The Pox Party

  Octavian, in particular, was Caesar Augustus’s name before he acceded to the imperial crown. I wanted to give the boy in my story a name that reflected his classical upbringing and also suggested a latent capacity for rulership — a promise that he would someday use his gifts as a leader and enter into his putative birthright as a prince.

  Q: Did you find any information about eighteenth-century pox parties really having taken place?

  A: Yes — in fact, coming across a description of a pox party was one of the first germs, so to speak, of the book, one of the things that first gave me the idea for the story. People really did hold parties at which a doctor would infect them with a mild form of the disease and they would all suffer it together, and then acquire an immunity. Their understanding of quarantine was very imperfect, however, so they sometimes infected others in the process — which led to protests by the population at large against inoculation.

  The moment I read about pox parties, I thought one would be an amazing setting for a novel: a festive month when a bunch of young people are cut off from the outside world, quarantined together, dancing minuets and running fevers.

  Smallpox was an incredibly destructive and virulent killer in the eighteenth century. It was estimated around 1700 that one death out of every twelve could be chalked up to the disease; in the military, that figure was as high as one death in every four. During the Revolution, America was wracked by a smallpox epidemic, and the progress of the disease in fact deeply affected the strategies and outcomes of the war. It is horrifying but true that African Americans were used as experimental subjects in the struggle against the disease. Thomas Jefferson, for example, performed large-scale experiments with smallpox vaccination on hundreds of slaves before declaring the process safe and effective and vaccinating members of his family.

  Q: What about the other experiments? Are they real?

  A: Yes, believe it or not, most of the experiments pursued by the Novanglian College of Lucidity are based closely on experiments of the period. Meteorologist John Lining, for example, weighed everything he ate and excreted in an attempt to discover the effects of weather on his metabolism. John Winthrop of Harvard set out on a voyage from Boston to observe the Transit of Venus in northern climes. The demonstrations of electricity described in the novel were, in reality, undertaken by members of the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society of London. And so on.

  There also really were trials held to determine whether non-Europeans had the same capacity for learning as whites. A young Jamaican named Francis Williams, for example, “. . . being a boy of unusual lively [intelligence], was pitched upon to be the subject of an experiment, which, it is said, the Duke of Montagu was curious to make, in order to discover, whether, by a proper cultivation and a regular course of tuition at school and the university, a Negro might not be found as capable of literature as a white person.” Williams was sent to Cambridge University in England to receive a classical education. He proved himself an extremely able student and later returned to Jamaica, where he opened a school and continued to write poetry in English and Latin.

  Unfortunately, even clear results in educational trials such as this one didn’t convince those who were determined to justify slavery. Despite Francis Williams’s achievements, his own colony never truly embraced him — finding him too “haughty” for a black man — and skeptics across Europe questioned the validity of the experiment. Some philosophers speculated, for instance, that Williams must have received help with his Latin compositions, or that “the noble duke would have made the experiment more fairly on a native African; perhaps . . . the Northern air imparted a tone and vigour to [Williams’s] organs, to which they never would have been susceptible in a hot climate.”

  But thankfully, others argued that philosophers who decried the achievements of Williams and other black intellectuals “[should] have known that souls are of no color, and that no one can tell, on viewing a casket, what jewel it contains.”

  M. T. ANDERSON is the author of several novels, including The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves; Thirsty; Burger Wuss; and Feed, a National Book Award Finalist and a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Growing up in the Boston area, he was surrounded by early American history. “I got my hair cut in the town that sent the first detachment of militiamen against the British,” he says. “My orthodontist worked in the town where Paul Revere was captured by the Redcoats.” On the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Old North Bridge, after watching several reenactments, he started wondering, “What would it be like to be standing there — untrained — facing the British with a gun I usually used to shoot turkeys? What would it be like to be standing there, not knowing that we would win? I decided to write a book from the point of view of someone who wouldn’t know the outcome of the war and who had to make a hard choice between sides.” M. T. Anderson lives in Massachusetts.