Good lines: in Victorian London

 

    "Outside in Tite Street the evening draws on. Lights go on in upstairs windows, smoke rises from the ancient chimneys to mingle with the darkening air. The faint melodious clatter of a pianoforte can be heard somewhere, as if to say, 'Why, d---, despite it all we can still be comfortable.' Cats begin to appear around the area steps and athwart the chimney pots, their eyes full of nocturnal purpose. Meek papas, thither conveyed from clerking offices in High Holborn and Fleet Street, are met at their front doors, relieved of their gloves and clerkly appurtenances, regaled with mutton chops brought in hot and hot and given babies to dandle while their supper beer is fetching. Such is the press of servant girls and stout matrons around the door of the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium that Little Sills, the celebrated comic tenor, engaged that evening to delight the company with the ballad of Villikins and his Dinah, and arriving early in a tall hat and a sateen waistcoat, grows suddenly sanguine of his prospects and imagines a roseate future in which he is summoned to Windsor, appears before the Lord Mayor's banquet and can introduce Mrs. Sills (at present with the children in Hoxton) to, as he puts it, 'the kind of society that a woman of her refinement, sir, demands.'"

From Kept: A Victorian Mystery by D.J. Taylor.

Comments

[Sarah Fox]

I loved Kept - and the eggs, and the little mouse! Wonderful use of Victorian imagery and a good story too.

[Cornflower]

I'm loving it so far!