Home - The Jack Vincent Papers

10 Jul

It was strange to think that a domestic withdrawing room, even one as ostentatiously furnished as Lady Blessington’s, was the acknowledged centre of all that was considered brilliant in literature and art in those days. But it was, and to be seen there was worth a thousand copies shifted in a week. Ainsworth seemed quite comfortable in this new environment, although his stentorian Lancashire accent was as foreign there as my own by then fluent Cockney. I had...

0 Comments

3 Jul

Chapter XIV

by Stephen Carver

The Serial

Years passed. And so, as they say, I grew to manhood. By the early part of next decade, I was quite the man about town, and as in love with the city as is any Londoner who was not born there but came in from the provinces. I was in the prime of my life, and fancied that I cut quite a dash. I dressed well, and like Cruikshank I was a bit of a dandy. My dramatic...

0 Comments

26 Jun

Chapter XIII

by Stephen Carver

The Serial

My mysterious benefactor had, of course, been Egan; Bob bloody Logic himself. Having built up all my courage to walk through that Plutonian gate and face the Modern Babylon on my own, he was waiting for me across the street, learning against a knacker’s wall and smoking a long cheroot. ‘Well if it isn’t London’s latest literary sensation,’ he said, revealing both rows of his glittering teeth in a broad grin, and thereby saving me from the indignity...

0 Comments

19 Jun

Chapter XII

by Stephen Carver

The Serial

In addition to reformers and evangelisers, another species from the outside well known to us was the tourist; dandies in the underworld who treated a visit to Bedlam, Newgate, or the Marshalsea as a social occasion. Sometimes they would even turn up with hampers and make a day of it. And if prisoners were willing to be observed in their natural habitat then boons might be bestowed upon them, in the form of food, drink or money. My...

0 Comments

12 Jun

Chapter XI

by Stephen Carver

The Serial

The buildings and courtyard of the Marshalsea had a much more pleasant aspect than usual the morning after the first night I spent in the bed of Flashy Nanse. Even though I had not slept, my senses seemed strangely acute as I quit her room and walked softly into the frozen dawn. I had left my lover sleeping heavily, and had taken leave of her soft warm body only by a tremendous effort of will, based upon...

0 Comments

5 Jun

Chapter X

by Stephen Carver

The Serial

I had now run out of pirates. Bill had not been forthcoming with any other books or broadsheets, and there was not a single line of print to be found anywhere in the damn prison. It seemed to me that my father and I were the only literate occupants of the entire place, but between us we had but one book. I lobbied the turnkey for literature, and he promised me that he would see what he...

0 Comments

29 May

Chapter IX

by Stephen Carver

The Serial

I had thus far avoided the tap room for it was intimidating to me, full of rough men and rougher women. I had no experience of such places beyond reading of them in picaresque novels. I was well out of my depths and I knew it. Although I had fooled Scott and Ainsworth by strongly implying that I was fully grown in our correspondence, there was no faking adulthood in the real world, the universe outside the...

0 Comments

22 May

Chapter VIII

by Stephen Carver

The Serial

I was barely fourteen years old when my father and I were arrested for the crime of destitution. The long walk to London had enfeebled us to the point of near insensibility, and that we found my uncle’s house at all was close to miraculous, just as inebriates often seem to be guided safely to their beds by angels, having subsequently no memory of the journey. There our luck had ended. We were received at the side...

0 Comments

15 May

Chapter VII

by Stephen Carver

The Serial

All told, after my mother died it took about eighteen months for things to fall apart. My sister survived, thanks to the priceless ministrations of Mrs. McGuire, who was as a mother to the child for the first year of her life, after which she was weaned and I tentatively assumed the duty. It was unanimously agreed that the baby should be named for her mother, whom she uncannily resembled, especially about the eyes. She was thus...

0 Comments

8 May

Chapter VI

by Stephen Carver

The Serial

The machine people continued, nevertheless, to toil. They had rescued what assets they could from the shop without arousing suspicion, and they set about working from home. My father now took the long walk to the market, and I began my apprenticeship. The work was hard on the eyes and the fingers, but I took to it readily enough for I had watched my father labour for years. I enjoyed the precision of measuring, cutting, felling and...

0 Comments