#a jsmn post? after all this harlots?

[calamity-bean]

Paris Ormskirk’s Revelations of Thirty-Six Other Worlds

A funny thing happens when you mash up novel and show canon regarding this book.

In show–JS&MN, Norrell mentions it (by a slightly different title: Revelations of Thirty-Six Different Worlds) in episode 2 while discussing the upcoming auction of the Duke of Roxburghe’s library. The Duke's estate has a copy, and Norrell — as he insists to Childermass with long-simmering frustration — has been trying to get his hands on one for quite a while as well.

In book–JS&MN, Revelations is not one of the seven magical texts acquired by Norrell at the auction. However, a copy of the book is among the possessions Childermass takes with him from Hurtfew after being dismissed. One assumes this is Childermass’s own personal copy, though I suppose it’s not impossible that it’s the same one — presumably belonging to Norrell — that Strange uses elsewhere in the novel:

It did not take long to collect his possessions. There was a mahogany case containing a pair of pistols, a small purse of money, a razor, a comb, a toothbrush, a bit of soap, some clothes (all as ancient as the ones he was wearing) and a small parcel of books, including a Bible, A Child’s History of the Raven King by Lord Portishead and a copy of Paris Ormskirk’s Revelations of Thirty-Six Other Worlds.

Either way, if you mash the book and show canons together, two possibilities appear:

1. Childermass secretly always had a copy of Revelations in his personal possession and just watched with quiet amusement while Norrell spent years searching for one.

2. Childermass did not secretly always have a copy, but — as a very subtle means of getting the last laugh, so to speak, after being dismissed in favor of goddamn Lascelles — nicked the long-coveted Roxburghe copy from Norrell on his way out of the door.

Because Childer-sass.

Both of these possibilities are hilarious to me and I choose to believe in them both simultaneously.