On the morning of 28 January 1754, an exceptional Englishman sat down at the desk in the library of his gothic mansion, Strawberry Hill, to attend to his correspondence. It was a daily ritual, for the man in question was Horace Walpole, the greatest letter-writer of his era, as well the author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). On that winter's morning, Walpole composed a letter in which he committed to paper for the first time a word – now fashionable, even hackneyed – based on the ancient Arabic name for Sri Lanka. The word was, of course, serendipity, defined by its creator as the faculty of discovery, "by accident and sagacity", while in search of something else.
That the organisers of the 2009 opening of Sri Lanka's much-praised Galle Literary Festival decided to commence events on 28 January, the 205th anniversary of serendipity's coinage, is an astonishing coincidence, for the literary significance of this date is little-known. The date also has another literary connection with Sri Lanka. In fiction, Jules Verne chose 28 January 1868 as the day that Captain Nemo and his fellow submariners aboard the Nautilus first caught sight of the island in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869). Calendar connections aside, Verne epitomises the surprising number of major Western novelists – Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Arthur C Clarke – who have used the island as a location, to varying degrees. In other instances, the island has provided characters or story elements. Some novelists react to the exotic ambience by penning inspired descriptions of the outstanding physical beauty of Sri Lanka. Unusual social and cultural aspects beguile others. Although disparate in style and content, these writings contribute to the rich fabric of fictional versions of the island, in many instances close to the real thing.
Fittingly, it was Daniel Defoe, a pioneer novelist in the English language, who made first use of the island, then held by the Dutch and called Zeilan. In his novel The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720), there is an episode in which the eponymous hero's ship is stranded on the shores of the island. The army of the Dutch-independent Kandyan Kingdom besieges Captain Singleton and his crew before they are able to escape. This episode was inspired by the experiences of sailor Robert Knox, who was confined in the kingdom for 19 years. His An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1681), written with help from physicist Robert Hooke, contains the first – and possibly finest – description of the island in English.
The Cinghalese
It took half a century after the British acquired Ceylon from the Dutch in 1796 for the first island-based novels, written by little-known authors, to appear. More notable were references to Ceylon by two celebrated novelists representing opposite ends of the fiction spectrum. First was Charles Dickens, whose last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), has as characters the enigmatic twins Neville and Helena Landless, who were born and brought up in Ceylon. After the death of their mother, they suffer at the hands of a cruel stepfather before being rescued by a philanthropist and sent to England. Second, the 1872 English translation of Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea contained a gripping underwater episode in which a pearl diver is saved from a shark attack off Mannar, the location of the traditional pearl fishery. While there are many storybook descriptions of Ceylon by characters aboard approaching ships, there is only one by a character aboard a submarine: "When at noon the Nautilus came to the surface of the sea, there was land in sight about eight miles to westward," Verne wrote. "The first thing I noticed was a range of mountains, the shapes of which were most capricious. On taking the bearings, I knew we were nearing the Island of Ceylon, the pearl which hangs from the lobe of the Indian Peninsula."