The Maid’s Secret
Page 27
My Gonsalva Road great-grandmother was working as a housemaid by the time she was 14 in 1891. Millions of women and girls did the same as her in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In England in 1900 domestic service was the largest female occupation with a third of women aged between 15 and 20 working as servants. Servants weren’t just the preserve of the wealthy, many self-respecting middle-class households had at least one servant.
My idea for Penny to work undercover as a maid is not a unique one: in the 1864 novel Revelations of a Lady Detective by William Stephens Hayward, the female detective works undercover as a maid in the home of the Countess of Vervaine in the story The Mysterious Countess.
Blundell’s vinegar factory and Lombard’s gin distillery are fictional. Legislation to protect factory workers from exploitation and accidents struggled to keep pace with rapid industrialisation during the nineteenth century. Despite countless factory acts being passed, workers still had to endure long days, low pay and dangerous working conditions. The London matchgirls strike of 1888 was prompted by poor working conditions in the Bryant & May match factory and the debilitating condition ‘phossy jaw’ which some of the workers suffered from. The women were supported by the social activist Annie Besant and were eventually able to negotiate better working conditions. Sadly, almost 130 years later, worker exploitation still makes the headlines.
The Royal Vauxhall Tavern was built in the 1860s and is now a famous gay venue. Many of the buildings which neighboured the pub have since gone but the Tavern is set to remain there for a long time yet having been made a Grade II listed building in 2015 in recognition of its importance to the LGBT community and history.
If The Maid’s Secret is the first Penny Green book you’ve read, then you may find the following historical background interesting. It’s compiled from the historical notes published in Limelight and The Rookery:
Women journalists in the nineteenth century were not as scarce as people may think. In fact they were numerous enough by 1898 for Arnold Bennett to write Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide in which he was keen to raise the standard of women’s journalism:-
“The women-journalists as a body have faults… They seem to me to be traceable either to an imperfect development of the sense of order, or to a certain lack of self-control.”
Eliza Linton became the first salaried female journalist in Britain when she began writing for the Morning Chronicle in 1851. She was a prolific writer and contributor to periodicals for many years including Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words. George Eliot – her real name was Mary Anne Evans - is most famous for novels such as Middlemarch, however she also became assistant editor of The Westminster Review in 1852.
In the United States Margaret Fuller became the New York Tribune’s first female editor in 1846. Intrepid journalist Nellie Bly worked in Mexico as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Despatch in the 1880s before writing for New York World and feigning insanity to go undercover and investigate reports of brutality at a New York asylum. Later, in 1889-90, she became a household name by setting a world record for travelling around the globe in seventy two days.
The iconic circular Reading Room at the British Museum was in use from 1857 until 1997. During that time it was also used a filming location and has been referenced in many works of fiction. The Reading Room has been closed since 2014 but it’s recently been announced that it will reopen and display some of the museum’s permanent collections. It could be a while yet until we’re able to step inside it but I’m looking forward to it!
The Museum Tavern, where Penny and James enjoy a drink, is a well-preserved Victorian pub opposite the British Museum. Although a pub was first built here in the eighteenth century much of the current pub (including its name) dates back to 1855. Celebrity drinkers here are said to have included Arthur Conan Doyle and Karl Marx.
Publishing began in Fleet Street in the 1500s and by the twentieth century the street was the hub of the British press. However newspapers began moving away in the 1980s to bigger premises. Nowadays just a few publishers remain in Fleet Street but the many pubs and bars once frequented by journalists – including the pub Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese - are still popular with city workers.
Penny Green lives in Milton Street in Cripplegate which was one of the areas worst hit by bombing during the Blitz in the Second World War and few original streets remain. Milton Street was known as Grub Street in the eighteenth century and was famous as a home to impoverished writers at the time. The street had a long association with writers and was home to Anthony Trollope among many others. A small stretch of Milton Street remains but the 1960s Barbican development has been built over the bombed remains.
Plant hunting became an increasingly commercial enterprise as the nineteenth century progressed. Victorians were fascinated by exotic plants and, if they were wealthy enough, they had their own glasshouses built to show them off. Plant hunters were employed by Kew Gardens, companies such as Veitch Nurseries or wealthy individuals to seek out exotic specimens in places such as South America and the Himalayas. These plant hunters took great personal risks to collect their plants and some perished on their travels.
The Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican is worth a read. Written in 1891 it documents his journeys in Colombia and demonstrates how plant hunting became little short of pillaging. Some areas he travelled to had already lost their orchids to plant hunters and Millican himself spent several months felling 4,000 trees to collect 10,000 plants. Even after all this plundering many of the orchids didn’t survive the trip across the Atlantic to Britain. Plant hunters were not always welcome: Millican had arrows fired at him as he navigated rivers, had his camp attacked one night and was eventually killed during a fight in a Colombian tavern.
My research for The Penny Green series has come from sources too numerous to list in detail, but the following books have been very useful: A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain by Michael Patterson, London in the Nineteenth Century by Jerry White, London in 1880 by Herbert Fry, London a Travel Guide through Time by Dr Matthew Green, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Onslow, A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide by Arnold Bennett, Seventy Years a Showman by Lord George Sanger, Dottings of a Dosser by Howard Goldsmid, Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Andrew Mearns, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin, The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant edited by Liz Stanley, Mrs Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light, Revelations of a Lady Detective by William Stephens Hayward and A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup.
The British Newspaper Archive is also an invaluable resource.
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News reporter Penny Green is committed to her job. But should she impose on a grieving widow?
The brutal murder of a doctor has shocked 1880s London and Fleet Street is clamouring for news. Penny has orders from her editor to get the story all the papers want.
She must decide what comes first. Compassion or duty?
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The Runaway Girl Series
Also by Emily Organ. A series of three historical thrillers set in Medieval London.
Book 1: Runaway Girl
A missing girl. The treacherous streets of Medieval London. Only one woman is brave enough to try and bring her home.
Book 2: Forgotten Child
Her husband took a fatal secret to the grave. Two friends are murdered. She has only one chance to stop the killing.
Book 3: Sins of the Father
An enemy returns. And this time he has her fooled. If he gets his own way then a little girl will never be seen again.
Available as separate books or a three book box set. Find out more at emilyorgan.co.uk/books
First published in 2017 by Emily Organ
emilyorgan.co.uk
Edited by Joy Tibbs
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