The ghosts of their ancestors — Background and Themes

Bell Tones and Urban Soundscape

The bells of St. Paul's are not mere background noise; they are a structural device. The opening paragraph establishes a pattern of sound moving through space: "over the thousands of slate-colored roofs, now insistent on the Broadway, now lessening a little in some long winding alley." This auditory geography maps the city, from the gentry street of Vesey to the bare meadows. Later, the bells "crash" into the Knickerbocker parlor, provoking Jonathan's outburst. The sound returns at the climax of the excerpt, when Georgina's violent knocking on the door "reverberated through the night, clashing against the bell-notes." The bells thus frame the action, providing a rhythmic pulse that underscores the characters' agitation.

Movement Through Thresholds

The narrative is built around a series of crossings: from parlor to street, from house to house, from present to memory. Julie and Georgina's journey to the Snograss House is described as a stumble "through the snow" past "huts and houses," with warm windows beckoning. The movement is physical and psychological—Georgina's mind is fixed on Patricia's secret, while Julie recalls a dancing master. The return journey is marked by a sudden apparition: "a shadowy mocking face was rising up before her," the face of the banished ancestress. This threshold crossing culminates in the violent knocking at the Knickerbocker door, where the bolt is drawn and the "gale-blown humanity" bursts in. Each transition is accompanied by a shift in sensory detail—from the lilac branches in the garden to the wind buffeting the aunts' faces.

Portraits and Ancestral Presence

The portrait of the ancestress, taken down from the parlor wall by Jonathan, becomes a spectral force. Georgina sees its face rising before her in the night, and the image is linked to the family's suppressed history. The novel's title, The Ghosts of Their Ancestors, is literalized in this moment: the past does not stay buried. The portrait is not merely a decorative object but a catalyst for the aunts' terror. Mills uses the device of the banished portrait to suggest that the Knickerbocker family's attempts to control their lineage—through ancestry books and selective memory—are fragile. The face that appears to Georgina is described as "shadowy" and "mocking," a reminder that the dead have their own agency.

Voice and Register Shifts

Mills employs a distinctive blend of formal narration and colloquial dialogue. The opening description is ornate: "Calm and serene lay Vesey Street with its rows of leafing elms." Yet Jonathan's speech is blunt and irritable: "What a dastardly noise!" The aunts' conversation is peppered with exclamations and rhetorical questions: "Are your wits leaving you, Jerusalem?" The narrator also adopts a knowing tone, referring to the "bibulous Sir William Howe" and the "horn of plenty on the door." These shifts in register create a layered voice that moves between mock-heroic and domestic realism. The effect is a narrative that is both arch and immediate, never settling into a single mode.

Readers attentive to the novel's structure will notice how Mills uses recurring images—bells, portraits, thresholds—to bind together a story that moves rapidly between interior and exterior, past and present. The excerpts suggest a work that is as much about the texture of early nineteenth-century New York as about the Knickerbocker family's secrets. Pay particular attention to the way sound and space are mapped; they are not decorative but functional, guiding the reader through the narrative's abrupt shifts.

Reading about the bells threading through those snow-filled New York streets, I found myself thinking of a much later trek, the eager tramp of khaki scouts toward their own small adventures. It’s a different era, surely, but both carry that same quiet pulse of belonging—hearing a familiar sound, stepping out into the cold, and feeling a ghost of the past walk beside you. Great Hike; or, The Pride of the Khaki Troop — Background and Themes holds that echo for me.