by D. J. Taylor
For full descriptions of the first Great Train Robbery of 1855, from which this account is substantially derived, see George Dilnot, ed., The Trial of Jim the Penman (1930) and Donald Thomas, The Victorian Underworld (1997), pp. 204–50.
I have taken much useful information from Moss Taylor, Michael Seago, Peter Allard and Don Dorling, The Birds of Norfolk (Robertsbridge, 1999).
In the notes that follow, the place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated.
I. EGGMEN
Highland Line through Inverness-shire: The original Highland line from Aviemore to Torres was opened in August 1863. See C. J. Gannel, Scottish Branch Lines (Oxford, 1999).
Lewis Dunbar: Together with other gentlemen adventurers of the period, such as his brother William, Edward T. Booth, John Wolley and Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, Dunbar was a notable exterminator of the Highland ospreys. See Richard Perry, Wildlife in Britain (1978), pp. 206N–7 which, additionally, quotes from one of his letters.
“Not for a hundred years and more”: The last wolf in the Scottish Highlands was killed at Findhorn in 1743, having previously devoured two children whom it had waylaid on the high road in broad daylight. See Anthony Dent, Lost Beasts of Britain (1974), chap. 4, “The Last of the Wolf.”
II. MR. HENRY IRELAND AND HIS LEAVINGS
Black care had waylaid him: See Horace, Odes, 3.1.40.
Eccleston Square: This area south of the modern-day Victoria Station represented the outer limit of Victorian bourgeois respectability. “For heaven’s sake, my dear, don’t let him take you anywhere beyond Eccleston Square,” a friend counsels Lady Alexandrina de Courcey shortly before her marriage to Adolphus Crosbie in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864), 40.
Dr. John Conolly: John Conolly (1794–1866) has been described as “one of the most ambiguous figures in nineteenth-century medicine.” After qualifying at the University of Edinburgh he failed as a general practitioner, but in 1830 he published an influential treatise, An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity. This advocated radical reform of the treatment of lunatics and a system of patient care known as “nonrestraint.” The measures introduced at the Hanwell Asylum, which he governed from 1839 to 1843, made Conolly a celebrated public figure. Dickens admired him, and the character of Mr. Dick in David Copperfield was intended as a tribute. Thereafter his reputation declined, and by the mid-1850s he was operating as a freelance “alienist,” or lunacy consultant. There were difficulties with money, and in 1859 an action was brought against him for false imprisonment. For a suggestive, if somewhat overstated, account of Conolly’s literary connections, which attempts to link him to the very different marital troubles experienced by Thackeray, Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton, see John Sutherland, “Dickens, Reade, Hard Cash and Maniac Wives,” in Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 55–86.
Irish Sketchbook: An account of W. M. Thackeray’s journey around Ireland in the summer and early autumn of 1842, originally published in May 1843.
Mr. Hutton: R. H. Hutton (1826–1897) had become joint proprietor and literary editor of the Spectator in June 1861. “Mr. Arnold’s Last Words on Translating Homer” appeared in the issue of 22 March 1862.
Mr. Masson: Perhaps David Masson (1822–1907), at this time professor of English Literature at University College, London, editor of Macmillan’s Magazine and at work on his seven-volume Life of Milton (1859–1894).
“quite demented”: For a similar case, see the accounts of the derangement of Thackeray’s wife, Isabella. Her descent into madness reached its climax on a ferry plying between Bristol and Cork. Mrs. Thackeray never recovered her reason and lived for a further half century in a state of semiautistic self-absorption. For Thackeray’s letters describing the voyage and its aftermath, see Gordon N. Ray, ed., The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, volume 1, 1817–1840 (Oxford, 1945), pp. 482–83.
“One of Mr. Smith’s novels”: Presumably Albert Smith (1816–1860), author of The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury (1844) and The Struggles and Adventures of Christopher Tadpole (1847).
“Mr. Procter”: Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874), barrister, poet and dramatist (under the pseudonym “Barry Cornwall”) and between 1832 and 1861 a metropolitan Commissioner of Lunacy.
All the Year Round: Dickens’s weekly magazine, which began publishing in 1859 following the demise of Household Words.
“Lord John”: Lord John Russell (1792–1878), third son of the sixth Duke of Bedford, created Earl Russell in 1861; he was Prime Minister in 1846–1852, and again, briefly, in 1865.
Russell Square: A popular Victorian (and pre-Victorian) residential area for prosperous City figures; for example, the Sedley and Osborne families in Vanity Fair.
III. SOME CORRESPONDENCE
“specie”: Coin, as opposed to paper money.
IV. THE GOODS ARE DELIVERED
shiny widow’s weeds of black bombazine: A worsted or worsted-and-cotton dress material dyed black.
a copy of the St. James’s Chronicle: A weekly magazine of impeccable Anglican tone, with a large circulation among the well-to-do and clerical classes. It was, for example, much enjoyed by the genteel spinsters of Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford (1853).
pattens: Wooden soles, fastened with a strap over the wearer’s shoes, worn in wet weather.
dealt with at Snow Hill by Mr. Ketch: Jack Ketch, public executioner from c. 1663 to 1686. As a result of his barbarity at the executions of William, Lord Russell, the Duke of Monmouth and others, the name became synonymous with hangman.
V. ESTHER’S STORY
cadder: Or caddow, a jackdaw. See Peter Trudgill, The Norfolk Dialect (Cromer, 2003), p. 40.
“Bow Bells”: A popular Victorian fiction magazine, aimed at the working-class female audience.
“shot a seraph that happened to be flying across Easton Wood”: A similar hoax is played upon the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson by Peter Jenkyns in Gaskell, Cranford, chap. 16.
“in China with the army”: Following minor hostilities throughout the 1850s, British forces had captured Canton in 1859. A full-scale war broke out in the following year.
VI. SINGULAR HISTORY OF MR. PARDEW
Astley’s: Philip Astley (1742–1814), the celebrated equestrian performer, opened Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre in London in 1798.
the nature of the ravens that fed him: An allusion to the ravens that fed the prophet Elijah by the brook Cherith (1 Kings 17:5–6).
no more had been known of Mr. Pardew’s whereabouts, or his undertakings, than Captain Franklin’s: The Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin (1786–1847) set out on his final, disastrous, voyage of discovery in the ships Erebus and Terror in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage.
Eldon, Coke and other luminaries: Lord Eldon (1751–1838), chief justice; Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), chief justice 1613–1616, the last three books of whose Institutes form the basis of British constitutional law.
“the poor wretch who shot at Her Majesty in the park”: There were several attempts on Queen Victoria’s life. Mr. Guyle is probably referring to the incident of 10 June 1840 in which the Queen was shot at by a weak-minded boy of eighteen named Edward Oxford as she was driven in her carriage up Constitution Hill. Her attacker, who spent twenty-seven years in a civil lunatic asylum, was apprehended by Mr. Millais, whose schoolboy son—later the artist J. E. Millais—had just raised his cap to the Queen.
copies of pictures by Frith and Etty: William Powell Frith (1819–1909), famous for his large-scale canvases of Victorian scenes. His Ramsgate Sands (1854) was bought by Queen Victoria. William Etty (1787–1849), painter of historical and classical subjects, and renowned for his nudes.
Pall Mall Gazette: An influential and Liberal-supporting evening newspaper founded by the publisher George Smith and his associate Frederick Greenwood in 1865.
VII. CURIOUS BEHAVIOUR OF MR. CRABBE
one of Miss Edgeworth’s novels: Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849), author, whose firs
t novel was Castle Rackrent (1800); among her other books were The Absentee (1812) and Ormond (1817).
VIII. JORROCKS’S CART
Suffolk Fencibles: A militia regiment composed of volunteers who undertook military service in times of domestic emergency.
Bradshaw: A general name for the series of railway guides inaugurated by the Manchester mapmaker George Bradshaw (1801–1853) in 1839.
Shoreditch Railway Station: Forerunner of the modern Liverpool Street.
that engraving in which a man, journeying down a country road at night, finds himself pursued by a fearful fiend: By Thomas Bewick (1753–1828).
The story of Mr. Le Fanu’s: In Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864) the sinister governess Madame de la Rougierre is first observed by her charge, Maud Ruthyn, through the garden window at twilight.
Mr. Chinnery’s pictures: George Chinnery (1794–1852), a celebrated portrait and landscape painter who specialised in oriental subjects.
“Omphalos”: Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), the distinguished naturalist, published in 1857 Omphalos: or The Geological Knot Untied, in which he attempted to reconcile Scripture with current evolutionary theories by proposing that God had created fossils at the same time that he had created man. The book was widely ridiculed. See Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (2002).
“The American war”: The American Civil War had by this time reached its closing stages. By January 1865 Sherman’s Union forces were ravaging South Carolina. On 6 February the Confederate Congress appointed Robert E. Lee to command all that was left of the rebel army.
IX. ESTHER’S STORY CONTINUED
“The Volunteers”: Volunteer regiments had been created by the Militia Bill of 1757. The Volunteer Act of 1863 allowed the sovereign to call out volunteer help if an invasion was anticipated, rather than—as had previously been the case—if the enemy had actually landed on British soil.
“mawther”: A girl, here used with a neutral meaning, rather than the more recent “large, awkward girl”; see Trudgill, Norfolk Dialect, p. 45.
X. THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK
Limehouse Hole, where Rogue Riderhood dwelt deep and dark: The sailor who blackmails Bradley Headstone in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865) and is drowned struggling with him in the Thames.
any redeeming features: For a detailed description of the Clerkenwell of a slightly later period, see George Gissing, The Nether World (1889), chap. 2.
Mr. Egan’s Life in London: Life in London, or The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and Corinthian Tom by Pierce Egan the Elder (1772–1849), first published in monthly numbers in 1820 with illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank, and an invaluable sourcebook for the opinions, habits and slang of the Regency-era man-about-town.
“snide”: Counterfeit coin.
A wonderful houseboat that Mr. Dickens had put into one of his novels: The Peggotys in David Copperfield (1851) inhabit a converted boat on Yarmouth beach.
“Titmarsh”: One of various pseudonyms used by Thackeray in the early stages of his career. Others included “C. J. Yellowplush,” “George Savage Fitzboodle” and “The Fat Contributor.”
XI. ISABEL
“Hannay”: Presumably James Hannay (1827–1873), man of letters and author of Brief Memoir: Studies on Thackeray (1869). Thackeray’s daughter Anny maintained that a similar incident gave her father a model for his drawings of Arthur Pendennis. See Lilian F. Shankman, Abigail Burnham Bloom and John Maynard, eds., Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters (Columbus, OH, 1994), p. 131.
“Mr. Smith that was Papa’s publisher”: George Smith (1824–1901), head of the firm of Smith, Elder from 1846, founder of the Cornhill Magazine (1860) and the Pall Mall Gazette (1865), and sponsor of the Dictionary of National Biography (63 vols., 1885–1900).
“How much Papa disliked Mr. Jerrold”: Douglas Jerrold (1803–1857), all-purpose early Victorian literary man, famous for the prickliness of his temperament. Thackeray once referred to him as a “savage little Robespierre.”
“Sir Charles Lyell”: Professor of Geology at King’s College London from 1832 and author of Principles of Geology (1830–1833). The latter’s effect on nineteenth-century intellectual life is comparable with Darwin’s Origin of Species.
“his friend Mr. Lewes”: G[eorge] H[enry] Lewes (1817–1878), literary journalist, biographer (in particular his Life and Works of Goethe, 1855) and from 1854 the consort of George Eliot.
“Sir Henry Cole”: Designer, writer and civil servant, Henry Cole (1808–1882) was director of the South Kensington Museum (1853–1873), which subsequently became the Victoria and Albert Museum.
“over the door hung Daniel O’Connell”: Daniel O’Connell, “the Liberator” (1775–1847), Irish nationalist leader and successively MP for County Clare, Dublin and Cork. In 1844 he, his son and five of his prominent supporters were briefly imprisoned for conspiracy to raise sedition.
“Mrs. Brookfield”: Jane Octavia Brookfield (1821–1896), wife of the Reverend W. H. Brookfield, chiefly remembered for her long and almost certainly platonic association with W. M. Thackeray; in later life she was a novelist.
XIV. THE DEAN AND HIS DAUGHTER
Ritualism, Puseyism and the Oxford movement: An attempt to revive the High Church traditions of the seventeenth century, which took literary form in the series Tracts for the Times launched by John Keble, John Henry Newman and R. H. Froude in 1833. Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and a contributor to the series, became the movement’s leader in 1841. Distrusted by many Anglicans for its apparent sympathy to Roman Catholicism, the Oxford movement’s unity was called into serious question by Newman’s decision to convert to the Catholic Church in 1845.
XV. DOWNRIVER
“Mr. Smiles”: Samuel Smiles (1812–1904), secretary of the South-Eastern Railway, 1854–1866, and celebrated for his best-selling Self-Help (1859). This series of minibiographies of great men formed the cornerstone of Victorian notions of self-improvement.
XVI. “THE BLACK DOG KNOWS MY NAME”
black dogs everywhere in Norfolk: For an account of “Black Shuck” and the other demon dogs of East Anglian legend, see Peter Jeffery, East Anglian Ghosts, Legends and Lore (Gillingham, 1988), pp. 6–21.
XVII. MR. RICHARD FARRIER
Taglioni: Maria Taglioni (1804–1884), Italian ballerina who achieved great success with her creation of La Sylphide in 1832. Later, as the Comtesse de Voisins, she taught deportment to the children of the Royal Family.
Mr. Cook: Thomas Cook (1808–1892), who popularised the idea of conducted holiday excursions and founded the travel agency that bears his name. His railway tour of Europe was inaugurated in 1856.
XVIII. SUB ROSA
“Maria Monk”: A sensational (and best-selling) piece of anti-Catholic propaganda, first published anonymously in 1836. Presented as the authentic confession of a nun abused by lecherous priests in Canada, it was in fact the work of an impostor, assisted in her composition by the English Presbyterian minister the Reverend George Bourne (1780–1845).
XX. ROMAN À CLEF
Bell’s Life: An immensely popular Victorian sporting periodical.
“Garryowen”: A stirring march which began life as a late-eighteenth-century Irish drinking song. Extremely popular in the British army, it became the regimental march of the Eighteenth Foot, the Royal Irish Regiment and was much sung in the Crimea.
XXII. AN AFTERNOON IN ELY
“sent a copy of Mrs. Caudle”: Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, a comic serial by Douglas Jerrold (see notes to chapter XI), featuring Job Caudle, a good-natured merchant who is nagged unceasingly by his termagant wife, was first published in volume form in 1845.
Sir William Smith’s Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Bible (1860–1863) by Sir William Smith (1813–1893).
Mrs. Brookfield’s new novel: Possibly Only George, published in 1866.
XXIII. A NIGHT’S WORK
Cornhill: The most successful monthly periodical of the mid-Victorian age, launched by George Smith in January 1860 with Thackeray as its founding editor.
Fraser’s: Founded by James Fraser in 1830, with William Maginn as its first editor, Fraser’s Magazine was initially known for its riotous High Tory bohemianism. Notable “Fraserians” included Thackeray, Carlyle and James Hogg. In later years, under the editorship of G. W. Nickisson, it became a more conventional chronicle of Victorian life.
“as sober as Father Mathew”: The Irish priest Theobald Mathew (1790–1856), crusader for total abstinence, who having campaigned successfully in his native land, arrived in London in 1843. Jane Carlyle, who attended one of his gatherings, described it as “the only religious meeting [she had] ever seen in Cockneyland which had not plenty of scoffers at its heels.”
XXIV. CAPTAIN MCTURK MAKES PROGRESS
what ravens fed him: See note for p. 75.
XXX. SOME DESTINIES
one of Mr. Leighton’s Attic paintings: Frederick Leighton (1830–1896), celebrated Victorian classical artist, president of the Royal Academy, 1878, raised to the peerage shortly before his death.
About the Author
Born in 1960, D. J. TAYLOR is a novelist, critic, and acclaimed biographer of William Thackeray and George Orwell. His Orwell: The Life won the Whitbread Biography of the Year in 2003. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich, England.
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