Or was it? Of course it wasn’t. My little Lucinda, dosed up on bromide; my grandfather Georgie Tanner, poisoned in his mental
asylum. Three generations apart, same old condition. The blank book of life presented to us by St Bartholomew as we are born
is a fantasy; our heritage is our destiny; and who are we to choose which bits of our mother dominate over which bits of our
father in the moment of conception?
Thus roamed my thoughts as I strode back towards Ivy-street, but as I crossed Waterloo-road I was aware of Sir Jocelyn’s brougham
passing me, and rattling off northwards away from me, and I stopped briefly to watch it recede. And when I started to walk
once more it was as if the narrow streets of the London map were no longer confining me, that there was something in my step,
in the way the basket swung at my side, and in my smile, that felt curiously light and untrammelled, as if all that had hampered
me were disappearing along with the carriage, as if it were taking with it a past that no longer served me.
But then it stopped ahead of me, and I felt no need to avert my step, for there was no danger to be had any more. Sir Jocelyn’s
head reappeared from the carriage.
‘Dora,’ he said as I neared.
‘Yes, Sir Jocelyn?’
He smiled broadly, albeit somewhat sadly, tipped his hat at me by way of farewell, and said quietly, such that I could scarcely
hear it over the rumble of traffic and trains: ‘Your arse may be a perfect octavo, but your spirit shall not be bound.’
W
hen my mother’s publishers requested that I write a preface for the publication of the first edition, I found myself unable
so to do. For her past is history, and I cannot preface it. I can only write an afterword, which I agreed to do, for the text
is still somewhat incomplete.
My mother had almost forgotten her request of Sir Jocelyn, when, three months after their meeting in the carriage, Jack walked
free, halfway through his ten-year sentence, much to his surprise. She gave him Damage’s Bindery: he approached new clients,
and proved capable, unlike my mother, of steering a course through the con-men and undesirables of the industry. It may not
have been the straightest course, but it was the soundest, and kept him closer to the right side of the law than she had ever
been.
It may surprise the reader to discover that he and Pansy got married, but it made perfect sense to them and us all. Their
affection for each other is greater than between most married couples; her barrenness is no obstacle to someone of his proclivities.
They offer mutual love, support and comfort, as do my mother and Sylvia to each other. Neither of them quite got over the
men they loved but could not have, and devoted their future to themselves and their children. My mother always disagreed with
Dr Acton that women are not victim to sexual urges, but she declared (rather loudly as age superseded decorum) that she would
rather have no one than an unsatisfactory lover, and that this was a view she had come to as a result of her late husband,
her soldier lover and a thousand pornographic books.
Sir Jocelyn Knightley died in Africa, some time between the 8th and the 14th of April, 1867. Information, and his obituaries
in
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
were vague, and to this day we still receive rumours of his demise. So far it has been mooted that he fell into the Victoria
Falls, got poisoned by a local chieftain, caught one or more of the sleeping sicknesses, marsh-fever, yellow jack, bilharzia
and malaria, was stabbed by a loose woman in a city, that it was deliberate, that it was accidental, that it was suicide,
and that it was murder. We shall never know the truth, but it was a suitably mysterious ending of which he would have been
proud. Africa swam in his bloodstream, and it claimed him in the end.
Sir Jocelyn left Nathaniel his, or rather Sylvia’s, entire fortune. The property in Berkeley-square was sold, and Christie’s
was entrusted with the sale of most of the furnishings, and all the scientific equipment. Sylvia chose, however, to donate
his book collection to the British Library, who were possibly too confounded by its contents to refuse. She never found any
female body parts pickled in glass jars, and neither did my mother receive a shrivelled scrotum in the post from Africa, much
to her relief.
Shortly after, we were to leave behind Jack and Pansy in Lambeth, and set up home in Gravesend, with Sylvia and Nathaniel
too, in a small but elegant Georgian townhouse with a large garden. Rumours spread quickly, but having weathered the malicious
gossip of Ivy-street, this mere tittle-tattle was nothing but amusing. Of course, the fact they were from London gave them
something of a shady patina anyway, as if sapphism, or tribadism, or whatever you want to call it, was
de rigeur
anywhere north of Clapham. The talk did not bother them. Nathaniel and I both went to the local school, where Sylvia and my
mother helped out a few days a week. My mother further eroded our neighbours’ fears once she offered to rebind the old text
books handed down by the boys’ public school up the road. She was also happy, too, to do the odd re-bind for those who asked,
and it was a constructive way of making new acquaintances, but she did not set herself up seriously.
But the first time somebody brought her a family Bible, she realised that the Song of Solomon still held memories for her,
both good and bad. The local vicar told her once in the queue at the butcher’s that he considered it to be the height of obscenity.
My mother, smiling sweetly, asked for half a pound of kidneys, and never enquired whether he had come across Archdeacon Favourbrook,
or the Reverend Harold Oswald, during his early ecclesiastical training in London.
And so to her journal, the book of MOIV BIBLL. After her last entry in it, it was left for many years. But my mother was always
one to know how to make a buck from a book, as the Americans would say, and, when the Society of Women in the Bookbinding
Trades wrote to her regarding the need to establish a Bookbinders’ Benevolent Fund, she wondered at the possibility of sending
it out into the world to raise some money. In the end, we decided to split the proceeds between the Benevolent Fund and the
Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic of London, an establishment in which I have been fortunate enough never to set foot.
My mother always said that if my kidnap and subsequent rescue hadn’t brought a fit on, then nothing ever would again; and
she was right. The nursery rhymes were my idea. Read into them what you will; they are my gift to you.
When she signed her publishing contract shortly before her death, we travelled together to London. The motorcar drove us down
the Strand – the new, improved Strand, that is – straight through where Holywell-street used to be, and we admired the curves
of the new Aldwych, then, round Trafalgar-square and onwards towards Regent-street; where my mother remembered there had been
only one department store, Messrs Farmer and Rogers, where Din had portered, and now there were many. ‘Liberty,’ my mother
read from the lettering above the door. ‘Liberty & Co.’ But the traffic did not allow us to linger at this peculiar monument;
she was unable to spy into its windows to ascertain what type of freedom it might offer – and at what price – within.
I once asked my mother about her own demons, but she said they were paved over like the relentlessness of architecture after
this visit to London. I did not believe her. Do we not hold on to our demons, for comfort? Do we not need them, in order to
cushion ourselves against the worse demons of others, in this strange and unpredictable world? Gas may have long given way
to electricity on these streets, in these establishments, but I defy even the most fervent metropolitan developer to say that
it has brought about the triumph of light over dark. One depends on the perpetual presence of the other, just like the trade
in pornography.
My mother must have known, better than most, that all the abolition of Holywell-street would achieve was the migration of
a handful of pornographers into other premises, and an easier thoroughfare for vehicles and pedestrians to navigate. She died
shortly after our visit, in the summer of last year, at a time when pornography had become no longer the privilege of the
wealthy, but available from barrows in every market. And although her eyes were failing, she knew that she had seen it all.
Lucinda Damage, Dartford, Kent, 1902
W
hile all characters and events in this book are fictional, I have taken several real examples as inspiration.
The London Anthropological Society, which shared many members with the Royal Geographic Society, was at the forefront of Britain’s
imperial ventures. Its inner circle was the so-called ‘Cannibal Club’, and its members, amongst others, were Sir Richard Burton,
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Sir James Plaisted Wilde (Lord Penzance), General John
Studholme Hodgson, and Charles Duncan Cameron. It was overwhelmingly Tory and reactionary, and supported research and enquiry
into outdated scientific practices and behaviours devoted to securing their place in the world. They were also the most prolific
producers and consumers of pornography. At three guineas a volume, and involving arcane, unmecha-nised methods of printing
and binding, pornography was not for the working class in the 1860s.
The pornographer Frederick Hankey owned several volumes of pornography bound in human skin. Richard Burton promised him that
he would bring back a piece of human skin from his trip to Dahomey in 1863 (stripped from ‘
une négresse vivante
’ so that it would retain its lustre); fortunately, he failed in this mission.
1
Monckton Milnes wrote in his commonplace book in 1860: ‘There is no accounting for tastes in superstition. Hankey would like
to have a Bible bound with bits of skin stripped off live from the cunts of a hundred little girls and yet he could not be
persuaded to try the sensation of f—ing a Muscovy Duck while its head was cut off.’ In the same entry he also mentions Hankey’s
‘extreme desire to see a girl hanged and have the skin of her backside tanned to bind his
Justine
with’.
2
The Ladies’ Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery is based on an admirable organisation that did much good
work towards the abolition of slavery in America. Frederick Douglass was one of the most high-profile slaves whose freedom
was secured by the Society, and there were many fugitive and freed slaves living in the British Isles in the 1850s and 1860s.
I by no means wish to suggest that all those involved in the Society were as hypocritical as Sylvia Knightley, but it is fair
to say that by the middle of the nineteenth century England was suffering from ‘philanthropy fatigue’, and such endeavours
were often sentimental and impractical, a balm to one’s conscience with little call to action. They gave otherwise idle gentlewomen
a certain prestige and, quite simply, something to do. However, the American Civil War provided an opportunity for such organisations
to regroup and exert a final push on the institution of slavery, and towards the end of the Civil War they made sent significant
contributions to the American Freedman’s Aid Movement.
3
For nineteenth-century white British attitudes to interracial relationships between black men and white women, and the objectified
sexual desire for black men as manifested by Lady Knightley, I recommend Ben Shephard’s
Kitty and the Prince
(London, Profile, 2003).
Sir Charles Locock, the Queen’s physician
accoucheur
, and President of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in London, announced his use of potassium bromide to treat patients
with epilepsy in 1857, after a presentation by Edward H. Sieveking (my great-great grandfather) at the Society. In 1861, J.
Russell Reynolds published a landmark monograph, entitled
Epilepsy: Its Symptoms, Treatment, and Relation to
Other Convulsive Diseases
.
The use of clitoridectomy to treat, amongst other things, dysuria, epilepsy, hysteria, insanity and sterility (which were
all believed to have their origins in heightened sexuality) was prescribed and conducted by Dr Isaac Baker Brown during the
1860s, and is mentioned in
The Lancet
. It was vehemently rejected by much of the medical profession, and Dr Baker Brown was vilified and forced out of the London
Gynaecological Society.
Dora’s dream, of a thousand members and one pound a week for women in the bookbinding trades, was shared by Miss Isabel Forsyth,
secretary of the Manchester and Salford Society of Women in the Bookbinding and Printing Trades. It was not realised until
1917.
Many of the erotic books mentioned – and quotations therefrom – are genuine; those that I have invented are as true as possible
to the spirit of the real thing.
1 Fawn Brodie,
The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton
, Eland, London, 1986, pp. 220, 239
2 Richard Monckton Milnes,
Houghton Commonplace Books
, Trinity College, Cambridge, p. 212, quoted in Ian Gibson,
The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of
Henry Spencer Ashbee
, Faber and Faber, London, 2001, p. 31
3 See Douglas A. Lorimer,
Colour, Class and the Victorians
, Leicester UP, Leicester, 1978
M
y thanks to:
Anna Balcombe, Emma Cameron, Tara Crewe, Professor Mirjam Foot, Peter Harvey, Dr Maria Iacovou, Eliza Kentridge, Dr Jeremy
Krikler, Robert Priseman, Paul Rumsey, Ally Seabrook, Boris Starling, David and Judy Starling, Mike Trim, Guy and Robina Taplin,
Jane Wilson; Arzu Tahsin, Holly Roberts and their team at Bloomsbury; my wonderful agent Stephanie Cabot and her team at the
Gernert Company.
A complete bibliography of works consulted during the writing of this book would be lengthy and dull, but I must credit Judith
Flander’s excellent and exhaustive book
The
Victorian House
, (HarperCollins, London, 2003) for informing much of the backdrop of everyday life throughout the story, and Lynda Nead’s
provocative
Victorian Babylon:
People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London
(Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005), which introduced me to Holywell Street and the pornographic industry.
Lee Jackson’s ever-growing www.victorianlondon.org is a masterful compilation of primary sources, which held so many answers
to my questions about the minutiae of living in London in 1860 that at times I found myself consulting it daily. I would also
like to thank Malcolm Shifrind for his fine Victorian Turkish Bath Project, at www.victorianturkishbath.org, and the online
expertise of the VICTORIA and SHARP lists, especially Ruth Croft, Michel Faber, Sheldon Goldfarb, Ellen Jordan, Patrick Leary,
Jan Marsh, Sally Mitchell, Heather Morton and Michael Wolff.
Finally, I must mention Jeni Bate and Karen Jefferies, without whom my children would have been much less happy while this
book was being written.