Site News

Happy 20th Anniversary to The Alienist!

Posted on 6 Comments

Today, March 15, marks the 20th anniversary of The Alienist’s publication. Over the past 20 years, this much loved and groundbreaking novel has been published in 35 different formats and editions, and is now considered a “modern classic”. What an amazing achievement!

A few months ago I asked 17th Street visitors to provide ideas for the best way to commemorate the 20th anniversary, and I received some wonderful suggestions. However, as most of the proposed ideas required a physical presence in New York, and I’m located nine and a half thousand miles away on the other side of the world, unfortunately I had to rule the majority of the suggestions out. So, after lots of thinking, I concluded that perhaps the best way to celebrate the anniversary would be through a new content feature that emphasised time, and thus the idea to recreate The Alienist’s original text based timeline for the site was born.

The new timeline is now up and is fully interactive. It contains maps of key locations for particular dates and chapters, as well as markers for key international, national, and local events, thereby placing the novel’s sequence of events within a wider historical context. A few short film clips from 1896 have also been interspersed in appropriate sections of the timeline. The interactive timeline has a permanent place in The Alienist subsection of 17th Street, but a copy has also been included for interested visitors below. I hope you enjoy the new feature. If you notice any major historical events that I have forgotten to add, please feel free to contact me and I will amend the timeline.

In addition to my own commemoration of the occasion, The Bowery Boys have also put together a fantastic article detailing some of the key historical locations used within the book to mark the 20th anniversary. Do check it out!

Finally, on a personal note, I would like to thank Caleb Carr for his wonderful novel(s). I can’t speak for others, but The Alienist, and its sequel, have been that very rare kind of book that really has “changed my life” in more ways than is apparent through this website, and for that I have no adequate way of saying thank you.

[timeline src=”http://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnGirj3rPR9IdGpNdUdBV0NsN2JBVGxXbW8zZGs0c2c&output=html” width=”100%” height=”650″ font=”AbrilFatface-Average” maptype=”sterrain” lang=”en” ]

Mary Palmer Character Profile

Posted on No Comments

She was “the only woman he ever loved” and she now has a character profile on 17th Street. Following from Japheth Dury’s character profile being added to the supporting characters page of the full character list earlier this month, Mary Palmer’s character profile has now been completed and can also be found on the supporting characters page. In addition, the spoiler warning feature has been added to the profiles that appear on the main characters page of the full character list.

Palmer, Mary

Appears in The Alienist

Mary Palmer, an attractive young woman afflicted with classic motor aphasia (characterised by the extreme difficulty speaking even though comprehension abilities are preserved) and agraphia (an inability to express thoughts in writing), is employed as Dr. Laszlo Kreizler’s housekeeper for the duration of The Alienist. We learn early in the novel that Dr. Kreizler had first discovered Mary at the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island where she had been involuntarily committed following the murder of her father in which she had chained him to his bed and set the house alight. Although Mary had been considered idiotic from early childhood due to her communication deficits, she appeared to have been cared for adequately by her family and had been taught to perform menial household duties as she was growing up. The murder of her father, a respectable schoolteacher, when she was only seventeen years old had therefore been considered an act of insanity, and she had been committed to the asylum as a result.

During his early consultations with Mary, Dr. Kreizler was struck by the lack of the symptoms she displayed for the only psychological disorder he felt constituted true insanity (dementia praecox, now known as schizophrenia), and he quickly determined her true diagnosis of motor aphasia and agraphia. After spending a number of weeks gaining Mary’s trust and developing a means of rudimentary communication with her, he went on to discover the shocking truth that her father had been sexually assaulting her for years prior to his murder. When the subsequent legal review of her case resulted in Mary walking free from the asylum, she managed to communicate to Dr. Kreizler that she would make a good employee for his household staff, and as her communication deficits would make it difficult for her to find employment elsewhere, the doctor agreed to take her on.

Click here to read more. Warning: Contains major spoilers for <em>The Alienist</em>

Unlike Dr. Kreizler’s other household staff who play an active part in the investigation, Mary’s role in The Alienist is relatively small as her employer makes it clear from the outset that he doesn’t want her to be involved in the case. Instead, John Moore suspects there is a love triangle between Dr. Kreizler, Sara Howard, and Mary, with Sara assumed to have captured the doctor’s heart and Mary feeling unrequited love for her employer. It is not until Dr. Kreizler’s life is threatened while searching for information about the team’s primary suspect in Massachusetts that he reveals to John that he is not in love with Sara; rather, he has been experiencing reciprocal feelings for Mary for quite some time, but the “complicated” nature of their relationship (first as patient and doctor, then as employee and employer) has made it difficult for him to acknowledge his feelings. Tragically, Dr. Kreizler and Mary’s relationship is never able to progress beyond employee and employer as Mary is killed when a group opposed to the investigation try to obtain information about the doctor’s whereabouts while he is out of the city and invade his home.

Referencing Guide

Posted on No Comments

As I’m currently taking the opportunity to catch up on research for future 17th Street updates, I only have a small update this weekend. I frequently get asked how to reference the material found on 17th Street given that I have chosen not to share my full name on the site for privacy reasons. As such, I have put together a brief referencing guide that can be found in the site section in order to provide examples of how to reference the material found on 17th Street in four major referencing styles — Harvard (AGPS), APA 6, MLA, and Vancouver — without an author. I hope this is useful to those of you who use the site for educational purposes. If there is another major referencing style that you would like me to add to the guide, please feel free to contact me.

Japheth Dury Character Profile

Posted on 1 Comment

Eight years after opening 17th Street, I am pleased to report that I have finally added a character profile for Japheth Dury (also known as John Beecham) to the supporting characters page of the full character list. As Japheth’s profile necessarily requires the inclusion of spoilers for the primary storyline of The Alienist, I have hidden the majority of the profile through a new spoiler warning feature. To read Japheth’s full profile on the supporting characters page or via the copy included below, please click on the spoiler warning which will reveal the complete profile. I will be adding the spoiler warning feature to other pages of the site as well as expanding the supporting characters page further over the coming months.

Dury, Mr. Japheth (also known as John Beecham)

Appears in The Alienist

Midway through The Alienist, the investigative team send enquiries to a number of hospitals looking for former patients who may fit the profile they have developed for the killer they have been hunting. A promising response from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C. about a discharged soldier with a facial tick prompts Dr. Kreizler and John Moore to visit the city in search of further information. While there, John also visits the Bureau of Indian Affairs to search for cases of disputes between natives and white settlers that may relate to the investigation.

While John is searching the records at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he comes across an interesting case relating to the violent killing of a minister named Victor Dury and his wife at their New Paltz, New York home sixteen years earlier; a murder that had been attributed to embittered Indians at the time. The only survivor of the attack was their youngest son, Japheth Dury, who was said to have been kidnapped by his parents’ killers.

Click here to read more. Warning: Contains major spoilers for <em>The Alienist</em>

Dr. Kreizler, meanwhile, obtains further details about the soldier who had been treated at St. Elizabeth’s for unstable and violent behaviour before being discharged from the Army, an officer known as John Beecham. Seeing that Beecham had listed his birth place as New Paltz, New York, Kreizler and John decide to follow the lead by visiting the home of Adam Dury, the elder brother of Japheth, to learn more about his parents’ murder and his brother’s kidnapping.

During their visit to his farm in Massachusetts, Adam Dury reveals that he and his brother had been raised in an unhappy home. His father, a zealous minister, had dreamed of raising a large family to send to the west for missionary work. While Mrs. Dury had been proud of her husband’s ministry work and performed her housekeeping duties as a wife without complaint, she disliked sexual intercourse and only endured her husband’s physical advances reluctantly, preventing her husband from raising the large family he had dreamed of. When her husband lost his post, the couple drifted further apart and rarely spoke or touched. Finally, under the influence of alcohol, the frustrated Victor Dury raped his wife. The terrible incident resulted in an unwanted pregnancy that led to the birth of the couple’s youngest son, Japheth.

As a living reminder of her husband’s violent actions that night, Japheth became an object of loathing for his mother. She blamed him for every unpleasant moment of motherhood, even when he was only in his infancy and had no control over his bodily functions, and took delight in telling him that he was really the son of “dirty, man-eating savages who’d left him in a bundle at [their] door” (A 348). Adam Dury went on to explain that as a result of these experiences Japeth grew up to be an odd boy with a disturbing interest in torturing small animals he trapped during the mountaineering and hunting trips the two brothers enjoyed taking together. He also developed a facial tick that was only absent while trapping. Adding to Japheth’s traumatic youth, he was also violently raped by a farmhand named George Beecham who his older brother had mistakenly entrusted to care for him while on one of their hunting trips when he was only eleven years old.

Upon hearing this story, it becomes clear to Dr. Kreizler and John Moore that Japheth Dury was likely the murderer of his own parents, and that he and John Beecham were really the same person, with Japheth having taken the surname of his abuser after fleeing his parents’ murder scene. Once back in New York, the team discover that following Japheth’s brief career as a soldier, he had moved to the city where he lived with a landlady in Greenwich Village while working for the Census Bureau, a job that would allow him to come in contact with children and research his victims. After being dismissed from the Bureau for “paying excessive and disturbing attention to a child” (A 419), he took a job as a debt collector and moved to his final residence in a dilapidated tenement flat on the Lower East Side, the location where the team obtain definitive proof that he is the killer they are chasing along with evidence of where he intends to commit his final murder.