The novel’s representation of the tangled political world of mid-nineteenth century London was crucially informed by the journalistic sketches of the Victorian parliamentary correspondent E. M. Whitty and several more recent histories, primarily Parliament, Party and Politics in Victorian Britain by T. A. Jenkins, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston by Kingsley Martin and the early chapters of Trevor Royle’s Crimea. Valuable material for the Irish strand of the story was provided by Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London by Lynn Lees, Irish Nationalism and the British State: From Repeal to Revolutionary Nationalism by Brian Jenkins and Kevin Kenny’s definitive Making Sense of the Molly Maguires.
My depiction of London life in the 1850s is based on various Victorian publications, including the social commentary of Henry Mayhew, Adolphe Smith and Thomas Beames (especially Beames’s gruelling The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s English Notebooks, which offer an amusingly acerbic American view of the metropolis and its people, Peter Cunningham’s Hand-Book of London, Past and Present, Charles Manby Smith’s The Little World of London and the anonymous and evocatively titled London By Night, or the Bachelor’s Facetious Guide to All the Ins and Outs and Nightly Doings of the Metropolis. A number of modern histories also proved helpful; Jerry White’s London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God, Liza Picard’s Victorian London, Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon, Felix Barker and Peter Jackson’s The History of London in Maps and Isobel Watson’s Westminster and Pimlico Past: A Visual History were all regularly consulted.
Sincere thanks are due to my agent, Euan Thorneycroft, and my editor, Susan Watt; also Katie Espiner, Clare Hey, Alice Moss, James Annal and the team at HarperCollins; Jennifer Custer, Kate Munson and everyone at AM Heath; the family and friends who have given me help, encouragement or advice over the past couple of years; and most of all to my wife Sarah, who made it possible.
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features…
About the book
‘England’s Foulest Graveyard’
The London of The Devil’s Acre
ONE OF THE major attractions for me of Colonel Colt’s Thames-side gun factory as the subject for a novel was the chance to write about Victorian London. I knew from the outset that each strand of the narrative would lead the story through some very different parts of the mid-nineteenth century metropolis. Sam Colt, in his efforts to win the custom of the government, would barge his way into the innermost sanctums of the British Empire; his conscience-stricken secretary Edward Lowry would inhabit a threadbare, overcrowded world of cheap lodgings and chop-houses; and the Irishmen from the factory floor, residents of the appalling slums that give the book its name, would drink and plot in the city’s lowest taverns, and brawl in its most fetid lanes.
My research into the main locations of the novel held a number of surprises, by far the greatest of which was the character of Victorian Westminster. I’d already picked up a little about the Pimlico of the period, where stuccoed squares were gradually being laid out across reclaimed marshland under the direction of Thomas Cubitt. A speculator and master builder of keen social ambition, Cubitt wanted his nascent neighbourhood to rival aristocratic Belgravia to the north, and was immediately hostile towards any new commercial or industrial premises that tried to set up there – hence his insistence that the Colt Company remove the painted slogan from its roof. I was also aware that Millbank, the next district along the Thames, was home to the Victorians’ largest inner-city prison, a vast panopticon that stood where Tate Britain does today. Westminster, however, was a complete shock. I’d expected it to be broadly similar to its modern incarnation, given over almost entirely to politics and affairs of state. This was not what I discovered.
In 1853, the year the novel opens, the building of the Palace of Westminster was at an advanced stage; although the towers at each end were still under construction, both the Commons and the Lords were already in use. Yet only a short distance from this imposing neo-Gothic edifice, literally just around the back of Westminster Abbey, lay the Devil’s Acre, one of the most infamous slums in the whole of London. The Victorians called such areas ‘rookeries’, as their occupants were believed to arrange themselves as rooks fill their nests – by simply cramming into the available space until it could hold no more of them. To outsiders, even to other Londoners well used to dirt and horse-dung, the squalor of the rookeries was overpowering. Dotted with open cess-pits, heaped with all sorts of refuse including animal carcases, they hummed with disease and desperation.
The proximity of Parliament to such a place did not pass without comment at the time. Thomas Beames, journalist, street preacher and city missionary, regularly ventured into London’s grimmest corners to perform works of charity and evangelism. He had this to say in 1852 about the divided nature of Westminster: ‘It is at once the seat of a palace and a plague spot; senators declaim, where sewers poison; theology holds her councils, where thieves learn their trade; and Europe’s grandest hall is flanked by England’s foulest grave-yard.’
Along with others such as Henry Mayhew, Beames tried to mobilise opinion on this issue, but without success; rookeries would persist to the end of the century and beyond. Indeed, in the 1850s the only official response was to embark on a series of urban clearances, wide channels being carved through the dilapidated alleys and yards to make way for new roads. Tens of thousands were displaced, worsening conditions in the surviving slums as these refugees were added to their populations. The Devil’s Acre was slowly compressed by the development of Victoria Street, a long avenue designed to provide a direct connection between Parliament and Belgravia, the address of many a lordly townhouse.
I knew that there would be a stark contrast between the horrors of the Devil’s Acre and the other settings of the story, particularly the luxurious dining rooms, hotels and gentlemen’s clubs toured by Colonel Colt in the course of his business, and felt that this would serve as a powerful illustration of one of the defining characteristics of Victorian London. However, I also wanted to show that some, like Amy Rea, did manage to scrape together a semblance of a respectable life in the rookery; and that others, such as her husband and his friends, had good reason to remain in its dank, maze-like streets. As was often noted by contemporaries, the rookeries offered an effective haven from the law, sheltering countless thieves and prostitutes. The police only ever made occasional forays within their precincts, and would usually face violent resistance when they did so. For those plotting to steal weapons from Colonel Colt – to use them to assassinate a prominent politician on the steps of the new Parliament – the Devil’s Acre would be the perfect place to hide.
Matthew Plampin,
London, May 2010
About the author
A Q & A with Matthew Plampin
How did you find writing the Difficult Second Novel? How did it compare with the experience of writing your debut?
Like many writers, I’d spent a long time working on my first book, The Street Philosopher, and it was rather disconcerting to leave it behind and move on to something new. I was also acutely aware of how the two novels might compare with one another and decided that I would employ a more straightforward structure in The Devil’s Acre, with only one chronological strand and fewer narrative points of view. I wanted something tighter, set in a single city with the fate of every main character bound closely to Colonel Colt’s progress.
Writing this book involved some steep challenges, such as conveying the complex history underpinning the story in an engaging and readable way, and marshalling a large cast of characters that included as many real figures as fictional ones. It was an immersive, all-consuming experience, and certainly not easy – but I think I’d be worried if it had been.
What inspired you to write about Colt?
I first came across references to Colonel Colt’s English factory while I was researching the Crimean War for The Street Philosopher. It seemed incongruous that six-s
hooting Colt revolvers, the quintessential guns of the Wild West, were once manufactured by the thousand in the heart of Dickensian London. I decided to investigate a little further and was soon hooked. There was a mystery here – why had this enterprise, set up at great expense and with such lofty ambitions, shut its gates after only three full years of operation? What had caused Sam Colt, a man not known for caution or defeatism, to retreat back to the United States? I found hints in the histories I was reading of unorthodox business practices, of calculated risks and barefaced deceptions, and saw the beginnings of a story.
From the start, much of the momentum behind this idea came from the arresting figure of Sam Colt himself. Bluntly spoken, barely literate and possessing a volcanic temper, Colt was an engineering and promotional genius who can be called the world’s first truly international arms dealer, counting a number of governments among his customers. I was struck by his chillingly amoral attitude towards his trade; despite freely using images of slaughter in his advertisements, he maintained that he was merely a salesman providing a product, the application of which was simply not his responsibility. His potential as a character was clear.
I also started to consider the London pistol factory itself, planted by the side of the Thames, producing state-of-the-art weapons only a short distance from one of the worst slums in the city. I imagined it must have attracted all kinds of malign attention; and before long plotlines involving thieves and saboteurs were developing in my mind.
How do you begin to turn a figure from history into a character from fiction?
I tend to start with the words of the historical figures themselves, taken from letters, lectures or publications, which I find invaluable when trying to create a ‘voice’ for them. I’ll then work my way through any biographies that might have been written and also see if I can locate a photograph or painted portrait. When this information has been gathered, I set about integrating them into the structure of the story and planning their relationships with the other major characters.
With Sam Colt, who has by far the biggest role of any actual person I’ve used in my work, this process was remarkably smooth. Colt’s brash personality emerges sharply from the few histories devoted to him; the letters that survive crackle with impatience and irascibility; a studio photograph taken in 1857 shows a massive bearded man in a fine suit, a ‘Yankee Henry VIII’ radiating aggressive pride. I had a vivid sense very early on of how the novel would follow his adventures through London, and the changing relationship he would have with Edward Lowry, his ambitious, slightly callow (and entirely fictional) English secretary.
For more minor characters, where considerably less historical material is available, creative license has to be relied upon more heavily. Most of the real people who appear in The Devil’s Acre left few traces of their lives behind them. The traitorous Colt foreman Gage Stickney is a good example: he now only exists in a couple of brief mentions in factory documents and the minutes of the Select Committee on Small Arms.
The truly famous figures I’ve used posed some different problems. An enormous amount has been written about someone like Lord Palmerston; the important thing about his appearance in The Devil’s Acre, however, is that it is filtered through Colt’s point of view, which gave my research on the then-Home Secretary a distinct slant. I had to get a sense not only of what Palmerston might have been like, but what the Colonel might have made of him – of how the two men might have interacted.
Generally, I’ll try to be as truthful as I can, but in the end the historical figures in my books have been drafted into a work of fiction – they are versions of a person serving a story rather than attempts at definitive portraits. I have also, on occasion, added the odd unverifiable detail to amuse myself and enliven the character. There is no evidence, for instance, to suggest that Sam Colt ever chewed tobacco.
Are you tempted to revisit any of the characters from your two novels?
Yes, most definitely. I like the idea of the books existing in their own universe, and in fact put a passing reference to the Crimean War coverage of the London Courier (the newspaper I invented for The Street Philosopher) in The Devil’s Acre. There is one particular character from the first novel who I suspect might have another tale in him; Sam Colt’s early life, also, is rife with hilarious and horrifying escapades.
Do you have any more historical figures on your hit list for future novels?
I’m currently working on a story that might well involve a couple of Impressionist painters, and some of the more colourful figures from French radical politics of the late 1860s. I also have a long-standing ambition to write something about the magnificently strange artist Augustus John, who scandalised polite society in Edwardian England by living as a polygamous Romany-style gypsy, trailing around the countryside in a painted caravan.
What have you read and loved since the publication of The Devil’s Acre?
In common with many others I greatly admired Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall; I felt she reinvigorated a somewhat over-familiar story, making it fresh, compelling and profound. For the past few months I’ve been working my way through Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, partly in preparation for a Paris-set story of my own, and have been captivated by the novels’ unflinching confrontation with the realities and tragedies of mid-nineteenth century life. Also, as a committed Moby-Dick fan I was hugely impressed by Philip Hoare’s Leviathan.
What are you working on at the moment?
As mentioned above, I’m a good way into a story set during the four-month siege of Paris that came at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, when the city was starved, bombarded and brought to the brink of ruin. At its centre is Hannah Pardy, an Englishwoman who comes to Paris on the eve of the siege in search of her twin brother Clement, a painter long resident in the city who has recently gone missing. Her intention is to collect her brother and escape back to England before the Prussian Army arrives; but when she tracks him down in the drinking dens of Montmartre, her plans undergo an abrupt change…
About the Author
THE DEVIL’S ACRE
Matthew Plampin was born in 1975 and grew up in Essex. He read English and History of Art at the University of Birmingham and then completed a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He now lectures on nineteenth-century art and architecture. Matthew is currently writing his third novel.
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Also by Matthew Plampin
The Street Philosopher
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