The reclusive, miserly, lonely Gilbert Norrell has been shut away for most of his life in a vast house in Yorkshire: Hurtfew Abbey - inherited from a rich uncle when Norrell was still a young man, orphaned and alone in the world. One day, young Gilbert found a scrap of paper from a magical book in his uncle's library. It made him dream of becoming a magician, and of restoring magic to England. Over the intervening forty years, Mr Norrell has dedicated himself to collecting every single book of magic in the country, and to becoming the first practical magician that England has seen for over three centuries.
When we first meet him, Norrell - with the help of his mysterious servant, John Childermass - is very close to achieving this goal. Of making magic a force in the realm once again. However, despite that fact that he can bring statues to life and summon visions out of rain, he still needs to overcome the fact that practical magic is no longer respectable. And respectability, and the acceptance of his fellow men, is what Norrell ultimately craves. In trying to solve this problem, he finds that he must consort with dangerous and elemental forces, and unwittingly unleashes terrors that have been safely sealed away for hundreds of years.
