Mother Leakey and the Bishop joins together Atherton’s two criminal worlds of West Country infanticide and Irish buggery, while not claiming to furnish conclusive proof for either’s existence. What concerns Peter Marshall is the fascination exerted by spectral Susan and the erring bishop not just on their own era but on successive ages of gossip and credulity, including our own. As Puritanism gives way to the Latitudinarians and the Deists, we watch Atherton’s image shift from that of a turbulent priest, accused, among other things, of intercourse with a cow, to a pattern of manly virtue, making his good end with a courage which caused ‘even the very papists to weep’. Nowadays, though not the most glittering exemplar in the homosexual martyrology, his name figures regularly on gay history websites.
As for Susan Leakey, the genie has never been soundly re-corked within its bottle. Peter Marshall’s zestful pursuit of her story maps that ambiguous frontier between so-called ‘pure oral folklore’ and the literary elaboration which eventually replaces it. No sooner had her ghost stopped visiting the family than it was being credited with whistling up storms to wreck Minehead merchant vessels. Marshall is surely right in suggesting that Coleridge, whose Rime of the Ancient Mariner was conceived on the Somerset coast, turned her into the nightmare Life-in-Death aboard the phantom ship, who whistles thrice when she wins the fearful dice game. The past, as this shrewdly calibrated, abundantly entertaining study demonstrates, is there for its inheritors to mould and reassemble as they choose, a creative playground rather than a landscape of unalterable truths. Minehead, rather than laying Mother Leakey’s ghost, has named a teashop after her, the ultimate proof of immortality.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.