The Daguerreotype

By Patrick Gregory

With an unerring ear for Victorian language and a sense of authenticity, Patrick Gregory takes Elizabeth from unsure girl on unfamiliar soil to resilient matriarch. The poignancy of her story lies in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081560825X
• ISBN13: 9780815608257
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Time Made Palpable

In the middle of the 19th century, a class-confined London school girl plans to spend a year in France to groom herself as a teacher of French so that she can ultimately make a home for her adored and long-widowed father. John Gow finds his career as a laboratory technician faltering over issues of patronage and when his only offer for work comes to him from Philadelphia, the dutiful Elizabeth drops her own plans and sails off to the new world with her father. Practical and reserved, this seventeen year old offers us a view of mid-century America: Philadelphia, too, turns out to require connections and the Gows end up in Wisconsin where class gives way to knowledge and skill and where educated women plant their own beans. What a treat to see Madison in 1852 as Elizabeth opens the window of an inn at the center of the new town: "A scattered array of primly modest frame buildings shyly confronted one another from opposite sides of the street, while between lay naked plots of land, still raw from recent clearing. Through the gaps one perceived fragmentary views of distant hills. Leaning out the window, Elizabeth could see at the end of the street the handsome facade of the new State House, with its obligatory porticos and cupola. Though it was a workday morning, few people seemed to be about. Several buildings down a man was loading lumber onto a cart, another was taking down the shutters on the front of a dry goods store, and directly across the way a woman had just this moment come out onto the porch with a broom in her hands and was standing there, gazing pensively into the sky. A couple of hawks, slowly turning in the air high above the rooftops, served to emphasize the stillness of the scene." And its only slowly that Elizabeth herself learns to exert her own force over her life. The novel happily turns unexpected corners; even the sentences contain surprises that reveal a great breadth and width of experience. Subtly done, and with a beautiful underlying irony. Patrick Gregory gives us more than an American story, he gives us a tale in which time seems palpable and we feel it sliding through our fingers.

A thoroughly rewarding and erudite reading experience

The Daguerreotype is an ambitious and engaging historical novel by Patrick Gregory which covers seventy years in the life of a woman, from her girlhood in a mid-19th century fashionable London seminary to her death on a remote Iowa farm at the outset of the Depression. The text is a controlled, careful prose that fully showcases the psychological ambiance of an era now gone as we follow the life adventures of Elizabeth Gow, who being young and ambitious gave up the prospect of a teaching position in England to accompany her widowed father to America and an uncertain future that takes her from Philadelphia to the Midwest where she marries, raises a family, and struggles to adjust her once youthful ideals and aspirations with the harsh realities of adult responsibilities. The Daguerreotype is a thoroughly rewarding and erudite reading experience, one which will linger in the mind long after the book is set back upon the shelf.