Things have changed a little with my newest release: The Legacy of Foulstone Manor. I’ve stepped away from Dickens for a while, though there’s still plenty of mystery, intrigue and investigation. But this time, our hero is Joan Goss – though that’s not the name she was given by birth by the mother she never knew.
The Waxwork Man is Now Available
Mysterious moving waxworks, multiple brutal murders, and maybe something supernatural…?
Book number of 11 of my Charles Dickens Investigations is now available to buy from Amazon.
The Jaggard Case is out today!
Book 10 of my Charles Dickens Investigations series is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Murder, forgery, coining, kidnapping, prostitution, a brutal gang of boys, fire, water, wooden dolls, elephants, the slums of Clerkenwell and Belle Isle, the workhouse, the sinister marshlands, lime kilns and Limehouse – these are the ingredients of the tenth […]
The Curious Names of London Pubs
I recently came across The Food of London by George Dodd (1856). It’s a dizzying compendium of statistics about the sales and consumption of food and drink in 1850s London. I can now tell you that about 100,000 people worked in the trade out of a population of about three million. I doubt if the […]
My Top Books with Historical Figures
I was recently asked to write a short article with some of my book recommendations. It came from a website called Shepherd, where authors create lists of their top books. There are all sorts of topics, from general themes such as novels about Shakespeare, to more niche subjects. “The best children’s books about chocolate” offers some tasty […]
Mr Dickens’s Guide for Lovers
Mr Dickens’s Guide for Lovers Warnings, Wooings, and Willingness ‘There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.’ Sometimes it’s better just to stop before you start. But if you must, then heed the advice of Mr Jellaby to his daughter in Bleak House: ‘Unless you mean with all your heart […]
Mr Dickens’s New Words
I ended my January newsletter with the word ‘fanteeged’. I meant fatigued, but it seems to suggest fantastic, too. Sam Weller uses it in Pickwick Papers, referring to Mr Pickwick. And you would have been ‘fanteeged’ had you participated in a ‘farinagholkajingo”, a word which Dickens uses in Sketches by Boz (The Dancing Academy). It […]
About Mr Dickens
From The Hampshire Courier, February 10th, 1812: Births On Friday at Mile-end Terrace, the Lady of John Dickens, Esq., a son. Mile-end Terrace was in Portsmouth, a modest house with a basement kitchen, a parlour, two bedrooms and two attics – nothing to write home about. John Dickens – Esquire as he presented himself rather grandly […]
Ghost Stories
The Victorian age was the age of the ghost story – the Victorians were fascinated by the supernatural, by all sorts of matters connected to the spirit world. Seances were popular; there was a lot of table rapping, there was that desire to communicate with the other world. There was also a deep interest in […]
An A-Z of Murder
Read an extract of my free e-book below, then download the full dastardly dictionary here. Mr Dickens’s Dreadful Dictionary This is Mr Dickens’s compendium of murder –a dictionary of atrocious acts, dreadful deeds, and hideous horrors. Dickens asks the question: ‘Is it in the interest of any man to steal, to gamble, to waste his […]