And then, when I was writing, Once Upon a Marquess, a random minor character appeared on the screen and I called him Crash. I don’t know why. It’s not exactly a name one would normally use. But as soon as I wrote the name—Crash—I figured out that his real name was Nigel, and everything sort of followed from there.
The word “bicycle” was in use back in 1866, although rarely; I’ve chosen to use the word “velocipede” almost exclusively because the velocipedes of 1866 were dissimilar from today’s bicycles in a number of ways. For one, there was no bicycle chain in most production models. There were definitely no shocks. And bicycle helmets are an incredibly recent invention. Nonetheless, the bicycle was an amazing invention, and it became all the rage late in the 1860s. Crash would have been perfectly positioned to take over the craze.
Britain was an empire, and for a very long time, one of the chief products that empire sought after was labor. It was involved in the African slave trade for a very long time, until slavery was outlawed in Britain itself in 1772, followed by the abolition of the trade in slaves in 1807, and finally by slavery in British colonies in 1833. This did not end the thirst for cheap labor. In lieu of African slaves, Britain would impress sailors (both domestically and internationally). It was one of the global players engaged in what was colloquially known as the “pig trade”—which involved Chinese laborers who were indentured servants, where some of them entered their period of servitude more involuntarily than others. And of course, Britain ruled over numerous colonies where cheap, abundant, exploitable labor was used—India being one of them.
These workers were often impressed into doing grunt work for the merchant marines. As you can imagine, worker safety was not highly valued, and workers who were injured on the job back in those days had little by way of regulatory protection. The global empire of Britain is littered with stories of sailors from around the world being marooned in various ports. If they weren’t able to work to the rigorous standards of an ocean-going vessel, they might find themselves far from home with no way to return.
Britain didn’t obtain racial data in its census for quite some time, and so reconstructing questions like how many people of color were in Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century is difficult. But how many is not relevant to the question of their general existence: They were absolutely there, and it’s probably reasonable to assume that those who ended up in London for one reason or another tended to band together.
When I was doing research for Talk Sweetly to Me, I read an essay about how a photographer in the 1920s who was taking pictures of working-class people discovered a tiny neighborhood in Bristol near where the slave ships had docked over a century before. In this area, nearly everyone was some shade of brown, the result of people who had been stranded generations ago and had intermarried with each other and the local population and various sailors of every ethnicity who had wandered by.
When I wrote Crash and his aunt and their group of friends, I was imagining that sort of Bristol neighborhood in London. Given the number of people from around the world who ended up stranded in London, such a place would have to exist.
When Crash says that much of England would refer to his aunt and his friends as whores, this is not meant to be descriptive as many people would understand that term. One of the main problems that authorities had in the 1860s is that it was difficult to corral the spread of STDs because it was hard to tell who was involved in sex work and who wasn’t. This is in part because upper-class English gentlemen were jerks who thought they could have sex with anyone poor, and in part because prostitution just didn’t work the way they thought it did. There were some people who only earned a living in prostitution, but a huge number of people who might be classified as sex workers back then had a regular job, and then maybe a man or three on the side. Many authorities basically assumed that anyone working jobs that earned little enough money had to be involved in prostitution on the side.
Finally, a note on two items mentioned in the book. The velocipede really did start to become popular at the end of the 1860s, and it has basically never stopped since, despite significant advancements in transportation technology. Crash would have gotten his foot in the door right at the start. Crash is also (basically) right when he says that you’re more stable on a bicycle the faster you go. For the same reason, tops wobble less when you spin them faster. It’s a physical phenomenon known as precession. I didn’t want to go into too much detail, because obviously the faster you go, the more you can hurt yourself, and bicycle helmets were a shockingly recent invention, compared to the history of the bicycle.
Second, there is such a thing as a carbolic smoke ball, and that (like other random things that show up in my book) is a joke between me and ten thousand law students who will all say, “ARGH, CARBOLIC SMOKE BALLS!” There’s a famous case from 1892 involving an advertisement for a carbolic smoke ball.
The basic idea behind a carbolic smoke ball was that the ball contained carbolic acid, which interacted with the air and filtered it. The makers of the ball claimed it would filter out, say, influenza germs. Like about 95% of the purveyors of Victorian-era medical equipment, they were totally wrong. The actual Carbolic Smoke Ball Company featured in the 1892 advertisement didn’t exist in 1866, but upon research, I did find references to early inventions that were basically carbolic smoke balls that were period. So I hope you enjoy it.