Elizabeth Macneal’s first novel, The Doll Factory, is as full of strange, beautiful and horrifying things as a Victorian curiosity cabinet. Her protagonist, Iris, moves from sweatshop labour making dolls’ clothes to the exotic company of the Pre-Raphaelites, only to become the object of a collector’s obsession. She spoke to Historia about her novel and […]
The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal
London, 1850. The greatest spectacle the city has ever seen is being built in Hyde Park, and among the crowd watching two people meet. For Iris, an aspiring artist, it is the encounter of a moment – forgotten seconds later, but for Silas, a collector entranced by the strange and beautiful, that meeting marks a […]
Mrs Whistler by Matthew Plampin
Chelsea, 1876. Struggling artist Jimmy Whistler is at war with his patron. Denied full payment, he and muse Maud Franklin face ruin. As Jimmy’s enemies mount, he resolves to sue a famous critic for libel, in a last-ditch attempt to ward off the bailiffs. Although she has no position in society, Maud is expected to […]
Peterloo by Jacqueline Riding
On a hot late summer’s day, a crowd of 60,000 gathered in St Peter’s Field. They came from all over Lancashire – ordinary working-class men, women and children – walking to the sound of hymns and folk songs, wearing their best clothes and holding silk banners aloft. Their mood was happy, their purpose wholly serious: […]
The Conviction of Cora Burns by Carolyn Kirby
Birmingham, 1885. Born in a gaol and raised in a workhouse, Cora Burns has always struggled to control the violence inside her. Haunted by memories of a terrible crime, she seeks a new life working as a servant in the house of scientist Thomas Jerwood. Here, Cora befriends a young girl, Violet, who seems to […]
‘Paedo Hunter Turns Prey!’ The ironic fate of the father of tabloid journalism
In the past few years, amateur paedophile hunters have rarely been far from the headlines of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, writes author Carolyn Kirby. “The nation is in the grip of an extraordinary phenomenon involving possibly thousands of have-a-go investigators,” said the Daily Mail in June last year. Sometimes caught on the wrong side of the […]
The Five by Hallie Rubenhold
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their […]
Review: Les Miserables
Everything about Les Miserables is built on an epic scale. At around 1500 pages, depending on which edition is making your bookshelf sag, Victor Hugo’s novel (published in 1862) is not only physically enormous, but also it deals with MASSIVE themes: love, obsession, redemption, justice, fate and the nature of good and evil. It’s human […]