One woman’s stand against a literary Goliath

There are books that are interesting, even valuable, simply because -- regardless of form or actual content -- they reveal some marvelous bit of long-buried human business that has captured the single-minded attention of a passionate reader who, after years of research and writing, draws you, the uninitiated, into the same romance that has long possessed the chronicler. “The Spinster and the Prophet” is such a book.

First the tale, then the book: In the autumn of 1914, a 50-year-old woman named Florence Deeks sat down in the Toronto Public Library to start researching an original history of mankind. Her idea was to tell the story of the world from the beginning to the present as a struggle on the part of man -- and woman -- for social values. Nearly four years later, in July 1918, she delivered her manuscript by hand to an editor of the Macmillan Co. of Canada. The company held the manuscript for nine months, at last declaring it unpublishable, and it was returned to its owner who, in a “mood of dejection, laid it away without even unwrapping it.”

A year and a half later, in December 1920, Deeks bought H.G. Wells’ newest book, “The Outline of History,” read it and experienced a sinking sensation. It so strongly resembled her own that it seemed almost impossible that Wells had not had her manuscript in hand while he wrote. Now, for the first time, she unwrapped the package she had received back from Macmillan. The manuscript was stained and dirty, paragraphs marked, pages worn, torn or turned down; it had obviously been thumbed through repeatedly. Deeks sat down at her desk with her manuscript and Wells’ book side by side and read them both thoroughly. She did not find actual sentences copied word for word from one book to the other, but she did find an extraordinary sameness of conception, both in the large and in the small.

To begin with, these histories were almost identical in plan and treatment. Then, in many paragraphs, while the words were not exactly the same, the details were almost perfectly matched. And then -- this most striking -- since writing her book, she had discovered that she had made a number of mistakes. Wells’ book duplicated them. Deeks concluded that Macmillan of Canada had sent the manuscript to the head office in London and that it had then been passed on to Wells (long one of their authors), who had used it freely to write his own book.

She sought out one authority after another -- scholars, historians, lawyers -- to gain assurance that she was not deluded, and, indeed, a remarkable number of them supported her conclusions, with one important reservation. All agreed that the internal evidence alone was insufficient to prevail in a court of law, though sufficient enough, as the Cambridge critic I.A. Richards put it, “to arouse a strong suspicion.” What would have to be proved outright, at the very least, was that the manuscript had been in London in 1918.

Florence Deeks was now a 56-year-old unmarried woman, living as the dependent of her brother, George Deeks, a leading member of Toronto’s wealthy middle class. For these people, the sine qua non of respectability was public invisibility. But Wells’ apparent insult -- to her person and her labor -- was too great to be borne. She had spent four years in the library, transformed herself into a disciplined researcher, completed an arduous intellectual task and endowed her aimless woman’s existence with intelligent purpose. Was all this to be sacrificed without a murmur to casual plunder? She decided to bring suit against Wells for “literary piracy.”

Hearings were held in June 1929 in Chancery Lane in London -- the same Chancery Lane of “Bleak House,” Dickens’ bitter masterpiece about how the law eats people alive -- and a year later, in the spring of 1930, the trial was held in Toronto. Deeks lost her case. Lost, and immediately appealed to a higher court. She lost the appeal as well. Unable to believe this was happening to her, she decided to appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

She and her sister traveled to England for a second time. The hearing before the Privy Council, when it finally came, was, for them, a painful mockery. The extraordinary evidence of sameness between the manuscript and Wells’ book was ignored. The bottom line for their lordships: You cannot prove that the manuscript was in London in 1918, much less that it was passed on to Wells. The evidence is only circumstantial. Florence Deeks immediately asked for another hearing before the council but was denied.

By now the Deeks sisters had spent a miserable year and a half in England, living in a single room with a hot plate and a bathroom down the hall. The case had become their entire life, with humiliation a spur to further action. What drove them was not only the righteousness of their cause but also that the world as they had known it had turned itself upside down. Who would have believed that British justice could fail people like themselves so badly? They would pursue this thing to the very end.

They went to Buckingham Palace and there, at the entrance, handed over a petition to be forwarded to the private secretary of the king. Three days later word was received that the secretary regretted it was “not within his province to submit such communications to His Majesty. All petitions to the King must be sent through His Majesty’s responsible Ministers.” Florence Deeks hunted down the responsible minister, but her appeal to him was intercepted and declared “frivolous.” She wrote a personal letter to the king; she tried the Home Office. Door after door closed in her face. At the last, she wrote to each of the lords on the Privy Council, telling them that their judgment had amounted to “a palpable misrepresentation of the Case.” The registrar replied, forbidding her from any further communication with their lordships.

It was over. In the spring of 1933 the sisters returned to Toronto. Thirteen years of Florence Deeks’ life and nearly $100,000 of her brother’s money had been consumed by “the Case.” She was 69, the great drama of her life at an end. She lived on in the family home in Toronto until age 95 with her files, her clippings, her manuscripts and, no doubt, a monologue drumming in her head of all that she should have said in court but had failed to say.

A.B. McKillop, a Canadian historian, accidentally stumbled on the Deeks-Wells case while researching another book, discovered that it had been a tabloid sensation in the 1920s and became caught up in the question of justice for Deeks. Over the next few years he searched out and read the Florence Deeks Collection in the Toronto Reference Library; the H.G. Wells Collection at the University of Illinois; the Macmillan Archive in the British Library; the Macmillan of Canada papers in Hamilton, Ontario; as well as the papers of numerous minor figures connected with the case; and, of course, every biography of H.G. Wells ever written (there was none of Florence Deeks). He also prepared a computerized transcription of “The Web” ( the title of Deeks’ book) to be examined side by side with “The Outline of History” by a pair of scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health who had developed a “plagiarism machine.” It detected no more instances of commonality than Deeks had presented in court.

For McKillop, Deeks is a figure of romance. He sees her as upright, idealistic, one of the little people over whom the world of power and status rides roughshod. Wells, therefore, must be the certifiable villain. I, for one, am more than willing to concur in this prejudice, but McKillop’s book does not persuade. The only case he can think to make against Wells -- as indeed there is no hard evidence -- is his bad character in relation to women.

So, in alternating chapters, we have the absorbing picture of Deeks tracking “the Case” and the much less absorbing one of Wells as he pursued his notorious affairs, at the same time that he subjugated his wife, Amy Catherine, whom he renamed “Jane” to conform with his despotic insistence of her as the very image of the devoted homemaker. All of which is indisputably true, and none of which comes within a mile of convincing us that Wells swiped Deeks’ manuscript to write his own book.

Yet “The Spinster and the Prophet” lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned. McKillop’s feeling, not just for Deeks and the injustice he is convinced was done her but also for the boldness of the enterprise as he experiences it -- the unexpected beauty of Deeks’ obsession, the possibility of Wells’ criminality, the dramatic meanness of Chancery Lane -- is laced through the entire book. The prose is so strongly invested with McKillop’s ardor that it attains power. His insistence on imagining against the grain -- no one ever saw Florence Deeks as other than a frustrated old maid, substituting “the Case” for the family she didn’t have -- is not only the most persuasive defense she ever had, it also performs an act of narrative originality, endowing the bare bones of court transcription with larger meaning. It reminds us that every human circumstance finds its poetic response in someone, and that reminder in itself is of immense value. *