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Mr Blackwood and his party visit the Great Exhibition on 8 October. I chose the date for two reasons: one is that it was the day of peak attendance, when 109,915 people went through the turnstiles; the second is that it was the day that the Duke of Wellington paid his last visit to the Crystal Palace. (Tennyson and Lord Palmerston certainly visited the Exhibition, […]

In 1849 the ruler of the Punjab, the 10-year-old Duleep Singh, was forced to sign over his kingdom along with the Koh-I-Noor diamond to the British. Five years later he travelled to England, where he spent the rest of his life in exile, but not before giving Queen Victoria permission to re-cut the diamond, a permission he later came to regret and which led to […]

The picture at the head of this post (by John Orlando Parry) is entitled ‘The Poster Man’ and dates from 1835. Two things made this explosion of advertising possible: the growth in literacy and the invention of the steam-powered printing press.  A surprisingly large number of the posters in the illustration are for theatres and concerts; in newspapers and magazines, most of the adverts would […]

Harrison’s Hostel really did exist. Thomas Cook, who, as a temperance reformer, got into the travel business by using excursions to lure working people away from drink, persuaded Mr Thomas Harrison of Pimlico to turn his furniture depository into a hostel for visitors to the Great Exhibition. From Cook’s point of view, the venture proved a great success in that it protected ordinary travellers from […]

If Henry Mayhew is remembered at all today, it is as author of London Labour and the London Poor, a series of articles on street traders, buskers, beggars and the like. He was also the editor of Punch and a novelist. Mr and Mrs Sandboys – or, to give it its full title, 1851 the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family who Came […]

No collection of Victorian tales would be complete without a ghost story, hence the inclusion of The Diocesan Exorcist’s Tale.  Of course, there were ghost stories before and after the nineteenth century, but the Victorian period was the golden age. One obvious reason is the proliferation of magazines like Blackwoods and The Strand, all of them eager for tales of the supernatural. The short story […]

The third story in Mr Blackwood’s Fabulorium, ‘Miss Biddlecombe’s Proprieties’, concerns a scandal in an academy for young ladies in Ramsgate.  When the headmistress is persuaded against her better judgement to allow sea bathing, all manner of moral depravity ensues, much of it connected to the circulation of a mysterious book. This story was suggested by the earliest surviving prospectus from the Godolphin School in […]

This weekend I went to the annual model railway exhibition in Wilton. It’s easy to dismiss railway modellers as anoraks. True, many of them are pedants, but many are genuine scholars.  (The fanaticism displayed in the opening page of Mr Blackwood‘s Fabularium is really not exaggerated.) Many modellers insert an imaginary railway between two actual lines or stations. In some cases, they exhume plans for […]

In ‘The Devil’s Coachman‘, the first of the inventor’s two tales, there is an account of how a lioness attacked the Salisbury mail coach at what was then called the Winterslow Hut (until recently The Pheasant). This is a true story, which occurred in October 1816. A travelling menagerie had pulled in for the night at the inn. A lioness escaped its travelling cage and […]

Waiting for a train at Waterloo last Saturday, I thought of the scene in Hardy’s short story The Fiddler of the Reels which gave me the idea for my new novel ‘Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium’ in the first place. In it a Wessex man waits for his girlfriend to arrive at Waterloo on a Great Exhibition ‘special’ from Dorchester. “The seats for the humbler class of travellers,” […]