Alice Thornton's Books as a Resource for Others

Blog article published by Eleanor Thom on 25 April 2024  animalschildbirthcreative writingdeliveranceseventsfamilyillnesslifewritingnaturetravelwars of the three kingdoms

As the Alice Thornton’s Books team works towards the launch of the Digital Scholarly Edition, we have had some great discussions with members of the public and with other researchers. We are largely based within the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, but our discussions have been cross-disciplinary, partly because of the wide range of topics written about by Alice Thornton herself. There are often wonderful surprises in store for us too when we find out what other people discover in Thornton’s material, or material related to it.

The First Early Modern Newt in Yorkshire

Recently, we published a series of tweets for World Sleep Day, comparing three beds. Firstly, there was Thornton’s description of her own bed, one which she says 'makes a show'. Then there was her assessment of a Sir John Gibson’s 'very rich hand-silk, damask' bed that was a particularly 'noble down bed, with bolster pillows'.^[1] Finally, we shared Anne Danby’s complaints about her salubrious sleeping place in Bedale, so damp that it attracted frogs, toads and newts. She suffered this indignity after being thrown out of the Thornton household. Seeing our Tweets, Dr Lee Raye (author of The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife) got in touch, excited to see Anne Danby’s description of her bed, which comes from Danby’s ‘Accompt’ of her life.^[2] Unbeknownst to us, frogs were poorly recorded in Britain at that time, and Raye said she had seen no other records of newts in early modern Yorkshire!

A Creative Resource

I always thought Thornton’s Books would be a great resource for linguists, for writers of historical fiction and for historians, but recently Thornton’s books have also inspired a local writers’ group, the Citizen Writers, who write frequently about their own lives. The writers’ group formed as part of the Citizen Project which is run by the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The group has been meeting since early 2019. With the group now in its fifth year, there are people taking part from all over Edinburgh and East Lothian. I am lucky enough to work on both projects, as Engagement and Impact Officer for Alice Thornton's Books, and as Communities Writer in Residence for the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Writing an autobiography is something so many people aspire to do, but it’s very hard to write an entire life story. Working with the Citizen Writers I've often given them prompts that help them shift their focus away from entire life stories and onto smaller, sometimes everyday events. Doing this instantly makes autobiography more accessible, a much less daunting task.

When the group wanted to know more about who Alice Thornton was, and when they later met the Thornton Books team, they were excited by Thornton’s prolific accounts of the small moments in which she nearly died. Thornton attributed surviving these events to God having saved her. She wrote of being delivered from death. Few writers could resist such a prompt, and over fifty modern-day ‘deliverances from death’ were soon produced. The Edinburgh International Book Festival have now published some of the modern stories on their Citizen Project blog, along with beautiful illustrations that were created by third year illustration students from Edinburgh College of Art. It's really worth clicking through to read them all.

Shared Journeys

Reading the Citizen Writers’ stories, it was striking just how many parallels could be found between the modern-day deliverances, and those Thornton recalled and recorded in the late 17th Century. The 21st-century writers may not attribute their survival to any divine intervention, but just like in Thornton’s books, travel is still delivering a good proportion of near-death experiences. Only the means of travel is different, of course. The most terrifying journeys Thornton wrote about involved ships in storms, overturning carriages, horses crossing deep rivers and exhausting walks over inaccessible hills wearing what were probably not very sensible shoes. In the modern stories, planes, trains, cars, bicycles and motorbikes all feature.

Caught up in Conflicts

Some writers shared terrifyingly dark, near-death encounters, experiences that depict ordinary people caught up in terrorism and violent conflicts. Stories by Evelyn Karlsberg and John Young recall the 1980 bombing of a platform in Bologna station, and Janet Lewis remembers an escape via rooftops from a bomb in a Belfast department store. Thornton lived through an era marked by violence and political upheaval too. In just one example here, she recalls a near-miss with a cannon shot during an attempted siege in Chester in 1643:

“I had, in this time of the siege, a grand deliverance standing in a turret in my mother’s house. Having, been at prayer, in the first morning we were beset in the town and not hearing of it before, as I looked out at a window towards St Mary’s church, a cannon bullet flew so night the place where I stood that the window suddenly shut with such a force the whole turret shook. And it pleased God, I escaped without more harm, save that the waft took my breath from me for the present and caused a great fear and trembling, not knowing from whence it came.”^[3]

Illness and Accidents

Childbirth and illness are other common experiences, as well as cures provided by doctors and friends in the community. In Olivia Begbie’s story, ‘Oranges’, it’s the neighbours who come to help. There are childhood accidents including falls from trees, and there is the shared terror of mothers, hundreds of years apart, when children come close to danger. Two daughters spanning the centuries have a close shave at the fair. Two more fall, or nearly fall, one playing at the window of a first floor Edinburgh tenement, another playing at the high door of a 17th-century hay loft.^[4]

Childhood Games

There are also, thankfully, lighter moments and a good bit of humour in many of the modern stories, and modern readers will find some of Thornton’s stories, whether she intended it or not, quite amusing as well. Take, for example, Patricia Clifford’s modern account of a childhood prank, being jumped on by her siblings under a huge mattress. It’s a nice companion piece to Alice Thornton’s tale of a game that took place in her house, the young Thornton girls jumping on top of each other, and her daughter, Nally, ending up winded.

“Upon my Dear Daughter's Preservation from a Wound in her Belly, 1661. My two children was playing at Oswaldkirk in the parlour window, and Kate, being very full of sport and play, did climb into the window and, leaping down, fell upon her sister, Alice, and thrust her upon the corner of the same (with a great force and strength she had) and her sister cried out with pain & soreness, which had grievously hurt the inner rind of her belly so sore until I was afraid she had broken it.”^[5]

Deliverances from Death at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

In both Thornton’s deliverances and the modern deliverances by the Citizen Writers, it’s the interplay between the personal and the bigger picture that make these collections so fascinating and relatable. The Thornton Books team is delighted to have played a part in such a creative collaboration, and we look forward to August, when The Edinburgh International Book Festival will programme an event dedicated to the deliverances from death project. A collection of double-sided postcards of the modern deliverances and their illustrations will also be available. Look for them at the North Edinburgh Community Festival on May 11th, and at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival.