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More on Mr "B" (Backwards to Britain;Voyage à Reculons)

From: Ian Thompson <ithompson~at~ges.gla.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 21:44:40 -0000
To: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>

In Voyage à Reculons, Verne and his friend Hignard are entertained by a Mr "B", a respectable businessman in Edinburgh. In an earlier posting I identified Mr "B" as being William Bain residing at 6 Inverleith Row, on the basis of documentary information and a survey of the house and its locality. I have taken the research a stage further by trying to discover more on the profile of the Bain family to be certain that it matched that described by Verne in the book.This has involved further scrutiny of the census, birth and death certificates and the Last Will and Testament of William Bain and his wife Catherine. They had five children of whom the oldest, Margaret, would have been nearly eighteen at the time of Verne's visit, and who I have proposed is fictionalised by Verne as "Amelia". The 1861 Census defines Bain as a banker and in fact he was the Manager of the City of Glasgow Bank. By examining the registered place of birth of his children we find that Bain resided successively in Glasgow and Aberdeen before Edinburgh. This suggests that after starting work at the Head Office of the bank in Glasgow, Bain was promoted to Manager at the Aberdeen Branch before becoming Manager of the Edinburgh Branch just a few years before Verne's arrival in Edinburgh. Hence, he was able to afford a prestigious house which so impressed Verne and which the census tells us had fourteen rooms and two resident servants. Bain clearly prospered, since he left the Glasgow City Bank (which in fact collapsed spectacularly in 1882, the year of Bain's death) to become Joint Cashier of the Bank of Scotland, a much more important national bank.
However, at the time of his death from heart disease aged 68, Bain resided in a smaller house in a less exclusive area of Edinburgh. This probably reflected the fact that his children had left home to follow business careers in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, while Margaret and her sister Christian had married. William Bain's Will and Testament shows that he left an estate of £3,254, a comfortable amount at that time. The testament of his wife who died of pneumonia in 1888 aged 77 shows that the value of the estate had doubled to £6541, probably accounted for by the value of the house.
The profile of the Bain family is thus entirely consistent with that portrayed in Voyage à Reculons - a highly respectable upper middle class family living in an elegant house in a fashionable area of Edinburgh overlooking the Botanic Gardens. Two of the sons followed in their father's footsteps, rising to high positions in the Bank of Scotland. At the time of Verne's visit, Margaret (Amelia) is recorded in the census as having completed her education and thus would have had time to entertain (and charm!) Verne.
Ian Thompson
Received on Fri 03 Mar 2006 - 23:43:17 IST

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