MDDM Ch. 70 Scalping Lord Lepton

[jbor]

Bandwraith wrote:

> Absolutely, but no case of mistaken ID, imo. Lepton is notorious
> and chosen, I think, for that purpose. His evility has more
> to do with his Slave-run Iron Plantation, above (north of)
> the line, and his linkage with what will one day grow to be
> a worldwide arms trade on the largest scale. It is foreshadowed
> by both the twin gallows of chapter 11, and Dolly's conversation
> with Dixon, at the Flower-de-Luce.

Yeah, I'm beginning to suspect, like Mason, that "perrhaps these
Occurrences,-- as others, are *invisibly connected* .... " (429)

My thinking was that Catfish had been seeking out the owner of the rifle
with the Lancaster Pentagram as "the one" responsible for the massacres of
the Susquehannock - a deliberate act of retribution, in other words - and
that Lepton's possession of a replica of one such rifle was the coincidental
cause of his demise. Which would still fit in with the poetic justice/Major
Marvy angle.

But I see the factory system, weapons production and trade, Enlightenment
and rationalism thing happening too. And the fetishisation, the beauty and
the cold hard finality of steel. Like Stig and his axe-blade.

I'm also wondering whether we can make connections between an
"Iron-Plantation" and more agricultural enterprises - other types of
"plantations" - along the same lines as the connection Dixon makes between
the caretaker-farmers and their giant beet and the Geordie coalminers?

Maybe I just can't see a way back to some Bronze Age idyll. Or don't want
to. Or maybe it was never really all that idyllic either?

best