Places, People & Peculiarities
Eleanor's Gamble
I’ve aimed for historical accuracy with all the New Women of Mayfair novels while taking liberties. The cast of characters tells you which characters are entirely fictional, and which based on real people. Some extra detail - for the truly keen! - follows. But don’t worry if it’s not your thing…there’s no need to know any of the following to enjoy the stories. Conversely, for enthusiasts, these are just casual notes - please get in touch if there’s anything you feel ought to be amended or added.
And remember….it’s all for fun.
Barings Bank - where Eleanor seeks her million pounds - was one of the great merchant banks of its day, though almost brought down by poor lending decisions in Argentina at the beginning of the 1890s (one hundred years later misadventures in Singapore delivered the fatal blow). It was not however based at Admiralty Arch - I chose the location as it’s more pictureque than the City.
Prince Bertie - present when Charles takes Eleanor to the opera - waited 59 years to become King Edward VII. He was by all accounts a hugely popular man, even with his wife, despite having more than fifty acknowledged mistresses. Beneath the Royal Box was a staircase Prince Bertie infamously used for liasons with Covent Garden leading ladies. Or at least that’s the story many have chosen to believe.
Adelina Patti was a superstar soprano of the period and sang in both New York and Covent Garden. There are no grounds to suggest she had any relationship with Prince Bertie, but it would hardly be a surprise if people assumed so.
In Manhattan, Eleanor refers to the NAWSA. The National American Woman Suffrage Association. Susan Anthony is regarded as the dominant figure in the NAWSA and Mrs Stanton was her lifelong colleague.
Millicent Fawcett was perhaps the best known of Britain’s suffragists, before the suffragettes came behind them and seized so much of the popular imagination.
Westminster Town Hall - now Caxton Hall- a popular venue for public meetings in the 1890s and, a decade later, an HQ for the suffragettes.
Ma Mayfield’s - an anachronistic shorthand. ‘Ma Mayfield’ was really Kate Meyrick, a famous figure of the first half of the twentieth century who ran a series of illicit ‘nightclubs’ for which she was repeatedly charged by the police. Sebastian Flyte’s downfall (in ‘Brideshead Revisited’) begins after he and Charles Ryder pay a visit to Ma Mayfield’s. Charles and Mulcaster however were rampaging around London at least twenty years before Ma opened her first establishment.
Parliament Square - handing out pamphlets to Members of Parliament and general citizens was a core suffragist strategy.
The Tuppence Ha’penny in Leicester Square is a fictional gin palace, but based on late Victorian fashion. Leciester Square itself was, and remains, a popular nightspot.
Opium-stained cigarettes feature in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (the ever so cool Lord Henry Wotton is smoking one as the novel opens) but were not in fact in common use. Fox’s - an excellent cigar shop on St James’s - did sell Wilde cigarettes, but only the usual kind.
The General Post Office at St Martin’s Le Grand was a huge building which, amongst its other functions, was used for telegrams from the 1870s. The post service in London, and other parts of the Home Isles at that time, was unimaginably superior to today. Mail might be delivered as frequently as a dozen times a day.
The Guildchapel, in the City of London, was, and remains, an astonishingly beautiful Italianate building. It has plenty of paintings now (including one of the death of John Singer Sargent) but none of Sargent’s own. The Portrait of Madame X - now in the Met in New York - still belonged to Sargent himself in the 1890s.
Widow’s buttonhole - not, in fact a Victorian expression for men of a certain age who cause ladies to blush and forget to use their fans
Jodhpurs! Invented in Jodhpur (obviously) in 1890s. Eleanor is certainly an early adopter to wear them in London in 1897.
Adverts for Horlicks - and plenty of other familiar brands - were commonly painted onto omnibuses in the 1890s.
The Crush Room at Covent Garden is - thank goodness - still fully operational, though it’s a little late to hope to bump into Prince Bertie, Charles, Eleanor, Percy or Isabella there.
Carnegie Hall opened in 1891 (Tchaikovsky appeared!). I’ve made it five years younger to give Eleanor more leverage in her negotiations.
Porthenge House in the Highlands does not exist, but Ben Wyvis (the Peak of Terror), Dingwall and Strathpeffer certainly do.
Places, People & Peculiarities
Georgia's Lesson
Euston Station already had 15 platforms by 1896. It was an eight hour journey from Carlilse to Euston. Wigan had an early morning service to and from Carlisle.
Kensington School for Girls is fictional but its address is real enough - Kensington Court, just off High Street Kensington
Ellen Terry was one of the great actresses of her day. Georgia has seen her at Her Majesty’s Theatre Carlisle and will see her again at the Lyceum in London, where she often appeared alongside Henry Irving.
Her Majesty’s Theatre is also where Georgia saw La Boheme but only with the help of fiction. La Boheme had its UK premiere in Manchester a year later and then skipped Carlile on its way to Glasgow.
18 Clifford Street, the Worthing family home, is based on Buck’s Club.
10, Berkeley Square, the Braitwaite family home, is another fictional building with a real address, and is the setting for much of Isabella’s Mission.
Fancy dress themed parties were all the rage in the 1890s but, so far as I’m aware, they didn’t feature ballet dancers bursting out of cakes.
Education was transformed after Foster’s 1870 act, from which time the overwhelming majority of boys and girls attended primary school. However, after the three Rs, girls and boys education differed wildly. I recommend MV Hughes marvellous memoirs on the subject. Lydia and Georgia are engaged in the same process Molly Hughes and her colleagues undertook at exactly this period - attempting to make sure girls had the same opportunities in education as the boys.
Hancock’s Jewellers in Burlington Arcade was jeweller to the gentry…and those who could afford to try to appear like the gentry
Butcher’s Hall was built in Bartholomew Close in Smithfield in 1888 and is still available for hire for events
Nettie Honeyball was an indefatigable promoter of women’s sports
St James’s Piccadilly stopped allowing fresh burials in the late 18th century…no wonder Lady Miranda was so pleased the vicar found space for her late husband
Notting Dale in the 1890s was one of the most notorious slums in London. Mrs Charlotte Despard - very much a real person - was renowned for her charity work, and her campaigning.
Mary Neal and Emmeline Pethick founded the Esperance Girls Club in Cumberland Terrace, Somers Town,. It both served as a cooperative sewing business and a social club, which can take credit for repopularising morris dancing in this country. I’ve tried to do it justice (both in this story and in Eleanor’s Gamble) but recommend Kathryn Atherton’s excellent book to anyone who would like to know more about the admirable Mary Neal and her work.
The Carlton Club is still the social home of a certain part of the Conservative Party, and is still in St James’s, though has moved address since Jacob’s visit.
John Law’s A Manchester Shirt Maker (really by Margaret Harkness) is a polemical novel not to be read by the faint of heart. I’d compare it to the much better known Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel, written about twenty years later. Henry George’s Progress and Poverty was a hugely influential book amongst progressive thinkers of the period. Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘North and South’ remains justly well known to this day.
The Second International - hosted by the publicity hungry Harry Hyndman - did take place in 1896, but the Trafalgar Square riot did not. It took place in 1887 (taking the sad title of the ‘original’ Bloody Sunday). I’ve used the 1887 real event as inspiration. If you’re keen, Margaret Harkness describes it in her novel ‘Out of Work’ (also published under the pen name John Law).
There was a police station at 10 Vine Street, just off Swallow Street, for most of the nineteenth century. It closed early in the second world war.
Several coal mines operated around Bedworth in Warwickshire in the 1890s. Incorporated companies operated most. Jacob’s family colliery is fictitious.
The Ragged Staff is, alas, a fictional drinking establishment.
The Marquis of Stratford upon Avon is also fictional.
Brook’s, however, is very much a real gentlemen’s club which can still be round on St James’s. I’m sure the real Brook’s wouldn’t allow a dastard of Gilbert Harrington’s stripe to darken their door…
The Old Bailey remains, of course, the setting for box-office trials in England. I’ve stuck as closely as I can to the court etiquette of late Victorian England, but have been catholic about the detail.
Chaffanbrass is *borrowed* from Trollope (he is on the right side in the Phineas Finn novels…given he’s a barrister, I’ve allocated him to the wrong one here). Edward Carson was a real and very famous barrister of the period, too complex and contentious to discuss briefly here. Judge Bullingham has been more stolen than borrowed from John Mortimer’s immortal Horace Rumpole stories.
Places, People & Peculiarities
Isabella's Mission
Skating in Central Park was so popular in the late nineteenth century that there were at least two lakes devoted to it.
The Waldorf was already a smart Manhattan hotel in 1895. William Waldorf Astoria's feuding cousin built the Astoria next door.
Euston Station - then, and now, the main station for trains from the North West to London. Just as Georgia arrives in Euston from Carlilse, Isabella arrives from Liverpool, where her trans-Atlantic steam docked.
The Whitechapel School for Girls in fictitious but based on a composite of East End schools of the 1890s. Its locale - including the White Hart public house - is all real.
Spiritualism was very popular in the 1890s - automatic writing, Ouija boards, seances. Mrs Marchant and Monsieur Lafayette are fictious but only just.
Cycling was a huge growth sport in the 1890s. There were lots of organised races and, of course, complaints about cyclists’ use of public roads. Many women - perhaps lots of New Women - adopted bicycles as an affordable path to independence. The Camden Ladies Cycling Club, run by the admirable Agnes MacKenzie, is fictional but could easily not be.
Crouch End Athletic Ground was a real place, and the site of Nettie Honeyball’s historic football match between women players of North and South London.
Punch and Judy shows continued to be very popular in London in the 1890s, though generally had become more child-oriented and less cruel (though still outrageous by modern standards). Under Dorian’s influence, of course, it reverts to a more privative style. Punch and Judy puppeteers had their own Italianate slang, incomprehensible to most Brits, but not, perhaps, a Neapolitan like Dorian.
The National Gallery was well established by the 1890s.
The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition was a major social event in the 1890s - indeed, for many it is still today.
The Epsom Derby was a huge affair in the late 19th century, drawing crowds of up to half a million people. The race was held on a Wednesday and was a public holiday. The Minister, Lord Roseberry, owned Lord Visto, the winner in 1895. For the curious, check out the end of the race on YouTube- it was filmed by Birt Acres and Robert W Paul. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VelmuwHdp8w
Boating on the Serpentine was popular in the 1890s and still is (you should try it if you get the chance!).
The East India Club looks from the outside in St James’s Square just as it did in the 1890s.
Mr Jacks’ opium establishment in Bethnal Green is fictious. The journey there owes something to Dorian Gray’s trip east, and (historically) to some of Dicken’s description of East London in Barnaby Rudge.
Fancy dress balls - such as dressing up for Midsummer Night’s Dream - were all the rage. Isabella stole the concept for the 10 Berkeley Square ball from the Countess of Warwick, a famous hostess of her day.
The South Western Hotel was a popular Southampton hotel for people waiting to sail to the States.
