DARK HORRORS BELOW THE SURFACE OF THE VICTORIAN WORLD...

The grand chandelier and the mirrors once fixed in arched niches around the walls may now be long gone, but the metal barley twist pillars remain to support an ornate balcony. And it was during my visit, while seeing the light reflected on those that I felt myself almost transported in time, almost able to see the Victorian crowds, to hear the clatter and bang they made. The laughter. The shouting. The pop of champagne corks, all echoing around the walls from hall’s Victorian heyday. 

But, of course, any beauty and elegance – and Wilton’s is very elegant despite its delapidated state – cannot hide the uglier truth that any mirrors of the past would also have reflected back. There would surely have been violent scenes such as fighting and thieving and drunkenness, not to mention those transactions made between gentlemen and prostitutes – although John Wilton, the hall’s proprietor, was always very keen to ensure that any whores who worked his hall were of a finer variety than those to be found in the Haymarket. 

In Elijah’s Mermaid, the excesses of the Demi-monde – all the Sin and Inebriation...the Lust and other such Wickedness - are witnessed at first hand by Elijah Lamb, a naïve young man from the countryside who has come to London to take up employment as a studio assistant for the artist, Osborne Black. But before going to live in Osborne’s house, Elijah visits Wilton’s hall – escorted there one evening by his somewhat older and louche Uncle Freddie; an occasion which Elijah will later recount in his diary – 

I found many tableaux of classic themes which provided me with a window into a certain Victorian world. This albumen print by William Lake Price, I used as a basis for some of Elijah’s own photographs – when he is just beginning to experiment with his camera and uses his author grandfather as a model for Quixote. 

I also found the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, and really it was her distinctive style that I imagined Elijah creating of his grandfather and sister in their Herefordshire country home – and those images then being admired by the artist, Osborne Black. 

For these glimpses of a time and place that would otherwise have been quite lost we have to thank men such as Henry Fox Talbot, a founding father of the English art – or science – of photography. And here, I’d like to quote something that Fox Talbot once wrote of photography, and these exact words are quoted in the pages of Elijah's Mermaid where they have a great significance as the mystery, art, and magic unfolds – 

Old Victorian photographs do possess something magical. (And if this is a subject that interests you, then I recommend a visit to Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, which is where Henry Fox Talbot once lived and worked, and where there is now a museum dedicated to the science and art of photography). To see those old pictures of captured light, however faded or grainy they are, allow us the luxury of almost being time travellers - to really see the people then – what they wore – the glint of life in an eye – whereas, in previous ages, we can only look at portraits, and those were often idealised. So we think we know what Shakespeare looked like, but we know exactly how Dickens appeared, whether that be in his prime, or as the exhausted and over-worked man here depicted shortly before his death. 

Such intimate portraiture – and the way it can illicit the most poignant emotional response – may also be why I’ve never been tempted to write about earlier historical times. Even so, I do realise that for many people, even the Victorian era already seems too ancient – too far away for us to reach. 

Or is it? When researching on the internet, I came across this self portrait! My first thought was how similar this young man was to how I imagined Elijah Lamb. But then I was fascinated to find that this daguerratype – a photograph on glass named after its inventor, the Frenchman Louis Daguerre – was also the very first portrait of a human being, rather than a landscape or stationery object. 

It was made in 1839 by Robert Cornelius who already had a great interest in the science of photography and the chemistry that was involved in improving the speed of exposure times. Here he is in Philadelphia, outside his family’s lamp-making shop, and despite this picture having been taken nearly two hundred years ago, Robert Cornelius looks to be as real as any other young man you might happen to pass on the street today. You could almost reach out and touch him, tap him on the shoulder, talk to him, get to know him. To me, he is very much ‘alive’. 

In the fictional ‘reality’ of my novel, the artist hires Elijah Lamb to photograph the backgrounds that are used in his painted portraits – which is what many artists did at that time – using the new technology to aid them in their paintings, so that if the weather proved to be inclement, or when a view changed with the passing of time, the painter could have an aide memoir and continue to work in his studio. 

One famous example of this is the Millais painting of Ophelia– an image that is also referred to in my novel. Most of us know the story of how the model, Lizzie Siddal, very nearly caught her death when she posed in a bath of cold water for hours. But, as well as the beautiful, pale ‘dead’ face, there is the most astonishing detail in the water and the plants in this picture – exactly the sort of detail that my artist, Osborne Black, is obsessive about in his own work. 

But returning to the subject of writing - and the subject of serendipity – whereas my chance visit to Wilton’s led to the writing of The Somnambulist, the main inspiration for Elijah’s Mermaid dates back to the time of my childhood – when – at around seven years old, I went to the local library and took home an edition of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby. 

I found that story magical, with all of the promising allure of any ‘Once upon a time...’ or the ‘far far away of another land...’ But, as in the best children’s literature, this Victorian story goes deeper than I could have realised back then. It contains a message for adults too – especially those Victorians who read when it was first published in 1862, when they would have been perfectly aware that Charles Kingsley was making a social and political stand regarding the dreadful conditions in which many children were forced to work. Indeed, when reading again as an adult, as well as the basic storyline, I found pages of ranting sermons, and lists of all the ills in the worlds – some of which would be very offensive today regarding other races and creeds. 

My childhood version was surely abridged. I don’t remember those lists at all. But I do remember the pictures - the enchanting illustrations by the artist, Jessie Willcox Smith. And, for those who do not know the tale, Kingsley’s book is all about little Tom, an orphan who works as a chimney sweep, who, when trying to wash himself clean in a stream, happens to fall asleep and drown – only then to wake and find himself reborn as a water baby. In this new underwater existence, Tom has a great many adventures. But, for me, it is the earlier chapters that have always lingered in my mind – the ones that convey the darkness of the world in which the orphan lived – all the crime and filth and poverty – and how that contrasted with the life of a rich little girl called Ellie, who looked just like an angel and who lived in the purest, whitest world. 

In Elijah’s Mermaid, those two worlds are reimagined when I have one orphaned child called Pearl being raised in a London brothel, while two others (Elijah and Lily, who also happen to be twins) grow up in an innocent countryside idyll with their grandfather, an author of fairy tales. Those two worlds are kept entirely apart until all three reach puberty and visit a London freak show tent, into which they have been lured on the hope of seeing a 'real mermaid'. Whatever they chance to view – and it is rather dramatic – it is at that point their paths converge, just as others so many often did in nineteenth-century society, where nothing was ever as black and white as the moralists would have liked to think. 

Decadence was common, if you only knew where to look for it. Just as men sought out whores in the music halls, they might also find them on the streets, in the theatres or pleasure gardens...and often with girls who were underage. When the age of consent was only twelve this conjures the most fearful scenes. 

It is almost unbearable to think that in the Victorian age it was not an uncommon thing for parents to play the parts of pimps, not necessarily with evil intent, but because they had no option but to find the money with which to provide the food and clothes for their families: to pay for a roof above their heads – or else to starve and be destitute. When it came to such stark realities – a choice between matters of life and death – even though it may disgust us now, prostitution was often viewed as being the lesser evil. 

But more evils lurked in sin and sex. And wherever prostitutes were found, and whatever age they might happen to be, a very real consequence of any such encounter was that of contracting venereal disease. 

This is the wax model of the face of a man who has died of syphilis – that infection being rampant in nineteenth-century England. Today, we have antibiotics which can cure such infections easily. Then, there was no hope at all. For the Victorians – a culture who were already obsessed with death – it was true to say that sex could kill. Such was the hysteria that at one point a law was passed so that any woman on the streets could be arrested and physically examined for showing signs of the disease. Not men, you note – just women! And, as you can imagine the system could often be abused, with complaints from many an innocent soul who was apprehended when walking alone. 

Those who were infected could be placed in isolation, in medical institutions such as the London Lock Hospital – a cross between a prison and a convalescent clinic where it was hoped that sinful souls were saved and prepared for heaven. While those patients suffered hellishly, kept  away from the public eye, well out of sight and out of mind, the highly infectious but physically well continued to spread the vile disease. 

Many an innocent bride would be infected on her wedding night, after which the disease could lie dormant for years, hiding in the blood’s circulatory system and finding its way to a child in the womb. In the later stages it could produce some terrible lingering symptoms – when apart from the weakening of the heart, lesions would affect the bones, the skin and the nervous tissues. Any ‘cures’ on offer then were almost as bad as the illness itself, which led to the popular saying,‘One night of love with Venus...a lifetime spent with Mercury.’ 

Mercury – what we now understand to be a toxic metal – was taken in the form of pills, or smeared on the flesh as ointment, or else inhaled in a steam bath. It might alleviate some of the symptoms but was most certainly not a cure. It had some horrible side affects, resulting in the loss of teeth, or ulcers or further damage to nerves. And it very often led to death. Yet, with no other option, those who had the means to pay could use it to try and delay their fates. But ultimately, all were doomed. Syphilis was the great leveller. It did not discriminate between rich, or poor – or famous. 

This is a photograph of Bram Stoker. The author of Dracula was a long time sufferer of the disease – even though he was said to have met his end from physical exhaustion – that popular Victorian euphemism when referring to venereal disease. But I always think, when you know that fact, you might consider differently the nature of Bram Stoker’s book – seeing anew in its pages a description of a corruption of the blood: a corruption which can be passed on even when those affected are ‘dead’ – a horrible and immortal scourge. 

And here is Mrs Beeton who, before I knew any better, I always imagined as someone officious, portly, and middle-aged – something of a dragon of the range rather than a Domestic Goddess. In fact, she died before she was thirty, and from complications of childbirth when her health was much weakened by syphilis. She had been infected by Samuel, her husband. No doubt he was unwittingly trapped when during his bachelor years he would have sought fulfillment in the only way he could – the only way offered to many young men of a certain social class back then, which was via the services of prostitutes. 

In Elijah’s Mermaid, Mrs Hibbert is the madam of the brothel in which the child, Pearl, is raised – who was found when only a baby, when floating in the river Thames. Mrs Hibbert conceals her face in veils and apart from the obvious, those veils symbolise the depravities of the Victorian demi-monde - all the evils concealed in darkness, that contrast between the day and the night - between the pure and the corrupt.

This is another painting by Millais. It is called A Somnambulist and for those of you who have read my first novel, you will know of its significance. But in Elijah’s Mermaid there is another character who also takes to walking out upon the night-time London streets. 

Sleepwalking was a popular theme in Victorian Sensation literature, indicting ignorance or deception, or the mysteries of the occult. Some say that the Millais painting was based on La Sonnambula, a Bellini operetta – the success of which could be compared to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals now. But personally, I prefer to think that it was The Woman in White, the novel by Wilkie Collins, that provided the true inspiration for such a darkly brooding scene, where – being at odds with all rigid Victorian sensibilities – a young woman is in peril, walking alone in the dead of night, her virtue and reputation at risk, never mind the risk that she will fall to her death on the rocks below.

But then, as as many Pre-Raphaelite paintings are full of symbols and ‘stories within stories’, I think we might very well assume that those are the rocks of moral doom! And speaking of rocks of moral doom – this painting which is called A Mermaid, by the artist John William Waterhouse – is one that greatly inspired me when writing Elijah’s Mermaid: in particular for the character of Pearl, the girl who spends her childhood in a house where the walls have murals of mermaids. There, she is pampered and cossetted and kept in relative innocence until, at the age of fourteen, she is sold to the highest bidder. In this case that man is Osborne Black, the artist who has an obsession with water, and who, from that point onwards, constantly wishes to paint his muse in the form of a nymph or mermaid. 

Both paintings are dramatic. Both encapsulate so much about Victorian literature, which was anything but stuffy or dry, often relishing in scandalous themes, such as illicit affairs, bigamous marriages, or divorce – the stigma of which, in reality, could lead to ruin and social disgrace. There were orphans or illegitimate children. There were stolen or lost inheritances. There were women gone mad and confined to asylums, and murders and other audacious crimes – not to mention the vengeful ghosts upon which the truly ‘sensational’ plots might twist and turn so dramatically that the reader was left not only thrilled but often left panting in anticipation and desperate for more to come. 

It is due to their enduring appeal that many Victorian classics are still being adapted for our screens. There is something about the simmering tension, the menace of murky, candle-lit worlds that I always find alluring. Even as a little girl I loved to watch all the old black and white films that were shown on Sunday afternoons, when I’d snuggle up on the sofa with my mother and aunts, and lose myself in dramatic tales such as that of Madame Bovary, or Wuthering Heights, or The Barretts of Wimpole Street, or Jane Eyre, or Great Expectations (which I saw again very recently, and found just as wonderful as I’d remembered). And above you can see the haunting face of Ingrid Bergman in Fanny by Gaslight.

I suppose it was no surprise when I set my own stories in such a world, and with many real settings that are still existence now to provide me with inspiration.

In Elijah’s Mermaid, just as in The Somnambulist before, I have taken a Herefordshire setting – in this case the village of Kingsland where I spent a great deal of my youth, where a house that was once the rectory has a stream at the end of its garden. It is here that my foundling children, Lily and Elijah Lamb, one day take a jam jar in the hope of catching a water baby. And when that particular venture fails they make a grotto from stones and shells, hoping instead to create a place that might lure a mermaid to come and live. 

Meanwhile, the novel’s real ‘mermaid’, Pearl, is shivering and frightened while having her portrait painted in a subterranean cavern, where the walls are covered with millions of shells. This setting is based on the Margate Shell Grotto which, if you have not been there, I highly recommend. It is the most astonishing place, and one of the greatest mystery as no-one knows to this very day when, or why, the grotto was made. 

Chiswick House is another glorious setting, and one which I know very well from those years I spent living in that part of London. In my novel, it is in these beautiful gardens that Pearl is sketched as a water nymph while she lies beside the temple pool. But what I didn’t know until mid way through writing this scene was that, while researching asylums for another aspect of my plot, I discovered that in the Victorian era Chiswick House had also been leased out as such an institution. 

The house is no longer used as such but has been restored to its original glory, which dates back to 1729 when the third Earl of Burlington spared no expense in the building of the villa and garden which were used to display his art treasures, and also for entertaining friends. Each successive family member then made their own mark on the estate. (At one point the gardens housed a menagerie of exotic animals.) It was also leased to the Prince of Wales, until, in 1893 that tenure fell to the Tuke Brothers who created their asylum, where among other wealthy patients there resided Millais’ sister in law. The troubled Sophy is the girl who features in some of Millais' works, and to whom I hope the Doctor Tukes were kinder than those wicked souls who appear in Elijah’s Mermaid– in which I explore another sort of Victorian demi-monde: that being the way in which the sane could be hidden away behind locked doors, and on little more than the whim of a husband or other male relative, who could pay two doctors to sign the forms which then left the deceiver free to pursue affairs of the heart elsewhere, or perhaps to steal an inheritance.

There is another location featuring in Elijah’s Mermaid which has now been forever lost to us – and that is the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens which existed in Chelsea, on The Thames, which is very near to Cheyne Walk where my brothel, The House of the Mermaids, is set. This picture by Phoebus Levin shows the gardens as I imagined them on the day when Lily and Elijah Lamb visit there and meet with Pearl, when all three hope to see a mermaid, and find themselves confronted instead by something truly hideous.

This is a Fee-jee mermaid. Many such monstrosities were produced in Victorian times, to be displayed in travelling shows. A taxidermist’s hybrid (usually half-monkey and half-fish), the body parts were preserved and stuffed, and then joined together to make one whole.

It’s hard to imagine anyone being convinced that these horrors could be real. But, I think we need to remember this was a time when people were generally more naïve. And this was also when Darwin’s work about evolution was coming to light – so perhaps it was not such a stretch of the imagination to think that it might be possible for such a creature to have evolved. 

I know, when I was a little girl, I would have liked for nothing more than to find that mermaids and water babies really could exist. Of course, I was not the only one. There is a lovely story relating to the Kingsley’s novel, when the five year old grandson of the scientist Thomas Huxley saw an illustration of a water baby caught in a bottle and then wrote this charming letter – 

To which his grandpater wrote this reply: 

For Lily and Elijah Lamb, seeing the Fee-jee mermaid is of enormous importance, not because it makes them believe in such things, but because it is the turning point when their hopes are crushed and they grow up, to leave such childish dreams behind. As for Pearl, something of a freak herself, having been born with webbed toes on her feet, she thinks of the mother she never knew, who drowned around the time of her birth, and who tried to kill her child as well when she jumped to the Thames from old Battersea Bridge. 

And that is when my novel begins – and also where this article ends, with an extract taken from the book, just after a newspaper cutting – an article from The Times newspaper which is dated May 1850, and headed MYSTERIOUS DEATH. It tells of a woman found in the Thames, who is wearing a long black cloak, adorned with black ostrich feathers, and who has no injuries to her person, except for the signs of a recent childbirth and the suffocation of her lungs, which leads the coroner to pass what was then the all too common verdict of: ‘Found Drowned’ – as depicted in the painting above by the artist George Frederick Watts. 

After that newspaper cutting we begin to read the narrative of Pearl, and have our first brief introductions to the Madam and the Pimp who share her home in Cheyne Walk -