SOME REFERENCES
This is a work of fiction, but many contemporary and later publications helped me toward a fuller understanding of fireworks and their chemistry and history, including The History of Fireworks, Alan St. Hill Brock, Harrap, London, 1949; Fireworks: A History and Celebration, George Plimpton, Doubleday, New York, 1984; The Chemistry of Fireworks, Michael S. Russell, Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, 2000; The Incompleat Chymist, Jon Eklund, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., 1975; The Pyrotechnist’s Treasury: The Complete Art of Firework-Making, Thomas Kentish, American Fireworks News, Pennsylvania, 1993; Artificial Fireworks: Improved to the Modern Practice, Robert Jones, London, 1776; The Great Art of Artillery, Kazimierz Siemienowitz, trans. George Shelvocke, London, 1729; The Art of Making Fireworks , Frederick Bruhl, London, 1844; Pyrotechnia, or A Discourse of Artificiall Fireworks, John Babington, London, 1635.
Reading about eighteenth-century life included The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754-1765, ed. David Vaisey, Oxford University Press, 1984; London Life in the 18th Century, M. Dorothy George, Peregrine, London, 1985; Dr John-son’s London, Liza Picard, Phoenix, London, 2001; Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings, trans. I. and G. Herdan, Cresset Press, London, 1966; The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Lawrence Stone, Penguin, London, 1990; English Society in the 18th Century, Roy Porter, Penguin, London, 1991; English Dialect Words of the Eighteenth Century, ed. N. Bailey, London, 1883; Housekeeping in the 18th Century, Rosamund Bayne-Powell, John Murray, 1956; The Art of Cookery, Hannah Glasse, Prospect Books, Totnes, U.K., 1995.
Peter Lineburgh’s The London Hanged, Verso, London, 2006, was a particular inspiration, as was The Psychoanalysis of Fire by Gaston Bachelard, Beacon Press, Boston, 1968.