I'm absolutely thrilled with the below post because one of my absolute favourite things about this book was the setting of Victorian London! Rob Lloyd Jones talks a bit about the places that Wild Boy encounters during this book and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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Wild Boy’s London
Thanks for having me on Fluttering Butterflies.
I
wanted to write something nice today but all I could think of were
horrible things. You see, there’s nothing writers love more than
horrible things, especially when they’re forced upon our heroes. The
hero of my new book – Wild Boy – faces more than his unfair share of
unpleasantness. For starters, he’s a performer on a Victorian freak show
(he’s been covered in hair since birth), which were very horrid places.
Wild Boy’s framed for murder, though, he finds himself hunting the real
killer across London, in places that are even worse. So I thought I’d
tell you about a few of them, to bring a bit of darkness to your day.
Smithfield
This
part of London is known for the same thing today as it was in Wild
Boy’s time – meat. Back then, though, meat wasn’t just sold in
Smithfield. It came there alive – bleating and squawking through the
narrow, twisting streets. Then it was killed. Imagine the noise!
The shrieks of slaughtered beasts and the cries of market men. The scene
changed once a year when Smithfield hosted the country’s biggest and
rowdiest festival, Bartholomew Fair. The area was crammed with freak
shows, sideshows, drinking tents and little stages. When Wild Boy
reaches Smithfield, Bartholomew Fair is in full swing, and somewhere
among the crowd lurks a killer.
Anatomy colleges
A
much grimmer form of butchery was practiced in London’s private anatomy
colleges – medical schools where students carved open corpses to study
their insides. These had dissection tables rutted with knife marks,
buckets for dripping organs, and rags on the floor to soak up whatever
unpleasantness seeped from the bodies. But when Wild Boy breaks into one
of these colleges he discovers a secret chamber in which a far, far
darker form of science is taking place...
Technically
London didn’t have any sewers in the early 19th century. There were
lots of tunnels – some as old as when the Romans lived in London. But
these were built to carry rainwater, not toilet waste, from the streets.
Instead, people were supposed to tip their business into cesspits under
their homes. Really, though, it was easier to connect your cesspit to
one of the drains and pour its reeking contents underground. In fact why
not dump everything else in these tunnels too? Industrial chemicals,
fish guts, dead cats and dogs...You’d think Wild Boy would be safe
hiding down there in the stinking darkness. But he’s not alone. There
are also bounty hunters and bloodhound dogs...
Graveyards
There were, unbelievably, places in London where the smell was even more troubling than the sewers.
Graveyards.
London’s
population trebled during the first half of the 1800s. The more people
lived there the more people died there. Parish churchyards became
crowded and then overcrowded. Bodies were buried two, three, even four
deep. The reek of rotting corpses grew unbearable. There are reports of
zombie-like hands breaking through soil! Things got better in the 1840s,
after new cemeteries were built beyond the city centre, but when Wild
Boy’s search for the killer leads him to St Mary Somerset churchyard,
the place still stank of its dead.
These
are just a few of the nasty locations that Wild Boy visits on his hunt.
But there is another place where he discovers something even worse. It’s a very particular and a very famous place. Only I don’t want to ruin the surprise...
Very intriguing post, I am quite eager to read the book now!
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