not really finished...the moment of handing a manuscript in to the publisher is always weird. there's a mix of worry that they won't like it, huge relief at having finished it, doubt about how it could have been done better (one more draft?), and a niggling awareness that it's not really actually "done"; there is a lot more to do, little technical things and edit reviews and image permissions...until the book is in one's hand it's not done, and not even then because then one must - wants to - promote it so people actually read it. last night I saw my first book on the shelf of a bookshop and I was like, oh, there you are. Two years ago that was "done" too...

...writing a book does not of course leave a lot of time for blogging...but it is coming together pretty nicely.

Arcade's little books are not overlong. The manuscript is 30,000 words, including breakouts and quotes from all those funny 19thC documents and letters I've read along the way. Some are so delicious they are going in despite not being strictly necessary. And the quotes from journals by passengers aboard the ship Oxford took to Australia, though from different voyages, are priceless: all kinds of dramas, fights, deaths, vomiting and ways to combat months of seaborne boredom.

I have a self-imposed deadline of late next week to get the ms in...there will be small additions, like references, but if I don't do it by then, it will be February.

Right now I am exactly the age Oxford was when he was released from prison. I cannot imagine starting life with nothing now. The more I find out about how well he acquitted himself, the more I like him...and the more I cannot quite reconcile him with the utter fool he was at 18. Though of course many of us were utter fools at 18.

The joy and pain of archives: you can spend a day turning old pieces of parchment, squinting at smudged copperplate handwriting, and get nothing.
you can walk into a library, pick a volume of church gazettes almost at random from a daunting 25-year span to be examined, and hit a new reference to your subject on the first page you open it to.
No matter how armed with dates and names, you can flounder in a sea of not very precise filing by some clerk 142 years ago.
and the most frustrating and rewarding: you can be constantly distracted by the flicker of little historical diamonds: stories of nobodies calling out from scraps of papers. For instance: In 1868, Jane Boyd, a "sorrowing widow" from Co. Antrim, Ireland, took the liberty, as she said, of writing to the Victorian Police Commissioner to ask, had he heard of her son John Boyd, last heard of in the Victoria Police, but silent these past years. "I am distressed between hope and despair," she wrote.
And that's the end of it. no report, no record of a reply to Mrs Boyd. Just a woman in Ireland casting out a line to a missing son, suspended.

new discoveries are always fun...some dedicated searching on the Trove site last week revealed that not only did my man Edward serve the church in his time in Melbourne, he was also a stalwart of the West Melbourne Mutual Improvement Society...so appropriate for someone who seems to have been a self-improver from the moment he was tossed into Bethlem Hospital.

I wonder how he kept a straight face during the talk on the topic of "Sham", though?

Edward Oxford's been my part-time obsession for the past 18 months, and it's time to start telling the story.

Oxford - 18, unemployed and slightly demented - tried to change the course of history. He shot at Queen Victoria and Prince Albert when Victoria was newly pregnant with her first child, Princess Adelaide.

He missed. That, or the gun wasn't loaded.

Then - by a long and complex path that has been the subject of my obsession - he lived to a ripe old age and was buried in Melbourne General Cemetery under the name John Freeman.

He lived with secrets, duality and, no doubt, regrets and what-ifs. I can't claim that I discovered him, but I have pretty much claimed him for myself. Other researchers have worked on him and as I work through my material I'll publish their links here, but I think I have more of the story than anyone else.

The idea, of course, is to blow his cover as widely as possible. The book should be out with one of Melbourne's best little publishers next year (I'd name them but no deal is done until it's done, and I haven't checked in with them on this blog).

So the blog is part workspace for me, and partly a way to share the experience of turning this digital and dead-tree pile of research material into a story that somehow makes sense. By putting up links, I can also share material that won't make it into the book, or can't be posted here for copyright reasons.

As a first step, there's a photo of Oxford, taken in the notorious Bethlem (Bedlam) hospital here.