The Solitary House (45 page)
Read The Solitary House Online
Authors: Lynn Shepherd
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Literary, #Mystery & Detective, #Traditional British
Bleak House
was first published in instalments between March 1852 and September 1853, and is a wonderful, complex, and compelling work. It’s a gripping story, a powerful social commentary, and a panoramic portrait of contemporary London life. It also manages—single-handedly and almost in passing—to create a whole new literary genre: the detective mystery. For a writer who aspires to write “literary murders” herself, it could hardly be richer territory to explore, and I hope that anyone who loves Dickens as much as I do will
enjoy seeing how I have interleaved my own mystery with the characters and episodes of his novel, and used his chapter titles for events in my own, though each time with a new twist, and a rather different meaning. In doing this I have, of course, drawn extensively on
Bleak House
, and also on others of Dickens’s works, especially his
Overland Tour to Bermondsey
, the
Sketches by Boz
, which includes his account of Seven Dials, and
On Duty with Inspector Field
, a piece he wrote for the
Household Words
magazine about the real-life police inspector who may well have been the model for Mr Bucket.
The second of my three great works is
The Woman in White
, written by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins, and published in 1860. Even if the relationship between this novel and my own is not made explicit until the closing chapters, the moment when
The Solitary House
really came to life for me was when I realised that the time-scheme of
Bleak House
could be made to run parallel with Collins’s very precise chronology for
The Woman in White
, which culminates in Sir Percival Glyde’s death in a fire in late November 1850. This allowed me to create a ‘space between’ these two great novels, where I could locate a new and independent story of my own, and explore some of the same nineteenth-century themes of secrecy, madness, power, and abuse, though with the benefit of twenty-first-century hindsight.
Last but not least of my three is
London Labour and the London Poor
, by Henry Mayhew. This huge work was originally published in the form of sixty-three pioneering articles in the
Morning Chronicle
, which were then collected together in book form in 1851.
London Labour and the London Poor
is the closest thing we have to an oral history of the crowded, rowdy, filthy streets of the mid-Victorian city: Mayhew conducted hundreds of interviews with real people, and gives many of their words almost verbatim. The result is an account so immediate that it’s almost as if we’re walking those streets by his side, and eavesdropping on his conversations. In fact this is exactly what I do during some of the episodes of
The Solitary House
,
most notably the rat-killing, where I send young Charles Maddox to the Graham Arms on the very night when—with a little artistic licence—I imagine Mayhew himself might have been there.
I talked just now about looking at the nineteenth century from a twenty-first-century perspective, and there’s another obvious reference point for
The Solitary House
which famously took a similar approach, though set some seventeen years later. John Fowles’s
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
has long been one of my favourite modern novels, and when a close friend casually observed to me that there was “room for a
French Lieutenant’s Woman
for this generation,” I realised at once that this could indeed be one of my ambitions for
The Solitary House
. Much of my novel was already written by then, and it seemed a wonderful coincidence that I had already named my young hero Charles after his great-uncle, and made him an amateur scientist, even if in a different field from that of Charles Smithson in Fowles’s novel. It’s Fowles who is the “celebrated novelist” I refer to in
chapter 17
, and readers who know his book well will spot a very young Ernestina Freeman walking with her nurse in Hyde Park, and the deliberate echoes of Sarah Woodruff in my own “Sarah.”
Anyone who has visited Sir John Soane’s Museum in London will recognise his extraordinary collection in my depiction of Tulkinghorn’s underground gallery of artefacts, though Tulkinghorn’s more infamous items are his and his alone. Although I’ve taken one or two architectural liberties, the museum is essentially as I describe it, and in 1850 this real collection had already been amassed in Soane’s real house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the same square where Dickens sets his lawyer’s fictional chambers. Dickens himself says nothing of Tulkinghorn having such a collection, of course, but neither does anything in
Bleak House
preclude it. In fact one of the great delights, for me, in writing this book was the chance it gave me to add new layers to a character like Tulkinghorn, from the secrets of his private museum to the even more horrifying secrets of his private history.
I would like to thank Timothy Duke, Chester Herald at the College of Arms, for his kind help with some of the finer points of English heraldry, and Jan Turner, Deputy Librarian at the Royal Geographical Society’s Foyle Reading Room, for her assistance with the history of the Society, and with Baron von Müller in particular. The speech I give him was indeed his own, and formed part of an address he gave to the Society in March 1850 (though everything else is my own invention). There seems to be no trace of him thereafter, so it may be that his belief in unicorns was indeed his professional downfall, though not, needless to say, at the hands of one “Charles Maddox”! James Duncan is another real historical figure, though having both him and his drawings in the British Museum is also my invention.
I read a number of books about London in the 1850s as part of the research for this novel, including Jerry White’s fascinating
London in the Nineteenth Century
, Catharine Arnold’s
Necropolis: London and Its Dead
, and
The Victorian Underworld
by Donald Thomas. Books like this also helped point me to useful primary material, as did the excellent website
www.victorianlondon.org
.
As for Robert Mann, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mei Trow’s book
Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer
for providing a new suspect in the Ripper killings who was old enough to have started his murderous career as early as 1850, and who might—just possibly—have been prevented from any further atrocities until the 1880s by the vigilance of a man like Inspector Bucket.
Finally I would like to thank my husband, Simon, my “first reader,” and my excellent agent, Ben Mason of FoxMason, whose input was absolutely invaluable as the novel took shape. I would also like to thank my two wonderful editors, Krystyna Green of Constable & Robinson and Kate Miciak of Random House, for everything they did to make this book as good as it could be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LYNN SHEPHERD is the author of the award-winning
Murder at Mansfield Park
. She studied English at Oxford and was a professional copywriter for over a decade. She is currently at work on her next novel of historical suspense,
A Treacherous Likeness
, which Delacorte will publish in 2013.
www.lynn-shepherd.com
BLEAK HOUSE
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bleak House
was first published in monthly parts from March 1852 to September 1853 and appeared in volume form late in 1853. This edition contains the author’s final revisions as incorporated into the Charles Dickens Edition of 1868.
Bantam Classic edition published March 1983
Bantam Classic reissue published October 1992
Bantam Classic reissue / November 2006
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90306-5
v3.1_r1
Contents
Preface to the Charles Dickens Edition
(I)
*
(II)
(III)
8. Covering a Multitude of Sins
(IV)
(V)
(VI)
(VII)
(VIII)
(IX)
27. More Old Soldiers Than One
(X)
(XI)
(XII)
(XIII)
42. In Mr. Tulkinghorn’s Chambers
(XIV)
(XV)
(XVI)
(XVII)
(XVIII)
(XIX)
67. The Close of Esther’s Narrative
*
Roman numerals indicate the breaks between the original nineteen monthly parts. In the text, these are noted by single asterisks.
PREFACE TO THE CHARLES DICKENS EDITION
A
Chancery Judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the Judge’s eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate. There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress, but this was exaggerated, and had been entirely owing to the “parsimony of the public”; which guilty public, it appeared, had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means enlarging the number of Chancery Judges appointed—I believe by Richard the Second, but any other King will do as well.
This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of this book, or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have originated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt quotation from one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets:
