Coachman by Sue Millard

In 1994 a neighbour of ours asked me to transcribe a letter written by her great-grandfather William James Chaplin. A bookseller had bought it at auction and brought to show her. Neither of them could read his writing. I could… and that long, rambling letter with its air of ‘one-too-many-ports-after-dinner’ gave me the idea for the novel.

William Chaplin was a huge force in the London coaching business in the 1820s and 30s, yet the few stories about him that are recorded in books by his contemporaries all show him in an affectionate light. He was largely responsible for the abolition of heavy brutal driving whips in London’s coaching trade, and his vision was so clear that when the railways began to challenge his trade he was immediately stepped back, sold all his coaches and rebuilt his business on new lines. A thoroughly solid, sound, clever fellow.

When I realised how damn boring that story would be – Dallas with only the nice bits on display – I knew I had to invent someone humbler, so I could show what might have happened to the drivers, stablemen and horses when railways took the heart out of their daily life. Many of the drivers I mention in Coachman were real people in the Golden Age of Coaching, and some, such as Cross, wrote autobiographies during their twilight years for the benefit of Coaching Revivalists in later Victorian times. Their anecdotes were rich sources for this novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed the research that has been necessary, from the theatre productions of London to the beginnings of the railways and the changing business plans of the Royal Mail. The task was made much easier by the digitizing of old and expensive books by the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, while the British Postal Museum and Archive were helpful in providing photocopies of such material as the instructions and route for the last-ever Procession of Mail Coaches on 17^th May 1838. The icing on the cake was the drawing of the Procession by John Sturgess in my copy of The Coaching Age in 1885. It’s not a truly contemporary image but it captures the flavour of the scene beautifully and it made a perfect cover.

The setting among horses and coaches was easy to write about because I have been a carriage driver myself since 1985. Horses still work and misbehave in the same ways today as they did then, so speeds and difficulties were not hard to imagine. To get the full flavour of riding on a coach behind a four in hand I took part in a coaching run between Newcastle and Carlisle in 2011, with the Bowman family from Penrith. They are leading lights in the North West Driving Club and known internationally in competitive driving, and I have shamelessly stolen one or two of the comments that they have let slip over the years.

I have given George Davenport some rather forward-looking attitudes, such as his reluctance to be cruel to horses to get the work out of them that his timetable demanded. Such kindness was probably not typical of most men of his time, but I needed it to make him a warmer character, because his dedication to driving was obviously going to be a rich source of conflict with the women in his life. I gave him the name of my own great-grandfather, because he was a coachman in domestic service, though he didn’t work a commercial route, and he lived 50 years after Chaplin’s time. Although his wife, my great-grandmother, really was called Lucy Hennessy, she didn’t live in Carlisle and my relatives will no doubt be relieved to hear that I have completely invented her unpleasant mother and their unsavoury history.

As for the rest of the cast, I am grateful to Jennie Hill for permission to write the novel and for giving me a copy of Chaplin’s family tree. He had 16 children, of whom Sarah was the only one of his children who died unmarried (Rosa died aged 8 and Horace died in infancy). Nothing else is known about Sarah, so I could safely invent whatever reasons I liked to account for her spinster status. A former coachman remarked that Chaplin’s business was founded on “systematic application ... in which the female members of the family were called to assist,” so I decided to make her obsessed with business and power, determined not to lose them by marriage and yet tormented by physical desires that – due to the strict notions of propriety at that time – she had little hope of satisfying. The temptation to move the newly-married George to London, to hold Lucy back with illness and leave him within reach of such a woman as Sarah was quite irresistible.

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Sue's website

http://www.jackdawebooks.co.uk/

To Take Her Pride by Anne Brear

The story of To Take Her Pride came to me quite easily. It flowed very well and was a joy to write.

I am always intrigued by the idea of what happens when a character’s life is turned upside down and all that they knew becomes foreign, their private world they thought was safe and secure suddenly becomes alien and fragile.

In To Take Her Pride, Aurora lives a privilege life that she has taken for granted as the wealthy do, but one event destroys all she knows and she is soon leading a very different life she never expected.

I found it interesting that Aurora becomes a much stronger character as the book continues. She starts off at the beginning as an ordinary young women, but in a short space of time, she becomes an extraordinary strong women fighting to survive in a strange and frightening new life.

The era the book is set in is late Victorian just as the strict confines of the old Victorian ways are starting to loosen up as women become more interested in the world outside of their own kitchen. England becomes embroiled in the Boer War, which also touches Aurora’s life, but as the world advances to more modern ideas as a new century dawns, the working class are still struggling to rise above the ever present threat of poverty, disease and death. All these things Aurora experiences first hand as she is torn from her comfortable life and thrust into a much different existence.

To Take Her Pride is set in Yorkshire, like most of my books, and largely in the city of York.

I find York a fascinating city, full of history, where each street and lane has a story to tell. Grand old buildings, the castle walls, and the River Ouse all have their own fascinating history and provides a great back drop for the story. Again Aurora finds contrasts as she leaves the country is and swallowed up within the slums of York’s poorest areas.   

With all the twists and turns Aurora endures, I found writing her journey totally absorbing. As always, the character became dear to me, a friend, and it’s exciting to see when readers enjoy her story too.

Anne Brear’s website: http://annebrear.blogspot.com

To Take Her Pride can be bought in paperback or ebook formats.

Amazon USA

http://www.amazon.com/Take-Her-Pride-Anne-Brear/dp/1908483113/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332331520&sr=1-1

Amazon UK

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Take-Her-Pride-Anne-Brear/dp/1908483113/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3

Polly's Story by Jennie Walters

The ‘Swallowcliffe Hall’ trilogy: ‘Polly’s Story’, ‘Grace’s Story’, ‘Isobel’s Story’

It was dates that inspired me to write my three ‘Swallowcliffe Hall’ books. I suddenly realized that a young Victorian girl could have had a daughter of that age in 1914, on the brink of the First World War, and a grand-daughter her age in 1939, on the eve of the Second. So there was the timeline for my three novels: these fascinating periods of history. I decided to root the stories in a grand old English country house, large enough to accommodate an army of servants besides the aristocratic family who’ve lived there for generations. I wanted the house to become another character, regarded in a very different light by each of my three heroines. Polly, who comes to the house as under-housemaid in 1890, wants nothing more than to stay there and serve the Vye family for the rest of her life. Her daughter Grace, a reluctant kitchenmaid, is stifled and suffocated by the Hall; she manages to find work in the stables when the male servants go off to fight in the war, but still feels the restrictions of servant life – especially when she falls in love with a member of the Vye family, and he with her. And although Grace is determined her own daughter, Isobel, will have nothing to do with Swallowcliffe, she has no choice but to send her there to convalesce after a bout of TB in 1939, when the country is on the brink of war. Isobel is captivated by the Hall’s crumbling beauty and the chance of sanctuary it provides for Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.

Each girl’s reaction to the house and to the world of service gave me a clue into her character, a starting point to examine all sorts of other thoughts and emotions. I became fascinated by the way in which the world changed between 1890 and 1939, all in the lifetime of my first heroine, and realized my own grandmother had lived through the same tumultuous time. If only I could have asked her about it! I also loved finding out about the strict code that governed the servants’ hall in a big country house: the upper servants departing to take their pudding in the housekeeper’s parlour, the under-housemaids who were only allowed to dust the legs of drawing-room furniture rather than the surface, the condescending ‘Rules for the manners of servants in good families’: do not smile at droll stories told at the table, do not enter into conversation with your mistress, give any information required in as few words as possible. ‘Downton Abbey’ has its appeal, but it’s just as well those days have gone and we’re living in more open, fairer times today.

For a wealth of background information into the stories, including original photographs, extracts from servants’ letters, and much more, visit

www.jenniewalters.com

where you can also purchase the book as an e-book or in print

The Vice Society by James McCreet

The pleasures of the unknown city

CCTV cameras now see virtually everything we do in public. Our web footprint is recorded through IP addresses and cookies. Our spending patterns are logged in vast computer systems. Each of our identities is a mass of ever-accumulating data that maps our existence more comprehensively than any biography could.

So imagine a time and a culture in which even a man’s name was unreliable. People could appear and vanish at will, changing identities as easily as they changed their clothes. Photography was in its earliest infancy – an expensive and arcane pseudo-science seen by most people as a fad.

Now imagine you’re a detective standing in a city of two million souls. You’re looking for a villain whose name is unsure, whose whereabouts are hearsay, whose associates are too afraid to say a word about him. Where do you begin? How do you navigate a city changing so quickly that maps are changing faster than they can be printed?

This is the essential premise behind my Victorian crime thrillers.

London in the 1840s straddled historical eras – caught mid-stride between Elizabethan squalour and the industrial miracles of the steam age. Criminals were more modern; crimes were as black as the unchanging immorality of city dwellers since the beginning of time.

In such a place, the detectives had to choose whether to take the path of justice and honour, or to resort to the methods of their quarry. My books present a suite of investigators – good and bad – who take distinctive routes to the solution. Inspector Albert Newsome plays the game by his own rules, whereas George Williamson is a man of principle. For Noah Dyson, self-preservation is the first priority, while ex-constable John Cullen dreams of a place in the lauded Detective Force.

I love trawling through archives for forgotten facts. I love the crime genre. Most of all, I love books that entertain me until the last page. If you’re the same, you might like the McCreet version of Victorian London.

http://www.jamesmccreet.co.uk/

Perhaps Tomorrow by Jean Fullerton

Since I read Katherine by Anya Seton in my early teens I have had a lifelong love of historical fiction so it seemed natural when I started writing nine years ago to set my stories in the past.

I chose the Victorian period as it reflects many of the concerns and issues, such as the introduction of new technology, the impact of scientific and medical advances on society, that we have today. It was also a period when centuries of long-held beliefs were being questioned. Slavery was abolished, Catholics were emancipated, philanthropists pressured successive governments to improve the working conditions of the poor, and women started to challenge the male preserves of education, politics and the professions.

East London, where I was born is a very special place for me and as a fifth generation Cockney I wanted to bring the story of my own ancestors who lived in the vibrant, poverty stricken dockland area to life. My first novel, No Cure for Love, was set in Whitechapel 1832 during a cholera epidemic. The hero was Doctor Robert Munroe, who battled to improve the plight of the poor and the heroine was Ellen O Casey, an Irish pub singer desperately trying to scrape together the passage money to take her family to New York.

My second book, A Glimpse at Happiness, continued the story when Josie O’Casey, Ellen’s daughter, returns to England twelve years later in 1844 and my latest, Perhaps Tomorrow, the third in the Wapping series, is set three years after that. The idea for Mattie’s story in Perhaps Tomorrow came to me as I was writing A Glimpse at Happiness as I felt she needed a handsome hero of her own. All the books are linked but can be read as stand-alone stories.

Mattie is a widow struggling to keep the family coal business solvent and herself and her family out of the workhouse -which, in a time before the welfare state, was a plight many women found themselves in. The situation was made even more difficult by the fact that women weren’t allowed to own property, operate bank accounts or have dealings with commerce of any kind. Of course, there were always women who fought against the odds and built business empires but they had to work doubly hard to succeed.

And for the women who went before us the daily grind was back-breaking. The day started before dawn when you had to rake the ash from the grate and light the fire before drawing your water from a stand pipe in the backyard. You physically did the washing and scrubbed the floor. Before stainless steel you had to keep you baking dishes clean by scrubbing them with sand. There was a constant battle to keep bed-bugs, cockroaches and head lice at bay, not to mention the mice and rats. In addition to this they had to cope with often a yearly round of pregnancy and the dangers of childbirth but surely the most heart-breaking part of their life must have been coping with the loss of a child which almost every mother in the 19th century would have experienced.

Although Perhaps Tomorrow is a fictitious work I have trawled through research papers and contemporary diaries to bring women’s everyday experiences to life. After reading contemporary accounts of their lives I couldn’t help but admire the hundreds of unnamed women, our great-great-great grandmothers in fact, who worked every hour God gave them to put food on the table and keep a roof over their family’s heads. I hope that my book sheds light on their stories and, in a small way, honours their struggles.

http://www.jeanfullerton.com/

The House of Women by Anne Whitfield

My story ideas are born from all sorts of sources. Usually when I’m doing something mundane, like ironing or washing the floor etc, and ideas will come into my head then. Sometimes they might come from researching. I might be flipping through my research books and I’ll see something interesting that leads to ideas for a story.

I love the Victorian era. It was a time for immense change. Populations were growing rapidly and people were no longer content to stay in their own village. Of course, there were circumstances which forced many people to leave their homes and search for new lives, and this only highlights the way people adapted to new changes. The Victorian era gave women freedom to travel and explore and in many ways educated them beyond their role as mere mothers and wives. A fascinating time.

The House of Women was a great book to write. The idea came from wondering what it would be like to have a young woman at a cross roads of her life. Grace was always busy taking care of everyone else and not listening to her own wants and needs. I loved the idea of a large family all pulling different ways. With a selfish mother, a tyrannical father and seven daughters, the family was complex, but add to that a lost love, a heroic butler and a handsome stranger - well, the real fun began then!
I wanted to know how far I could push Grace. I wanted to see what she would do and how she would react to certain situations. Above all I wanted to show a strong yet vulnerable character, who did what she thought was the best for her family and ultimately herself – only it takes a while for her to really find out what that is and along the way she runs a gauntlet of emotions and experiences.

http://www.annewhitfield.com/
http://annewhitfield.blogspot.com/

The Somnambulist by Essie Fox

It was strange how my novel came about. I’d been thinking of something quite different when one hot summer evening I went along to a performance at Wilton’s music hall – a dilapidated venue in London’s East End still open for public events today.
That performance – Handel’s Acis and Galatea is a baroque and beautiful operetta that tells of unrequited love and results in tragedy for all. It went on to become the plot around which my own Victorian story unfolded, even using sections of the libretto to head up individual chapters.
That venue – Wilton’s hall is built at the back of a bar, an intimate rectangular theatre full of arched niches that used to hold mirrors, and a high vaulted ceiling from which there once hung a glorious crystal chandelier. The balcony is supported by elegant brass barley twist pillars that glint and flash when reflecting the lights. And while gazing at those cold metal posts I felt my mind spinning through spirals of time, imaging Wilton’s in its prime, almost able to hear the popping of corks, the raucous laughter, the music hall songs. There wasn’t a moment of doubt in my mind that this was where my novel would start.
The next morning I woke with three distinct characters in mind. I really don’t know where they came from. It was almost as if they’d simply been waiting for me to bang the knocker on their door – which fronted a grand Victorian house in Tredegar Square in East London, not that far at all from Wilton’s hall. And inside was a dark-haired young woman called Phoebe who lived with her mother, Maud, a strictly religious widow who campaigned for all theatres and bars to be closed. Their home was shared with Cissy, Maud’s much younger, more glamorous sister who once had a singing career on the stage to which she was about to return, performing as Galatea at Wilton’s music hall – a performance that Phoebe goes to watch – and what Phoebe sees and does that night heralds change for the lives of all three of them.
If you read The Somnambulist I hope you will share the excitement I felt that first night when I visited Wilton’s hall, and I hope you will share my affection and fears for my heroine, Phoebe Turner as she gradually wakes from long years of deception and opens her eyes to the tragic truth that has haunted her life since the day she was born.

http://www.essiefox.com/
For more information on Wilton’s music hall, see Essie’s blog, The Virtual Victorian http://virtualvictorian.blogspot.com/2009/10/wiltons-music-hall.html