Dodger didn’t answer that, not being entirely sure what thwarting meant, but Solomon was in there fast with, ‘He assists with the proper running of the drainage, Your Majesty.’
Prince Albert rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, drains, we have them here and they never seem to work properly.’
Dodger opened his mouth, but the Queen, anxious to get drains out of the way, said, ‘Well, sir, I wish you well in whatever post you eventually take. And now . . .’ she added, glancing at a flunky, ‘we think that bravery such as yours should be recognized, and so I would like you to step forward here and get down on one knee. See the cushion here, and it would probably be a good idea if you took off your hat.’ A flunky stepped forward holding a sword, and quite a shiny one at that. The Queen took it, and then said, ‘What is your full name to be, Mister Dodger? I have been advised that you would like to see the last of Pip Stick.’
Dodger stared at her, and then Serendipity said, ‘If it’s any help, Your Majesty, I’ve always thought that Jack is a very nice name.’
Jack Dodger, thought Dodger. It sounded slightly nobby, but he didn’t know why. The Queen looked at him expectantly and said, ‘If I was you, sir, I would take the advice of your lady.’ She glanced at Prince Albert and added, ‘As all sensible husbands do.’
All Dodger could do now was say, ‘Uh, yes please,’ and then there was a breath of air over his scalp and the sword was back in the arms of a flunky again and Sir Jack Dodger stood up.
‘It makes you look taller,’ said Serendipity.
‘Indeed it does,’ said Queen Victoria. ‘Incidentally,’ she went on, ‘I am told, Sir Jack, that you have a very intelligent dog as a pet?’
Dodger grinned. ‘Oh yes, Your Majesty, that would be Onan; he’s a very good friend, but of course we couldn’t bring him along here.’
‘Quite so,’ said the Queen and she cleared her throat. ‘You mean Onan, as in the Bible?’ Out of the corner of his eye Dodger could see Solomon stepping backwards, but nevertheless he said, ‘Oh yes, miss.’
‘Why did you call him that?’
Well, Dodger thought, after all she did ask. So he told her,1 and the young Queen glanced at her husband, whose face was a picture, and then burst out laughing and said, ‘Well now, we are amused.’
Like some sort of clockwork, the tea then disappeared as quickly as it had turned up, and there was a certain signal that this audience was at an end. Greatly relieved, Dodger took Serendipity by the arm and led her away, and was slightly surprised as they left the room when the white-haired man he had met before walked boldly up to him and said, ‘Sir Jack, allow me to be the first to congratulate you. May I trespass upon your time for a moment? Have you perchance had time to consider my proposal?’
‘He wants you to be a spy,’ murmured Solomon behind him.
The white-haired man made a ‘tsk, tsk’ noise and said, ‘Oh dear no, Mister Cohen. A spy, sir? Perish the thought. Her Majesty’s government, I can assure you, has no dealings with spies, oh my word, no. But nevertheless we like the kind of people who help us . . . take an interest.’
Dodger took Serendipity to one side and said, ‘What should I do?’
‘Well, he does want you to be a spy,’ Serendipity replied. ‘You can tell that by the look on his face when he says that he doesn’t. For someone like you, Dodger, it seems to me to be the perfect occupation, although I suspect it will mean learning one or two foreign languages. But I have no doubt that you will find learning them quite easy. I myself know French and German, as well as a little Latin and Greek. Not too difficult if you put your mind to it.’
Not to be outdone, Dodger said, ‘Well, I know some Greek. ?’2
Serendipity smiled at him and said, ‘My word, Dodger, you do lead a very interesting life, don’t you?’
‘My love,’ he replied, ‘I think it’s only just beginning.’
And that was why two months later, Jack Dodger was running through the boulevards of Paris with the gendarmerie lagging far behind him. He was carrying a pocket stuffed with coins and bonds, a tiara that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette and would look very good on his wife Serendipity, and last but not least, the plans for an entirely new type of gun. Whistles were blowing all over the place, but Dodger was never where anyone thought he would be. He had been most interested to find out that the Froggies had drains too, pretty good ones which you wouldn’t have expected from Froggies, and so he jigged and dodged and ran on to the safe house he had sorted out last night, and he was having the time of his life.
1 If you want to know more about Onan – a well-known biblical character – I am sure that many of my readers know their Bible from one end to the other. And if not, Google, or any priest – possibly a slightly embarrassed one – will help you.
2 Please direct me to where the naughty ladies are.
Author’s acknowledgements, embarrassments and excuses with, at no extra cost, some bits of vocabulary and usage
DODGER IS SET broadly in the first quarter of Queen Victoria’s reign; in those days disenfranchised people were flooding into London and the other big cities, and life in London for the poor – and most of the people were the poor – was harsh in the extreme. Traditionally, nobody very much bothered about those in poverty at all, but as a decade advanced, there were those among the better off who thought that their plight should be known to everybody. One of those, of course, was Charles Dickens, but not so well known was his friend Henry Mayhew. What Dickens did surreptitiously, showing the reality of things via the medium of the novel, Henry Mayhew and his confederates did simply by facts, lots and lots of facts, piling statistics on statistics; and Mayhew himself walked around the streets chatting to little orphan girls selling flowers, street vendors, old ladies, workers of all sorts, including prostitutes, and exposed, by degrees, the grubby underbelly of the richest and most powerful city in the world.
The massive work known as London Labour and the London Poor ought to be in every library, if only to show you that if you think things are bad now, they were oh so much more worse not all that long ago.
Readers may have heard of the movie Gangs of New York; well, London was worse and getting even more so every time fresh hopefuls arrived to try their luck in the big city. Mayhew’s work has been shortened, rearranged and occasionally printed in smaller volumes. The original, however, is not heavy going. And if you like fantasy, in a very strange way fantasy is there with realistic dirt and grime all over it.
And so, it is to Henry Mayhew that I dedicate this book.
Dodger is a made-up character, as are many of the people he meets, although they are from types working, living and dying in London at that time.
Disraeli was certainly real, and so was Charles Dickens, and so was Sir Robert Peel, who founded the police force in London and became Prime Minister (twice). His ‘peelers’ did indeed replace the old Bow Street runners who were, more or less, thief-takers and not known for excessive bravery. The peelers were a very different kettle of fish, being drawn from men with military experience.
Readers will recognize other personages from history along the way, I expect. Most fantastic of all was Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, heiress of her grandfather’s fortune when she was still quite young and at that time the richest woman in the world, apart perhaps from a queen here or there. She was an amazing woman who did indeed once propose marriage to the Duke of Wellington. But more importantly, for me at least, she spent most of her time giving her money away.
But she wasn’t a soft touch. Miss Coutts believed in helping those who helped themselves, and so she set up the ‘ragged schools’, which helped kids and even older people to get something of an education, wherever they were and however poor they were. She helped people start up small businesses, gave money to churches, but only if they were in some way assisting the poor in practical ways, and all in all was a phenomenon. She plays a major role in this narrative, and since I couldn’t ask her questions, I had to make some informed guesses about t
he way she would react in certain circumstances. I assumed that a woman as rich as her without a husband would certainly know her own mind and generally not be frightened of anything very much.
The Romans did build the sewers in London; they were haphazardly repaired as the generations passed. The sewers were mostly intended for rain water, rather than human waste, cesspits and septic tanks effectively doing that job, and it was when these overflowed, simply because of too many human beings, that you were in the land of cholera and other dreadful diseases.
There were indeed toshers, whose lives were anything but glamorous, but the same applied to the mudlarks and the young chimney sweeps who had nasty diseases of their very own. Dodger, then, was very lucky to find a landlord who was in receipt of four thousand years’ worth of food safety information. But even then, I have to admit, as Mark Twain did many years ago, that I may have put a little touch of shine on things.
I didn’t need to put a shine on Joseph Bazalgette, who appears in this book as a young but keen man. He was the leading light among the surveyors and engineers who changed the face, and most importantly the smell, of London sometime after the story of Dodger has been told. The new London sewers and sewer works were one of the technological miracles of the new Iron Age and so, with some maintenance here and there, they remain.
‘Boney’, of course, was the nickname of Napoleon Bonaparte, and if you don’t know who he was, I am quite certain, alas, that your keyboard will sooner or later let you know.
A note about coinage. Explaining the British pre-decimal coinage to generations that haven’t had to deal with it is difficult, even for me, and I grew up learning it. I could talk at length about such things as thrupence ha’penny, and tanners and crowns and half crowns and the way it drove American tourists, in particular, totally nuts. So all that I can say is that there were coins made of bronze, of all sizes, and these were the cheaper coins; and then there were the coins made of silver which, as you might expect, occupied the middle ground finance-wise, and then there were the gold coins which were, well, gold and in Dodger’s day were truly golden, not like the coins you get today, mumble, mumble, complain. But in truth, the old currency had a certain reality to it that the modern ‘p’, God help us, does not; it just doesn’t have the same life.
Then there was the wonderful ‘thrupenny bit’, so heavy in a little kid’s pocket . . . No, I’d better stop here, because if this goes on, sooner or later I’ll be talking about groats and half farthings and someone might have to shoot me.
The wonderful thing about slang is, if you like that kind of thing, that it is interesting to note that once upon a time the word ‘crib’ meant, among many other things, a building, or place where you lived, and quite recently for some reason has come back again in the English-speaking countries.
Victorian slang, and there was such a lot of it, can be a minefield. Looking at the world from Dodger’s point of view means that you can’t say ‘posh’, because that word had not yet been created. But nobby does the trick. It would be possible to fill up this book with appropriate slang, but sooner or later, well, it’s not there to be a textbook of slang and so I’ve left in some of the ones I liked. Unfortunately, I cannot find a place for my favourite piece of slang which is ‘tuppence more and up goes the donkey’ because, alas, it’s just a little bit too modern.
And very short though Dodger is, I’ve been helped time and again by friends with particular expertise, and my thanks go out to Jacqueline Simpson, Bernard Pearson, Colin Smythe and Pat Harkin, who stopped me putting a foot wrong. Where one is wrong is probably my own dammed foot.
I have to confess ahead of the game that certain tweaks were needed to get people in the right place at the right time – students of history will know that Tenniel didn’t illustrate his first Punch cover until 1850 and Sir Robert Peel was Home Secretary before Victoria came to the throne, for instance – but they are not particularly big tweaks, and besides, Dodger is a fantasy based on a reality. It was the devil’s own job to find out where the headquarters of the Morning Chronicle was. It seems that they changed offices periodically, so I’ve stuck them, for the purposes of Dodger, in Fleet Street – where they ought to have been anyway. This is a historical fantasy, and certainly not a historical novel. Simply for the fun of it, and also too, if possible, to get people interested in that era so wonderfully catalogued by Henry Mayhew and his fellows.
Because although I may have tweaked the positions of people and possibly how they might have reacted in certain situations, the grime, squalor and hopelessness of an underclass which nevertheless survived, often by a means of self-help, I have not changed at all. It was also, however, a time without such things as education for all, health and safety, and most of the other rules and impediments that we take for granted today. And there was always room for the sharp and clever Dodgers, male and female.
Terry Pratchett, 2012
About the Author
Terry Pratchett is the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld® series, the first of which, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he is the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Worldwide sales of his books now stand at 70 million, and they have been translated into thirty-seven languages.
For more information about Terry Pratchett and his books, please visit www.terrypratchett.co.uk
Also by Terry Pratchett
The Discworld® series
1. THE COLOUR OF MAGIC
2. THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
3. EQUAL RITES
4. MORT
5. SOURCERY
6. WYRD SISTERS
7. PYRAMIDS
8. GUARDS! GUARDS!
9. ERIC
(illustrated by Josh Kirby)
10. MOVING PICTURES
11. REAPER MAN
12. WITCHES ABROAD
13. SMALL GODS
14. LORDS AND LADIES
15. MEN AT ARMS
16. SOUL MUSIC
17. INTERESTING TIMES
18. MASKERADE
19. FEET OF CLAY
20. HOGFATHER
21. JINGO
22. THE LAST CONTINENT
23. CARPE JUGULUM
24. THE FIFTH ELEPHANT
25. THE TRUTH
26. THIEF OF TIME
27. THE LAST HERO
(illustrated by Paul Kidby)
28. THE AMAZING MAURICE AND
HIS EDUCATED RODENTS
(for young adults)
29. NIGHT WATCH
30. THE WEE FREE MEN
(for young adults)
31. MONSTROUS REGIMENT
32. A HAT FULL OF SKY
(for young adults)
33. GOING POSTAL
34. THUD
35. WINTERSMITH
(for young adults)
36. MAKING MONEY
37. UNSEEN ACADEMICALS
38. I SHALL WEAR MIDNIGHT
(for young adults)
39. SNUFF
Other books about Discworld
THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD
(with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen)
THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD II: THE GLOBE
(with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen)
THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD III:
DARWIN’S WATCH
(with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen)
THE NEW DISCWORLD COMPANION
(with Stephen Briggs)
NANNY OGG’S COOKBOOK
(with Stephen Briggs, Tina Hannan and Paul Kidby)
THE PRATCHETT PORTFOLIO
(with Paul Kidby)
THE DISCWORLD ALMANAK
(with Bernard Pearson)
THE UNSEEN UNIVERSITY CUT-OUT BOOK
(with Alan Batley and Bernard Pearson)
WHERE’S MY COW?
(illustrated by Melvyn Grant)
THE ART OF DISCWORLD
(with Paul Kid
by)
THE WIT AND WISDOM OF DISCWORLD
(compiled by Stephen Briggs)
THE FOLKLORE OF DISCWORLD
(with Jacqueline Simpson)
THE WORLD OF POO
Discworld maps
THE STREETS OF ANKH-MORPORK
(with Stephen Briggs, painted by Stephen Player)
THE DISCWORLD MAPP
(with Stephen Briggs, painted by Stephen Player)
A TOURIST GUIDE TO LANCRE –
A DISCWORLD MAPP
(with Stephen Briggs, illustrated by Paul Kidby)
DEATH’S DOMAIN
(with Paul Kidby)
A complete list of Terry Pratchett ebooks and audio books as well as other books based on the Discworld series – illustrated screenplays, graphic novels, comics and plays – can be found on
www.terrypratchett.co.uk
Non-Discworld books
THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN
STRATA
THE UNADULTERATED CAT (illustrated by Gray Jolliffe)
GOOD OMENS (with Neil Gaiman)
THE LONG EARTH (with Stephen Baxter)
Non-Discworld novels for young adults
THE CARPET PEOPLE
TRUCKERS
DIGGERS
WINGS
ONLY YOU CAN SAVE MANKIND*
JOHNNY AND THE DEAD
JOHNNY AND THE BOMB
NATION
DODGER
*www.ifnotyouthenwho.com
DODGER
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 409 02441 5
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2012
Copyright © Terry and Lyn Pratchett, 2012
Illustrations copyright © Paul Kidby, 2012
First Published in Great Britain by Doubleday, 2012
The right of Terry Pratchett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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