I grew up reading and loving Victorian novels. At the age of ten, I set my first “novel” in London’s gothic fog: hundreds of composition book pages about the misadventures of orphaned Oliver Twist-ish mice. The fog served a dual purpose. It was atmospheric, and it obscured much of the city, so I didn’t have to worry about details. (The fact that all of the characters were rodents also helped explain the geographical vagueness.) I traveled to England for the first time decades later, when I started writing The Duke Undone. There are a few mice in The Duke Undone, but they aren’t the main characters. To do justice to my human Victorians, I committed myself to collecting the details that would enable me to evoke the setting and time period.
Lucy was the character who came to me first. I grew up reading Victorian novels, and I also liked to look at prints of broody, mysterious paintings by Pre-Raphaelite artists. I had the idea to write a romance that followed an artist in Victorian London. Anecdotes about the Pre-Raphaelites tend to focus on the dynamic between male geniuses and their female models. I knew I wanted to flip the expected genders of the artist and the muse, and that Lucy would be a painter.
This meant I had to learn about art education in late nineteenth century London, particularly as it pertained to women. I decided to make Lucy a student at the Royal Academy Schools. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, the Royal Academy of Arts in London was the defining force in English art. The most well-regarded English artists trained at the Royal Academy Schools, showed in the Summer Exhibitions, and became Academicians, receiving privileges that helped them further consolidate their reputations and the academic tradition.
By the 1880s, the Royal Academy didn’t completely dominate the scene, and many artists were bored by its aesthetic; venues such as the Grosvenor Gallery provided artists with alternatives. But the Royal Academy retained its influence, and a painting hung “on the line” could make an artist’s career. Lucy dreams of becoming another Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler, who became famous overnight after showing The Roll Call in the Summer Exhibition in 1874.
Women were admitted to the Schools in 1860, but even in the 1880s they didn’t receive equal instruction. In The Duke Undone, Kate and Lucy are petitioning for life classes. Female students did petition (repeatedly) for permission to draw from the partially draped model. They didn’t receive it until 1893. Robert Yardley’s patronizing attitude toward female students wouldn’t have been uncommon. To portray Yardley’s condescension, I relied heavily on G. D. Leslie’s book The Inner Life of the Royal Academy, which I read while researching at the Royal Academy of Arts’ library. Leslie, writing in the early twentieth century, claimed that pretty girls make the best students (and he called the admission of women an “invasion”). His descriptions of the Royal Academy are very informative and often very pithy. I borrowed a line of his and put it in Kate’s mouth; Leslie is the one who disparaged the bulk of submissions to the Summer Exhibition as “piteous pictures of Yorkshire seaports.”
While I was at the library, I also had the opportunity to read through the archives, where I saw original petitions and a copy of the school laws from 1882. I got a chance to roam the basement hallways of Burlington House and to stand in the classroom where Lucy meets Anthony (when he’s conscious). All of which was immensely helpful as I visualized and dramatized daily life at the Schools.
To develop the plot surrounding Lucy’s eviction and Anthony’s inheritance, I consulted books and articles on the municipal politics of late nineteenth century slum clearances and Victorian estate law. I found The Government of Victorian London, 1855-1889: The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation by David Edward Owen particularly useful, as well as The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Andrew Mearns and William C. Preston. I wanted to get the social and legal history “right,” or right enough that nothing I wrote was strictly impossible or anachronistic.
Along the way, I fell into plenty of research rabbit holes. Every now and then, a writing day would be swallowed up by a bottomless new fascination; for example, corpulent cattle art. In the early nineteenth century, wealthy farmers commissioned portraits to celebrate and advertise their biggest, girthiest ox and heifers. Some of these portraits—such as John Boultbee’s painting of the Durham Ox—circulated widely as engravings, and on decorative ceramics. Of course, Lucy’s talents as an artist lie elsewhere. But drawing cows might have been a good plan B.