Maria asked Sean Gibson:

Where did you get the inspiration for Henry's character from? It was just so adorable^^

Sean Gibson Thanks for the question, Maria (and for reading!). Just before I started writing the book, I stumbled across an article on synesthesia, which is a neurological phenomenon that's essentially, as I understand it, a co-mingling of generally unrelated senses that some people experience. Some synesthetes experience color synesthesia (or grapheme), wherein they associate (or "see") a color associated with a particular letter or number (say, S = red). I was fascinated by this idea, and it was around the time of the when the book was set that this phenomenon was first studied, so I thought it would be interesting to incorporate it into one of the characters. But, given limited understanding of such phenomenon at that point (heck, we still don't even fully understand how it works or why it happens), it made sense to me that a Victorian-era synesthete would be seen as something of an oddity (to say the least--if not a downright outcast or lunatic). So, I started to perceive the character as being something of an eccentric as well, perhaps because of the way people perceived or treated him because of his synesthesia. I had those ideas in mind when I wrote the letter that Henry sends to Alfred early in the book, but that was all I had in mind.

Writing the letter was a bit strange in that I was writing with the voice of a character who had not yet appeared in the story (nor had I yet visualized him in my head), so he was by no means fully formed at that stage. As soon as I started writing the letter, however, his voice emerged, and he quickly grew to be one of my favorite characters (that letter was one of my favorite sections of the book to write, alongside Will's flashback to the night of his induction into the Circle).

By complete coincidence, my son's name is Henry, too--not in honor of the character, but just because it was the right fit. :)

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