The Story of London in 50 Novels: 13 - "The Giant O'Brien," by Hilary Mantel

London's seasonal fairs, of which Bartholomew Fair was the best known, had, since Medieval times, been a focus for public entertainment, as well as social interaction and commercial transactions. Storytellers and performing bears, jugglers, musicians, and fortune tellers, all vied for the attentions of stall-holders and revelers. Later, as "London" became more than just "The City," and as burgeoning theatres and shopping arcades attracted increasing numbers of people to "The West End," entrepreneurs from across the British Isles, and from further afield, began to think in terms of "curiosities" that they could "exhibit" for the entertainment of an eager (and sometimes gullible) public.

Throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, there were "sapient pigs," trained to perform calculations, spell out words, and even tell fortunes, by picking up cards with their mouths; "mermaids," created by stitching together the desiccated torsos of monkeys with the tails of fish; and a whole host of bearded ladies, hermaphrodites, and "freaks of nature."

Advertisement for "Toby the Sapient Pig," 1817 (image is in the Public Domain).

Often suffering from disabilities or serious illnesses, the living "exhibits" were mercilessly exploited for the profit of others. Some "exhibitions" were overtly racist, as in the case of Sara Baartmans ("the Hottentot Venus"), a woman from southern Africa, who was exhibited in London and Paris between 1810 and 1815.

Caricature by William Heath (1810), of Sara Baartman, with the politicians, Richard Sheridan (in green), and Lord Grenville (image is in the Public Domain).

Charles Byrne (1761-83), the "Irish Giant," was born in County Tyrone, and arrived in London in 1782. He was 7'7" (2.31 metres) tall, the result (we now know) of the pituitary tumour that would take his life just a year later. He was exhibited at Spring Garden-gate, Piccadilly, and Charing Cross, and, on his death, his body was acquired, contrary to his own wishes (he had asked to be buried at sea), by the surgeon, John Hunter. Despite recent attempts to secure a burial for his remains in accordance with his wishes, his skeleton is still on display in the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields (the remains of Sara Baartman, by contrast, were returned to South Africa for burial).

Charles Byrne (centre), flanked by the Knipe brothers (twin giants), by John Kay, National Portrait Gallery D14755 (image is in the Public Domain).

The Hunterian Museum, with Charles Byrne's skeleton at the end. Photo: Paul Dean (StoneColdCrazy) - licensed under GNU.

John Hunter, portrait by John Jackson (1815), after a lost original (1786) by Sir Joshua Reynolds: National Portrait Gallery 77 (image is in the Public Domain).

Hilary Mantel's novel, The Giant O'Brien is based on Byrne's life story, but, by changing the name, she gives herself free license to invent the many details that history has not remembered about the real man (we know almost nothing of Byrne's background, character, or life in London beyond his public appearances).

In the novel, the life-stories of the giant, Charles O'Brien, and that of the surgeon, John Hunter, are juxtaposed. Both are outsiders in London, but, whilst the dour Scot is a calculating man of science; the Irish giant is a man steeped in traditional story-telling and folklore, a generous and engaging character with an original perspective on London life. Whether this reflects the personality of the real Charles Byrne is open to question (he is unlikely to have had much learning of any kind, and may have suffered from mental impairment as a result of his condition), but what is certain is that London in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries was a meeting place for people from many different backgrounds, and with sharply contrasting outlooks on the world.

"London is like the sea and the gallows. It refuses none. Sometimes on the journey, trapped in the ship's stink and heave, they had talked about the premises they would have at journeys end. They should be commodious, Vance said, and in a fashionable neighbourhood, central and well-lit, on a broad thoroughfare where the carriages of the gentry can turn without difficulty. 'My brother has a lodging in St Clement's Lane,' Claffey said, 'I don't know if it's commodious.' Vance blew out through his lips. 'Nest of beggars,' he said. 'As to your perquisites and embellishments, Charlie, they say a pagoda is the last word in fashion'  ... 'Will you have a story?' the Giant soothed them. For the time must be passed, must be passed" ... The Giant did not stop to ask what kind of story they would like, for they were contentious, like fretful children, and were in no position to know what was good for them. 'One day,' he began, the son of the King of Ireland journeyed to the east to find a bride.' 'Where east?' Vance asked, 'East London?' 'Albania,' the Giant said. 'Or far Cathay.'" 

"Seventeen forty-eight saw John Hunter, a set-jawed red-head astride a sway-backed plodder, heading south towards the stench of tanneries and soap-boilers. He came to London across Finchley Common, with the gibbeted corpses of villains groaning into the wind ... At the top of Highgate Hill he came to the Gatehouse Tavern, and observed London laid out before him. The evening was fine and the air mild." 

"London is ringed by fire, by ooze. Men with ladders carry pitch-soaked ropes in the street, and branched globes of light sprout fro the houses. Pybus thinks they have come to a country where they do not have a moon, but Vance is sure they will see it presently, and so they do, drowned in a muddy puddle in Chandos Street." 

"That summer the Giant grew rich. He washed in Castille soap, and made the purchase of some decanters. His followers ate green peas and strawberries. Joe Vance played with the writing set, and Pybus, Claffey, and Jankin haunted the skittle-alleys, the cock-fighting, the prize-fighting, the dog-fighting, and the bull-baiting. 'If we go on so,' said Claffey, grinning, 'we will have tamboured waistcoats like the quality, and silver buckles to our shoes.' 'What do you mean, if we go on so/ I am not likely to shrink.'

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Story of London in 50 Novels: 12 - "The Quality of Mercy," by Barry Unsworth

Eighteenth Century London was the hub of a continually expanding network of global contacts. At its wharves and quays, ships arrived bearing lacquer-ware, porcelain, and tea from China; cotton fabrics from India; tobacco from North America; chocolate from Mexico; coffee and spices from Indonesia; and sugar from the Caribbean; smaller ships brought coal from the north-eastern ports of England, which was increasingly burned as a fuel in London, in preference to wood, the nation's forests having been depleted for the building of ships. The new commercial system was underpinned by innovations in banking, insurance, and corporate governance; but it was also underpinned by something more tangible, yet less visible to most Londoners: the trade in human beings.

Coal merchant's advertisement (image is in the Public Domain).

The Pool of London, by John Wilson Carmichael (image is in the Public Domain).

Advertisement for a coffee house in London (image is in the Public Domain).

Almost every spoonful of sugar consumed in London, and every tot of rum carried on the ships for the benefit of their crew-members, had been produced on plantations in colonies such as Jamaica or Barbados, on the basis of slave-labour. The slaves were Africans, who had been shipped to the Caribbean, often on British ships, with British captains; they were the property of British plantation owners; yet very few of them ever came to Britain itself. Although tens of thousands of ordinary Britons owned shares in companies that formed part of the supply chain, slavery itself was largely out of sight and out of mind.

"Slave Dance," by Dirk Valkenburg, Dutch Brazil (image is in the Public Domain).

May Morning," by John Collet, 1770: Museum of London (image is in the Public Domain). A black servant joins the celebrations: under English law, he would not have been a slave.

From the mid-Eighteenth Century, movements emerged in Europe, committed to the abolition of slavery. Within Britain, these campaigns were often led by Evangelical Christians, and by religious dissenters, including Quakers and, later, Methodists. In 1777, a key ruling at the Old Bailey determined that a fugitive slave who had arrived in England, was a free man, since English law included no provision for the institution of slavery, and that, in the words of Lord Justice Mansfield,  "[slavery] is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law" (in other words, an Act of Parliament, which never actually came to pass).

Portrait of Lord Mansfield's nieces, Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Lindsay, Scone Palace, Scotland, 1778 (image is in the Public Domain). Dido was the daughter of a slave mother and a planter father, and lived as a member of Lord Mansfield's household.

Design for an Abolitionist medallion, by Josiah Wedgwood, 1795 (image is in the Public Domain). 

The first book published by an African author in English, 1782 (image is in the Public Domain). Direct testimony by individuals with first-hand experience of slavery played an important part in the Abolitionist movement. 

With so many vested interests, however, the process of abolition was a slow and painful one. Slavery was formally abolished by the newly created French Republic in 1794, but this was revoked by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. In England, William Wilberforce's act of 1807 outlawed the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but British plantation owners continued to make use of slave labour until 1833.

Illustration from Voltaire's "Candide" (widely read across Europe). His protagonist meets a maimed slave in Surinam: "it is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe," the caption reads. Image: Jean-Michel Moreau, 1787 ((image is in the Public Domain).

Barry Unsworth's novel, The Quality of Mercy, is based around an imagined conflict (though closely based on historical circumstances), between a ship-owner, Erasmus Kemp, whose slave-ship has been taken over by its crew,and run aground in Florida; and the abolitionist, Frederick Ashton, who accuses Kemp of insurance fraud (in claiming for the value of slaves allegedly thrown overboard on the orders of the Captain), and seeks to demonstrate, in the courts, that, as human beings, the slaves had never been Ashton's lawful property. The situation is complicated by a love-interest between Kemp and Ashton's sister; and by the position of Sullivan, the ship's Irish fiddler, one of the few men who might actually know what happened on the ship, and who is, unbeknown to Kemp or Ashton, making his way on foot to a mining community in County Durham, with a message for the family of a murdered ship-mate.

"On finding himself thus accidentally free, Sullivan's only thought was to get as far as he could from Newgate prison while it was still dark. Fiddle and bow slung over his shoulders, he set off northwards, keeping the river at his back. In Holborn he lost an hour, wandering in a maze of courts. Then an old washer-woman, waiting outside a door in the first light of day, set him right for Gray's Inn Lane and the northern outskirts of the city ... An hour's walking brought him to the rural edges of London, among the market gardens and brick kilns north of Gray's Inn Road ... At a junction of lanes here was a huddle of houses and a small inn. He was hungry but he did not dare to stop. One way led to Watford the other to St Albans. He took a shilling from his new purse and tossed it. It came down heads. St Albans then."

"'I had hoped the business might be settled privately between us,' Van Dillen said. 'The outcome must be doubtful in law and if we go to the extent of a hearing there are costs to be thought of. Why should we fatten the lawyers, Mr Kemp?' He was not finding the interview easy. He was physically uncomfortable, for one thing; the seat of his chair was too small for a man of his bulk, and the weather was unseasonably hot. The room had only one window, and the morning sun, strong despite the clogging air of London, slanted through it and lay directly on him. He felt overheated in his bob-wig and broadcloth suit ... He felt an itch on the side of his neck, some insect crawling there ... the windless days and early heat had produced a plague of small black beetles that flew about blindly, getting tangled in wigs and snared in the corner of eyes, copulating and dying, leaving a scurf of corpses ... 'What can be predicted are the legal costs,' Van Dillen said. 'My good sir, the facts are not in dispute, at least as regards the central fact of the Negroes being cast overboard and the necessity thereof.' 'It is precisely the necessity of it that the insurers will dispute if it comes before a court."

"Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying," by J.M.W. Turner, 1840, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, 1840 (image is in the Public Domain). Slavery was already illegal in British territories at this time, but Turner was campaigning for its global abolition.

"The insurance claim on eighty-five African slaves, cast overboard while still alive from the deck of the 'Liverpool Merchant' on grounds of lawful jettison, was heard at the Guildhall, Justice Blundell presiding. In contrast to the long course of postponements and delays that preceded it, the hearing itself was brief, occupying no more than three hours of the court's time. The insurers were represented by an elderly lawyer named Price, who had a large experience of such cases. Kemp's lawyer, Pike, had wished to hold his fire for the criminal trial at the Old Bailey, which was due to be held at a date not yet specified; he had recommended a young barrister named Waters to represent the ship's owner."      

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Story of London in 50 Novels: 10 - "A Journal of the Plague Year," by Daniel Defoe.

In 1663, news first reached London of a plague that had been devastating the city of Amsterdam. The extensive trade links between England (especially London) and the Netherlands (most significantly Amsterdam) made it more or less inevitable that the sickness would, in time, make its way to these shores. The plague (both bubonic and pneumonic) was no stranger to Londoners: there had been periodic outbreaks over a period of more than three centuries, the most serious, by far, being the "Black Death" of 1347-8, which wiped out somewhere between a third and a half of the population of England, and set the ground for fundamental social and economic change.

The Great Plague of London, 1665 (image is in the Public Domain).

The most recent strain of the plague reached London in the autumn and winter of 1664-5, and raged through the summer of the latter year. Many of the City's wealthier citizens fled into the countryside; as did King Charles II and his court, settling first in Salisbury, and later in Oxford. There was only a limited window of time in which such escape was possible: as soon as the news of the plague spread to the rural districts, the people of the countryside became unwilling to accommodate their urban neighbours, or even allow them to pass. 

The Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Lawrence, and most of the Aldermen, had, in any case, opted to remain, and to oversee the City's defences against the unseen killer. Between the, they saw to it that the dead were buried; that regular "Bills of Mortality" were published; and that those known to be suffering from the disease were quarantined in their homes to prevent the spread of contagion.

Bill of Mortality (image is in the Public Domain).

Bill of Mortality (image is in the Public Domain).

A Plague Doctor (image is in the Public Domain): the "beak" held aromatic plants, believed to stave off contagion. Seventeenth Century doctors could, in fact, do nothing to help patients suffering from the plague, although they could, and did, record the progress of the disease in such a way as to improve the understanding of the process of infection.  

Ultimately, the disease would kill around 100,000 people (roughly a quarter of London's population), and it would disappear almost as suddenly as it had fallen upon the City. The role of the following year's Great Fire of London in destroying what remained of the disease has probably been over-stated: it seems, rather, that he disease had simply completed its life-cycle. The over-land trade routes that connected the Mediterranean world with the Far East, and along which the plague seems originally to have spread into Europe, were, by this time, in decline, replaced by the maritime routes around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean, that were being opened up by Portuguese and Dutch navigators.

Daniel Defoe's book, A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, has often been seen as a work of non-fiction reportage. It is written in the first person, and appears to be a detailed eyewitness account, but can hardly be so, since Defoe had been just five years old in 1665. The account is credited to "H.F." (possibly Defoe's Uncle, Henry Foe, on whose reminiscences the author may have relied). Although Defoe has sometimes been cited as the first English novelist (John Bunyan and Aphra Behn arguably have stronger claims), those making this suggestion have generally had in mind Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). Recently however, A Journal of the Plague Year has itself been reconsidered as a novel (and, indeed, a historical novel, since it was written fifty-seven years after the events that it describes took place. Writers of Defoe's generation had yet to agree on a clear definition of what a novel actually was, but this account, though clearly rooted in detailed empirical research, has a number of the features that we might recognise as typical of the novel, including characters (though not many of them), and dialogue (though not very much of it). As such, it gives a fascinating insight, not only into London life during the Great Plague, but also into the embryology of the historical novel in English.

Daniel Defoe, possibly after Sir Godfrey Kneller, National Maritime Museum (image is in the Public Domain).

"It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods that were brought home from their Turkey fleet; others said that it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again."

London in 1665, by Wenceslas Hollar (image is in the Public Domain).

" ... now the weather set in hot, an from the first week in June the infection spread in a dreadful manner, and the bills rose high; the articles of the fever, spotted fever, and teeth began to swell; for all that could conceal their distempers did it, to prevent their neighbours shunning and refusing to converse with them, and also to prevent authority shutting up their houses; which, though it was not yet practised, yet was threatened, and people were extremely terrified at he thoughts of it ...  I lived without Aldgate, about midway between Aldgate Church and Whitechapel Bars on the left hand or north side of the street; and as the distemper had not reached to that side of the city, our neighbourhood continued very easy. But at the other end of the town their consternation was very great: and the richer sort of people ... thronged out of town with their families and servants ... this was a very terrible and melancholy thing to see, and ... it filed me with very serious thoughts of the misery that was coming upon the city, and the unhappy condition of those that would be left in it."

"I say they had dug several pits in another ground, when the distemper began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began to go about, which was not, in our parish, till he beginning of August. Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week; and they could not well dig them larger, because of the order of the magistrates confining them to leave no bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at about seventeen or eighteen feet ... " 

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Story of London in 50 Novels: 9 - "Nothing Like the Sun," by Anthony Burgess

The golden age of English theatre spanned the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. It was overwhelmingly a London phenomenon (although productions did tour, especially when the plague was raging in the City), and is not really matched in any of the other major cities of Europe, where the main cultural achievements of the late Renaissance were in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. We have already looked at this in relation to Christopher Marlowe, but his career was cut short by murder, and his reputation, in modern times, has been eclipsed by that of his longer-lived contemporary, William Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare, by John Taylor, 1610 (The Chandos Portrait). Image: National Portrait Gallery (Public Domain).

Unlike Marlowe, Shakespeare did not have the advantage of a university education (he might, perhaps, have taken a degree at Oxford, had his family not fallen upon hard times, the result of ill-advised business risks taken by his father). Shakespeare probably arrived in London some time between 1585 and 1592, and joined an acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, who staged productions at The Theatre in Shoreditch. He soon began writing, as well as acting, attracting the jealousy of rival playwrights. Robert Greene (when did we last see a play of his performed?) wrote, in 1592, that " ... there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum is in his own conceit the only shake-scene in a country."

Coat of arms procured by Shakespeare for his father, 1596. Image: College of Heralds (Public Domain).

The Theatre had been built by James Burbage, the father of the actor, Richard, who played the leading roles in many of Shakespeare's plays, but the lease on the land expired in 1599, and the actors, assisted by a carpenter, dismantled the theatre, and transported the timber, beam by beam, across the Thames. Their new theatre, The Globe, opened in 1599, and it was here that several of Shakespeare's plays, including Julius Caesar and Henry V, were first performed.

The Globe in 1647, by Wenceslaus Hollar (image is in the Public Domain).

The reconstructed "Shakespeare's Globe," opened in 1997. Photo: ChrisO (licensed under GNU).

The original location of The Globe. Image: Old Moonraker (licensed under CCA).

Conjectural reconstruction of The Globe, by Walter Hodges (1958). Image: Folger Shakespeare Library (licensed under CCA). 

Shakespeare's true home was always in Stratford-upon-Avon (in London he lived in rented rooms), and he retired there in 1613, dying three years later. In 1642 the theatres, including The Globe, were closed by Parliamentary decree, marking the end of the London theatre's golden age.

Anthony Burgess's novel, Nothing Like the Sun, follows Shakespeare's perambulations between Stratford and London, and explores his personal and professional relationships, including his romantic entanglements with both women and men (of the private life of the historical Shakespeare we actually know very little, although there are good reasons for believing that he may have been, in modern terms, bisexual). The novel presents a vivid picture both of Shakespeare's (imagined) character, and of the London through which he walked.

Long View of London, by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1647 (image is in the Public Domain). 

Panorama of London, by Claes Visscher, 1616. Image: Library of Congress (Public Domain).

"Far from the river now. North of the divers fair and large builded houses for merchants and suchlike. North even of the City Wall and the fair summer houses north of the wall. Good air in Shoreditch. The Theatre a finer playhouse than The Rose. Burbage as good a man of business any day as Henslowe and an old player too, though, from what I see, of no great skill. But now, his son promises, this Richard. He may yet go further than Alleyn. Is that Giles Alleyn from whom old Burbage got the land of Ned's kin? It may be so. In '76 it was. A lease of twenty-one years. A mere patch with rank grass and dog-turds, even a man's bones they say. A skull grinning up at the surveyors. And now a fair playhouse. Twenty-one years, let me see. To '98, which is but four more. Will this Alleyn renew? Were I he I would not. But it is the men more than the playhouse, sure. The Lord Chamberlain's Men."

"Let me take a breath, let me take a swig, for, my heart, she is coming. She is about to make her entrance. It was while he was walking off Bishopsgate - Houndsditch, Camomile Street, St Helen's Place, St Helen's Church - that he saw her. She stepped from her own coach outside a house near St Helen's, escorted by her unveiled maid. But, in the fresh fall wind, her veil lifted an instant; he saw. He saw a face the sun had blessed to gold ... They were rehearsing Romeo at the Theatre when, in a break or brief ale-intermission, he asked old James Burbage ... 'There be many tales touching her origins. Her own story is (or they say so) that she was brought back as an infant from the East Indies by Sir Francis Drake himself, in the Golden Hind that lies at Deptford now. It is said that both her father and mother were a sort of noble Moors of those parts and were killed by Drake's men in a fight they had there, then she was left all alone and weeping and so, in pity, was brought to England to be in a manner adopted.'"

Saint Helen's, Bishopsgate, where Shakespeare was, for a time, a parishioner. Photo: Lonpicman (licensed under GNU). 

Richard Burbage:

"They have relented: we may play again.
Gain, though - what gain? Only the Rose hath gained
With three new petals that to us be thorns.
Spencer and Shaa and pestilential Ben
Have navigated the rough Marshal's sea
And are three masts now for the Admiral."

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Story of London in 50 Novels: 8 - "The House of Doctor Dee," by Peter Ackroyd

London during the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries was a bustling port, with ships arriving on a daily basis from the most dynamic cities of Europe: Stockholm & Copenhagen; Rotterdam & Antwerp; Bordeaux & Seville; Genoa & Venice. These ships brought furs, timber, wine, silks, and spices, but, just as importantly, they brought knowledge and information, and they brought books. Following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turk in 1453, waves of Greek immigrants settled in Italy, some of them bringing manuscripts from the Byzantine Imperial Archives. Many found work as tutors, teaching Greek to the children of  aristocrats and wealthy merchants, and some, at least, of these, must have found their way to England. The brightest among these immigrants, however, set to work translating the classic works of Greek philosophy, mathematics, and literature into Latin. These works soon appeared in Italian, English, Dutch, and French translations.

In 1527, a boy named John Dee was born in the shadow of the Tower of London, the son of a merchant family of Welsh descent. As a child, he probably spent time on the London docks, and developed a prodigious gift for languages. By the time he began his studies at Cambridge in the 1540s, he could read both Greek and Latin, and probably French, German, and Dutch as well.

Doctor John Dee, Ashmolean Museum, anonymous portrait (image is in the Public Domain).

He became one of the first fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, following its foundation in 1546, and began the tradition, which survives at Cambridge to this day, of staging Greek plays in the original language. His production of Aristophanes's Peace gained him a reputation as an illusionist or magician (nobody was quite sure which), as he sent an actor into the roof-space of Trinity College, clinging to the back of a giant beetle, probably with the assistance of college porters who had served as Petty Officers in the Royal Navy. 

The logo of Venice's Aldine Press (image is in the Public Domain). Aldines were the Penguins of their day. Working in partnership with the Doge's brother, the publisher, Aldus Manutius had a monopoly of books printed in Greek on Venetian territory: he played a key role in establishing a pan-European and multi-lingual market for the Greek classics in Renaissance Europe. 

The Aldine Latin translation of the works of Herodotus (image is in the Public Domain).

Despite his Cambridge connections, and his extensive European travels (Louvain, Brussels, Paris, Krakow, Prague), Dee remained, for much of his adult life, a Londoner, accumulating a vast library at his home in Mortlake. He was a philosopher, an alchemist, an astrologer, and a mathematician; an early English enthusiast for the philosophy of Plato, but also for the more esoteric ideas of "Hermes Trismegistus," a supposed Egyptian contemporary of Moses. Like many of his generation, Dee made no distinction between what we would call "science," and what we might think of as "occult" activities. He believed in a harmonious synthesis of all forms of human and divine knowledge: he taught Euclidian mathematics to navigators; but he also experimented in communication with angels. The British Museum holds a collection of objects that he used for these experiments, including an obsidian mirror, probably seized by a Spanish conquistador from an Aztec priest in Mexico.

Crystal ball, believed to have been owned by John Dee. Photo: British Museum (non-commercial license CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0).

The "Seal of God," believed once to have been owned by John Dee. Photo: Geni (licensed under GNU).

The "Corpus Hermeticum," translated from Greek to Latin by Marsilio Ficino in 1471 (image is in the Public Domain). Thought by Ficino, and by his patron, Cosimo de Medici, to have been written by an ancient Egyptian sage, the original is probably a Roman forgery of the 1st Century AD. Ficino's translation was a key source for Dee's occult experimentation.

Peter Ackroyd's novel, The House of Doctor Dee, brings together two London-based stories, both narrated in the first person: the first by a fictional modern character, Matthew Palmer; and the second by John Dee himself. The connection between them arises from Palmer's inheritance, from his father, of a house that once belonged to Dee (although Ackroyd uses artistic license to move this from Mortlake to Clerkenwell - nothing, in fact, remains of Dee's actual home). The worlds of the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries come together, as Palmer researches and imagines the ghosts of London Past; and Dee divines and imagines those of London Yet to Come.

"But why was I thinking about these people, as I sat in the house at Clerkenwell? They were no more than phantoms conjured up out of my weakness, their voices less real to me than the shape of this ground-floor room and the texture of its thick stone walls ... I heard myself talking into the air in my sudden exaltation: 'Let the dead bury their dead' ... Then I noticed something ... And there came upon me a curious fear - that there were, somehow, shadows where no shadows should have been. No, they were not shadows. They were patterns in the dust, caught suddenly in the changing light of that summer's evening."

"We were so close to the waterside that we would take our quadrant ... down Water Lane to Blackfriars Stairs where, among the barges and the herring buses, we called out 'Westward! Westward! until one of the passing watermen noticed us. The wherry took us by the open fields beside Lambeth Marsh where, with the quadrant established upon firm earth, we would make various observations of the sun's progress. Sometimes, coming or going, we were close to falling into the Thames over head and ears with the cumbersomeness of the quadrant, but we always escaped onto dry ground ... There were sly citizens who were accustomed to call us sorcerers or magicians for all this measuring ... 'They had nothing to do with what is vulgarly called magic.' I took more wine to consume the fire within me. 'Mine are wonderful sciences, greatly aiding our dim sight for the better view of God's power and goodness. I am, by profession, a scholar, sir, and not some magician or mountebank.'"

"Now look upon this. Look upon the world without love. I awoke and found myself in as black a night as I have ever known; but I was not in my chamber. I was walking abroad, with the help of a lantern and candle, and now stood below the wall of the city. The stone rose before me like the face of that idol discovered in the Devonshire mines, yet as I raised my lantern I saw all the wrinkles, cracks, crevices and flaws that lay within the ancient stones ... I passed in through the More Gate even as there came the sound of a horn, and one blown with such force that the echo redoubled again in the dark London air. I knew these streets so well that without any light I could have made my way but, when I put up my lantern by All Allowes in the Wall, I saw many citizens walking slowly through the lane there in long gowns and velvet coats. Each one held a wax candle lighted in his hands, and sighed continually as if his bowels might break ... Why did they walk and moan continually, down Wormwood Street and Broad Street?"

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Story of London in 50 Novels: 7 - "The Marlowe Papers," by Ros Barber

It has sometimes been said that England, in contrast to Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, never really had a "Renaissance." To the extent that this is true at all (questionable in itself), it applies only to the visual arts, and most particularly not to literature, drama, or philosophy. In fact, it can be argued that the institution of the commercial theatre, which, in the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries, was almost uniquely English, and, more specifically, London-based, brought some of the key themes of the Renaissance to a far wider audience than had been the case in most of the countries of continental Europe. If it is true that there was never an English Leonardo or Michelangelo, then it is equally true that Italy (at least, not in this time period) never produced an equivalent to Christopher Marlowe or William Shakespeare.

Portrait, believed to be of Christopher Marlowe, Corpus Christi College Cambridge (image is in the Public Domain).

Even in terms of the visual arts, the aesthetics of the European Renaissance were brought to London by continental artists, such as the Florentine sculptor, Pietro Torrigiano, and the German painter, Hans Holbein. Printed texts circulated widely, if not always freely, and these included original works in Italian, French, and German; as well as the Latin classics; and Latin translations of ancient Greek texts (in England, as elsewhere in Europe, many more people could read Latin than Greek). With no effective copyright laws in operation, anyone was free to translate these works into English, and Saint Paul's Churchyard was the place where most London booksellers kept their stalls. It was here that the dramatists of the day found much of the inspiration for their stories.

London's first commercial theatre was established by James Burbage in Shoreditch in 1576, and, in the decades that followed, many more were established around the outskirts of The City, including The Globe, The Rose, and The Swan, on Southwark's Bankside.

James Burbage's Theatre in Shoreditch (image is in the Public Domain).

London's early play-houses (image is in the Public Domain).

Excavation of The Rose Theatre, Southwark, where many of Marlowe's plays were performed. 

Despite his humble background (his father was a shoemaker in Canterbury), the poet and dramatist, Christopher Marlowe, had taken a degree at Cambridge, and, unlike his broad contemporaries, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, was probably literate in Greek, as well as Latin (Greek plays were performed in the original in Cambridge colleges, and Marlowe may well have acted in these). His apparently short life (1564-93) is shrouded in mysteries: including his possible involvement in espionage; and the circumstances of his violent death.

Ros Barber's The Marlowe Papers is a novel in verse, exploring the possibility that his life did not end with a "great reckoning in a little room," in Deptford in 1593, but that his death was, rather, staged, and that he subsequently escaped into exile on the continent (this suggestion has been made many times over the years, and there are documented examples of fugitives escaping under similar circumstances). As such, the novel not only takes the reader into the heart of London's first theatre-land; and into the dangerous world of late Tudor England, with all of its religious and political tensions; but also into the soul of a troubled man, facing permanent separation from the world that he loves, and even the loss of his identity itself. 

"Church-dead. And not a headstone in my name.
no brassy plaque, no monument, no tomb,
no whittled initials on a makeshift cross,
no pile of stones upon a mountain top.
The plague is the excuse; the age's curse
that swells to life as spring gives way to summer,
to sun, unconscious kisser of a warmth
that wakens canker as it wakens bloom.

Now fear infects the wind, and every breath
that neighbour breathes on neighbour in the street
brings death so close you smell it on the stairs.
Rats multiply, as God would have them do.
And fear infects like mould; like fungus, spreads -
Folks catch it from the chopped-off ears and thumbs,
the burning heretics and eyeless heads
that slow-revolve the poles on London Bridge ... "

" ... This banished man is writing you a poem,
the only code I know that tells the truth,
though truth was both my glory, and my ruin,
the laurel, and the handcuff, of my youth.

London seduced me. Beckoned me her way
and spread herself beneath me, for a play."

Edward Alleyn was one of the greatest actors on the London stage, and made many of Marlowe's theatrical roles his own (c 1626, image is in the Public Domain).

"'They've never seen the like before.' Applause
a clapping swell like starlings after grain
and Edward Alleyn's striding off the stage
dressed as the thunderous Tamburlaine. 'Some beer!'
He claps me on the back. 'Look what you've made.
It seems they love a monster. As do I.'"

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Story of London in 50 Novels: 6 - "The Woman in the Shadows," by Carol McGrath

In the early decades of the Sixteenth Century, London was one of the great trading cities of Europe, a major port city, and a rival to Antwerp as a hub of the international cloth trade: yet it remained, by any modern standard, a relatively small urban settlement. The estimated population in 1530 was around 50,000: comparable to modern Salisbury or Surbiton; a little smaller than today's Tamworth or Maidstone; a city that offered little in the way of anonymity, in which people were likely to have made a point of knowing each other's business. Yet it also had one of the greatest concentrations of wealth of any city in northern Europe. Rivalries, whether between individuals, families, trading houses, or livery companies, carried very high stakes.

A drapers' market, c1530 (image is in the Public Domain).

The drapers' market in Bologna (image is in the Public Domain).

A late Medieval market (image is in the Public Domain).

It was a city poised for change: by 1605, the population would swell to 225,000. New technologies were transforming the lives of people across the continent, few more so than that of printing, which revolutionised people's access to books and information. With the mass-movement of goods between England and the continent came the mass-movement of people, and, despite the best attempts of the authorities to prevent it, the spread of new ideas, many of them religious. In 1517, Martin Luther's scathing assault on the Catholic Church was published in Germany: it was soon translated into most European languages, and in widespread circulation. In 1526, the Englishman, William Tyndale, published an English translation of the New Testament. England, in the early stages of Henry VIII's reign, was still very much a Catholic country, and anyone caught in possession of such documents in London risked imprisonment, torture, and death: printers on the continent, however, churned out thousands of copies, and it was impossible to keep out the new ideas.

Bust, believed to be of William Tyndale, St Dunstan-in-the-West, London. Photo: Lonpicman (licensed under GNU).

The Gospel of St John, from Tyndale's New Testament, British Library (image is in the Public Domain).

Carol McGrath's novel, The Woman in the Shadows, tells the story of Elizabeth Cromwell, the wife of the merchant, lawyer, and statesman, Thomas Cromwell. In some ways, it reads like a prequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (since the Cromwell we encounter is a relatively young man, who has not yet established a role for himself at court), but it is told from Elizabeth's, rather than Thomas's point of view, and in a different narrative style (first person, mainly past tense; rather than Mantel's third person, present tense).

We know relatively little about the historical Elizabeth: she was the daughter of a cloth merchant, and was already the widow of another cloth merchant by the time she met Thomas; they had three children together, but Elizabeth died in 1529, before her husband's political career really took off. The novel opens with the death and burial of Elizabeth's first husband; depicts her taking over his business, contrary to her father's advice, and traveling to wool and cloth fairs; and shows us her romance with, and marriage to the ambitious Thomas; all set against the background of commercial life in a London that still moved to the rhythms of the liturgical year of the Catholic Church.

"Mother returned to her manor without me, and Father purchased broadcloth at the Bartholomew Cloth Fair, as well as the fabric for the monasteries. I was grateful ... Gerard Smith made all my deliveries that week, except for the cloth to Austin Friars . I told him not to visit the friars because I wanted to bring them the painted cloth myself. The Friary's beauty was well known and, since Tom had dealt with the Prior before, I hoped to see something of this famous place where scholars gathered, often traveling there from far-flung countries, the lands of oranges and figs."

"When the monasteries paid us, I paid my debt, pleased to see that there was now enough left over to keep my household fed that winter. The rent on Wood Street was due by All Hallows' Eve, and I knew that I must use the rest of Master Cromwell's silver for this ... there would not be enough over to rebuild my much-needed woolshed unless I sold the remaining mixed cloth I kept in the attic storerooms and replaced it with even better cloth."

A bishop blessing a fair. Image: Bibliotheque Nationale de France (MS Calais f 96e - image is in the Public Domain).

The Old Wool Hall, Lavenham, Suffolk. Photo: Mick Lobb (licensed under CCA).

"'Smith,' I said after I had recorded our gains in the ledgers. 'Where can I buy new draperies? You know, linen or wool and silk mixes.' He thought for a moment, then beaming broadly said, 'There is always the Northampton Cloth Fair. Those fancy new cloths are woven up in Norfolk. They will be there aplenty, Mistress. They are in high demand.'" 

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.