"Micah Clarke": The Rising of the "Old Leaven"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part One

Set at time of Monmouth's Rebellion, the events in Arthur Conan Doyle's "Micah Clarke" occur just a few years before those in Scott's "Old Mortality."

Framed as story told by an old man -- Micah Clarke -- to his grandchildren, relating experience of his own youth.

He speaks as among the last survivors: "it is not likely that in the whole county of Hampshire, or even perhaps in all England, there is another left alive who is so well able to speak from his own knowledge of these events."

Micah's father a Dissenter and veteran of Cromwell's army; generally mild, but can be subject to fits of "the old leaven" what "his enemies would call fanaticism and his friends piety." Micah's mother is a churched Protestant -- a believer in the Church hierarchy -- and so his religious heritage is divided between extremes.

The adult friends of Micah's youth include a bookish carpenter, Zachary Palmer, who shares with the boy works of serious drama and poetry as well as Classics and treatises of contemporary political philosophy. His other "father" is Solomon Sprent, a retired seaman, tattooed with the Old and New Testaments (Creation upon his neck and the Ascension upon his left ankle) and full of romantic stories of faraway lands and adventure, his talk "a library in itself." Micah's intellectual heritage is thus also divided between extremes.

Rumors abound that there will be a rising of the "Independents" under the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth against the Catholic James II.

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