Time Setting: 1840
Genre: Historical
Minimum Word Goal: 90,000
Timespan: August–May
Locations: Linlithgow, West Lothian; Glasgow, Lanarkshire; and Edinburgh, Midlothian1, Scotland
Main Characters: A. Josiah MacEachern
Background Information:
Conceived in Canton2, China, where his Scottish-born parents were serving as missionaries with the London Missionary Society, Josiah was actually born at his maternal grandparents’ estate in Linlithgow, West Lothian due to his father’s death while his mother was pregnant.
Josiah was the youngest of seven children his parents had, but was the only son who lived to adulthood; his first brother was stillborn, his second brother died the year before he was born of the same disease that claimed his father’s life, and his last brother drowned in the Firth of Forth when Josiah was two years old.
Only one of his three sisters failed to reach adulthood — even though his middle sister did nearly drown with his last brother — and that was the youngest one, who was stillborn two years before Josiah came along.
Having enjoyed the missionary life, Josiah’s mother wanted to return to China, but the London Missionary Society refused to send her unless she remarried or left her children in Scotland; not wanting to do the latter, she pursued remarriage, but to no avail.
Because of her desire to return to China, Josiah’s mother kept up the Chinese she’d learned by teaching her children the language, and using it around the house with them, as well as telling them tales about life in China that induced Josiah to nightmares.
Josiah’s maternal grandfather became his closest companion — as his sisters were six and seven years his senior and not keen on his being their playmates — taking him on walks, and later rides, through the West Lothian countryside, reading him exciting tales of adventurers in the British Colonies and other places that weren’t China, and fostering in him an overall interest in the natural world.
Unfortunately, age claimed his grandfather’s life when Josiah was ten years old, which was a devastating blow to him. His mother was displeased at how broken he was, telling him he needed to get used to death if he was going to live with her in China, but his grandmother came to his defence and became his go-to confidante until her own death two years later, also by age.
Following his grandfather’s death Josiah’s oldest uncle and his family moved into the house, granting permission to Josiah’s mother to remain, even though relations between his mother and uncle have become particularly tense since their mother’s death.
The tensions have been fuelled in part by Josiah’s mother’s plans for Josiah’s future, which she decided on when he reached the age of ten — an age none of his brothers reached — which was that, since she wasn’t finding a husband, it would be Josiah who would go to China as an ordained Presbyterian minister, like his father, and take up the work his father had been unable to finish.
Josiah’s uncle was of the belief that Josiah should choose his own future, after all, his sisters were allowed to marry local men — with his older sister marrying the heir to the Earldom of Uphall3, and his younger sister marrying the son of a prominent merchant from Glasgow — with no expectations of what they should do with their lives, for which Josiah has been heartily grateful.
His mother, unfortunately, has been stubborn, forcing Josiah to speak to her in Chinese by ignoring him when he responded to her in English or any other language he learned in school, and otherwise subjecting him to unpleasant trials in training for his life in China; plus, her constant proclamation that such is his future to those around her has prompted everyone around to presume that going to China as a missionary is what he actually wants to do for himself.
At first Josiah wasn’t sure what he wanted to do for himself, but when he was granted the opportunity by his uncle to participate in a fox hunt — against his mother’s wishes — when he was fifteen, shortly before his middle sister’s wedding, he and a party of younger men, all sons of the men his uncle had invited, got separated from the main group, and one of the boys’ horses refused to jump a wall, throwing its rider, whose arm broke so severely that the bone could be seen.
Despite having never seen such a wound, and only knowing a little bit of medicine from the adventure stories his grandfather had read to him until he could read them on his own, Josiah calmly, quickly set and splinted the arm and staunched the bleeding while other, older boys blanched and the most upset of them fled for help.
When the doctor arrived he was impressed with the job Josiah had done, especially when he found out that Josiah wasn’t related to any doctors, and had never seen one in action. The doctor encouraged him to pursue medicine, and, as a result, Josiah started reading medical books, which he found wholly engrossing.
As time progressed he became hopeful that by becoming a doctor he would be able to avoid the mission field, however, he didn’t tell his mother about the incident or his desire to become a doctor until he was eighteen, at which time she enrolled him into seminary to become a Presbyterian minister.
Just weeks before he was supposed to leave for the seminary he finally got up the courage to tell her he wanted to be a doctor instead. To his supreme distress, although his mother was a little shocked by the news, she expressed satisfaction that he still wanted to do something that would be useful on the mission field and had him enrolled into medical classes in Edinburgh, as well as telling people that he was going to be a medical missionary to China.
As much as Josiah has enjoyed the medical courses he’s been taking for the last two years, the fact that pursuing medicine has not been the way out of going to China he hoped it would be still weighs on him and has left him desperately looking for medical positions that he could possibly be given before his mother can succeed in getting him to China, such as possibly becoming a doctor in the Army or Navy, or even getting some sort of a position in one of the Colonies like Canada, South Africa, or Australia, but he’s not far enough along in his education to apply for any of those positions yet.
1to my understanding, Edinburgh was in Midlothian until 1921; 2Guangzhou, China; 3not an actual earldom in the Peerage of Scotland or the United Kingdom.
Pronunciation:
MacEachern: mahkehkrihn
No comments:
Post a Comment