Books
Click on any of the books covers below to either buy or get more information on Amazon
Articles
Click on the links below to read the full article
I was looking for a drowned girl. My old friend, Professor Swaine Taylor had provided the grisly forensic detail in his Medical Jurisprudence: ‘the eyelids livid, and the pupils dilated; the mouth closed or half-open, the tongue swollen and congested, frequently pushed forwards to the internal ...
‘… the sufferings of which were dreadful … when I awoke with that horror upon me …’Charles Dickens had a cold. Man flu? One might wonder when reading the dramatic description of his anguish. But he was a novelist given to melodrama at times, and, considering the always present possibility ...
What's My Poison? ‘It is clear that the “favourite” poison with us is arsenic.’So wrote Charles Dickens in his journal, Household Words, in December 1851. Dickens argues for the enforcement of laws regulating the sale of medicines. Dickens refers to the Sale of Arsenic Bill passed in the ...
Charles Dickens and Charity: The most perplexing female I have ever encountered…In the research for my novels featuring Dickens as an amateur detective, I frequently turn to the Pilgrim Edition of the letters. The footnotes provide all kinds of fascinating detail for the novelist who must ...
Crime in Victorian LondonOne of the settings for my new novel, The Jaggard Case, is Clerkenwell - the scene of the arrest of Oliver Twist for pickpocketing. Clerkenwell was famous not only for its jewellery and watchmaking industries, but also its criminality and dreadful poverty. In 1847, ...
Historical Heroes: Charles DickensFrom pasting labels onto pots at the blacking factory, from taking supper with his family in the Marshalsea Prison, to the top of the Victorian literary tree, Charles Dickens’s story is a remarkable one.The blacking factory by Hungerford Stairs, ‘a ...
Author Interviews
Jean Briggs, welcome to Aspects of History! What prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in? It was my interest in Charles Dickens that decided the period. I was reading his journalism and found that he had written about the Victorian police force and gone out with policemen to look at ...