Goodreads asked B.D. Stocker:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

B.D. Stocker The spark was from Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor in a recollection under the heading ‘Seventy Years a Beggar’ that I came across a mention of Copenhagen Jack. The interviewee describes how, as a boy, he became valet to the Captain of the “Pye-Street beggars” who had two hundred followers to whom his “word was law” and who worked “lays”. That was just one of the elements that started me off and in the Author's Note in the back of the book I explain more.

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