by Karen Odden
Finally, as always, my deepest gratitude to George, Julia, and Kyle; and Rosy Bea, my faithful furry friend.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
* * *
Meet Karen Odden
About the Book
* * *
Behind A Dangerous Duet
Further Reading
Reading Group Guide
Read On
* * *
An Excerpt from A Lady in the Smoke
About the Author
Meet Karen Odden
KAREN ODDEN received her Ph.D. in English literature from New York University and has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. She formerly served as an assistant editor for the academic journal Victorian Literature and Culture. Her debut novel, A Lady in the Smoke, was a USA Today bestseller.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
About the Book
Behind A Dangerous Duet
I can trace the beginnings of this novel, about a young woman pianist in Victorian London, to two experiences I had in 2012—one that struck me painfully and close to home, and one that I encountered fortuitously thousands of miles away on the other side of the Atlantic. Together, they led me toward certain themes and to my heroine, Nell Hallam.
The first was that my father, a pianist, died suddenly, in a car accident, in May. We had never been close, but after his death, I came to understand him better and to see that for him, music was, at times, a language more instinctive and satisfying than speech. His piano, a baby grand, stood in our 1970s living room, its three wheeled feet resting on a goldenrod shag carpet. As a child, I took lessons from him, though I really didn’t have the ear or the talent. But my son has my father’s gift, and over the years, the very tilt of his head when he plays, so like my father’s, has raised questions for me about just what we inherit from our ancestors.
This question, about what is “bred in the bone” (that is, genetic) was widely debated by medical men and laymen alike in the 1800s. A group of pseudoscientific endeavors in vogue at midcentury—including phrenology, which claimed that the bumps on the skull indicated proclivities for everything from music to licentiousness—poked at questions about inherited characteristics and the role of the brain in determining character. Serious scientists and medical men were also tackling these enigmas. For example, in the 1850s, two Frenchmen, Jean-Pierre Falret and Jules Baillarger, each wrote about what we would now call bipolar disorder; and during the 1800s, a range of hospitals came into being, including specialty hospitals, to develop treatments for those with mental illnesses, incurable diseases, and other ailments.
Fueled by my research into pianos and Victorian medicine, ideas for the novel began to coalesce: a mother who is a brilliant pianist but whose brain is at odds with her well-being; music as a language and a passion; Nell’s fear that she might be prone to mental illness herself. But I still needed to learn more about Nell’s character and what she wanted, and to find a setting that was perfect for her story line.
The second thing that happened in 2012 was that my husband went to London for work, and I could tag along. (It’s always fun to go on an expense account. London is so pricey!) While he was in meetings, I visited the Royal Academy of Music on Marylebone Road. The Academy, which is the oldest conservatory in London, opened in 1822, and from the beginning it enrolled young women. There, with the best luck ever, I found a special exhibit about students in the nineteenth century—and Fanny Dickens’s name, written “Dickens, Frances Elizabeth,” next to the name of her sponsor, Thomas Tomkison, a piano maker from Soho. I just stood there, staring at the faded ink on a foxed page.
Charles Dickens’s older sister, Fanny (born Frances, in 1810), attended the Academy to study piano with Ignaz Moscheles, who had studied with Beethoven himself. Her tuition was costly—thirty-eight guineas a year—which the Dickens family could ill afford, as their father was a spendthrift. A rising star in 1824, Fanny’s early musical success was cut short in 1829 because her tuition had gone unpaid, and she had to leave, though she was later awarded an honorary membership. All this got me thinking: What would Fanny have done if her parents had refused to pay her tuition initially? Given that she was a talented musician, what could she have done to earn her way?
I knew that in the 1860s, London’s music halls were centers for the kind of countercultural humor that celebrates bawdiness and sexuality and makes a joke of religion and politics. (Think Saturday Night Live skits, not a beautifully staged Broadway show.) But I wondered if that sort of place hired pianists. So my next stop was Wilton’s Music Hall, one of the few Victorian music halls still standing (https://www.wiltons.org.uk). I remember finding it, in Graces Alley in Whitechapel, and walking through the narrow pair of doors into the bar. I prowled all over the place, upstairs and down, and asked questions of the building manager. When I peered through a small window to see the U-shaped hall and the stage, Wilton’s morphed into the (fictional) Octavian in Soho. I could imagine Nell taking her place in the piano alcove beside the stage, and I sensed that the piano itself was becoming an important symbol for my book. My father once explained that the piano is both a percussion instrument and a string instrument, in that the key hits the hammer, which strikes the strings. And because I am attracted to things that are both/and, the piano became an emblem of the many dualities and literal and figurative duets throughout. At the music hall, acts are both art and artifice; the audience members are both spectators and participants; Nell is both pretending to be a man and a woman in pursuit of her goals.
I had some elements for Nell’s character and plot, but what about a mystery? And how could they intertwine?
Having read my Dickens, I knew about the infamous “lads-men,” the nineteenth-century version of criminal bosses, who trained boys to steal and then fenced or pawned the goods they brought back. (Remember Fagin and Oliver Twist?) I started combing through my Victorian history books for more stories of thieving by children: of thief trainers such as Thomas Duggin, who worked in the St. Giles slum, and Charles King, who ran a gang of pickpocket boys; and of “flash houses,” where gangs of young thieves lived and were supervised by a “captain.” The crimes I describe in this book are merely updated versions of those. As a counterpoint to those stories, I also read Haia Shpayer-Makov’s excellent book The Ascent of the Detective, about the rise of Scotland Yard. The accounts I found there became the basis for Nell’s brother, Matthew.
Like my first book, A Lady in the Smoke, A Dangerous Duet is set in the 1870s, partly because it was a time of extraordinary political, social, and economic flux. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 had extended the vote to roughly 40 percent of men, and suffragists were beginning to petition Parliament. The 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War had tipped the balance of power in Europe toward Germany. In 1874, Disraeli and the Conservatives were voted in after years of Gladstone and the Liberals. Ideas about class and gender were evolving unevenly, partly as a result of significant laws passed in the late 1860s and 1870s—laws that concerned education, divorce, the rights of married women to hold property, the rights of infants and children to protection, and the hours of factory work. I feel that a complex historical context always adds depth to a story.
The process of writing a book isn’t unidirectional—and by that, I mean that the book writes back to me as well. It was only during final revisions that my manuscript showed me that I was really trying to write a book about truth and value.
In the 1990s, I worked at Christie’s auction house in New York. There, I learned how the value of objects could fluctuate wildly depending on various factors. For example, a footrest could be sold for many times its ordinary value if Barbra Streisand had owned it. A book with its original endpapers brought more than one without. And if a Picasso sold for a high price at Sotheby’s, a Picasso at Christie’s might receive a price boost. This held true in Victorian England as well. Fo
r example, let’s consider a pair of silver candlesticks. Did their value reside in their craftsmanship, confirmed by the maker’s mark on the bottom? Or in their provenance? Or in the weight of the raw silver? Or in the number of sixpence that could be made from the silver? The more philosophical question is: what anchors or guarantees or determines an object’s value?
And by extension, what anchors or determines a person’s character? For Nell, the music hall brings into sharp relief how character doesn’t reside in the clothes we wear, or our names, or even the stories we tell others about ourselves, on any stage, literal or figurative. Where does our character reside? In our brains? Our hearts? Our patterns of interacting with others? Is our character determined by the consistency with which we act, day in and day out? I’m not sure there are incontrovertible or fixed answers to these questions, but I like the conversations that happen when we ask them.
Further Reading
ON MUSIC HALLS
* * *
The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict by Dagmar Kift
Murder, Mayhem and Music Hall: The Dark Side of Victorian London by Barry Anthony
ON VICTORIAN HOSPITALS AND MEDICINE
* * *
The Victorian Hospital by Lavinia Mitton
The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London by M. Jeanne Peterson
ON PIANOS AND MUSIC
* * *
The Piano Shop on the West Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier by Thad Carhart
Piano Man, BBC podcast with Ulrich Gerhartz
“The Virtuoso” by James B. Stewart in The New Yorker (January 1, 2018)
ON SCOTLAND YARD
* * *
The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England by Haia Shpayer-Makov
ON VICTORIAN CRIME AND CONTEMPORARY EVENTS
* * *
The Victorian Underworld by Donald Thomas
Gangs of London by Brian McDonald
The Good Old Days: Crime, Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London by Gilda O’Neill
London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew
The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise
For further historical context, please visit Karen Odden’s website, www.karenodden.com, where she has blog entries on a variety of subjects, including Victorian music halls, Scotland Yard and the police, Victorian crime, and Victorian pianos and female pianists.
Reading Group Guide
Mental illness was poorly understood in the 1870s in England, though some medical men and scientists were working in the emerging field. What do you make of the different explanations that Dr. Everett and Peggy give for Nell’s mother’s illness? What would twenty-first-century knowledge of psychology suggest?
Music halls were places where the lower classes came to be entertained and celebrate their own brand of bawdy, raucous humor. This flew in the face of the rigid and righteous middle-class morality epitomized by the Society for the Suppression of Vice (founded in 1787), which deplored profanity, gaming, and brothels, among other things. Do you see any similarity between the music halls and any venues or entertainment genres today?
Do you believe that character is something that can change over time? Do you find Jack’s account of his father’s change believable? When do you first feel you understand Stephen’s true character?
Although many characters have experienced the pain of loss, numerous acts of kindness reverberate throughout the story. Do you see good and evil behaviors having a ripple effect?
Were you surprised by the revelation about Dr. Everett and Charles Tindale? In England, homosexual acts were made a felony by the Buggery Act in 1533 under Henry VIII. The punishment was death by hanging until 1861 in England and Wales. Did you find the representation of a same-sex relationship realistic for the period? Why or why not?
Dr. Everett says that the piano is a “dangerous partner” for Nell. To what extent do you think Nell’s love of her piano may derive from her longing for danger? Or for her mother? Or another kind of longing altogether? In what ways is her dilemma about playing the piano related to the question of how she should live her life?
Clearly the boys in the Fleet are being exploited, but given Jack’s comments about where many of them came from, do you find his comment that they might be better off in the Fleet compelling? Do you see places where this sort of ambiguity exists in our society today?
Amalie and Nell are to some extent similar: each is talented; each comes to the Octavian with dreams. As you learned more about Amalie, were you surprised by her past and the way she had managed her life? Were there any other characters that surprised you?
Nell and Matthew’s relationship mirrors Marceline and Sebastian’s in some ways. Nell understands Marceline’s desire to protect her brother, and Nell’s desire to reunite Marceline with Sebastian drives the first half of the book. But how is Sebastian alike or different from Matthew? Do you think Sebastian behaves with his sister’s best interests at heart?
In the 1870s, Scotland Yard was not the respected division it is today, and the public didn’t necessarily trust plainclothes detectives—a distrust that wasn’t unfounded. In fact, in 1877, two years after this novel is set, the Yard came under fire for a huge corruption scandal, and four senior detectives were put on trial, with three sentenced to prison. In investigating men in his own division, Matthew is like some other courageous police figures in pop culture. What do you think of this archetype? Do you feel it resonates for particular time periods?
Read On
An Excerpt from A Lady in the Smoke
LIVERPOOL STREET STATION, LONDON, MAY 1874
My mother’s nerves were brittle as a porcelain teacup worn thin around the edge, which is why she took an extra dose of laudanum before we boarded the train home that day. I doubt anyone around us on the crowded platform could have guessed that she had a tincture of opium and alcohol running through her veins at half past eleven o’clock in the morning. Looking at her, they’d see only a well-dressed gentlewoman, her face tranquil, and her fair hair beautifully arranged under an expensive hat.
But I knew. In the ten years since my father had died, I’d learned how to recognize when she’d taken an extra sip from the brown bottle she kept in her reticule: by her dreamy silence, by the faint smile that came and went without cause, and a certain softness to her chin, like a blur in an unfinished portrait.
I glanced sideways. Yes, she was very different now from what she’d been a mere ten hours ago, when we were alone in our rooms—her voice hard, her face contorted with fury—
A shriek cut through the dull roar inside the station, and our train rounded the corner, the racket of the wheels driving the pigeons off the rafters and into a whirl of feathers. The engine came to a halt, belching steam and filling the air with the smells of coal dust and burned oil. “Up train to York,” bellowed the stationmaster, “running express to Hertford and stopping at all points north!”
Railway servants in red uniforms rushed to the first-class carriages with sets of wooden steps, and passengers started to disembark. In a few minutes, we’d be on our way out of this godforsaken city.
“Lady Fraser! Lady Elizabeth! Oh, my dears!” shrilled a woman’s voice. I kept my face averted. I didn’t want to see anyone I knew. Please, please just let us get on this train and be gone.
“Lady Elizabeth! I say, Lady Elizabeth!”
I sighed and turned to see a plump woman trying to shift her way through the crowd. What was her name? Miss Rush. She was one of my distant relations who had been at Lady Lorry’s ball last night. Her round face was splotched pink with the effort she was making to reach us, and I felt a pang of pity. She must exist on the furthest fringe of society, for apparently no one at the ball had felt there was any social currency to be gained by telling her the rumors about us. Otherwise, Miss Rush would have been watching us slyly and leaving us quite alone.
“Are you
taking this train home, then?” she asked breathlessly as she drew near.
I forced a smile. “Yes, we are. And you?”
“Oh, yes.” Miss Rush gave a quick, curious glance at my mother, who was staring into midair. Then she gazed wistfully at the train. “But of course you are riding in a first-class carriage! Alas, when one is retrenching, every farthing matters, as you know—but, then”—a little, tentative laugh, and a wave toward the second-class carriages, close behind the smoking engines—“you wouldn’t know, my dear—but no matter! I’d have endured any sort of travel for such a ball! I didn’t see you dancing very often; but when you’re married, I’m sure you’ll have a ball just as beautiful.”
I winced and looked away. The first passengers were being helped aboard, and people around us were beginning to push forward. I took my mother’s arm and said apologetically, “I’m afraid my mother is very fatigued. We should go to our—”
“And your cousin looked just as a bride should with her new husband!” She leaned forward as if she were about to confide a secret. “I’ve heard that Americans are brash and uncouth, but he wasn’t dreadful at all! In fact, he was—”
I let the crowd draw us apart, raised my hands helplessly, and called over my shoulder, “I’m sorry we must go. I wish you a pleasant trip home.”
“Oh! Of course! Goodbye, dear.” She smiled brightly, like a child pretending not to be hurt, and gave a little wave as we turned away.
Something inside me shriveled at my selfishness, for not taking her hint and inviting her to share our compartment. But if I had to listen to her prattle on about that wretched ball for hours, I’d throw myself off the train like one of those mad people I’d read about in the papers.