Coram Boy

by Jamila Gavin, Helen Edmundson (Adapted by)

Overview

Set in the eighteenth century, Coram Boy is a tale of two cities and a tale of two boys: Toby, saved from an African slave ship, and Aaron, the illegitimate heir to a great estate. It’s also a tale of fathers and sons: slave-trader, Otis, and his son Meshak; and landowner Sir William Ashbrook and the son he disinherits.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781854598943
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	04/01/2006
Series:	Nick Hern Book Series
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Jamila Gavin was born in India of an Indian father and English mother, but spent part of her childhood in Shepherd's Bush. She joined the BBC and started writing in 1979. Helen Edmundson's breakthrough came in 1992 with her award winning adaptation of "Anna Karenina" for Shared Experience, for whom she also adapted "The Mill on the Floss". Her adaptation of "War and Peace" was staged at the National Theatre in 1996.

Editorial Reviews

This historical novel, winner of the 2000 Whitbread Award, deals with one of the more lurid and fascinating bits of English history. In 18th-century England, a man makes his living disposing of the unwanted children of both rich and poor women. Sometimes he sells them into slavery, sometimes he kills them, and sometimes he blackmails the mothers for years thereafter. He even abuses his own son Meshak, a simpleminded lad. Meshak, who is quite literally haunted by the babies he has helped to bury in ditches throughout the countryside, rescues one special abandoned child: the illegitimate newborn of a young woman whom he has worshipped from afar. He takes the baby to the Coram Hospital, where he is named Aaron, raised as an orphan, and exhibits a prodigious talent for music, encouraged by none other than George Frideric Handel. Years later, the paths of all the participants of the drama-Meshak, his villainous father, the illegitimate child, the child's parents-intersect with electrifying consequences. For when the participants in the original tragedy gather together, "there was not just one truth, because there was not one person there who knew the whole of it." This of course lends the plot structure considerable tension as the readers watch the characters try to unravel things. In her Preface, the author gives historical background regarding the infanticide and child slavery of the era, and the real historical character, Captain Thomas Coram, who devoted much of his life to establishing the Foundling Hospital where abandoned children would be sheltered. The historical setting is presented in enough detail to set the stage but not overwhelm readers with no previous background andknowledge. This is the stuff of high melodrama, and readers of the genre who will be swept along by the theatrics will not be disappointed. (Fiction. 11-16)

Kirkus Reviews