Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

The author wishes to thank his publisher, David Poindexter, and his editor, Pat Walsh, for their long and undiminished support for his work and for this book in particular. A grateful nod should also go to Dave Adams and Joe Di Prisco for their editorial input, and to the staff of the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections at the University of New Mexico’s Zimmerman Library who gave the author unrestricted access to their delicate 120-year-old set of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica . The author also wishes to thank his friend Susan Guinter, who made herself available for even the most oddball sorts of questions about Lycoming County, Pennsylvania.

A few somewhat quixotic thank-yous are also in order: to Mr. Dickens, whose voice and literary spirit were greedily channeled for this book; to the Community Theatre League of Williamsport, Pennyslvania, whose support for the author’s work for the stage kept him returning over and over again to the beautiful valley of the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, which would play so prominent a role in his novel; to Teddy Roosevelt, subject of the author’s yet unpublished fictional biography, whose bully literary voice animated the account of the firefight at the foot of Belgrave Dam; and to Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter and Pennyslvania Governor Ed Rendell, who were unbeknownst inspirations for the characters of the “Senator” and the “Governor”.

The author wishes most of all to thank his wife Mary — soulmate and most trusted critic — who touches his heart every day with her love and kindness, sound judgment and herculean indulgence of this most emotionally needy and demanding author. Without her, he should never have found the inspiration or stamina to take that long journey to Dingley Dell.

Dear reader:

You will find upon the pages that follow my best efforts to chronicle the final twenty-seven days in the life of the ill-fated Dell of Dingley. I have attempted to tell all that can and all that should be told both from the record of my own experiences and from the experiences of others as they have recounted them to me. (I take no liberties in imagining the actions or fabricating the dialogue of those individuals who are no longer with us.)

You will note that I have made no attempt to conform the spelling of certain words used in both Dinglian English and the Dinglian vernacular to American English, nor is it my desire to give the book a contemporising idiomatic scrubbing. It is my wish that the Outland reader should read the book exactly as a Dinglian would, its syntactic construction and linguistical presentation constituting important and defining constituents in the ethos of our now vanished homeland. Any reader of Dickens should find the book easily navigable, as the Dinglian idiom is quite Dickensian in structure.

A good many things that the Outland reader will discover upon the leaves of this book will be familiar to twenty-first century American readers, for the community of man is by natural instinct united the world over by those shared exigencies of our species; all must eat and drink, all must sleep, must work, must play; and by the universality of the human condition: we love, we hate, we mourn, we venerate, we laugh and cry and hope and strive to better our lot. The world I have limned upon the leaves of this book will be comfortably familiar to readers of Mr. Charles Dickens and to those strongly acquainted with the latter years of the nineteenth century, for our Dinglian society was built largely upon that literal, historical, and cultural foundation.

However, there is much contained herein that is unique to our segregated valley, and which I will do my best to explain through the course of the narrative. Readers are encouraged to read the explanatory notes I have put together at the end of some of the early chapters, for they serve as important illuminative supplement to the main text. Each entry has been opportunely drawn from articles prepared for a one-volume Dinglian encyclopædia, its compilation halted in 2002 by judicial injunction for failure to submit it for a proper Parliamentary review. The reader will find certain terms within the text of the narrative printed in bold; these link the reader to those related chapter endnotes, which come from the aborted encyclopædia (not to be confused with the Encylopædia Britannica , Ninth Edition, about which more to come).

I have no doubt that I shall write other books. However, I am certain that my future years in exile from my ancestral home will little by little dilute the singularity of my Dinglian voice. Here you will find that voice in its purest state. Ten years hence I could easily be mistaken for one of you. I have reconciled myself to my eventual assimilation even as I rue losing some not insignificant part of the Dinglian who lives within me.

But my loss is no matter for your concern.

Read on of my story, and of the story of my doomed compatriots. You may find it a most bracing yarn.

Frederick Trimmers, Esq.

South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

December 2004

t has been said that a slow child is an inconvenience to its parents; a slow and ill-countenanced child, an unhappy burden; and a slow, ill-countenanced, and fractious child a veritable curse. Of these three truisms, it is the last that found most fitting application within my brother’s family in the person of Augustus’ young son Newman, who, at the tender age of eleven, was more child than my brother and his wife Charlotte could easily bear, though he constituted the sort of curse that one hoped, in time, might be dispelled, to the peace and sanguinity of all concerned.

With this aim in mind, my nephew was sent forth from one end of Dingley Dell to the furthest-most opposite end, to be placed under the caring and attentive tutelage of one Alphonse Chowser, Esq., a pedagogical worker of miracles in the field of captious, unyielding boys. The Chowser School would, in attendance to its mission, provide Newman with every granule of the guidance and education that was heretofore deprived him by his own intemperate nature within his small village school, and all the love and kindhearted affection that was not easily bestowed in the lad’s familial circle, given my brother Augustus’ want of forbearance, his wife Charlotte’s nervous complaint, and the couple’s daughter (and Newman’s older sister) Alice’s aversion to disagreeable visage and mental deficiency in a sibling — an indefencible bias on her side, but one often evinced by wilful young girls of thirteen, who have no patience for much of anything that cannot be slipped with frills and lace over the head or patted roseate upon the cheek.

Early reports from the school offered promising evidence of rapid progress. Newman had shewn an especial interest in those esoteric disciplines which characterised Chowser’s unconventional (some say Bohemian) approach to education, and had delighted in posting to me a series of letters written almost entirely in a modified version of the hieroglyphic language of the ancient Egyptians, each of which I was fortunately (and somewhat miraculously) successful in deciphering, though my own youthful interest in early ideogrammatic writing had waned somewhat over the years.