Jonathan Van Olden Barnavelt is the owner of 100 High Street where he and his nephew, Lewis, live in New Zebedee, Michigan. He is the brother of Lewis' deceased father, Charles, and the two meet for the first time when Lewis comes to live in New Zebedee:

There in the aisle stood a man with a bushy red beard that was streaked in several places in white. His Big Mac khaki trousers were bulged out in front by his pot belly, and he was wearing a gold-buttoned red vest over a blue work shirt. Lewis noticed that the vest had four pockets; there were pipe cleaners sticking out of the top two, and a chain of paper clips was strung between the lower pair. One end of the chain was hooked to the winding knob of a gold watch [The House with a Clock in its Walls; 5].

...[he] had heard a few things about Uncle Jonathan, like that he smoked and drank and played poker. These were not such bad things in a Catholic family, but Lewis had two maiden aunts who were Baptists, and they had warned him about Jonathan [4].

Jonathan continues his wizardly and fatherly role in The Figure in the Shadows, comforting Lewis about bullies and school. His next major role comes in 1993's The Vengeance of the Witch-Finder, when he and his nephew visit the Barnavelt ancestral home in England and awaken a curse on their family.

Throughout the Barnavelt series "Weird Beard," or "Brush Mush" (both typical good-natured insults cast on Jonathan by Mrs. Zimmermann), is a voice of reason and good-humor who must take on a new role as parental figure in Lewis's life.

Character

Originally Jonathan's role in the story was to be much larger, as early first draft focused mainly on the adult character; subsequent rewrites at the request of an editor changed the hero’s role to Lewis. As a result Jonathan became the first of Bellairs' older characters to befriend younger and timid protagonists, traits seen throughout all of Bellairs’ young adult fiction. This bond between the generations is modeled somewhat after aspects of Bellairs' relationship with his paternal grandfather, John Monk, who "was a model of kindness and friendship" [You Can Take the Boy out of Michigan, But..., 1987] and taught the young Bellairs to read. Likewise, some of Jonathan's traits and habits are easily modeled after aspects of Bellairs' own personality - or what he would have liked to become at an older age.

Naming

Jonathan’s name stems from a highly-regarded Dutch statesman and leader of Dutch independence named Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619), considered to some as the founding father of the Netherlands. He was executed on May 13, 1619 in The Hague by Prince Maurice of Nassau on a charge of subverting religion. Such an execution of a prominent citizen for political reasons, however in a religious disguise, in which the freedom of worship was involved, must have terrified the Pilgrim Fathers greatly, possibly leading to a decision to leave the country and bring them as the first Sabbath-keeping group to America.

Bellairs probably used the anglicized name after hearing of it in post-graduate English literature studies, specifically the play, The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (1619), written as a collaboration between John Fletcher (1579-1625) and Philip Massinger (1583-1640), playwrights of Shakespeare's era. Fletcher wrote 15 plays and is thought to worked with Shakespeare on The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII. Around 1605 he began to write plays in collaboration with Sir Francis Beaumont, and, before his death of the plague, produced numerous works with many collaboraters. Why Bellairs chose the name of this executed statesman for a character is a bit beyond us, though it wouldn’t be the first time he utilized historic and literary allusions in his books (such as Anthony Monday, Aurelian Townshend, and Gorboduc).

Adaptation

On television, actor Severn Darden portrayed Uncle Jonathan in the 1979 program, Once Upon a Midnight Scary.