London in Chains
Page 30
All but one of the documents quoted are real; the exception is the newsbook article at the beginning of Chapter Six. The personal letters, however, are invented, though I’ve tried to make them sound like letters of the period. I apologize if readers find the language of the dialogue irritating. I was trying to make it sound sufficiently seventeenth-century that it would fit in with the quotations, while keeping it sufficiently modern that it would be intelligible to twenty-first century readers. Tastes being what they are, I’ve probably annoyed traditionalists and modernists alike.
For those who’d like to know more, the best history of the Civil Wars is still S.R. Gardiner’s four volume History of the Great Civil War, first published in 1889; those looking for a shorter and more accessible work might like to try Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006). The latter contains a bibliography with suggestions for further reading. For my part, I owe a particular debt to Joseph Frank’s The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–1660 (1961): if I hadn’t stumbled across it, I wouldn’t have embarked on this novel at all. Hmm. Considering how hard I’ve had to work, maybe I should be blaming not thanking him!
I must also mention a debt to two websites, which I looked at every day I wrote: british-civil-wars.co.uk and pepysdiary.com. The first has timelines, biographies and links to various documents; the second, though slightly out of period, is great fun and provides everything from recipes to the price of a seventeenth-century hackney cab. If any of you on either web community are reading this, keep up the good work!