Canada, 1898, and the Gold Rush is on in the frozen wilderness of the Yukon. Fortunes are made as quickly as they’re lost, and Dawson City has become a lawless settlement. In the middle of this, three women are trying to survive on the edge of civilisation. Journalist Kate has travelled hundreds of miles after […]
Dark Frontier by Matthew Harffy
1890. Lieutenant Gabriel Stokes of the British Army has left behind the horrors of war in Afghanistan for a role in the Metropolitan Police. Though he’s risen quickly through the ranks, the squalid violence of London’s East End proves just as dark and oppressive as the battlefield. With his life falling apart, and longing for […]
Why I’ve written a Western
From the ‘Dark Ages’ to a Dark Frontier: Matthew Harffy, author of the Bernicia Chronicles, explains why he’s written a Western — and how it’s not such a big leap after all. I have wanted to write a Western for as long as I can remember. I always enjoyed Western movies and fell in love […]
The Men Who Were Sherlock Holmes by Daniel Smith
In 1893, young army officer Cecil Hambrough was murdered at the sprawling Ardlamont estate in Scotland, unleashing one of the most gripping court cases Victorian Britain had ever known. Even more remarkably, the case brought together two pioneering forensic experts – Joseph Bell and Henry Littlejohn – two men upon whom Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock […]
Finding the decadent women of the 1890s
The historian and author Jad Adams has been researching the remarkable women of the 1890s for many years. But it was only when he concentrated on contributors to the famous — and decadent — Yellow Book that the project came into focus. Even then, there were many difficulties, as he tells Historia. I like writing […]
Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives by Jad Adams
During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal called the Yellow Book. For the first time, based on original research, […]
Magicians and film-makers, masters of illusions
Liz Hyder is enchanted by the magicians and film-makers of the 1890s, whose extraordinary inventions inspired her new novel, The Illusions, set at a time of great technological and social change. A few years ago, I went to the Wellcome Collection’s Smoke and Mirrors exhibition, which explored the psychology of magic. It was a feast […]