Felicia’s Journey
Felicia’s Journey
THE LITERARY WORK
Set in the English Midlands in the early 1990s; published in 1994.
SYNOPSIS
Felicia, an out-of-work young Irishwoman, is wandering through a town in England’s industrial midlands. In search of the young man who got her pregnant, she falls into the clutches of another man, the dangerous Mr. Hilditch, who has at least six young women buried in his back garden.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Born William Trevor Cox in 1928 in County Cork, Ireland, to Irish Protestant parents, William Trevor spent his childhood in Ireland, where he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He has lived in Devon, England, however, since the early 1950s. Although many of his works are set in England, he belongs to the Irish Academy of Letters and considers himself an Irish author, a point on which he stands firm. That he has lived all his life on the margins of the dominant culture—a Protestant in Catholic Ireland, an Irish writer in England—is something Trevor considers a source of his artistic strength: “I was fortunate that my accident of birth actually placed me on the edge of things. I was born into a minority that all my life has seemed in danger of withering away” (Trevor, Memoirs, p. xiii). The artistic value, feels Trevor, lies in the perspective gained from observing a culture from a distance, which helps explain his early focus on English subjects and his later focus on Irish subjects, now that he has lived so long away from his homeland. Trevor is most widely known for his short stories, but his novels have also won high acclaim. From the early 1960s, Trevor published a stream of novels that tend to center on the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of eccentric or outcast members of society, both of whom appear in Felicia’s Journey.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Irish immigration to England
Though most of Ireland won its freedom from England in 1922, becoming the Republic of Ireland, the strong connections between the two countries were not severed. Six Irish counties, generally referred to as Northern Ireland, chose a separate path from the Republic and remained part of Britain. Moreover, both Irelands share cultural ties with England, born of centuries of English governance. Despite a concerted effort early in the century to expand the use of the Irish language, for instance, English remains the first language of nearly the entire Irish population. Family ties to England have also remained strong. Popular imagination connects Irish immigration to places such as Australia, Canada, and—especially—America. But the highest rate of Irish immigration has actually been to England, a reasonable development since it is relatively easy to reach and return from. The difference in numbers is actually staggering. In 1999, while there were 220,000 Irish in the United States, there were more than 800,000 in England (“Irish Abroad”). They had in fact exceeded this number already at the beginning of the decade in 1991. Comprising 1.5 percent of the English population, the Irish formed the largest migrant minority in Western Europe at the time, a fact not often discussed. Especially since the middle of the nineteenth century (when the Irish Potato Famine struck), England has harbored a large population with close ties to Ireland, with the comparatively short distance between the two lands giving rise to much fluidity and mobility. Irish immigrants often return home for visits (in Felicia’s journey, for instance, Johnny Lysaght is back from England when Felicia falls in love with him).
How has the large Irish minority fared in England? Its members have been both ignored and vilified, a pattern that has persisted since the nineteenth century. The Irish were difficult for the English to classify, being neither fully black nor fully white according to nineteenth-century theories of anthropology. These theories assumed the “Teutonic” people (such as the English) to be at the top of human evolution, black peoples to be at the bottom, and peoples such as the Irish and the Jews to be somewhere in the middle. Over time these theories would lose their credibility, but to some degree the old prejudices would remain stubbornly intact.
Researchers point, for example, to psychiatric studies that discount the Irish, ignoring the group as worthy of study: “[It] has been known for over twenty years that the Irish in Britain have the highest rates of psychiatric hospital admission of any immigrant group, yet discussion of the Irish has been extremely limited in the British texts of transcultural psychiatry and completely absent in some” (Bracken, p. 44). No doubt, the cause for the omission has to do with not thinking of the Irish as a full-fledged immigrant group. A paradoxical attitude exists towards Irish immigrants—that, essentially, they are both “English” and “non-English.” Thus, while other immigrant groups—such as the Haitian, Jamaican, Indian, Pakistani, and Chinese, are often treated separately in government and other studies, Irish immigrants are often not treated as a group at all.
At the same time, the Irish do not merge un-noticeably into the general British population. Irish immigrants are immediately recognizable by their accents, for one thing. This has often caused grief among Northern Irish citizens, who consider themselves British rather than Irish, but find themselves identified as Irish when they are in England. Once identified as such, the Irish are often dismissed as inconsequential. The novel’s Mr. Hilditch dismisses Felicia, whom he thinks of not by her name, as he thinks of his previous victims, but rather as “the Irish girl.” For him, the bulk of her attraction lies in the fact that she is wandering unattached, with no one to look for her, which makes her like all the girls who have been Mr. Hilditch’s “special friends.” On the other hand, he lets her into more facets of his life than any of the others, speaking to her outside his workplace and taking her into his house.
Mr Hilditch wonders if the breaking of his meticulously kept rule is in some way related to the fact that the Irish girl comes from so far away, a foreigner you might say, the first time there has been that.
(Trevor, Felicia’s Journey, p. 52)
“A foreigner you might say” is telling, for it reveals Felicia’s status as a quasi-foreigner. She is “simple as a bird,” he also thinks, “which you’d expect her to be of course, coming from where she does” (Felicia’s Journey, p. 127). He assumes the Irish are less sophisticated than the English, a prejudice based on his sense of English superiority, and his appraisal of Ireland as a backward country. The fictional Mr. Hilditch gives voice to what the social historian Ken Livingstone has called “crude anti-Irish prejudice,” a public as well as a private phenomenon in English society: “[Just] as in previous centuries, the Irish [today] are regularly depicted in the press and on television as stupid, drunken, and backward” (Livingstone, p. 79).
Rough sleeping in England
The English have had a long history of wrestling with the issue of homelessness, having been concerned with the problem for centuries; it first became widespread enough to cause legislation after the Black Death (1348-49), a plague that killed off one-third of the population and drove up wages, since there were not enough workers left. Laws were passed aimed at keeping wages low, fixing them at what they had been before the plague struck. In response, many laborers became vagrants, looking for places where the wages were higher than in their native counties, or where the laws were ignored.
Vagrants were, as they are now, problematic for the government. Indeed society considered them bothersome, for they caused disorder—or at the least looked disorderly —and often committed crimes, a predictable outcome of having no means to support themselves. Meanwhile, they were, as they are now, vulnerable members of the society, vulnerable to the criminal elements of society, to the orderly elements of society (when it decided to punish them), and to disease, weather, and starvation.
In 1388, a law was passed making each county responsible for its own poor citizens, the beginning of governmental involvement in trying to help the homeless, rather than simply punish them. This was followed by three centuries of laws specifying punishments for vagrancy, however, which varied from whipping, to imprisonment, to branding, to temporary slavery. Then in 1601, the “Acte For the Reliefe of the Poore” was passed, an act now referred to as the “Old Poor Law.” Under this act, “each parish was obliged to relieve the aged and the helpless, to bring up unprotected children in habits of industry, and to provide work for those capable of it but who were lacking their usual trade” (Higginbottom). Each parish, therefore, was not only responsible for feeding and sheltering its poor, but for finding them work, a task that was not always easy. Previously, the indigent poor—often the elderly or the mentally ill, who had no families to care for them, or illegitimate children and their mothers—had been parceled out to various parish households, their upkeep paid for by parish funds. Now many parishes began to establish socalled “bridewells” (after St. Bride’s Well in London, where one of these shelters was founded), known later as “workhouses.” These were notoriously dreadful shelters; “at best they were spartan places with meagre food and sparse furnishings—at worst they were unsanitary and uncaring places” (St. Mungo’s Charities).
When an amendment was passed in 1723 allowing parishes to consolidate and join together in creating expanded workhouses, which served larger communities, conditions became worse, especially since the workhouses were specifically intended to be places of last resort—they were to be places that no one would wish to go to, in an effort to keep the number of their inhabitants down. Decades of these conditions led, by the Victorian age, to the horrendous circumstances detailed by Charles Dickens in such works as Oliver Twist, and to national scandals that, by the close of the nineteenth century, had led to some reforms. By the end of World War I, the workhouse was abolished as a government institution in England, though some of the old workhouses continued to exist, on a much smaller scale. Run by local committees, they were called “hospitals,” a situation that would continue until the 1960s.
It was then that the problem of homelessness, which had abated somewhat in the previous decades, became once again of great concern. In 1949, for instance, only six people were sleeping rough in London—the term “rough sleepers” in England, means officially “those who sleep on the streets from very late at night to the early hours, i.e. from midnight to 5 or 6 a.m.” (“Rough Sleepers: Government Strategy”). But by the 1980s “around 20, 000 single homeless people were living in accommodation for homeless people in London… the numbers on the streets of London… had risen to more than 1,000” (St. Mungo’s Charities). The burgeoning number of not just the homeless in general, but specifically those sleeping rough, would lead to the creation, in 1998, of the Rough Sleepers Unit, a government agency devoted to the problem.
Felicia, the novel’s main character, becomes a rough sleeper just before the establishment of that Rough Sleepers Unit, which aimed to cut the number of homeless people in England by two-thirds before 2002. She lives on the streets when the long-standing problem hit its twentieth-century peak. (The Rough Sleepers Unit would have remarkable success. In Birmingham, the city through which Felicia wanders in the novel, the unit would exceed the two-thirds target and ahead of schedule, reducing the homeless from 56 in 1998 to 15 in 2000 [“Press Notice”].)
Serial murderers in the late twentieth century
The phenomenon of serial murder is not new; several serial murders are famous in history—those committed by Caligula, Vlad the Impaler, and Giles de Rais, for instance. Though the term “serial killer” did not come into common use until the 1980s, Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London’s East End in 1888, is generally considered the first “modern” serial killer. Serial murders are alarming, but relatively rare. Apparently there has been a rise in the number of serial killers since the 1960s, though the extent of this rise is under debate (Norris, p. 19). Under debate also are the questions of what defines and characterizes a serial killer. Key to Felicia’s Journey, however, is not scientific debate about serial killers, but rather the popular notion of them. In the late-twentieth-century popular imagination, the serial killer is not instantly recognizable as such. He appears to be a normal male but is in fact a sexual predator, preying especially on the vulnerable (runaways, prostitutes, the homeless), outcasts with whom he has no connection in his everyday life. As a child, the predator was a victim himself, most likely of sexual and/or other physical abuse. Such is the popular profile
IRISHMEN AND THE ENGLISH ARMY
In the novel, Felicia’s lover, Johnny Lysaght is a soldier in the English army. The British Army will have offered him a pretty good deal—less than $16,000 per year in the early 1990s in United States dollars, but in addition to room and board and with opportunities for advancement.(An equivalent position in the United States Army would have brought in just over $ 12,000, plus bonuses,) Though Ireland proper is no longer part of Britain, citizens of the Irish Republic join the British Army as easily as do British citizens of English, Scottish, Welsh, or, Northern Irish descent. Thai Johnny is welcome in the British Army at the same status as British citizens is in itself indicative of the odd position of the Irish in England—the Irish were once part of the English empire, and still have an unstable relationship to the country, neither fully citizens nor fully aliens. Ironically the English Army makes it clear in its recruiting materials that it will provide for the families of recruits, which means Johnny does not abandon Felicia for economic reasons alone. As Mr. Hilditch infers but Felicia cannot believe, Johnny is simply a cad.
of a serial killer; the novel’s Mr. Hilditch fits this profile exactly.
According to the popular conception, the serial killer is difficult to catch precisely because he is not connected to his victims. Finding them more or less at random, he goes through several phases before, during, and after each murder. The first phase, the “aura phase,” during which the killer is somewhat disconnected from reality, can be momentary or it can last for weeks. In the second “trolling” phase, the killer searches for his next victim. Third comes the “wooing phase,” in which the killer lures in his victim. The fourth phase, which again can be extremely short or prolonged, is the “capture phase”; in the fifth, the killer actually commits the murder. The sixth is the “totem phase,” in which the killer takes some sort of souvenir of the experience, and in the final “depression phase,” the killer discovers, to his grief, that the murder has not actually solved his problems. The novel’s Mr. Hilditch does not follow this pattern exactly—even in reality, of course, serial killers often don’t—but he exhibits enough of these behaviours to have clearly been constructed from the same general conception. His experience with Felicia, for example, leads to his remembering things done to him by his mother in his childhood, which carries him into Norris’s last phase, in his case, a suicidal depression.
The Novel in Focus
The plot
Pregnant and unmarried, Felicia arrives in England in search of her future baby’s father, Johnny Lysaght. At the same time, Mr. Hilditch, the obese manager of a factory canteen in the English Industrial Midlands, just north of the city of Birmingham, is anticipating the turkey pie that will be on the menu at lunch, food being one of his major obsessions. They first meet when Mr. Hilditch encounters Felicia, looking lost and confused, searching for the nonexistent lawn-mower factory in which Johnny has told her he works. Mr. Hilditch sends her off to try a nearby industrial park, which could possibly have a lawn-mower factory. Felicia, who is low on funds, walks for miles through the city and around it, looking vainly for the factory, unable to understand much of what she hears, since it is spoken in an English dialect so different from her own. We learn, while Felicia wanders, of her history: her family has proud ties to the Irish Revolution, which led to the creation of the Irish Republic. Other, more immediate details come to light too. Felicia lost her job at the local meat packers; she met Johnny Lysaght at a wedding. Back home, she has been sharing a room with her very old great-grandmother, the widow of an Irish Revolution hero. The family’s entire self-concept has been centered on that fallen hero, and their connection to the Irish Republic.
Felicia continues to wander around the town and its environs for some days, observed by Mr. Hilditch. He takes an interest in her; she reminds him of other young women he has known, waifs also down on their luck, to whom he was helpful. Mr. Hilditch approaches Felicia, offering to aid her in her search. He lies, saying he has a sick wife in the hospital (he has never been married) in order to appear harmless. We learn that Johnny has probably joined the British Army, a high crime in Felicia’s father’s mind. He ordered Felicia not to see Johnny, but then discovered that she has become pregnant by him. Felicia, who believes that Johnny loves her, refuses to accept that he would do such a terrible thing as join the army of the oppressors. However, while still in Ireland, she tried to obtain information about how to have an abortion, causing the reader to wonder if at some level she doesn’t distrust Johnny’s sincerity. Felicia’s father learns that she is pregnant by Johnny, a member of the “occupying forces,” her father’s term for the British Army, given its presence in Northern Ireland. Enraged, he calls her a whore, or “hooer” as he pronounces it (Felicia’s Journey, pp. 58-59). Desperate, Felicia stole the money hidden under her great-grandmother’s mattress, broke into Johnny Lysaght’s mother’s home for Johnny’s address (which she failed to find), then took the bus to Dublin and the ferry to England.
Back in the present, Mr. Hilditch drives Felicia to watch for Johnny as workers leave the local factories. Hilditch elaborates on the fiction about the dying wife. While Felicia is out of the car, making inquiries, he rifles through her bags, finds her stash of money, and steals it.
Felicia is next taken up by Miss Calligary, a member of a religious group that goes door-to-door spreading the Message of the Church of the Gatherers. Mr. Hilditch, meanwhile, is busy discovering Johnny’s true whereabouts—he is indeed a private in the British Army, stationed nearby, information Hilditch will not pass on to Felicia. Felicia goes to stay in the Gathering House, where she at least does not have to spend any more of her small funds. She stays there for some days, continuing her search for Johnny. Discovering that her money is missing, she accuses the Gatherers of stealing it, whereupon she is promptly thrown out of the Gathering House.
Without money and homeless, Felicia meets up with some of the rough sleepers of the city, who show her where to find shelter in an abandoned house and where to find food. Unwilling to descend to this level yet, she ends up at Mr. Hilditch’s door, asking for help—exactly what he has been wanting her to do. He pretends to aid her in her continued search for Johnny, stopping by cafés and relishing the thought that everyone around considers them lovers. He talks Felicia into having an abortion, takes her to the appointment, and makes sure everyone in the clinic thinks the baby is his. Back at Mr. Hilditch’s house, Felicia, ill and depressed, asks only to bor-
STATELY HOMES
One of Mr. HiIditch’s favorite weekend pastimes is to visit stately homes, of which there are many in England. The fortunes of the nobility have declined over the last century, prompting private stately homes to open themselves up to the public during posted times. Sporting in some cases cafés, such homes provide tours of the house and grounds. The family may still live in the manor, in carefully roped-off sections of the house, or it may have sold the ancestral home to a firm that runs it for a profit. Warwick Castle, close enough to Birmingham for a day trip, is one of the finest medieval castles in England. Owned by a firm in the early 1990s, it charged the equivalent of $11.60 for a tour, which consisted of a visit to its “armory, dungeon, torture chamber, ghost tower, [and] clock tower,” as well as (he “private apartments” of the former owners (Porter, p. 505). According to Frommer’s Comprehensive Travel Guide, another part of the state home was must-see: “Don’t miss the Victorian rose garden, a re-creation of an original design from 1868 by Robert Marnock… . The romantic castle is host to various colorful pageants” (Porter, p. 505). As indicated in the guide, the castle evokes the past through an amusing combination of historical accuracy—the Victorian rose garden—and historical fluff—the pageants. Such gardens are important to the novel; concerned as it is with innocence and evil, they hark back to the original garden of Eden. Interestingly, while Hilditch enjoys the splendid gardens of the stately home he visits, his garden ties untended at home, showing several patches of overturned earth.
row enough money from Mr. Hilditch to make her way back home to Ireland. This is upsetting to Mr. Hilditch, who suddenly remembers that all the girls he has helped have eventually, as he remembers it, left him. When he wakes Felicia in the night, talking about the other girls, she intuitively understands what has happened to them.
She knows the girls are dead. There is something that states it in the room, in the hoarse breathing, in the sweat that for a moment touches the side of her face, in the way he talks. The dark is oppressive with their deaths, cloying, threatening to turn odorous.
(Felicia’s Journey, p. 155)
Mr. Hilditch tells her to come down and get into the car, so that he can drive her on the first leg of her journey home. She agrees, but knows better than to climb into the car. While he sits waiting, she runs away.
Things are beginning to fall apart for Mr. Hilditch, so he goes off on one of his frequent visits to a stately home, where he enjoys the beautiful gardens and the luxury of the house itself. The events seem disconnected at first, but apparently whenever one of his “friends” disappears, Mr. Hilditch, who doesn’t remember exactly what happened, conducts little rituals to bring his life back into balance, one of which is visiting stately homes, icons of order and beauty. For some weeks after Felicia’s disappearance, he continues on with his life. The Gatherers locate him. Miss Calligary discovers that Mr. Hilditch knows Felicia and assumes that she tricked him the way she seems to have tricked the Gatherers. Even though Miss Calligary assumes him to be Felicia’s victim, the fact that someone knows of his connection to Felicia disturbs Mr. Hilditch greatly. He becomes increasingly reclusive, abandons work, and begins to recall more of what he does not want to remember, including his mother’s sexual abuse of him when he was young. Miss Calligary attempts to “Gather” in or convert Mr. Hilditch. Eventually he confesses that he stole Felicia’s money, and she sees how badly the Gatherers have misjudged Felicia. Mr. Hilditch falls completely apart and hangs himself.
Felicia, on the other hand, is well, and even safe, though not by society’s standards. She has sold off the last of her possessions and become one of the rough sleepers. Though young to be on the streets, she is careful, and unlike many other girls on the street, does not resort to prostitution. Felicia knows when and where to beg, and when and where not to. She has friends among the other rough sleepers and continually gets help from storekeepers and doctors. Miss Calligary finally finds Felicia and tries to gather her back in, but Felicia refuses. She may not have found Johnny, but she has found serenity and peace.
Felicia drops out
The end of Felicia’s journey is a fitting culmination to a trip that takes her through various forms of homelessness. Though she seems to start out from a place of great security—a home, a duty, an identity, an honorable place in the history of Ireland—clearly her family has not provided a true home for her. Their identity with the cause of Irish Republicanism is so complete, that it makes no room for a daughter pregnant by a soldier in the British Army. This is especially ironic, given the changing circumstances in Ireland at the time—historically, Ireland has been an extremely uncomfortable place for unwed mothers, but by the early 1990s, conditions were shifting, as reflected in the changing rate of illegitimate births: “[In] Ireland, the increase in single parenthood and the fall in births inside marriage has been very striking. In 1980 births outside marriage made up 5% of all births, whereas by 1996 they made up one in four of all births” (O’ Connor, p. 8). Felicia’s family, however, has not kept up with the times. Locked in the past of the Irish Revolution, they lag behind in other respects as well. Her father’s response to Felicia’s pregnancy is worthy of earlier in the twentieth century. And if her nuclear home seems to have little room for her in an emotional sense, her national home has little room in an economic one; in her family’s economically depressed area of Ireland, Felicia is unlikely to find work.
In England, though Felicia has money and a perceived destination, she is also homeless, cut off from her Irish birthland, seeking a person who does not want to be found. Even when taken in by the Gatherers, Felicia is essentially homeless. Her place there is dependent entirely on their good will, which she quickly loses, and Mr. Hilditch certainly offers her no safe haven—quite the opposite. It’s only when Felicia takes to rough sleeping, that she finds peace and comfort, as revealed by her musings at the end of the novel, on a park bench in the sun. The homeless Felicia spends her days in contemplation, considering not the evil done her, nor the evil she has done, but grace: “She looks out now from where she is, and does not brood: what’s done is done. She does not focus on her one-time lover’s treachery. She walked away from a man who murdered girls. She was allowed to walk away: that is what she dwells upon” (Felicia’s Journey, p. 209). Her view of mercy and grace extends even to Mr. Hilditch, whom she learns has committed suicide. Felicia does not reveal his secret; in fact she now sees him from an almost inhumanly merciful perspective: “Lost within a man who murdered, there was a soul like any other soul, purity itself it surely once had been” (Felicia’s Journey, p. 212).
Trevor, who is so interested in the margins of cultures, and the ways in which they collide, takes Felicia from one boundary to another until she assumes a completely marginalized life, yet one that seems curiously resonant and full. The novel turns the usual perception of homelessness on its head: “There will be charity and shelter and mercy and disdain; and always, and everywhere, the chance that separates the living from the dead” (Felicia’s Journey, p. 213). We are led by her extraordinary serenity and her apparent happiness to contemplate the extent to which our considerations of the state of the homeless resemble Mr. Hilditch’s disparaging view of the state of Ireland.
Sources and literary context
William Trevor has not stated any real-life inspiration for the story of Felicia, a fact that is not surprising, since he regularly refuses to pinpoint sources for his stories. “People always ask me how stories begin,” he says, “They expect me to say, well, they begin by sitting in a place such as this, because I’m known as quite an eavesdropper. But it’s not as neat as that. It’s an untidy, rather dirty business” (Trevor in Caldwell, p. 47). Felicia’s story seems to have evolved from Trevor’s personal concerns, from his growing use of Irish characters, from his interest in questions of innocence and guilt, and from his interest in the intersections of cultures. Of his Irish characters, Trevor says, “Leaving Ireland enabled me to see Ireland through the wrong end of the telescope. You’ve got to write about the parochial in the most universal way you know how. That’s part of distancing, and judgement: to find what is recognizable outside of, say, a small township in Ireland” (Trevor in Caldwell, p. 44). Felicia herself, supremely parochial, becomes, at the end of the novel, so universal as to be completely untethered, a citizen of the world, not of any particular country.
A GLOSSARY OF SOME ENGLISH AND IRISH EXPRESSIONS IN FELICIA’S JOURNEY
- “Mr Hilditch weighs nineteen and a half stone.”
A “stone” is 14 pounds—he weighs 273 pounds. - “Nineteen and six in the pound.”
There were 20 shillings in a pound, and 12 pence in a shilling; the term means that someone isn’t “all there,” is slightly daft. - “I have a cheek coming here.”
I’ve got some nerve coming here. - “Lay-by.”
A place at the side of a highway where cars can pull off the road. - “Looking for a kip, dear?”
‘Do you need a place to stay?” - “The Black and Tans should have sorted that island out.”
The reinforcements for British police action in Ireland in the early 1920s should have completely suppressed the Irish. - “Is maith liom.…”
Irish for “I like.…”
(Felicia’s journey, pp. 6, 15, 57, 76, 103, 149, 152)
Reviews
The twenty-first of his published works, a list that includes both novels and short-story collections, Felicia’s Journey was well received, winning the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. Francine Prose, reviewing the novel for Book World, considered the book to be not merely extremely well written—she mentions “the depth, the bravery, the felicities of language, style, narrative economy and psychological insight” in it—but also important to read when considering “the misfits and the poor, the underground man and woman” (Prose, p. 10). Hilary Mantel, in the New York Review of Books, compliments the novel for having “the elegant tensions of a high-class thriller” in seamless style: “It is rare to find a book which is so gripping as Felicia’s Journey, yet so subtle. There is no straining for effect, and hardly a false note in it” (Mantel, pp. 4, 6). A later review, by Bruce Allen, praises the “brilliantly worked-out suspense thriller” for its “dual character study whose skilfully calibrated juxtapositions are interesting in themselves” (Allen, pp. 329-30). The novel has since sustained its regard as one of Trevor’s finest fictions thus far.
—Anne Brannen
For More Information
Allen, Bruce. “Souls Like Any Other Souls.” Sewanee Review 106, no. 2 (spring 1998): 329-33.
Bracken, Patrick J., and Patrick O’Sullivan. “The Invisibility of Irish Migrants in British Health Research.” Irish Studies Review 9, no. 1 (April 2001): 41-51.
Caldwell, Gail. “A Gentleman of Substance.” The Boston Globe, 30 May 1990, 37, 44.
Higginbotham, Peter. “Poor Laws.” The Workhouse.http://users.ox.ac.uk/~peter/workhouse/index.html. (August 2002).
“Irish Abroad.” Irish Centre for Migration Studies.1999. http://migration.ucc.ie/. (July 2002).
Livingstone, Ken. Nothing But the Same Old Story: The Roots of Anti-Irish Racism. London: London Against Racism, 1986.
Mantel, Hilary. “The Mystery of Innocence.” The New York Review of Books 42, no. 9 (25 May 1995): 4-6.
Norris, Joel. Serial Killers. New York: Anchor Books, 1988.
O’Connor, Pat. “Ireland: A Country for Women?” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 1 (1999 Fall). 1999. Online: North Carolina State University. http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v4:l/con41.htm. (July 2002).
Porter, Darwin. Frommer’s Comprehensive Travel Guide: England ‘95. New York: Macmillan Travel, 1995.
“Press Notice.” Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Rough Sleepers Unit. 1999. http://www.housing.odpm.gov.uk. (July 2002).
Prose, Francine. “Mr. Hilditch’s Curious Hobby.” Book World 25, no. 4 (22 January 1995): 1, 10.
“Rough Sleepers: Government Strategy.” Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Rough Sleepers Unit. 1999. http://www.housing.odpm.gov.uk (July 2002).
St. Mungo’s Charities. “History of Homelessness.” 2002. http://www.mungos.org/facts/history.shtml (August 2002).
Trevor, William. Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
_____. Felicia’s Journey. New York: Penguin, 1994.