AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am indebted to a number of books for having opened the door to a Victorian age so like our own I am almost persuaded I remember it.

Matthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians (2002) challenges notions of a prudish era enslaved by religion and incomprehensible manners; rather, he shows us a nineteenth century of department stores, big brands, sexual appetites and a fascination for the strange.

An obscure book by an anonymous Essex rector, Man’s Age in the World According to Holy Scripture and Science (1865), suggests a clergy that did not see faith and reason as mutually exclusive. It amuses me to think of it on William Ransome’s shelves.

In Victorian Homes (1974) David Rubinstein collates contemporary accounts of housing crises, venal landlords, intolerable rents and political chicanery; they would not look out of place in tomorrow’s newspapers. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) was compiled by Rev. Andrew Mearns, and is readily available online. It draws spurious parallels between poverty and lack of moral virtue that may strike the reader as familiar from modern political rhetoric.

Those in the habit of picturing the Victorian woman as forever succumbing to fits of the vapours under the gaze of a bewhiskered husband can do no better than to read Rachel Holmes’s biography of Eleanor Marx (2013). In its preface the author says: ‘Feminism began in the 1870s, not the 1970s.’

In researching the treatment of tuberculosis – and in particular its effects on the mind – I am grateful to Helen Bynum, both in correspondence and in her book Spitting Blood (2012). Meanwhile Richard Barnett’s The Sick Rose (2014) shows the troubling beauty that can be found in sickness and suffering.

Roy Porter’s majestic work The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (1999), his overview of surgical history Blood and Guts (2003), and Peter Jones’s A Surgical Revolution (2007), have all been invaluable in framing the mind and work of Dr Luke Garrett. Inaccuracies and elisions in the medical aspects of this novel – as in all others – are of course mine alone.

The nature of Stella Ransome’s spes pthisica was profoundly influenced by Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, an exquisite meditation on desire and suffering, filtered through a lens of blue.

Strange News Out of Essex, the pamphlet alerting villagers at Henham-on-the-Mount to the presence of the Essex Serpent, is real. You may see both the 1669 original and Miller Christy’s 1885 facsimile at the British Library; a copy of the facsimile is also held in the library at Saffron Walden, Essex, where it was first printed. The titles of each of this book’s four parts are taken from the text of the pamphlet.

Mary Anning’s ‘sea-dragons’ are displayed in London’s Natural History Museum.