NOTES ON THE TEXT

Most of the places in the London of Chain of Gold are real: there was a Devil Tavern on Fleet Street and Chancery, where Samuel Pepys and Dr. Samuel Johnson drank. Though it was demolished in 1787, I like to think it lived on as a Downworlder haunt, invisible to mundanes. The poem Cordelia recites when she is dancing in the Hell Ruelle is from Sir Richard Francis Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, published in 1885. The Dick Whittington stone is real, and located at the foot of Highgate Hill. Layla and Majnun ( ) is an epic poem in Persian/Farsi, written in 1188 by the poet Nizami Ganjavi. I have used the exonym “Persian” to refer to the language Cordelia and her family speak throughout, as Cordelia and Alastair did not grow up in Iran and “Persian” was the way anyone speaking or thinking in English in 1903 would have thought of the language. I’d also like to take this moment to thank Tomedes Translation and Fariba Kooklan for help with the Persian in this book. The excerpts of Layla and Majnun are taken from James Atkinson’s 1836 translation, which is the one most likely for Cordelia to have owned.