Imogen Hermes Gowar

Mermaids have played an enduring role in western literature. In William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600) the sea-maid’s music travels seductively on ‘dulcet and harmonious breath’. In Hans Christian Anderson’s classic story ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837) they tell of unrequited love. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1857) they are portentous symbols of death by drowning. In T.S Eliot’s ‘Love Song …’ (1915), they haunt the tawdry sexual fantasies of J. Alfred Prufrock, ‘riding seaward on the waves/Combing the white hair of the waves blown back’.

Within myth and legend more widely, mermaids, sirens and selkies are objects of male desire, deferred gratification and death. Their ominous associations have inspired fantasies, fear and foreboding for centuries. Perhaps because they appear to embody ideas of untamed freedom and unobtainability, mermaids are deemed dangerous creatures: they typically elude, exhaust or extinguish the sexual appetites of men.

Imogen Hermes Gowar’s first novel flirts with these myriad associations of mer-culture while giving them a distinctive twenty-first century twist. Like Angela Carter’s handling of Little Red Riding Hood and other fairy tale figures in The Bloody Chamber (1979) Hermes Gowar takes up the established mythology of the mermaid in order to unleash what the former once called its ‘latent content’.

Yet if the ambience of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock gestures towards the mythical, it is also at heart, an historical novel. The ethereal and supernatural connotations of the mermaid are postponed across the physical bulk of its 500 pages for an insistently visceral and material world.

A former student of archaeology and anthropology, Hermes Gowar’s story was inspired by a ‘real’ mermaid at the British Museum which combines the body of a monkey and a fish tale. Flesh, skin and bone are focal points throughout The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock. Bodies shift beneath the ribbed confines of corsets and stays, or threaten to burst free from chemises, silks and stockings. When we first meet the novel’s kindly and ‘portly’ protagonist, the shipping merchant Jonah Hancock, his ‘rough’ fingers are ‘rasping’ across the ‘threadbare scalp’ of his ‘meaty face’.

Set in Calson, the book closes with a detailed historical note on the choice of type. Bound and packaged within a sumptuous cover that glitters with gold, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock captures something of the commodified world of objects that is fictionalised across its pages.

The narrative opens in the late summer of 1785 as Jonah (his biblical associations are suitably aquatic) anxiously awaits the return of one of his ships. The Calliope takes its name from the seductively melodic muse of Greek mythology and in turn the ship’s captain, Tysoe Jones, finds himself seduced by a mermaid, trading the Calliope in return for a corpse of one of the sea creatures.

When Tysoe Jones unwraps his catch in Jonah’s counting house, it appears like an affront to the archetypal image of the mythical mermaid. Clawed and fanged, ‘desiccated and furious, its mouth open in an apish scream’, the mermaid’s ‘parchment skin’ is ‘brown and wizened’. Understandably, Jonah is less than ecstatic at the exchange of his vessel for the wizened specimen that now stares back at him.

But Jonah’s misgivings seriously underestimate the savvy of Captain Jones. The whole of London is soon flocking to see this curious, otherworldly creature, and are willing to pay good money to witness the spectacle. It is not long before word has reached the ailing, upmarket brothel owner, Mrs Chappell (‘the premier abbess in all of London’) who hires the mermaid for her house of ill repute.

It is an exchange that brings the widower Jonah into the seductive ambit of the Angelina Neal, the most beautiful of all Mrs Chappell’s women, and the mermaid into the upmarket underworld of the prostitute.

The trope of the prostitute-as-mermaid, or the mermaid-as-prostitute, is carefully woven throughout. We are told that one of the brothel’s prostitutes has been rescued from Billingsgate, ‘covered in fish scales, and reeking like low tide’. Angelina travels in a decorated carriage where she appears at point like a pearl ‘in an oyster shell’. When Mrs Chappell calls in past favours, and Angelina is charged with the seduction of Jonah Hancock in order to secure the mermaid for her bawdy house, their combination is complete.

Whether this will be the beginning of a fulfilling love affair for the well-meaning Jonah, or whether she will wreck him on the proverbial rocks, is among the many intrigues of this beguiling narrative. The book’s three volumes are Dickensian in both proportion and tone. Its humorous and boldly sketched stock of characters and caricatures provide social commentaries on class, race and sexuality. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock moves deftly along the Thames between the depths of Deptford and Soho and the pomp of the Houses of Parliament. It also shows Britain’s empire coming home to roost through its black Atlantic cast of former slaves and blackamoors who now find themselves living another kind of servitude under the employ of Mrs Chappell.

In its reflections on the commerce of late eighteenth-century sexuality and the fetishization of the female body, we might also see an oblique meditation on contemporary concerns around the gendered cult of celebrity and the treatment of women in an age of social media. When Angelina comes across the story of her friend, Mrs Fortescue (a fellow former prostitute now engaged to nobility) while flicking through the pages of Tête-à-Tête and Town and Country, she notes with irony ‘that the press are so disgusted by this to-do and yet continue to devote whole pages to it’. Similarly, when Mr Hancock first sets eyes on Angelina, he knows he’s seen her before, not in the picture of her displayed in the Academy as she assumes, but in a ‘yellowed print … smeared by many fingers’: a cutting from The Comic Muse tacked to the wall of a local coffee-house. Mermaids carry a peculiarly modern resonance within this historical fiction of Georgian London where the monetisation of sex and celebrity seems to anticipate our own hard times.

James Procter, 2018