A Q&A with Hope C. Tarr, Author of Irish Eyes (2023)

Welcome back to the Secret Victorianst for a different sort of blog today—an interview with fellow historical novelist, Hope C. Tarr. You might remember Hope from the virtual panel event I did with Lady Jane’s Salon, the NYC-based romance readers’ club she co-founded, back in 2020. Next month, Hope’s debut historical novel Irish Eyes will be released by Lume Books, and I know readers of the Secret Victorianist are going to love it. Irish Eyes opens on the Aran Islands in 1898 and takes readers on a journey, with its heroine Rose, to the streets of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century New York City. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Hope and enter for a chance to win a copy of her novel below!

SV: How did you first get the idea for your novel, Irish Eyes?

Hope: Irish Eyes is very much a love note to my Irish ancestors, who came to America on the coffin ships at the height of the Great Hunger. For years, I batted around the idea of writing something with an Irish heroine. Finally, on a hiking trip to Western Ireland in (gulp) 2008, I stopped at the famed Cliffs of Moher and gazed across Galway Bay to the trio of islands known as the Arans, and Rose O'Neill’s story began taking shape in my mind. Back in Manhattan, running along the Hudson River, looking out to Ellis Island and Lady Liberty helped further flesh out Rose’s story.

SV: How did the book evolve from your first to your final draft?

Hope: Whoever first said that “writing is in the rewriting” was wise indeed. Irish Eyes changed so many times. Originally, I had a prologue, in fact two prologues, which I really loved. The first prologue began with Rose in 1922 at mass narrating her life story to the parish priest. The second prologue started with Adam, Rose's future love interest, at the Battle of San Juan Heights during the Spanish-American War. I've actually shared that prologue on my History With Hope Substack! To pick up the pacing and start in the thick of the story, both of these very different prologues ended up on the chopping block. A la Stephen King, sometimes you really do have to murder your darlings. 😉

But by far the biggest shift in molding the story was also the scariest. At the onset, I'd written the entire book in my trusty go-to perspective: third-person. But something was missing. The story wasn't... gelling. As a reader, I'd always adored novels written in the first-person—du Maurier’s Rebecca, anyone? —but I'd never had the courage to try first-person POV myself. Once I did and rewrote the entire book in Rose's voice, it all began coming together.

SV: How did writing historical fiction differ from the genres you've written in in the past?

Hope: After wonderful years spent writing 20+ romances for Penguin, Harlequin, and Macmillan, I was ready for a BIG change. Ready to push the boundaries of genre and do a deep dive into history, in this case, mostly early twentieth-century history. Ready to write the sort of big, sweeping historical novel that I'd grown up devouring. Books like Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, technically romance, where you get to spend time with the characters, who evolve over not days/weeks/months but years. In other words, a saga. For a while now, “saga” has been something of a dirty word in American publishing. For that reason, I suspected I was going to have a tough time selling this book, especially as it would be my historical fiction debut, which probably explains why it took me so long to finish it and then shape it into a shoppable manuscript. That being said, if I had to sum up the experience of writing Irish Eyes and bringing it to this point, that word would be “freeing.”

SV: Do you have any tips for writers of historical fiction who are trying to make their books relatable to modern readers without being anachronistic?

Hope: Admittedly, this can be a tough balance to strike, especially when keeping in mind younger readers, who approach fiction with a very different set of expectations than I did at that age. With Irish Eyes, as with any historical fiction, I try to step back and ask myself, “how critical is this point/word/phrase to telling a great story?” If the answer is “not so much,” I may leave it out rather than veer into anachronism. But I also think it's important to understand how we've collectively evolved over the eras. And not evolved. So many of the issues addressed in Irish Eyes—immigration, the roles and rights of women, labor reform, income inequality—are eerily reflective of our present moment. History is cyclical, not linear. It's important to bear in mind that we are making "history" every waking moment.

SV: Your novel, while it's one woman's story, touches on major world and local events, e.g., WWI and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. What was your process like for naturally weaving these references into the novel?

Hope: The biggest challenge in writing Irish Eyes was to decide what historical events not to include. (Back to murdering those darlings!). The book covers 24 years in Rose's life. While the 24/7 news cycle is a recent phenomenon, newspapers were a big, busy feature of turn-of-the-century life. In writing the novel, I put in, and later took out, several events that, while interesting, wouldn't have directly impacted the immigrant community of my fictional heroine and her growing family. For example, the assassination of President McKinley (September 14, 1901) gets a brief mention while the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 25, 1911, in Lower Manhattan, gets a half-chapter.

SV: You're a New Yorker yourself. How did this help your process in writing the book?

Hope: Living here as I've been privileged to do, the city's history is all around, waiting to reveal its stories to those open to knowing them. I was here in 2011 for the centennial commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire at the Brown Building (formerly the Asch Building) where the factory was housed in 1911. The long-anticipated memorial was dedicated in October 2023. The adjacent Washington Square Park began as a potter's field when a series of yellow fever outbreaks starting in 1797 caused the city morgues to overflow. Human remains still rest beneath the elegant fountain and curated plantings. McSorley's Old Alehouse, NYC's oldest continuously operating bar (1854-present), which I recently revisited for another History With Hope episode, serves the same cheddar cheese and onion platters it did back when the great illusionist Houdini stopped in for a post-performance pint.

SV: What historical novels have you read and loved recently?

Hope: I'm very keen on World War II at the moment, likely because I'm working on the sequel to Irish Eyes, set in occupied Paris. I recently finished, and loved, Good Night From Paris, by Jane Healey, a fictional account of the real-life Hollywood screen actress, Drue Leyton, who was living in Paris with her French husband when the Second World War broke out. Rather than return home to the States, Drue accepted a position broadcasting from Paris to the (then neutral) US. Under the Nazi occupation, she repeatedly risked her life working for the Resistance.

SV: What should we look forward to seeing later in the American Songbook Series?

Hope: As I cagily slipped in above, I'm at work on a sequel, Stardust! The second book in my American Songbook series, Stardust follows Rose's granddaughter, Daisy, into the late 1930s and 1940s. Fashioned in the image of her indomitable Irish grandmother, Daisy will take the reins of Rose's Kavanaugh's Department Store when the time comes. In preparation, Rose sends Daisy to Paris to apprentice with the iconic couturier and fragrance entrepreneur, Coco Chanel. In shadowing the mercurial Chanel, Daisy is thrown into the thick of a glittering and treacherous cast of characters—American and British expats, the Parisian haute-monde, war correspondents, and German spies—all of whom congregate at the Hotel Ritz. While she's there, the Nazis invade and occupy Paris. Like the world-famous Chanel No. 5, a blend of 80 secret ingredients, no one in occupied Paris is what they at first seem. 😉

Hope C. Tarr

SV: Thank you so much for speaking with me, Hope, and for giving me the chance to read Irish Eyes ahead of publication. 

Hope: Thank you so much for having me! I hope readers will enjoy Irish Eyes as much as I loved writing it.

Would you like to win a signed paperback copy of Hope C. Tarr’s Irish Eyes, alongside a signed paperback of my own historical novel, Bronte’s Mistress? If so, sign up to my monthly email newsletter here. Anyone who subscribes to the newsletter between 21st November 2023 and 7th December 2023 (the Irish Eyes release day!) will be entered into a random draw to win both books. Already signed up? Spread the word to friends and family who might want to win and stay in touch with me via Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Thomas Hardy’s “How She Went to Ireland”: An Analysis

I’m being a poor Victorianist today and straying outside the nineteenth century to analyze one of Thomas Hardy’s lesser-known poems, “How She Went to Ireland,” which was written in response to the death of writer Dora Sigerson Shorter in 1918. 

While Hardy is now remembered best for his great nineteenth-century novels (think: Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1891) and Jude, the Obscure (1895)), he ended his career as a thoroughly modern poet. His verse often touches on the loss of religious faith as a harbinger to an emotionally challenging new century, while his language has a simplicity which can be hard to reconcile with the wordy descriptions we associate with Victorian prose.

Bringing you another poetry analysis!

“How She Went to Ireland” reads as follows:

Dora’s gone to Ireland

Through the sleet and snow;

Promptly she has gone there

In a ship, although

Why she’s gone to Ireland

Dora does not know.

That was where, yea, Ireland,

Dora wished to be:

When she felt, in lone times,

Shoots of misery,

Often there, in Ireland

Dora wished to be.

Hence she’s gone to Ireland,

Since she meant to go,

Through the drift and darkness

Onward laboring, though

That she’s gone to Ireland

Dora does not know.

One of the first things we notice about the poem is its fairy-tale or fabulistic quality, which is in keeping with Dora Sigerson Shorter’s own writing (she was also a poet and one fascinated by Gaelic myth and culture). Contributing to this are the poem’s frequent repetitions (“Ireland”—four times, “Dora”—five times, “gone”/”go”—six times) and the subtle variation in sentence structure that draws our attention and demands analysis. “Why she’s gone to Ireland/Dora does not know” in the first stanza is replaced by “That she’s gone to Ireland/Dora does not know,” confirming for the reader that Dora is dead, not just confused about the motive for her journey.

Similarly, the Ireland of the first stanza seems like a tangible place, reachable by ship and plagued by realistic weather conditions. But, from the second stanza, the Ireland written about here takes on a mythic quality. Dora, a proud Irish nationalist, “wished to be” in the Ireland that she’s now gone to, meaning the name of the country now seems to refer to an afterlife—albeit one that, in a post-faith world, the dead, like Dora, can have no consciousness of. 

A few other details are worth paying attention to. The phrase “shoots of misery” in the second stanza conjures up the violence of Ireland’s recent past (this poem was written only two years after the 1916 Easter Rising), as well as the imagery of budding plants (“shoots”) and physical sensation (the shooting pain we may feel in our nerves).

Hardy is also pointed in his use of line breaks. The words “though” and “although” are separated from the clauses they are grammatically part of, introducing a pervasive doubt reminiscent of Hardy’s better-known poems, like “The Darkling Thrush” (1900). The sing-song rhyme scheme (ABCBAB) and childlike language of “How She Went to Ireland” may lull us into a false sense that the story we’re being told is simple, but the poem is ultimately unsettling. Death is now merely “drift[ing]” through “darkness,” since we lack the guiding light of religious belief to light our way.  

What to do you make of this short but interesting Hardy poem? I’d love to hear from you. Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want to get monthly updates from my blog? Sign up to my email newsletter here.

Neo-Victorian Voices: Things in Jars, Jess Kidd (2020)

The crowded, murky streets of Victorian London. A detective. And a missing child. Pretty standard fare, you might think, for a historical mystery set in the nineteenth century, but Jess Kidd’s Things in Jars (2020), the latest novel under review in my Neo-Victorian Voices series, is anything but expected.

Things in Jars, Jess Kidd (2020)

First there’s her detective, Bridie—fearless, flame haired and ugly bonneted. Then there are the protagonist’s sidekicks—a seven-foot maid, with a penchant for a woman snake charmer, and a tattooed boxer, who may be either a ghost or a drug-induced hallucination. Christabel, the child Bridie has been employed to find, isn’t ordinary either. She has teeth like a pike. Snails, newts and other nasties trail after her. It’s said she can drown enemies even on dry land.

Things in Jars isn’t for the weak-hearted or stomached. But that doesn’t mean the novel offers only darkness. There’s a humour to the story, which is a wonderful complement to its macabre subjects, and an empathy to the shifting point of view, which plunges us into many characters’ motivations, feelings and desires, even those of a raven wheeling high above the scene. Kidd’s use of language is also astonishing. Her vocabulary is vast but her words always well chosen. Her Irish characters’ voices are expertly rendered—believable and lyrical without relying on cliché or non-standard spelling to convey dialect.

The fantastical elements of the story stood out for me in particular. I’m not a huge reader of historical fantasy, though I have reviewed a few favourites for this blog in the past (e.g. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus). But Kidd’s creatures are unique and genuinely uncanny, as unnerving as any creation straight from the pages of a nineteenth-century Gothic.

Things in Jars is a wonderful book to read if you want to stray outside your normal genre choices. The novel takes a familiar historical setting and makes it alien, gives us a satisfying conclusion to its central mystery while leaving us with more, and gives readers a creature of the ocean depths that belongs in neither The Little Mermaid, nor The Shape of Water.

Which novel would you like to see me review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, on novels written in the twenty first century, but set in the nineteenth? Let me know, here, on Facebook, on Instagram or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And if you want to read about my novel, Bronte’s Mistress, which was edited by the same editor as Things in Jars, click here and/or sign up for my monthly newsletter below.

Get updates on my novel - Bronte's Mistress

* indicates required

Email Address *

The Poor Clare (1856), A Novella by Elizabeth Gaskell

I don’t usually include spoilers in my reviews, but The Poor Clare is obscure enough that in today’s post I’ll be throwing caution to the wind.

The work is a long short story/short novella by Elizabeth Gaskell, who’s better known for novel-length works including North and South (1854) and Mary Barton (1848), and for her biography of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which inspired my own forthcoming novel, Brontë’s Mistress.

The Poor Clare first appeared in serialised form in Household Words, a publication edited by Charles Dickens. Perhaps as a result of this, it alternates between feeling rushed and sorely in need of editing. There are no paragraph breaks, for instance, except in dialogue, and the development of the plot is uneven.

The story is narrated by an unnamed lawyer, who finds himself involved in ‘extraordinary events’ of a decidedly uncanny flavour. Employed to track down the rightful heir to a sizeable estate, he tracks down a strange old Irish woman, Bridget Fitzgerald, whose fervour for Catholicism is matched with a proclivity for meddling with magic. Bridget’s beautiful daughter, Mary, has disappeared years before, leading to her mother’s unhappiness and isolation. But now her child—if she had one—is next in line for this windfall inheritance.

What starts out like a mystery soon turns to a ghost story. Our lawyer tracks down the child, Lucy, more through luck than strategy, and promptly falls in love with her. But there’s a hitch. Lucy is suffering under a peculiar curse. She has a demonic double, which is hell bent on dogging her steps, ruining her reputation and driving men from her life. What’s more, it transpires that it was her own grandmother, Bridget, who unwittingly cursed her.

Gaskell writes Gothic well. Examples:

‘I was sitting with my back to the window, but I felt a shadow pass between the sun’s warmth and me, and a strange shudder ran through my frame.’

‘In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of a body it belonged.’

The tone felt most similar to Behind a Mask, an 1866 story by Louisa May Alcott, writing as A.M. Barnard, which I reviewed back in 2013. And the doubling motif is suggestive of earlier (e.g. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)) and later (e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)) Gothic, as well as sensation fiction tropes. Notably, Laura, the heroine of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which appeared three years later, also suffers due to her near resemblance with another.

The Poor Clare takes an unexpected turn when our characters end up in war-torn Antwerp (only Bridget’s service to strict religious order, the Poor Clares, will be enough, it seems, to undo the curse). It’s tempting to imagine that Gaskell was inspired by the Brontës to depict a Belgian setting.

All in, although set earlier, Gaskell’s The Poor Clare is delightfully Victorian, with lots to recommend it despite its flaws. Short enough to read in one sitting, it could also serve as a great introduction for teens to Gothic fiction or as a quick-to-digest comparison text for students focusing on some of the more canonical novels in the genre.

Which lesser-known Victorian novels/novellas/stories would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know—here or on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And keep up with every facet of my life (reading, writing, work and life in NYC) via Instagram.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Wonder, Emma Donoghue (2016)

Many will know Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue from her much-lauded Room (2010)—the contemporary tale of a woman trapped by a predator and bringing up her son in captivity. But Donoghue’s works when viewed as an oeuvre otherwise have a decidedly historical bent. There’s Slammerkin (2000), inspired by an eighteenth-century murder, The Sealed Letter (2008), the story of an 1864 divorce case and Frog Music (2014), the tale of a nineteenth-century cross-dressing frog catcher. And then there’s her 2016 The Wonder, which I’m writing about today—a novel set in the 1850s that pits the English rationality of a nurse trained under Florence Nightingale against a village of superstitious Irish peasants, convinced they have a miracle in their midst.

The Wonder (2016)

Eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell hasn’t eaten in months, or so her parents claim. Is God sustaining the child with manna? Or is this a hoax, a medical oddity, something more sinister? Lib Wright, our protagonist, is determined to be vigilant and to get to the bottom of the mystery, but she doesn’t expect to grow fond of her devout and unworldly patient, or that she will have to confront her past—the secrets she is hiding of her own.

Donoghue’s cast of characters is small and her setting a tiny village, with one store-cum-drinking place, surrounded by bog. I was unsure how the simple premise would play out over the length of a novel but she’s masterful at building tension and at suggesting the monotony and repetitions of a nurse’s ‘watch’ or ‘vigil’, while keeping readers turning the pages.

Emma Donoghue (1969-)

The Ireland of the mid-nineteenth century leaps off the page, but, most unsettling, it’s not unthinkable to imagine a similar story unfolding in the country’s rural communities today. There’s much that’s recognisable—the pervasiveness of religion, which mingles with folklore and myth, the hostility towards outsiders, the culture of secrecy, suffering and martyrdom.

Much as I enjoyed the novel, there were two slight disappointments. First, the love interest character—a journalist—is under-developed, convenient for plotting purposes but lacking the nuance of Lib, Anna and others. Second, nothing really forces Lib to reassess her prejudices about the zealots she’s surrounded by. It wasn’t that I was hoping for a supernatural explanation but I would have liked a moment of self-revelation, where Lib rethought some of her assumptions.

Overall The Wonder is a quiet sort of historical novel, with drama and action saved for the final pages. It’s a novel about caregivers and patients, cynics and believers, and, more than anything, our complex relationship with food, our bodies, appetite. Donoghue has a gift for uncovering tales from the past, which have resonance today.

Which twenty-first century novel, set in the nineteenth, would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Theatre Review: The Judas Kiss, David Hare, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York

I first saw David Hare’s 1998 The Judas Kiss in 2012 at Hampstead Theatre in London. Four years on, the production, directed by Neil Armfield, has come to Brooklyn, with four of the seven-person cast unchanged, including Rupert Everett as a charismatic, but ultimately broken, Oscar Wilde.

The play is in two acts. The first is set in 1895, just before Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment. Robert Ross (Cal MacAninch) begs Wilde to flee the country while Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie, (Charlie Rowe), pins his hopes on a last minute reprieve from the Home Office.

Everett and Rowe as Wilde and Bosie

The second act skips forward in time to after Wilde’s imprisonment, as he and Bosie live their last few months together in poverty and obscurity near Naples. Hare has more room for imaginative speculation here than in the first act, where much of the evening’s drama is a matter of historical record. His Bosie has moments of redemption, despite his general unreasonableness and it is left to him—not Wilde—to give a vocal defence of homosexuality, despite Wilde’s eloquence on the subject in the here elided trial.

In Act One, light relief comes from Wilde’s quips (delivered with panache by Everett) and the antics of the hotel staff (two of them begin the production in flagrante, setting the tone for a production that doesn’t shy away from repeated full frontal nudity). In Act Two, an Italian fisherman, Galileo (Tom Colley), plays a similar role, but, while the audience still titters, his tryst with Bosie has a darker edge, reflecting as it does on the now muted, and static, Wilde.

Jessie Hills, Elliot Balchin and Alister Cameron as the hotel staff

Watching the production again, four years on and in a very different theatre, many of my reactions were similar. Most notably, on both occasions, I found there was a predictability in Wilde’s character, and his witticisms, which makes the play feel familiar even to a first time viewer. Everett’s characterisation is spot on, but you can’t help but wonder about the play—what is this adding to our understanding of Wilde, his arrest and Victorian attitudes to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’? The first time I watched the play though, the tragedy of Ross’s character hit me much harder—watching in Brooklyn it definitely seemed this was the story of Wilde’s tragedy, and Rupert Everett’s play.

The Judas Kiss will be performed at BAM until June 12. You can purchase tickets here.

Do you know of any plays in NYC you think the Secret Victorianist should review? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

The Importance of Not Being Earnest: The Opening of Oscar Wilde’s Most Famous Comedy

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the most famous comedic plays in English and one that has enjoyed popularity since its first performance in 1895.

The play is admired for its quotable quips, farcical plot twists and exaggerated characters, but this week I’ll be looking at what Wilde does in his opening scene to engage and entertain his audience right from the start.

The cast of the 2002 film adaptation

Anyone who has ever acted in a comedy, done stand up or been part of an improv group will know that getting the first laugh is all-important. It settles the audience, establishes the mood and allows those watching and the performers to relax. But how to set up a joke so quickly when the characters and situation are new to your audience? Here’s how Wilde does it:

Morning-room in Algernon’s flat in Half-Moon Street.  The room is luxuriously and artistically furnished.  The sound of a piano is heard in the adjoining room.

[Lane is arranging afternoon tea on the table, and after the music has ceased, Algernon enters.]

Algernon.  Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?

Lane.  I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.

Two lines of dialogue are all it takes for Wilde to make us laugh, but why do we?

First up, he opens with a comedic type—the sarcastic servant. Lane’s position is established immediately by what he is doing (‘arranging afternoon tea’) and how Algernon addresses him. His response to his master (‘I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir’) is sardonic but shrouded in politeness, bringing us instantly into the dynamic between these characters.

Second, Wilde ensures that we side with Lane from the outset, by placing us in an analogous position to him.  When the curtain rises, an audience hushes and is much more attentive than it will be in the middle of the play, when a lot may be going on. Those watching must assess what they can see and hear to be sure they are following. Because of this they will have been listening (like Lane) to Algernon’s piano playing quite intently and the idea of someone wilfully not listening will appear all the more ridiculous.

Once you’ve won your first laugh there is still work to be done to bring an audience on the journey with you. Introducing important character names early, without being overwhelming, is important in this. Over the next stretches of dialogue we are given the names Lane, Lady Bracknell, Ernest, Algy, Gwendolen and Cecily, gifting us with a run down of the cast and establishing the characters’ relationships to each other.

As well as setting up the cast, Wilde also hints at the laws of his universe. This is a world where masters are intrigued rather than angry about servants taking their champagne:

Algernon.  Oh! . . . by the way, Lane, I see from your book that on Thursday night, when Lord Shoreman and Mr. Worthing were dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed.

Lane.  Yes, sir; eight bottles and a pint.

Algernon.  Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne?  I ask merely for information.

Lane.  I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir.  I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.

And where characters are unabashed at their hypocritical behaviour:

Algernon. Please don’t touch the cucumber sandwiches.  They are ordered specially for Aunt Augusta.  [Takes one and eats it.]

Jack.  Well, you have been eating them all the time.

Algernon.  That is quite a different matter.  She is my aunt. 

Another way in which Wilde pulls his audience in, using a technique that is the hallmark of his comedy, is by reversing the familiar, especially through altering common phrases and proverbial maxims. Here are a couple of examples from the first scene:

Algernon. Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?  [Wilde applies to the ‘lower orders’ a role usually designated to the ‘higher orders’.]

Algernon. Divorces are made in Heaven [Wilde applies the language of marriage to divorce.]

Once you’ve set up your first laugh, introduced your most important characters, established rules for your world and pulled your audience in by building on, or reversing, information that is familiar to them, there’s one more thing that most comedies do—they set up a running joke, a comedic through line, which will keep the audience laughing even as further complications are added. In The Importance of Being Earnest, the cucumber sandwiches fulfil this role and it is these, rather than early gags about the piano or the institution of marriage, which the audience is most likely to remember.

What else do you think Wilde does in the early scenes of the play to pull his audience in? Why is it that Earnest remains so popular today? I’d love to hear your opinions so comment here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley (2015)

The latest novel I read as part of my neo-Victorian series was Natasha Pulley’s remarkable debut, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street – a fantastical tale of time manipulation, terrorist bombings, and – er – a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto – published this year.

Pulley’s novel has garnered a fair amount of attention – and has significant appeal at shelf, due to David Mann’s beautiful cover design. But my feelings as a reader, when I reached the end, were a little mixed.

What I loved

The setting: London is at the heart of Victorian literature and, up until now, this has been the case for much neo-Victorian literature too. But The Watchmaker of Filigree Street isn’t just about London. Several chapters take place in nineteenth-century Japan – a fascinating setting I haven’t seen dealt with much before. I thought it was really smart how Pulley chose to write a story linking both locales, allowing her to play on tropes of Victorian London, while introducing something new.

The octopus: A Maths textbook I had as a child featured a robotic cat sidekick I longed to adopt. In The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, the eponymous watchmaker, Keita Mori, has a mechanical octopus, which had a similar effect on me. The octopus isn’t sentient. It runs on randomised gears, making its actions unpredictable (a crucial element in the intricate plot). But it is undoubtedly one of the novel’s best characters, surprising and amusing us from its first appearance to its last. The choice of an octopus is also a fun nod to the neo-Victorian/steampunk aesthetic.

Character diversity: Pulley’s characters aren’t all male, straight and white. Yes, this should be a given, but sadly it’s not - and it was refreshing to see a writer choosing a diverse cast, but making them act and face obstacles in ways that feels believable for the time period (it’s 1883).

The complexity: As with much sci-fi and fantasy dealing with the question of time, Pulley’s plot takes some puzzling over, but she definitely pulls it off. She has a gift for complex descriptions and explanations, and is able to maintain a lay reader’s interest even when writing of mathematics, telegraphy, or musical theory.

Natasha Pulley

What disappointed me

The pacing: Sadly, the early stages of the novel drag. The protagonist, Thaniel Steepleton, leads a monotonous life, moving between his grim lodgings and dull civil service job. While it’s definitely important to establish Thaniel’s world before we are introduced to the oddities of Mori’s shop – flocks of mechanical birds, test tubes of magical rain – there definitely could have been some cuts here, and you may find it slow going for the first 80 pages.

Characters/Relationships: Another reason the octopus was the most appealing character was because the others were a little infuriating. Mori I liked, but Thaniel was hard to warm to and Grace Carrow – another POV character – had few redeeming features. Grace was the most disappointing feature of the book. A female physicist smart enough to dupe Mori, who has powers allowing him to affect the future, should have been a wonderful addition, but I was frequently baffled by her motivations. The novel’s main romantic relationship also comes out of nowhere, which is a shame, as so much of a romantic subplot comes from the will they/won’t they drama – which could have been really effective here.

The Irish context: The inciting incident in the plot is an attack on Scotland Yard by Irish Republican group Clan na Gael and I was really interested in how Pulley was going to weave the Irish political situation in the 1880s into her story. However, unlike the Japanese portions, those sections dealing with the Irish threat rang less true and didn’t feel so well researched.


Have you read The Watchmaker of Filigree Street? I would love to know what you thought! Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

The Secret Victorianist at Brooklyn Historical Society

Two weekends ago, the Secret Victorianist visited the Brooklyn Historical Society to see two exhibitions relevant to anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century history.

Brooklyn Historical Society

The first, In Pursuit of Freedom – Brooklyn Abolitionists (on show until Winter 2018), celebrates the lives of the unsung heroes of Brooklyn’s anti-slavery movement.

Laid out chronologically and covering the period from the end of the Revolutionary War to post-Civil War Reconstruction, the exhibition uses written testimonials, maps, paintings, photographs and census records to explore the lives of black and white Abolitionists who lived in Brooklyn - the centre of New York slavery due to its high levels of agricultural labour.

The six towns of Kings County

What I particularly enjoyed about the exhibition was seeing the geographical changes in Brooklyn over the course of the nineteenth century and how the black communities that lived there had a large impact on the history of the area and country.

It was also fascinating to learn more about slavery in the North and the continued tensions about the issue, even post-Abolition - especially since the most many of the most famous examinations of the American slave trade, from a non-American perspective, focus on the South. New York, for instance, was home to anti-Abolition riots, and spats of extreme violence between former slave and Irish immigrant communities, who were often competing for the same jobs.

'In Pursuit of Freedom - Brooklyn Abolitionists'

The exhibition also features a rare copy of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863).

Meanwhile, the second exhibition - Personal Correspondents: Photography and Letter Writing in Civil War Brooklyn (on show until Spring 2016) – focuses on the 30,000 Brooklynites, from all backgrounds, who fought for the North in the Civil War, through the lens of their letters home.

The well-curated and interactive exhibit gives you insights into life on the battlefield and the lives in Brooklyn these men had left behind, drawing you into personal stories of loss and the human impact of war.

'Personal Correspondents: Photography and Letter Writing in Civil War Brooklyn'

The Society’s beautiful building (constructed in 1878-1881) is a wonderful setting to learn more about the area’s history in, and there are also exhibits focusing on more modern features of life in the city – from a history of New York City’s Disability Rights Movement to a plotted history of the city’s sewerage systems. I would definitely recommend a visit.

Where in New York would you like to see the Secret Victorianist visit next? Let me know – here, in Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!