by Emily Organ
“Not at all.”
“Well, you did, because I was unable to get Maynell’s name from them.”
“It was all down to a tall tale and a few tears. That combination is easier to conjure when you’re a woman.”
“Indeed it is, Penny. I couldn’t have employed that same trick!”
We both laughed.
“I’ll let you return to your meal. Apologies for the interruption.” He placed his bowler hat back on his head.
“I wish you would join us, James.”
“You know that it would make matters rather awkward.”
I sighed.
“You were right, you know,” said James, lowering his voice.
“About what?”
“What you said on Blackfriars Bridge. No one is forcing me to marry Charlotte.”
“You made a choice.”
“I did. But I made that choice before I met you. Had we met sooner, I believe things might be rather different now.”
His words saddened me, and I couldn’t miss the opportunity to respond. “But we didn’t meet sooner, and nothing will ever change that. You can still make a choice, though. You know that, don’t you?”
“I can, but the repercussions of such a choice would be…” He trailed off and stared down at the tiled floor. “I don’t know. It would be quite dreadful. The wedding has already been postponed once before.”
“And?”
James looked at me, his eyes searching my face.
“Can you imagine if I called it off?”
“There would be some fuss for a while,” I said, “but it would eventually calm down and be forgotten about.”
“An uncle of mine was once sued for breach of promise.”
“Charlotte wouldn’t do that, would she?”
“She would! And her mother would weigh in, no doubt. It would be awful.”
“What else can I say, James? Yes, it would be awful, but only for a while. And then you would be free to pursue happiness with someone else.”
“With you?”
“Yes.”
No sooner had I said it than his warm lips were on mine. He rested his hand gently on my shoulder, which tingled beneath his touch.
But as quickly as he had kissed me, he drew away again.
“Miss Green?” came a voice from behind me.
I spun around to see Mr Edwards standing beside the door to the drawing room. He stared first at me and then at James.
A rush of heat flooded my face. I opened my mouth to speak but had no idea what to say.
How long had Mr Edwards been standing there?
“Your sister asked me to inform you that pudding is served.” His voice betrayed no emotion.
He adjusted his tie and walked back into the drawing room.
The End
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Historical Note
“And this invisible though mighty energy is day by day becoming more the obedient servant of mankind, whom once it only terrified in the lightning flash, or amused by the crackle of the philosopher’s electrical machine.” - ‘Electric Lighting in America, An Interview with Dr J A Fleming’. Pall Mall Gazette, Thursday 18th December 1884. Retrieved courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive.
Simon Borthwick is fictional, I borrowed his achievements from the British chemist and inventor Sir Joseph Swan. Swan obtained the British patent for the light bulb in 1880 and then began installing electric lighting in various buildings including the Savoy Theatre. It was Swan who lit the dancing fairies in the performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe in 1882.
Illumination displays were a popular form of entertainment in the early days of electricity. In the Sporting News of 9th June 1888 an advert reads:-
“Garden Fete - Crystal Palace - Today. Flowers, fountains, music, natural beauties of park, shrubberies and plantations revealed by electric light. Lakes, lawns, rosary and kiosks superbly illuminated by 50,000 fairy lights.”
Donald Repton is also fictional, I borrowed his achievements from the pioneering British electrical engineer Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton. Crompton established an engineering company and manufactured Swan’s light bulb under licence. In the 1880s the company dominated the British lighting market and worked on projects such as Windsor Castle, King’s Cross Station, The Mansion House and even Vienna Opera House. The Kensington Court project was built in 1888 (a few years later than 1884 when The Inventor is set). Crompton lived at the development for a time and it still stands today, Crompton’s Electric Lighting Station where the generators were housed is used as offices.
So who actually invented the light bulb? The American inventor Thomas Edison is often given the credit but that’s partly due to the success of his company General Electric (initially named the Edison Electric Light Company). Edison obtained the US patent for the light bulb in 1880. Despite my research I can’t determine whether Edison sued Swan for infringement or whether it was vice versa (or both!), but the end result was the establishment of the joint company Ediswan which manufactured the light bulb in Britain.
Inventors worldwide worked on the light bulb throughout the nineteenth century, as well as Swan and Edison they include: Humphry Davy, Pavel Yablochkov, Frederick de Moleyns, Hermann Sprengel, Henry Woodward, Matthew Evans, William E Sawyer and Albon Man. With so many inventors working on the same idea in the latter part of the nineteenth century, litigation between them was to be expected.
The police raid on the fancy dress ball at The Ha’penny is inspired by a real-life event in 1880 in Manchester. On 25th September of that year police raided a private party at the Temperance Hall in Hulme where 47 men were guests: around half of them wore women’s clothing. All the men were arrested and charged with ‘soliciting and inciting each other to commit an unnameable offence’. In court they were fined on the surety of ‘good behaviour’ for the following twelve months, if they defaulted then the punishment was imprisonment for three months. The incident was widely reported in the press with The Illustrated Police News headline being: ‘Disgraceful Proceedings in Manchester - Men dressed as Women.’
William Sherman is right to be cautious about his private life, the most extreme punishment at the time was imprisonment from ten years to life. In 1885 in Britain the Criminal Law Amendment Act recriminalized male homosexuality, one of the most famous cases tried under this act was the trial of playwright Oscar Wilde in 1895 for ‘gross indecency’. He was sentenced to two years’ hard labour which led to poor health and undoubtedly his untimely death at the age of 46.
The Crystal Palace was built for Britain’s Great Exhibition in 1851, the first international exhibition of manufactured products. The enormous glasshouse was constructed in Hyde Park and 14,000 exhibitors were contained within its 990,000 square feet of space. The building was three times the size of St Paul’s Cathedral.
After the Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace was painstakingly dismantled and reassembled eight miles away at a park in Sydenham, south London. It reopened in 1854 and was used for various events, festivals and exhibitions over the years. The park was attractively landscaped and its lake was home to the famous concrete Crystal Palace dinosaurs.
Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in 1936, an event witnessed by my Grandfather from five miles away on Clapham Common. Even at that distance he said the light from the fire was bright enough to read a newspaper by.
Some of the landscaped grounds of Crystal P
alace remain: including the grassed-over Italian-style terraces, steps and a few statues. These days the park is famously home to the Crystal Palace football team’s ground and the area itself is now called Crystal Palace. The 160 year old concrete dinosaurs are still there and the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs charity lovingly keeps an eye on them. Talk rumbles on of plans to rebuild the Crystal Palace but nothing has been confirmed.
St Bartholomew’s Hospital remains on the site it was founded in the twelfth century. Some of its buildings date back to the eighteenth century and the hospital has a long-held reputation for teaching and research. Buildings for the medical school were constructed in the nineteenth century and among these was the pathology museum. I worked at the hospital in the mid-1990s and at that time the pathology museum was one of its best-kept secrets: a fascinating place to visit in my lunch break and I’m not sure I was actually allowed to be in there. I don’t recall there being an attached store room - it was something I created for the story.
These days the pathology museum at Barts is now professionally curated and open to the public. Worth a visit if you’re ever in the area.
The police station at Old Jewry was used as the headquarters of the City of London Police from 1863 until 2001. The building is now used for office space but it’s popular with Jack the Ripper tours because officers in this building investigated the murder of Jack the Ripper’s fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes, in 1888.
The upmarket Burlington Arcade on Piccadilly opened in 1819 and was a precursor to modern day shopping malls. It was given its own private police force which still looks after the arcade today: the Burlington Beadles. Singing and whistling is banned in the arcade: rules which were established when pickpockets frequented the place and brothels were to be found in its upper chambers.
Apparently in the mid-nineteenth century Madam Parsons ran a bonnet shop in the arcade, her shop was actually a front for a brothel in nearby Regent Street. Madam Parsons facilitated liaisons between gentlemen and ladies and it was only after her death that Madam Parsons was discovered to have been a man.
If The Inventor is the first Penny Green book you’ve read, then you may find the following historical background interesting. It’s compiled from the historical notes published in the previous books in the series:
Women journalists in the nineteenth century were not as scarce as people may think. In fact they were numerous enough by 1898 for Arnold Bennett to write Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide in which he was keen to raise the standard of women’s journalism:-
“The women-journalists as a body have faults… They seem to me to be traceable either to an imperfect development of the sense of order, or to a certain lack of self-control.”
Eliza Linton became the first salaried female journalist in Britain when she began writing for the Morning Chronicle in 1851. She was a prolific writer and contributor to periodicals for many years including Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words. George Eliot – her real name was Mary Anne Evans - is most famous for novels such as Middlemarch, however she also became assistant editor of The Westminster Review in 1852.
In the United States Margaret Fuller became the New York Tribune’s first female editor in 1846. Intrepid journalist Nellie Bly worked in Mexico as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Despatch in the 1880s before writing for New York World and feigning insanity to go undercover and investigate reports of brutality at a New York asylum. Later, in 1889-90, she became a household name by setting a world record for travelling around the globe in seventy two days.
The iconic circular Reading Room at the British Museum was in use from 1857 until 1997. During that time it was also used as a filming location and has been referenced in many works of fiction. The Reading Room has been closed since 2014 but it’s recently been announced that it will reopen and display some of the museum’s permanent collections. It could be a while yet until we’re able to step inside it but I’m looking forward to it!
The Museum Tavern, where Penny and James enjoy a drink, is a well-preserved Victorian pub opposite the British Museum. Although a pub was first built here in the eighteenth century much of the current pub (including its name) dates back to 1855. Celebrity drinkers here are said to have included Arthur Conan Doyle and Karl Marx.
Publishing began in Fleet Street in the 1500s and by the twentieth century the street was the hub of the British press. However newspapers began moving away in the 1980s to bigger premises. Nowadays just a few publishers remain in Fleet Street but the many pubs and bars once frequented by journalists – including the pub Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese - are still popular with city workers.
Penny Green lives in Milton Street in Cripplegate which was one of the areas worst hit by bombing during the Blitz in the Second World War and few original streets remain. Milton Street was known as Grub Street in the eighteenth century and was famous as a home to impoverished writers at the time. The street had a long association with writers and was home to Anthony Trollope among many others. A small stretch of Milton Street remains but the 1960s Barbican development has been built over the bombed remains.
Plant hunting became an increasingly commercial enterprise as the nineteenth century progressed. Victorians were fascinated by exotic plants and, if they were wealthy enough, they had their own glasshouses built to show them off. Plant hunters were employed by Kew Gardens, companies such as Veitch Nurseries or wealthy individuals to seek out exotic specimens in places such as South America and the Himalayas. These plant hunters took great personal risks to collect their plants and some perished on their travels. The Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican is worth a read. Written in 1891 it documents his journeys in Colombia and demonstrates how plant hunting became little short of pillaging. Some areas he travelled to had already lost their orchids to plant hunters and Millican himself spent several months felling 4,000 trees to collect 10,000 plants. Even after all this plundering many of the orchids didn’t survive the trip across the Atlantic to Britain. Plant hunters were not always welcome: Millican had arrows fired at him as he navigated rivers, had his camp attacked one night and was eventually killed during a fight in a Colombian tavern.
My research for The Penny Green series has come from sources too numerous to list in detail, but the following books have been very useful: A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain by Michael Patterson, London in the Nineteenth Century by Jerry White, London in 1880 by Herbert Fry, London a Travel Guide through Time by Dr Matthew Green, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Onslow, A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide by Arnold Bennett and Seventy Years a Showman by Lord George Sanger, Dottings of a Dosser by Howard Goldsmid, Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Andrew Mearns, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin, The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant edited by Liz Stanley, Mrs Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light, Revelations of a Lady Detective by William Stephens Hayward and A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup. The British Newspaper Archive is also an invaluable resource. For more about Edison and the beginning of the electricity age you might like The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore.
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News reporter Penny Green is committed to her job. But should she impose on a grieving widow?
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The Runaway Girl Series
Also by Emily Organ. A series of three historical thrillers set in Medieval London.
Book 1: Runaway Girl
A missing girl. The treacherous streets of Medieval London. Only one woman is brave enough to try and bring her home.
Book 2: Forgotten Child
Her husband took a fatal secret to the grave. Two friends are murdered. She has only one chance to stop the killing.
Book 3: Sins of the Father
An enemy returns. And this time he has her fooled. If he gets his own way then a little girl will never be seen again.
Available as separate books or a three book box set. Find out more at emilyorgan.co.uk/books
Copyright © 2018 by Emily Organ
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Edited by Joy Tibbs
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