regshoe

They’re never explicitly mentioned in the novel, but the Enclosure Acts are a highly relevant part of its historical context, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. What it’s implied the gentleman with the thistledown hair historically did to magic (and, arguably, what Norrell tries to do) is a form of enclosure, and the book’s ending effectively represents a restoration of the true and rightful magical commons.

“Pleasant, is it not, to see oneself as others see one? I said I wanted John Uskglass to look at me and I think, for a moment he did. Or at least one of his lieutenants did. And in that moment you and I were smaller than a raven’s eye and presumably as insignificant.”

One chapter later:

“An English magician is an impressive thing. Two English magicians are, I suppose, twice as impressive — but when those two English magicians are shrouded in an Impenetrable Darkness — ah, well! That, I should think, is enough to strike terror into the heart of any one short of a demi-god!

...

• It’s something to keep in mind about Jonathan Strange’s character that he knows (or at least, has been told and is probably fairly certain) that John Uskglass appeared to these women and helped them. I mean, I don’t want to gloat, but I think it certainly informs his motivations in the later part of Strange & Norrell, and is obviously very relevant in the last few chapters.
• Cassandra Parbringer/Mrs Field OTP. Also Jane Tobias/Emma Pole. I’m convinced they all get together after the ending of Strange & Norrell and form a society of female magicians, together with Flora Greysteel and Miss Redruth and various others. I’m also convinced that Jane Tobias doesn’t really die in 1819 but disappears into some magical realm where she and Emma live happily ever after. (Look, I can headcanon what I want).
• The story that Cassandra tells about the child John Uskglass, and the later scene that calls back to it (why should I be afraid?) have the same sort of odd mixture of eeriness and bleakness and comfort and depth about them that some of the best parts of Strange & Norrell have. I love this thing very much.

• There are eight different names and titles used to refer to this character over the course of the book: the Raven King, the Black King, the King of/in the North, the King, John Uskglass, John d’Uskglass, the nameless slave, and an unknown word in a language of Faerie that supposedly means ‘Starling’.
  
• It’s a plot point that none of these names is actually the character’s ‘true name’ in a magically meaningful sense, and he considered himself to be nameless because he was taken into Faerie before he could be christened. However he was presumably christened at some point, after his return to England — he at least behaves as a Christian as king. The name he used at this point was probably John d’Uskglass, after his Norman (supposed) father, and it’s interesting that this apparently doesn’t make it his true name.
• John Uskglass and the Raven King are by far the most frequently used names. However, John Uskglass doesn’t appear at all until page 396, after which it gradually takes over from the Raven King as the most used name. I’m not sure why this is — perhaps it’s part of the gradual demystification of the character that we increasingly hear him called by a more ordinary-sounding human name, or perhaps Clarke/the narrator is hiding, in the early part of the book, just how important the character is going to be by concealing who the title of the third volume refers to.
• The Raven King is not a unique name, and has applied to other characters before. Possibly the original Raven King is the Welsh mythological King Brân the Blessed (his name literally means ‘crow’ or ‘raven’), who is associated with all sorts of interestingly relevant ideas about mythological kingship and the relationship between the king and the land, and with the Arthurian legends and the story of the Fisher King — and, incidentally, one story that involves an important starling.
• d’Uskglass is a strange name, and an evocative one (it always reminds me of ‘we see through a glass darkly’ — the image of a dusky mirror imperfectly reflecting the world, or perhaps reflecting something other than the world we think is real, is beautifully appropriate — and the rest of that passage is surprisingly relevant too). It and its original bearer are both Norman French, but Uskglass appears to be an older English place name, and its actual etymology seems to be Celtic (in which case it would mean something like ‘blue-green water’). Perhaps this unclear mix of sources reflects the messy reality behind the idea of Englishness and English magic as single coherent things.
• The language of Faerie in which he was first named is supposedly related to the Celtic languages. In both Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the word for ‘starling’ is druid. This must be an out-of-universe pun rather than anything significant, since this word has no actual relation to the English word ‘druid’, but still.

From The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke:

“I am a human child and all the vast stony, rainy English earth belongs to me. I am an English child and all the wide grey English air, full of black wings beating and grey ghosts of rain sighing, belongs to me. This being so, Robin Goodfellow, tell me, why should I be afraid?”

From Maurice, by E. M. Forster:

But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions’ who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.

…I’d write a long sensible post about the parallels here, and how these very different books are really saying similar things: both are about the very people who are oppressed and marginalised by English society taking back symbolic ownership of the land itself, whether that’s done using magic or otherwise (it’s significant that the first quote is probably not something John Uskglass ever actually says, but a story told about him centuries later by the magicians of England — this is how they choose to remember him), but I’m not literary enough to do that, so have this ‘put the quotes together and point at them emphatically’ thing instead.

• The narrator is an omniscient nineteenth-century novel narrator.
  
• The narrator is Susanna Clarke writing in the real world.
  
• There are two layers of fiction here, of which we see only one. The narrator isn’t actually omniscient, and the book that we have is a potentially inaccurate reconstructed account of historical events in the ‘real’ world of the story, written probably 20-30 years after the events it relates. This seems to be fairly popular, and if we allow that the novel exists within its own universe it’s probably the most plausible, but I find it unsatisfying — I don’t want to think that the story isn’t what ‘really’ happened, and certainly there are things in there that no in-universe author could have known about.
  
• The narrator is a fictional character and the book exists in its own universe, but it is an entirely reliable and truthful portrayal of events. As to how this could happen, perhaps some mid-nineteenth-century magician somehow managed to use magic to see into both the past and other people’s heads and write the book that way, or there could simply be a character who really does know everything (in a universe that contains John Uskglass and apparently various sorts of supernatural beings I don’t think this is necessarily impossible, although why any such being would want to write a book is a little more obscure).
  
• The narrator is Miss Redruth (possibly along with either or both of her sisters). Potentially this means there is no Jane Eyre in the JSMN universe, but it’s a really interesting alternative.
• I actually think there’s good reason to speculate that the book is the work of more than one person. In particular, the main narration and the footnotes seem to be written from different perspectives: the narrator is (or at least presents herself as) omniscient, while the footnoter with their uncertain historical reconstuctions seems not to be. I mean, this fits fairly well in the ‘unreliable account’ theory if the narrator simply drops the pretence of omniscience in the footnotes, but it’s interesting to take this as the real state of things and theorise from there. Perhaps the novel is a found document of mysterious origin that some helpful in-universe scholar edited and footnoted before publishing it.

• Handsome
• Long hair
• Attractive unusual accent
• Good fashion sense, ideally including a long black coat
• Mysterious and enigmatic
• >700 years old
• Extremely powerful magician
• Typically appears in the form of a large and ominous flock of ravens
• King of Northern England 1110-1434
• Sits upon a black throne in the shadows but they shall not see him. The rain shall make a door for him and he shall pass through it. The stones shall make a throne for him and he shall sit upon it.

The plot of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is about a revolution, really – a social revolution along a dimension that doesn’t actually exist in the real world, so what does that mean? Strange & Norrell is about the oppressed and marginalised people of England taking back the magic that is rightfully theirs, about the return of magic to the land. And yes, they can only do this because of the actions of a king, but this is a king who deliberately ends the dependence of English magic on his own presence*, and who ultimately puts magic back in the hands of the people in a way that it wasn’t before.

I think a lot of the book is concerned with the interaction between the past and the present – the constant historical footnotes, some of which turn out to be very relevant, the in-universe doubts over whether historical figures really existed, or events really happened. It’s the return of English magic, after all – and the return of magic could easily mean simply that, a going back to how things used to be, overthrowing the new order to re-establish the old. But that is very much not what happens, and I think that’s really interesting.

John Uskglass is explicitly associated with rebels, the Johannites, who believe – and the southern English government fears – that he will come back to take the throne of the North as he did in 1110. But he knows better than to do that. He doesn’t return in a blaze of glory to rule – instead he appears in person only for a few unremembered moments, he restores the power of English magic and places it in the hands of the people who no longer need him to sit on the throne. He disappears mysteriously once again, going back to the shadows. England is ‘his forever’, but it is no longer the same place that it was in 1110. The words are rewritten, and the England we see at the end of the book is not a land merely restored to its former glory but one changed now to something new.

*Is this what John Uskglass is doing? I don’t know! I think it’s a reasonable guess.