The Ingenious Edgar Jones by Elizabeth Garner

Garner’s first novel published in the U.S. is both a historical fiction novel about a small, lower –class family in the English city of Oxford in the 1840s-60s, as well as a dramatization of the early clash between science and religion in England. It tells the tale of William and Eleanor Jones, a porter (watchman) at Oxford University and his wife, and their only child, the precocious and wild Edgar. Slow to develop reading and social skills but brilliant at taking things apart and drawn irresistibly to metal objects, Edgar is apprenticed first to a blacksmith, then as an iron-worker on the construction of the Oxford University Museum, and finally, when he proves too unruly, to an inventor of toys and scientific instruments. Determined to please his father, who has very strict ideas about the role of knowledge as secondary and often destructive to the primary goal of living a Christian life, Edgar dreams of finding his place as an adventurer and creator of metal wonders, driven by an unstoppable curiosity, a love of heights, and the loneliness of a life without the approval of a father-figure. When his scheme of revenge against the Professor who turned him out of the University Museum causes a fiery disaster, Edgar is sentenced to prison at the age of 14 and his family torn apart.

Garner does an excellent job for the most part of making her three principle characters seem real, while at the same time using them to illustrate the changing of the guard in gender roles and religious attitudes of mid-nineteenth century England. William is pulled apart by his desire to protect his son and his love of and devotion to the University (which took him in as an orphan), and the misuse of his son by the Professor in his Museum scheme sets the two loves of his life at odds. He also struggles to relate to a wife who at first is unhappy having a boy rather than a girl, and then begins to come into her own working as a seamstress. Eleanor does her best to play her role as a housewife despite feeling unfulfilled socially and sexually. And in Edgar, Garner utilizes the boundless energy and fearlessness of a young boy to capture the spirit of an age of scientific discovery that seemed to many at the time to be both a wonder and a blasphemy, pushing in a physical and moral way against the religious and social status quo. The book’s ending is somewhat unsatisfying because Garner is so successful in making her readers care about her characters – as the plot plays out the three fade away into their uncertain futures, becoming less people and more the ideas they represent. Nonetheless, the book is beautifully written from start to finish, and manages to provide thrills, laughter, and an easily accessible grasp of the great ideological struggle that took place as science and religion clashed publicly for the first time in the city of Oxford. Some very minor violence and mildly explicit language, and discussion of prostitution.