Every man and woman, most of whom had served as teachers of skilled trades to the young orphans, had vanished without a trace into the dark night, leaving behind a short note that would have to suffice for explanation:
To the Children of Dingley Delclass="underline"
With terrible fear and wretched sadness we have learnt that a great plague has fallen upon the world. Its blanket of death has overspread every known place on this vast orb with the solitary exception of our isolated valley. It is with equal fear and sadness that we must tell you of that which we have learnt in addition: one of your own teachers has been taken by the pandemic, and has, moreover, exposed each of the other adult members of the community to this most horrible disease.
We have therefore concluded as a group that there is nothing else that can be done but that we should remove ourselves permanently from your society, and pray that the infection has not had time to spread to you as well.
So we hereby bid you adieu and leave you to your own good devices. We trust that we have trained the older amongst you well, and that you will thrive and grow and make of Dingley Dell everything that it has been our hope to attend and commend.
Do not venture from this cordoned valley or death will most assuredly take you. Remain here and God grant that you may abide in health and prosperity.
With undying affection,
Your teachers
(the names of each appearing in alphabetical order with the occasional appended personal note of encouragement and fond regard)
And so it came to pass that on the second day of April in the year of our Lord 1890, two-hundred, seven-and-fifty children ranging in age from three-years-and-three-months to fifteen-years-and-five-months found themselves left to their own devices. Though their juvenile apprenticeships gave them the skills necessary to build a community based upon the twin foundations of resilience and self-reliance, and though they would take good care of themselves in this valley that had yet to be given the name Dingley Dell, it would still be no easy thing for these young waifs to live without loving adult companionship, and there was the shedding of copious tears born of that painful abandonment (mixed with the tears of relief that the plague did not derange — in the end — the health of even a single child within the Dell). Although none of the Dinglian orphans had ever known the purest form of love — that which exists between parent and child — yet the tender care offered to them by their teachers had been sufficiently sustaining, and would be sorely missed and mourned.
The abandonment, as necessary as it appeared to have been, was made ever the more difficult to bear by the fact that every child, save one, had been left illiterate, the need for the children to learn to read having been superceded by the far more important vocational imperative. Were it not for a certain sewing teacher by the name of Miss Ruby Johnson and her ardent, most-favoured pupil, one Miss Henrietta Weatherfield, the young denizens of Dingley Dell would have been left severely wanting in the means by which they might further an education that did not employ, for example, the loom, the gimlet, the anvil, the bread-pan, or the awl.
The subversive Miss Johnson, as things turned out, had taken it upon herself to secretly violate the rule prohibiting the teaching of any of the orphaned children to read — a hard rule that was meant to be strictly enforced without exception. Every night for a good many months Miss Johnson, through whisper and tiptoe, had invited a most zealously compliant Henrietta to her private bedchambers to take up the Bible, or the elementary grammar, or a worn and ragged copy of The Eclectic First Reader for Young Children, with Pictures.
Over time, Henrietta had learnt to read quite well — an irony in that initial season, since, with the sudden exodus of all of the adults, there was nothing left behind for her to read, the teachers having hastily stuffed all of their books and journals and every scrap of personal correspondence into bulging carpetbags and capacious portmanteaus.
Except…(And it is a most amazing “except” to be sure!)…for a small library, perhaps overlooked, perhaps deliberately hidden, which was discovered in late summer of that same year by two exploratory little boys. The books were found half-buried in the dirt floor of an infrequently visited fruit cellar — a singular hoard of volumes that had not been hurriedly and irrecoverably carpetbagged! A collection of books, which at that point and ever thereafter, comprehended the entire bibliographic corpus, the full sum and substance of reading matter emanating in the Outland:
— A complete twenty-five-volume set of the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1878–1889).
— The Holy Bible, King James Version.
— A dictionary (unfortunately missing its cover, frontispiece, title page, and the leaves which comprised those terms from “Aa” to “Ash”).
— McCormick’s Atlas of the World, copyright 1872.
and a set of
— The Complete Novels of Charles Dickens from The Pickwick Papers to the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
There was one other book purported to be found amongst the volumes of the fruit cellar cache, which disappeared very soon after the discovery, only to be discovered the next year accidentally shredded in a cornfield between the teeth of a harrow. The book was titled Around the World in Eighty Days, and it had been written by a Frenchman by the name of Jules Verne.
But for the youthful “First Generationers” of Dingley Dell, the “Fruit Cellar Library” constituted an education that would prove to be quite broad in scope and which sufficed to define this receptive league of children and their multiple generations of descendents as English-speaking and English-reading expatriates of some greater Britannic realm. With those soilbegrimed volumes as tool and guide, and young Henrietta Weatherford as first in a long procession of teachers who would add English language proficiency and scholastic erudition to the proud list of our skills and talents, we succeeded over the course of the next century in making our microscopic world slightly less insular, while keeping our collective identity unmistakably…Dinglian.
Here is who we were in those early days and the many weeks, months, and years that followed: proud citizens of a state with an affinity for things English (and largely Victorian, for we had no other frame of reference), yet possessed of a conversely noble independence in those acquired attributes that distinguish and commend a people in isolation — people who must proceed upon intuitive inclination in those areas of acculturated human interaction in which Mr. Dickens and the otherwise accommodating authors of the Encyclopædia Britannica do not apprise. We were a people set adrift by unfortunate, even tragic, circumstances, yet blest by a set of implements-of-the-mind (either accidentally or purposefully left to us), which, in combination with the directives of our own hearts and our own God-given analytical, probing natures, allowed us to navigate our future, even though the course that lay ahead be mirky and disadvantageously adumbrated.
To these books we superadded volumes of our own, created from our very own pens, as we sought to enlarge and aggregate that initial Fruit Cellar Library with the works of writers of our own society (such as the one you are now reading). We did this not only to consolidate our many voices into one, but because, in more practical terms, the tradesmen who came each fortnight to deliver the outside goods that we required brought us no new volumes to read and extol. Each request garnered the same response in the very same words: “We have no books to bring you because there are no books.” The reply was always delivered with a shrug and in an invariant tone that hinted little at deliberately concealed meaning, and over time our brokers learnt to stop asking. How curious, we privately mused, that this world beyond our vale should be possessed of no new books, or perhaps of no books at all! We were given to imagine book burnings — great conflagrations that reduced every volume to ash. Perhaps, we thought, the leaves of their heritage books were required to heat their homes — sick-houses in which legions of Beyonders lay alternately febrile and shivering with some deadly ague, related, we surmised, to the plague that had originally estranged us.