The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Legacy of Foulstone Manor is a dual timeline Gothic mystery that explores family secrets, lies, and how the past can haunt and trap you. In 1970, we encounter forty-something-year-old Joan, who has inherited Foulstone, the family home she was taken away from at...
Historical Heroes: Charles Dickens From 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...
Crime in Victorian London One 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...
JC Briggs brings the reader into the world of mid-nineteenth-century London very effectively indeed. The Jaggard Case is the tenth in Briggs’ series of crime novels featuring the writer as detective, which began with The Murder of Patience Brooke in 2014. The mystery...
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...
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...
‘… 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...
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...
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...
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[dpdfg_filtergrid custom_query="advanced" use_taxonomy_terms="on" multiple_taxonomies="name_of_author"...
