A Book Report on TheWaterworks

~E. L. Doctorow~

Submitted by: Sem. Harris C. Acoba

T I

his novel written by E.L. Doctorow is mostly A mystery or a suspense one. It

focuses on a family which seems to be the cause of all the mysteries in this Book.

t begins with the Pemberton family. Martin Pemberton, who came from wealth, a

young fellow and the son of the late Notorious Augustus Pemberton. Martin was the kind of a moody guy, with a grey colored eyes and pale thinning hair. He has the life of a private freelance and being a freelance for him is so hard, because he has so many problems in life. But he had friends too. Actually he is engage to a beautiful girl named Emily Tisdale.

nother friend of him was Charles Grimshaw, the rector of St. James, who had

eulogized his father, Augustus Pemberton who is dead. One day martin insisted that he saw his father on a train and is alive, and here comes the problem of the story. Martin is going to prove that what he saw is true, That Augustus Pemberton is just hiding from the crowd. He tried to look everywhere through all possible ways , reading old newspapers about his fathers death, and even looking for persons who were close to his father. Eustace Simmons, was a friend, the secretary and business partner of his father, and who knew most about his father. He tried to look for Mr. Simmons but it seems that he died already or who knows if he is just hiding. Martin also consulted the help of his friends. One day Charles Grimshaw saw martin near the church and it seems that martin was troubled, so Grimshaw tried to help him, Martin also asked Grimshaw about his father. One of the things that Grimshaw mentioned was the burial place of Augustus Pemberton. It was in a little parish Graveyard of St.James, called woodland cemetery. Martin tried to look at that place and also he planned to open the grave to see if the corpse of his father was there and if all that funeral is just a show. During the night he and his friend finally decided to open the grave of Augustus pemberton, but their problem is that there are two graves that has an Augustus Pemberton on it, so without doubt, they both uncovered it. The first one was found empty and the other seems not , because there was a coffin in it. They now uncovered the coffin and what they found was just a body of a boy. Several days later he again saw his father, who was riding in an omnibus. He tried to catch his father and he end up losing sight of his father. One day he a attended a public party and there he saw Mr. Eustace Simmons and kept his sight of him, until he chased him up to the outside part of the building and talked to him. Simmons revealed to him that he dont know about martins father, Simmons told martin to look for Dr. Sartorius, the one who served as the physician of the late Augustus pemberton. So then, martin began looking for Dr. Sartorius . he asked many people who might know about dr. Sartorius,

including some doctors, until he caught a glimpse of this so called Dr. Sartorius. When martin met Dr. Sartorius, martin was brought to the rooftop, with his mother, Sarah Pemberton and miss Emily Tisdale,and Donne. After a while when they reached the place, they were all surprised with what they saw. All was like a fantasy, it was the result of Dr. Sartorius experiments, a facility for biologized wealth, and there was harmony and peacefulness all around. At the center was a courtyard. But then martin remembered Augustus and began to look for him at that place. Then later, he found Augustus sitting on a bench. Then he was surprised to see his father again, but sad to say Augustus cannot recognized him anymore. So dr. Sartorius introduced martin to Augustus saying: Augustus, Do you know who this is? Will you say hello to your son? Martin elapsed into silence and fainted, he was brought to a room and there he rested until he waked up.Later on, Dr. Sartorius explained to them how is it possible that Augustus was still alive. Martin cannot move on easily,he just has severe headaches. Several days later, a policemen were ringing the bell of the Pembertons residence , Emily who was downstairs was very worried and terrified with what she saw. She asked for Donne, but hes not around, and martin was sleeping. So she waited for Donne, they were all surprised , the drive of the omnibus was found dead in his cell, and they were accusing the pemberton family. Martin, inturn wants his father back to them, they tried to enter Dr .Sartorius building and theyfound no Augustus pemberton inside. Several policemen came and captured Donne, martin was able to escaped. Years later Donne was freed and Augustus Pemberton was never found,they thought that it may be Eustace Simmons who got him or dr. Sartorius, or they may be related to each other. But forgetting about that, martin was able to recover and was married to Miss Tisdale by the Reverend Charles Grimshaw and his Mother, Sarah Pemberton was also married to Donne.

~The End~

The setting of the novel is New York in 1871. Martin Pemberton is a freelance journalist. He had been disinherited by his late father Augustus Pemberton after expressing disapproval of the unscrupulous business methods by which Augustus had accumulated a large fortune. After his father's death, Martin sees his father, briefly and accidentally, in a horse-drawn "omnibus" belonging to the municipal transportation company as it drives past him in a crowded street. The passengers, including his father, are all elderly well-dressed men. Martin tells four people of the sighting: his editor, McIlvaine, his fiancee, Emily Tisdale, the family pastor, Dr. Grimshaw, and a college friend, Harry Wheelwright. When Martin disappears soon afterward, McIvaine begins looking for him and talks to all four. He also talks to Augustus's widow (and Martin's stepmother), Sarah Pemberton, who has always liked Martin and is deeply concerned about him. From Wheelwright, McIlvaine learns that he and Martin actually opened Augustus's grave and found a child buried there instead of the old man. From Sarah, McIlvaine learns that Augustus was diagnosed with a terminal blood disease and that with the assistance of his secretary, Eustace Simmons, he entered a private hospital said to be near Saranac Lake in upstate New York and run by a Dr. Sartorius. There, she was told, Augustus passed away. Sarah also reveals that Augustus's wealth seems to have vanished shortly before his death, leaving Sarah and her young son, Martin's half-brother Noah, penniless. McIlvaine approaches an old acquaintance, police captain Edmund Donne, for help. Donne, McIlvaine soon finds out, has a personal interest in the case - he had courted Augustus's widow Sarah many years earlier, before her marriage to Augustus. Their investigation finds no trace of the hospital in which Augustus supposedly died. Instead, it takes them to The Home for Little Wanderers, a well-funded private orphanage run by Eustace Simmons. They discover Martin locked in the basement, catatonic and almost dead of starvation. When Martin is at last well enough to talk, he reveals what he discovered after being kidnapped and imprisoned by Simmons to stop him from asking

questions about Augustus. Augustus Pemberton had faked his death. Along with other wealthy old men of the city, each of whom was terminally ill, Augustus is being kept alive by Dr. Sartorius. Sartorius, a brilliant and innovative Army surgeon during the Civil War, has invented treatments that were then unknown to medicine: blood transfusions, dialysis, bone marrow transplants and others. His dark secret is that young children must be sacrificed for their blood and somatic cells. Dr. Sartorius considers himself innocent of their actual deaths, as each child "died from fright" and not from his nefarious medical attention. With the assistance of the corrupt Tweed Ring, which runs New York (and with which several of the old men are connected), Sartorius has built a secret sanitarium in which he is free to experiment and administer his treatments without any supervision. When Donne discovers the location of the sanitarium in a municipal waterworks installation outside the city, he stages a police raid. The Tweed Ring is in the process of being destroyed by a corruption investigation and is no longer able to protect Sartorius and his establishment. Sartorius is arrested; his patients are found dead except for Augustus, who is missing. Sartorius is brought to the insane asylum on Blackwell's Island, where he continues his experiments, but upon himself. Augustus, who was removed from the sanitarium by Simmons before the raid, is found dead at his old home. Simmons is also found dead, killed in an accident while trying to flee with part of Augustus's fortune. The money is turned over to Sarah, as Augustus's widow. Sarah and Donne are soon married. Martin, now recovered, marries his fiancee, Emily. McIlvaine resumes his career as an editor, but never publishes the story of his investigation. [edit]Characters

Mr McIlvaine: first-person narrator Martin Pemberton: Freelance journalist, who writes scathing reviews and is at odds with his father Augustus Pemberton: gained wealth from the slave trade and the production of low grade war goods during the American Civil War

Harry Wheelwright: the only friend of Martin Pemberton. McIlvaine doesn't like him Emily Tisdale: fiance and schoolfriend of Martin Revd. Charles Grimshaw: in the circle of Augustus Pemberton Edmund Donne: One of the few policemen in New York who is not corrupt. Dr. Sartorius: Doctor with a Faust-like thirst for knowledge . He worked in military hospitals during the Civil War. In this role he appears in E.L. Doctorow's later novel, The March. McIlvaine gives the origin of his name, the Latin word for dressmaker.

[edit]World

outlook

The first-person narrator shows a very negative image of the city he lives in and he shows the readers an authentic view on the New York in 1871. He describes the corruption by William Tweed (whose picture we know from Thomas Nast's cartoons, published inHarper's Weekly) and he describes the child poverty, the calamities of the newsboys and a lot of buildings and streets how they looked at this time. He cites Walt Whitman for showing that his New York is another one. [edit]Form
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[edit]In

the context of the author's other works

The novel was less successful than Doctorow' books Billy Bathgate and Ragtime, which were also filmed. But it shares with them the alliance between history and fiction. Some characters appear in other works of the author, for example Dr Sartorius in The March. Doctorow's father loved Edgar Allan Poe and named his first son after him; Doctorow told a journalist that Waterworks was written in Poe's honour.[1] Already in 1984 Doctorow has written a story about the Croton Aqueduct with the title Waterworks (in the collectionLives of the Poets). This is the story of McIlvaine, who watched the child who drowned in the reservoir.

[edit]Sources

in literary history

The descriptions of child poverty are evocative of the novels by Charles Dickens. Dickens himself visited New York in the early forties and wrote the Book "American Notes". Another possible source is George G. Foster's New York by Gas-light and Other Urban Sketches (1850).