious disappearance of Harriet Vanger.

Stay tuned

How much of this is necessary?

In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo author Steig Larsson goes into detail about the main characters' biographical histories. We learn that Mikael Blomkvist grew up in a fairly middle class stable household in contrast to Lisbeth Salander's dysfunctional upbringing. Henrik Vanger is descended from a Dutch family that settled in Sweden in the twelfth century and has a branch in America. So I ask why is it necessary to into such depth about their backgrounds? In the case of Vanger, it might be necessary only if to produce a list of suspects in the mysterious disappearance of Vanger's niece Harriet, which Blomkvist does. However, I'm not so sure about Larsson's reasons for detailing Blomkvist's or Salander's life history. Perhaps it is to provide some sort of empathy for the character or to assist any actor taking on those roles for the film version. Perhaps in later chapters we'll find out why.

As a side note I did get the kindle edition of The Thousand Autumns of jacob de Zoet, which I'll be tackling next.

Stayed tuned

First Impressions

Well I finally completed the first part of theThe Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by the late Stieg Larson. I must say this book reminds me a bit of the work by American mystery writers Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler. The resemblance is in the way Larson, a former journalist, structures his syntax; using on the minimum required words to convey thoughts, dialogs, and descriptions. This is something that can be appreciated by a reader who does not take to flowery prose and necessary for a mystery novel. A mystery novel that gets too caught up in descriptive phrasing detracts from the story at hand. In this case, a murder mystery with far reaching consequences. I won't give away too much of the plot, I'll you the reader figure it out for yourself but I will say this, in part one the reader is not only introduced to the main characters, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, but also get a keen sense of their back story. It'll be fascinating to see how this story develops. Like any good mystery novel there are the usual plot twists, which not doubt make for a great ride.

The novel takes place in modern day Sweden and centers around disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who has been fined and sentenced to jail for libel. He is commissioned by industrialist Henrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance/apparent murder of his beloved niece Harriet. Meanwhile, the reader is introduced to Lisbeth Salander, a computer hacker and investigator for a security company. She is asked to investigate Blomkvist for Vanger by Vanger's attorney Frode. What ensues will be subject for the next blog.

Stay tuned.

At First Glance

The subject of Japan's sakoku ("Chained Nation") period has been an endless source of fascination for writers and historians alike. The idea of a far off island nation cut off from the rest of the world; no on is allowed to leave or enter, has provided an endless source for the imagination. So it's no wonder that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel by David Mitchell aroused the curiosity of reviewers the world over and has inspired your intrepid reviewer to chime in with a few thoughts on the matter.

First, a bit of historical background. Japan was not completely cut off from the world. The third Tokugawa shogun Iemitsu instituted Japan's "isolation" as a response to the growing threat of Christianity to his supremacy. Spanish and Portuguese Catholic missionaries made their first appearance in Japan in the mid-sixteenth centuries along with merchant ships. Spain and Portugal, in addition to demanding trade agreements from the shogun, brought with them Jesuit and Franciscan priests with the express purpose of converting the masses. Their influence grew so strong that they became a threat to the shogun. Both Conrad Totman, Japan Before Perry and Paul Varley Japanese Culture-available on Amazon-chronicle this history quite well. So, you ask, where does a Dutchman like the fictional Jacob de Zoet come in?The answer is simple. The Dutch and the English first landed on Japan in 1600 aboard the Erasmus. Both nations were Protestant and interested in doing business with the Japanese not converting the masses to their particular religion. For a terrific account of the English/Dutch experience in Japan, check out not only the above mentioned books but also Milton Giles' book Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan. The fact that the Dutch were not interested in proselytizing endeared them a bit more to the shogun. During the periodic Christian persecutions, the Dutch and the English were harassed but not condemned like the Spanish and Portuguese and their converts. Finally, Tokugawa Iemistsu put an end to the growing intrusion of the Catholic missionaries by ordering them out of the country or face sever penalties and closing the nation off to outsiders including other nations.

However, Japan was not completely closed off because non-Japanese people, i.e. the Dutch, English, Germans, and other Asian nations, could make contact on a fan-shaped man-made island called Deshima, where Mitchell's story takes place. Deshima was located off the coast of Kyushu, where Westerners made first contact with Japan. This was the place where Japanese and foreigners could come together. To be sure that no outside influence got in or the Westerners were not plotting a coup, translators (spies) were ordered to report to local officials. Mitchell sets the story in 1799, during a time when Japanese society, particularly at the upper strata, was under going a major change.

The samurai caste saw its power and influence dwindling during the eighteenth century as the chonin caste rose in prominence. Thechonin were the town folk who established businesses that catered to the samurai making their biannual pilgrimage to Edo (Tokyo). They grew wealthy and most of all they began to grow restless about dealing with the outside world. Mitchell introduces the reader to the character Aibagawa Orito, a Japanese midwife studying

Dutch medicine.

Dutch medicine

was a euphemism for Western medicine, in fact there was a whole school of study devoted to all things Western referred to as

Dutch Studies.

The term is derived from the fact that by the eighteenth century the shogun lifted the ban on certain Western books so it would have been possible for our midwife to have access to such knowledge. Possible but not likely since universal education was not introduced until the Meiji period (1868-1912).

Nonetheless, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel appears to make for a good, light read for those interested in Japan.