19th Century Seven Dials: There’s Nowhere Better to set a Murder
Doing research is one of the most rewarding aspects of writing fiction. I can almost hear my brain clanking and clicking like my central heating, valves expanding as new information trickles in, heating parts of my psyche long neglected.
I have files full of information, from the history of fairground rides to the first use of showers in domestic houses, to exactly how much a bus ticket from New York to Baltimore cost in 1963.
Much of that information is quickly gleaned from the internet, although not necessarily accurate. Wikipedia is a useful port to sail from but certainly not an end destination. It is simply too unreliable. The bulk of my research comes from reading books, journals, old newspapers, and so forth. As well as the indispensable library, second hand books shops are an absolute must, as well as specialist books produced by small publishing houses. One I was lucky enough to find second hand (or pre-loved as the current consensus calls it) is Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888: An Unconventional Handbook by Charles Dickens Jr – yes, the son of that Charles Dickens!
Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888
I was looking for a seedy location in 1880s London for my novel The Army of Righteous Deliverance. Whitechapel was overused, too much associated with the notoriety of Jack the Ripper for my needs, when Mr Dickens Jr led me to Seven Dials, so near to the heart of London’s West End, yet seemingly forgotten in the recent history of London’s poor – at least in popular imagination. What a rich seam it was to mine. His descriptions are wonderful:
“… the locality is a singular one, and … can be easily visited by those curious to see one of the seamier sides of the inner life of London…The stranger finds himself in a street that is altogether unique in its way. It is the abode of pigeon fanciers. Every variety of pigeon, fowl and rabbit can be found here, together with hawks and owls, parrots, love-birds, and other species native and foreign. There is a shops for specimens of the aquarium, with tanks of water-beetles, newts, water-spiders, and other aquatic creatures. Others are devoted to British song birds, larks, thrushes, bull-finches, starlings and blackbirds &c.”
It is hard now to imagine a street in central London teeming with caged fauna, crammed into one cacophonous space. Can you imagine the stench? The noise? Still, the image of it almost seems enchanting until you read on:
“Passing through this lane we are in the Dials, a point where seven streets meet… Here poverty is to be seen in some of its most painful aspects. The shops sell nothing but second or third hand articles… old shoes so patched and mended that it is questionable whether one particle of the original material remains in them. These streets swarm with children of all ages… it is evident that the school board has not much power in the neighbourhood of the Dials…”
Today Seven Dials is a gentrified upmarket extension of Covent Garden, home of on-trend boutiques and the flagship store of Neal’s Yard Remedies, exuding the joys of natural organic beauty products – a far cry from the Victorian Seven Dials where, according to Dickens Jr: “Nowhere can such a glimpse of the poorer classes be obtained as on a Saturday evening at the Dials.”
I will never be able to step back in time to witness this scene for myself but thanks to Mr Dicken’s Jr and the fabulous job publishers like Old House Books do by reproducing these old texts I feel as though as can. And when that happens my imagination takes off and I start to write.The Army of Righteous Deliverance is available as an e-book and will appear in print in December ’13 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Righteous-Deliverance-Alafreya-Naught-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00CERIPM2/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_t_3_NS3S
Tagged: Charles Dicken, Jack the Ripper, Old House Books, Seven Dials, Victorian murder, Writing research
