By Paul Carrier
Scottish “face painter and libertine” Stewart Jameson, heavily in debt and unable to pay up, sails to Boston in the 1760s with his mastiff Gulliver. Once there, Jameson tries to hide from his pursuing creditors by starting life anew in a city roiled by revolutionary rumblings.
Fanny Easton, the once-pampered daughter of a wealthy Bostonian but now a “fallen woman” who has hit bottom, is determined to conceal something even more difficult than her whereabouts - her gender. Disguised as a young man, she lands a job as Jameson’s apprentice, launching a personal and professional relationship simultaneously built on both affection and deceit.
So begins Blindspot, a rousing and racy yarn that combines an 18th-century tone with 21st-century erudition in a lusty but thought-provoking send-up of early novels. It is a raucous mash-up of murder mystery, historical fiction and bodice-ripping romance replete with riddles, proverbs and literary references, all against a backdrop of growing colonial discontent.
The authors - Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore - know their stuff, historically speaking, because the former is a history professor at Brandeis and the latter teaches American history at Harvard. Being well-versed in the period, they offer a droll display of 18th-century vernacular by spicing things up with such colorful terms as “dunderheaded catch fart,” “slip-slop wife,” “confounded sap-skull” and other colloquialisms.
In part, this is Jameson’s tale to tell, but of course he is not privy to the true identity of “Francis Weston” (Fanny Easton), who presents her side of the story in the form of revealing letters to a female friend. Blindspot uses several devices to provide a well-rounded view of the action, including Jameson’s narration, Easton’s correspondence with Elizabeth Partridge in New York and periodic bits of news from the Boston Gazette.
The blossoming relationship between Jameson and Easton - the painter is attracted to his apprentice despite, or perhaps because of, Easton’s disguise as a young man - moves along in clever fashion until the authors kick things up a notch by having someone murder Samuel Bradstreet, the abolitionist speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly.
When Ignatius Alexander, a brilliant escaped slave, physician and long-lost friend of Jameson, arrives in Boston, the trio of Alexander, Jameson and the still-disguised Easton set about trying to solve Bradstreet’s murder, to shift blame from a falsely accused slave named Hannah and her husband, Cicero. The deceased Bradstreet, meanwhile, lives on of a fashion, in the form of pseudonymous letters to the editor of the Gazette signed by “Bradstreet’s Ghost.”
It isn’t giving too much away to reveal that the innocent Cicero is convicted and hanged, offering readers a troubling glimpse of one of the many faces of pre-revolutionary Boston. While patriots and tories battle for supremacy, some of those who lament England's oppressive ways turn a blind eye to the hypocricy of owning slaves while decrying slavery.
In fact, Cicero’s conviction stirs a nauseating wave of bloodlust, as Bostonians turn out in droves to witness his death, acting for all the world as if a hanging is a form of entertainment. As they are portrayed in Blindspot, 18th-century patriots may have had high ideals, but their baser instincts were on display as well.
In keeping with their academic backgrounds, Kamensky and Lepore include a 16-page afterword that explains the similarities and differences between their narrative and the actual people and events of the 1760s.
“Because we are professors of early American history and literature,” the authors explain, “we relied on our combined four decades of researching and teaching to breathe life into the look, feel and sound of daily life in eighteenth-century Boston.”
Lepore and Kamensky also provide a bibliography of some two dozen books and articles for readers who share their fascination with the period, and want to learn more.
“We have loved this world, the passion of the Revolution, the brilliance of the Enlightenment, the playfulness of the eighteenth century’s prose, and the ambition of its portraits,” the authors explain in the afterword. “We wrote Blindspot to bring that world to life, on the page.”
