Josiah Venn

Overview

Dr Josiah Venn is a retired Company surgeon who lives in Chowringhee and collects philosophical apparatus: orreries, air-pumps, anything with a mechanism. He was among the buyers at the Zorab & Sons sale on The Strand on Wednesday 12 October 1814.

Appearance & Manner

A thin, stooped Englishman of sixty-one, sallow from thirty years in Bengal, with sunken cheeks and bright, delighted, slightly unfocused pale eyes. His sparse white hair is worn long at the back in an old-fashioned queue, and his steel-rimmed spectacles sit pushed up on his forehead. He wears an out-of-date snuff-brown tailcoat, a limp white cravat and a rumpled nankeen waistcoat with a watch-chain and a small brass loupe hanging from it, all carelessly kept, with the buttons misaligned. He holds his punch cup at a slight wrong angle and calls the trouble in his hands gout. His manner is one of cheerful scholarly curiosity.

Related

• Places: Chowringhee — keeps a bungalow there
• Places: Venns Bungalow — his bungalow, where he was left drugged
• People: Gregor Zorab — found catatonic in his study
• Things: Brain Cylinder Lot 14 — he seated the speech fitting that woke it

Campaign Log

• Session 13 - Sundry Fittings — introduced himself at the Zorab sale, complained of numb hands and pressed a lens on a metal stalk on the party; seated the speech fitting in Lot 14 with his dead hand, setting off the stampede. Taken in the party’s carriage, seized by a Mi-Go over the esplanade, and found to have two bloodless, perfectly circular punctures behind each ear. He gave up the study key cheerfully, giggling about his visitors. In his study a second Mi-Go lifted him toward the ceiling until Georgiana Wentworth killed it with a poker. The party drugged him, scattered his notes and paraphernalia around him as a drug-induced medical experiment gone wrong, and left him in his own house.