Literature: Response to The Dante Club

A Response to Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club Title

by Linda Tiessen Wiebe

WHEN A HISTORY reads like a novel, when names become characters with hopes and fears, when dates telescope into plot taking you inside lives lived long ago, you know you have a great read. Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club has done just this with both the 19th and 14th centuries, bringing to life 1865 Boston and through the lens of Dante’s 1306 poem, Inferno. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a group of friends are about to publish the first American translation of Dante’s Inferno, the first canticle of the three-part poem The Divine Comedy. The Dante Club tells the story of how this poem was brought to North America and the people who both helped and hindered this rebirth.

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Boston in 1865 is a microcosm of 19th century America. The aftermath of the Civil War has accentuated the country’s divide. A flood of Catholic immigrants threatens the Protestant heterodoxy of “Yankee Athens”. Harvard’s “war of words” highlights the bigotry of race and religion as shown through its opposition to the study of “vulgar vernacular” languages like Italian or French. A group of scholars led by Longfellow are swimming against the current. Every Wednesday night they meet to translate different sections of Dante’s Inferno with the hope of publishing in time for the 600th anniversary of Dante’s birth. The Harvard “Corporation” sees a real threat in their work and sets about to ensure the translation never sees the light of day. Meanwhile, unknown to either camp, someone is committing gruesome murders, amidst the usual garrotings and drunken slayings, that mimic the punishments of Dante’s Inferno. Nicholas Rey, a war veteran and the city’s first Negro police officer, is assigned to investigate.

Dante with the Simoniacs

I loved reading this book; the suspense, characters and context all unfurled themselves like a sunning cat into my imagination. The gruesome and graphic murders are Stephen-King-creepy, probably very much like Dante’s Inferno. I liked how the mystery invited me further into this history of both the Dante scholars and Dante himself. Mystery is a great way to explore history because both involve interpretation and suspense. We are constantly confronted with what happens and need to figure out what it means. Weaving the scholars’ actual words into the dialogue, Pearl lets them speak for themselves (just as Dante did with the historical figures in his work). The characters emerge as real people with quirks and warts. Oliver Wendell Holmes is a vain man, with a gift of intuition. James Russell Lowell is a blustery activist, who galvanizes the group’s conscience. Longfellow’s equanimity at times seems quietist, and yet he is the group’s Virgil, guiding them through while immersing himself in the poetry. J.T. Fields is the enlightened entrepreneur who sometimes descends into opportunism. As perhaps the first book club in North America, these four actually called themselves The Dante Club, and encountered real opposition in the politics of Harvard, which the fictional August Manning articulates so well. Nicholas Rey is a more stoic figure, perhaps more symbol than character. But even so, he gives a stark view into the reality of race relations at that time. The layering of Boston politics, Civil War horrors and racial inequalities all seem to come into focus through Dante’s vision of justice and hope in the pit of hell.

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