Victoria Day is available through the author at 

johnpassfieldnovels@gmail.com

The Story

On Victoria Day, May 24th 1881, in London, Ontario, Canada, a young reporter was relaxing on his boardinghouse porch after supper when he noticed a man who was staggering up the street, soaking wet and incoherent. The reporter rushed to the Thames River and dove into the water and took part in a massive rescue operation as the result of the sinking of the steamboat Victoria which foundered with five hundred passengers on board. After the rescue was over, the reporter, Lambert Payne, pledged himself to investigate the causes of the disaster, vowing that such an event would never be allowed to take place in his community again.

The Setting

In the 19th Century, municipalities dammed up local rivers in order to create municipal water supplies and recreational areas. The resulting parkland offered local entertainment, in the form of picnicking and boating for city dwellers, in the days before automobiles took them farther afield for recreation. In London, Ontario, the damming of the Thames River created a three-mile long channel which led from the Dundas Street Dock to the newly-created Springbank Park. At five o’clock in the evening of May 24, 1881, a holiday in celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday, the steamboat Victoria left the Springbank Park dock with approximately five hundred passengers on board, though she had been built to hold only three hundred passengers. The sinking of the Victoria – in which on hundred and eighty-two people lost their lives – took place near the present-day Guy Lombardo Bridge.

The Sources

I was born in the nearby city of St. Thomas and attended university in London, Ontario, so I had read short retrospectives of this story over the years which left me with a sense of the outline of the unfortunate event. As I did research in preparation for the writing of this novel, I was very pleased to find that the two London newspapers of the day, the London Free Press and the London Advertiser, offered a complete coverage of the event, both as a hot-off-the-press, fast-breaking news story and as the subject, a few weeks later, of a thorough inquiry into the probable causes of the disaster. In addition, I was pleased to note that the newspaper stories gave not only detailed eye-witness accounts of the experience of the trip up-river, but offered glimpses of the deeper patterns of social interaction and personal motive which I wanted to explore in turning the historical event into a novel.

The Nature of the Event

A steamboat loaded with passengers is a society in miniature. Each of the passengers has personal reasons for being on the boat, yet all are under the care of a leader whose role is to provide for the safety and welfare of those passengers while they are in his care. The ways in which the leader responds to the difficulties of the trip and the ways in which the various passengers respond to these same difficulties and approve or disapprove of the leader’s actions present a dynamic and dramatic version of the elements at work in a larger society.

Over the years, I have been interested in the process by which societies respond to the kinds of events, whether man-made or natural, which threaten to tear apart the very fabric of their communities. Often, a society will respond to a cataclysmic event by working its way through a three-stage process:

- as an immediate response to a disaster, a society will cooperate in a rescue operation in order to minimize the damage;

- within days of such a disaster, a society will mourn the human loss which it has suffered; and

- over a longer period of time, a society will assess the amount and nature of the damage which has occurred and inquire into the causes with the intent that such an event will be either prevented or minimized in future.

The Structure of the Novel

As I considered the events of the Victoria Day holiday in London, I was aware that I had written a number of novels in which I explored various aspects of the pattern which I have outlined above: in Grave Song, I explored the personal response of one individual, Robert Chisholm, to the loss of his family during the cholera epidemic of the 1830s; in Jumbo, I explored the loss of a world-famous entertainment superstar, Jumbo, as it was reported in the world-wide media; in Pinafore Park, I explored the process whereby a town responded to the loss of a number of its children; and in Rain of Fire, I explored the process whereby an inquiry sought to assess responsibility as a means of healing a wounded community.

In preparing to write this novel, Victoria Day, I decided that I would focus on the dynamics by which such a devastating event develops in stages, as seen through the experience of the captain and passengers, and on the attempt by another character, the reporter, to reconstruct the process whereby the event unfolded, with the aim of understanding the meaning of the event in both societal and personal terns.

Accordingly, I decided on a three part structure for the novel:

-Lambert Payne, a newspaper reporter, would encounter the event as it is happening and respond in two ways: he would plunge into the rescue operation while there was still hope of saving lives, and he would pledge himself to discover the causes of the disaster with the determination that his findings would help to prevent similar events from happening in the future;

-Captain Rankin, a first-time captain, would go through the difficulties that he encountered in the overloading of the steamboat, the confusion-filled trip up-river, his contentious interaction with the passengers and the terror of the sinking and would suffer emotional damage as a result of his shattering experience; and

-the experience of the passengers would be presented in two ways: as a group, they would be an ever-present and ever-vocal element in the journey, whose words and actions would reveal their contribution to the experience; they would also be represented by six individual passengers whose thoughts – before, during and after the sinking – would provide a sense of the interconnectedness of the members of the community and the loss which is incurred when valuable lives are cut short by a disaster.

The Form of the Novel

This pattern allows for a multiple perspective, as the reader explores the elements of the story in three interactive ways:

-as a detection story of the reporter’s attempt to understand the dynamics of the event;

-as an action story of the captain’s attempt to bring his steamboat safely through the experience to the safety of the Dundas Street dock; and

-as a group-dynamics story of the passengers’ experience of riding on a steamboat which half of them believed to be in danger of sinking at any moment and which half of them believed to be providing a thrilling but safe excursion experience.

The Question of the Novel

The pattern of a society which seems safe and sound to some and yet badly out of kilter to others is becoming a familiar phenomenon as we, in our global society, move deeper into our experience of the 21st Century. The question which the reporter tries to answer is the same question which the reader is asked to consider: if societies go wrong, what are the factors which contribute to unfortunate events of this nature; and, more importantly, how can societies prevent, or at least minimize, the threat of such disasters in future?

The Image-Patterns of the Novel

Each of the major characters of the novel – reporter Lambert Payne and Captain Donald Rankin – is engaged in an attempt to understand the experience while living through it. Each employs his own image-patterns in an attempt to interpret the nuances of the unfolding debacle in light of the patterns of experience with which he is most familiar. For both characters, books about past events suggest a means of evaluating the experience that they are living through according to time-honoured criteria of judgement. It is for the reader to decide which – if either of these characters – is capable of interpreting the event which they are both forced to live through and compelled to attempt to understand.

Victoria Day is available through the author at johnpassfieldnovels@gmail.com