Places: The History of Henry Esmond, Esquire

Castlewood History of Henry Esmond, Esquire, The (England). Great house in southern England’s Hampshire County where Henry Esmond is raised by his cousins in the Castlewood family. There Henry is first succored by Rachel’s solicitude, and there he falls in love with Beatrix. The house stands for all that is valuable in Henry’s heritage. Henry is the rightful heir to Castlewood, but he stands in an oblique relationship to the Castlewood family inheritance. Castlewood has an art gallery containing portraits by Van Dyck and Dobson. It is in this room where an unhappy Henry is first taken into the bosom of the family.

The Esmond family came into possession of Castlewood in the sixteenth century, when a page named Esmond married the lady of the house. This line gave rise to the viscounts of Castlewood. Neglected by the second viscount, Castlewood Manor was damaged during the civil wars of the seventeenth century, when its clock tower was attacked. Thomas, the third viscount, embarked on an ambitious program of refurbishment, whose residue is still evident in Henry’s day.

*Chelsea (CHEL-see). London neighborhood, near Kensington and north of the Thames, where the dowager Viscountess Castlewood maintains her residence. It is the third leg of the Castlewood-Cambridge-Chelsea triangle on which Esmond’s family relationships are based.

*Cambridge. University town northeast of London where Esmond is educated. Cambridge is less important primarily as a symbol of how Esmond is distanced from his idyllic boyhood memories of Castlewood and Lady Rachel.

*Newgate Prison. London prison in which Esmond is falsely imprisoned and separated from all he loves. This period is the low point of Esmond’s fortunes, although the prisoners are well fed and allowed a good number of visitors. Newgate is less a hellish place of torture than a site of confinement, in which Esmond hones his sense of his inner density and fortifies his moral convictions.

*Kensington (KEN-zing-ton). London neighborhood in which the Castlewoods maintain their in-town residence. Kensington is also the locale of the guard-table at which Henry meets Joseph Addison and other literary luminaries. The guard-table is associated with stimulating companionship and good cheer. William Makepeace Thackeray also uses the table as a vehicle through which to have leading historical figures of the day make brief appearances. The Old Pretender is brought to Kensington in secret and reveals his loutish ways. The Kensington scenes of the novel portray the dynamic coffee-house culture of the time and represent the public sphere as opposed to the aristocratic country-house culture of Castlewood Manor itself.

Castlewood (Virginia). The second Castlewood manor is an estate on the right bank of the Potomac River, in Virginia’s West Moreland County, north of the Rappahannock. There Henry and Rachel spend the idyllic “Indian summer” of their lives. Their descendants flourish there growing tobacco.