Title: The dream chasers: A tale of Cornwall, five mining brothers––and the land of the free
Author: Gill Bolton
This story is about five brothers in a mining family between 1870 and 1882, when Cornish tin extraction peaked and then declined. It shows how these men at ‘Wheal Bethany’, a tin mine in Biscovey, became part of the larger story of Cornwall and its Cornish diaspora, which was spreading through the US, Mexico, South Africa and Australia.
I read this book to find out how the decline of tin mining affected families who stayed in Cornwall and those who left. My interest is focused by my maternal great-grandmother, born to a Cornish miner in 1884, who grew up in Pachuca Mexico, married a Cornish mine manager and returned to Cornwall in 1903.
Bolton’s story opens after the father dies. His widow has retreated from life, while Nathan, the eldest brother, one of three point of view characters, struggles to find meaning in his life. Despite being a skilled miner and having a lover, it’s drink, tribal relations between villages and physical violence that softens his pain and rules his life.
While the father casts a shadow over this family, Bolton tells us little about him. He was a mine captain, which means the brothers ‘have more education than most, speak a few extra fancy words than our neighbours, and live in a decent home of sorts instead of a damp hovel.’ But once he dies, they’re ‘on the same level as everyone else.’ The stakes in this story relate to men, their masculinities and fragile achievements.
The storyline follows the brothers as they find their way in life, despite vulnerable economic circumstances defined by their father and family circumstances. Nathan travels to America, while James, the second brother, and Helen, who he marries––the other two point of view characters––stay in Cornwall. James seeks security through social mobility, marrying the daughter of a wealthy Cornishman. Other brothers and characters show through marriages and (possibly too many) deaths s the range of labour, freedom, and creative self-expression.
The brothers navigate freedom and unfreedom through individual choices about work and struggle to secure their livelihoods. America symbolises the land of the free and Nathan’s experiences, conveyed through letters, affects the brothers as they and, in some cases, their wives pursue economic independence. Unfreedom associated with poverty and economic dependence reveals the fragility of men’s achievements. Some men’s unfreedom distorts business behaviour, other’s translate failure into physical violence.
In Bolton’s portrayal of violence between men and domestic violence against women, I sense a larger history and geography of Cornwall and the Cornish. Sea trade was part of this mining economy in the 5th century CE. Tin was central to coinage in the 14th century, when the Crown secured supply by creating the Dutchy of Cornwall. The problem of transporting ore preoccupied wealthy Cornishmen since the 1600s.
But the novel shows how this objective economic world was mediated by individual’s creative capacities and subjective attitudes. By the 1870s, historic mining was being overtaken by innovations like Wesleyanism, unionism and the steam engine. Invented by Richard Trevithick (1771-1883), this Cornish mine manager’s son would have had a certain education, those ‘few extra fancy words’, like the Rosevean brothers.
This novel offered me new insights into Cornwall, the Cornish and their mining expertise. Bolton tells us that overseas mining caused ‘havoc with Cornish profits,’ displacing ‘men who had worked almost all their lives in mining’ across Cornwall. It was these conditions that produced the Cornish diaspora, a colonising force that spread across a red-coloured map.
These ‘dream chasers’ who pursued economic opportunities through hard work and self-possessed agency help me imagine my great grandmother. I see her now, like Nathan and Helen; a woman who ‘could not be rail-roaded.’ A person of ‘stubborn, individualistic, self-contained race’, this woman also questioned prevailing habits of mind, claimed her arts and built a future for her feisty family.
Published: 14 January 2019
Publisher: Kindle version, independently published, https://a.co/jbEnA24
Category: Historical fiction
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