The Dustshoveller's Gazette Has Moved Home!

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Thanks!

My New Year Reading Resolutions

I had a great haul of books in my Christmas stocking. Here's a list of what I got from family and friends and will be reading over the next few months. Some of them are for general interest, some work, and some just for fun.

First of all, I was given Mark Ormrod's Edward III, one of the Yale English Monarchs series. Over 20 years in gestation, it's a massive book, as is needed for a King who ruled for 50 years and whose reign shaped the fourteenth century both at home and abroad. I wrote my doctorate on Edward III's court and household in the first third of his reign so I'm dying to read what I imagine will be a great book by a great historian.

Next up is Claire Tomalin's biography of Charles Dickens that has received rave reviews. Now it's actually 2012 - Dickens' bicentenary - I'm looking forward to diving in as soon as possible to give myself some background for the celebrations.  PD James' Death Comes to Pemberley has me licking my lips, as does the secret santa present I received on New Year's Eve: Decadence Mandchoue - a modern edition of the scurrilous Chinese memoirs of the Edwardian scholar Sir Edmund Backhouse, who claimed to have slept with both Lord Salisbury and the Dowager Empress of China, among many others (though not at the same time, I think).  Are they fake or not?  I'll soon find out.

Back to some more serious books to tick off: A Short History of Parliament edited by Clyve Jones and John Tosh's Why History Matters. Which reminds me that I have still to finish John Maddicott's Origins of the English Parliament 924-1327. To my deep shame, this marvellous book got sidelined last year when all my spare time was taken up with, well, you know what...

I bought myself David Abulafia's The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean just before Christmas, one of the surprise hits of last year. It's another massive doorstop - hard to read on the train - so that'll be for evenings and weekends only. Over the holidays I've also been reminded of the difference in meaning between 'historic' and 'historical' by Simon Heffer's Strictly English, a rather humourless grammar refresher.

What's still on my wish list but not in my hand? Well, I keep meaning to read Simon Winchester's Atlantic: Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, and Helen Castor's She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth (probably good ebook downloads for my commute), and I have a few unread monsters on my shelves which have been languishing there for too long.  I'd also like to take a look soon at Thomas Penn's Winter King, which breaks new ground on Henry VII (the essential but forgotten Tudor), and Mathew Lyons' book The Favourite, on Walter Raleigh.

That's enough to be going on with, I think.  In the words of the title of a final stocking filler anthology, I am Buried in Books.  What books did you get for Christmas?

The Good History Book Checklist

If you want to choose a great read this Christmas for you or someone else, here are my top tips for finding a good 'un (and I'm talking here about non-fiction, not historical novels):

1) Check the biog of the author on the book jacket.  How do they describe themselves?  What's their platform? Do they sound credible?  When was the last time they published a book?  Producing a book like clockwork every year doesn't leave much (or any) time for original research.

2) Does the author have a track record of specialisation in the period or topic in question?  Or does their list of other publications indicate that they cherry-pick subjects from all over the place, skimming across the surface and not doing anything in depth?

3) Call me old fashioned but I do like a good footnote.  Personally, I find histories without them frustrating and suspicious. (Sorry to postmodernists). If I want to know more, or to follow a lead, then I can - with a footnote.  And I can tell what is new research, and what is anecdotal or apocryphal.  Similarly, you can see immediately if there is too much dependence on a small number of secondary works, and all you are going to get is reheated history.  Footnotes which cite only titles and no page numbers are, well, a bit odd, in my opinion - it seems lazy and superficial, and doesn't save any space.  Sometimes books don't have footnotes at all because of space constraints imposed by publishers.  But that itself makes me wonder about the seriousness of the publisher too.  One way round this is that some authors put footnotes and references on their websites.

4) Flick to the back.  What does the bibliography look like? I avoid books which have only used about ten books in their preparation, but equally a long bibliography of books which are 30 years old is not a good thing either.  A  sign that a book may be compelling, with lots of new ideas, will be a bibliography citing:

• manuscript (ie archival) sources, including foreign archives, where appropriate.  That means the book should contain some original work.
• many academic journal articles (of a recent date) and/or a number of recent unpublished PhD theses.  That's because here will be the latest ideas on a topic; the author will be up to date, or at least aware of current trends and new discoveries.
• recent publications, up to a year before the book in question is published ie up to the time the manuscript went to the publisher.

5) Look at the acknowledgements.  Who do they thank?  Lots of libraries, archives and other specialists?  Good.  In addition,  I'm usually nervous of any author who has used researchers to find material for them.  Why aren't they doing themselves?  Unless you're very old or infirm there doesn't seem to be a good reason not to do your own legwork; not least because only you can spot connections when researching and make serendipitous links. If an author's used a researcher to help them identify and translate odd bits of material in a tricky language, then that's OK, but if they are seriously specialising in a particular country's history it does make you wonder why they haven't learnt the language first. 

6) And finally, of course, have a read of the introduction or opening chapter.  Is it gripping right at the start?  If not, then you may be in for a bit of a slog.

7) Enough from me - what are your top tips?  Post your comments below!

Happy reading!

A Modest Proposal

So, while I'm waiting for the OUP copyeditor to contact me about deadlines for edits to The Day Parliament Burned Down, I'm working on mini-pitches to my agent Bill for the next book.  Though we've discussed some ideas face to face, I'm a bit diffident doing this off the top of my head and feel much more comfortable writing ideas down and making them punchy (probably goes back to a mispent year working in a PR agency straight after university).  So far I've got five paragraph-long pitches for books, some Parliamentary, some going back to my roots as a medieval historian.  I have another five or so in my head that I'm working on.  Once we've got a list, it'll be a question of discussing, rejecting, refining, or expanding.  Book No 2 will need to be something I know a bit about already, plus something which hasn't been written about before (or which needs a modern interpretation), plus something the market wants, plus something which I am prepared to spend two or more years of my life working on.  That's quite a tall order.  If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to write them on a postcard below...

Gainful Employment

Here is a little bit more about my day job (quite a lot of people seem interested in this!) which - along with my colleagues - is a great source of inspiration, posted by the lovely Peter Hay on his blog. 

Also, you can view my contribution to Parliament Week on YouTube, where I talk about some of my favourite records in the Parliamentary Archives.

Brother of the more famous John

Tate Britain is currently showing a wonderful exhibition called Apocalypse - on the work of John Martin, who specialised in huge and wildly popular paintings of biblical and ancient world disasters.  I highly recommend it.  During my research John Martin hovered on the edge of my reading, because I became very interested in his equally notorious and insane brother Jonathan (1782–1838), who caused the fire at York Minster in 1829.  In fact, at that fire, someone in the crowd was said to have commented how the scene was just like one of John Martin's paintings (but this may have been poetic licence by the journalist). 

“The Martins are all wildish in the head” opined Thomas Carlyle of this strange family, and today there would have been a specific psychiatric diagnosis for brother Jonathan.  The boys' grandmother mainly brought them up in a strict Methodist tradition, with a strong sense of hellfire and damnation.  During his early childhood in Northumberland he witnessed the violent murder of his sister by a woman neighbour, and he was unable to speak until he was six due to a malformation of his tongue. He was subsequently pressganged into the Navy, where he saw action in the Napoleonic wars. All of this caused him to become increasingly disturbed as a young adult and he started to have vivid dreams and fantasies, which included threatening the assassination of the bishop of Oxford.  After this breakdown he spent some time in asylums, but recovered, turning to freelance preaching and a little painting.

But in February 1829, the noise of the organ at evensong one Sunday in York Minster set him off again, and he hid in the aisle after the service, subsequently starting a bonfire of hymn books in the Choir during the night.  As I researched Jonathan's life, interested in the contemporary hysteria about arsonists, I realised there were a number of curious parallels between the York and Westminster fires. First of all, there was the delay to discovery. At 8pm, 9pm and 4am a number of people saw a light coming from inside the Minster but thought no more of it. At five in the morning, people heard what they later described as explosions from inside but did nothing. The alarm was sounded only at 7am, when a chorister slipped on the ice in the Minster yard and saw smoke coming from out of a window while flat on his back. By then, the south stalls were found to be well alight. The Minster engine was brought out, and the City and Yorkshire Insurance Company engines arrived in short order. Flames continued to work their way along the stalls to the choir screen, which housed the organ case. Once it reached there, the whole instrument went up, and sang – as organs in fires do, due to the draughts of hot air being sucked through the pipes. It let forth a phantasmal sound, echoing round the Minster and frightening the crowd which had gathered outside. From the top of the organ case the fire then stretched up to the maple bosses of the oak roof, and soon streams of molten lead were pouring down, followed by falling timber.

The York fire engines were equally as inadequate to the task, but very much more disorganised, as those at Westminster five years later. The engine pipes became choked with straw and rubbish from the streetplug in Minster Yard, while eyewitnesses described how, ‘from the screen to the altar, the vast area had the appearance of an ignited furnace; and the men who were employed in working the engines and in various ways attempting to stop the progress of the flames, resembled beings of another world...a number of bats and birds, burnt out of their quiet retreats were now seen flitting about, unable to find an outlet: and many perished in the flames’. The speed of the fire was just as terrifying as at Westminster. Once the doors to the Minster were opened on the fire’s discovery, they let in a rush of fresh air which made the wooden stalls burn more fiercely. By 8.30am the beams of the central tower were reported to be catching fire, and half an hour later the first portion of the magnificent medieval roof fell in with a tremendous crash to the choir pavement ninety-nine feet below. Sections of the roof continued to tumble in the smoky darkness until half past ten. By noon the firehoses were prevailing, but the collapsed burning timbers from the roof, collecting at the base of the limestone columns holding up the choir, had to be dragged out of the building to prevent the stone from cracking with the intense heat. The redhot remnants covered Minster Yard. Three more engines arrived on scene before 2pm, and then another three from Leeds – though heavily delayed as one had lost a wheel en route, another suffered a horse which dropped dead, and a third tipped over as it took the corner into Minster Yard at speed. There was however, never any shortage of water, the City waterworks supplying 7,250 hogsheads during the day. Soldiers and police arrived at 5pm after darkness fell. The fire was out before midnight, but had destroyed all the roof of the choir (some 130 feet long and 45 feet wide), 66 medieval carved stalls and their misericords, the galleries, pulpit and the throne. Twenty-one monuments were damaged or destroyed, along with the organ and the Minster music collection, as Martin had intended. The great East window, however, miraculously survived.

When he was caught, Martin narrowly missed a lynching from the citizens of York, and spent his last years in Bedlam - the asylum on the site of what is now the Imperial War Museum in London.  His son, who had mainly been brought up by John Martin, committed suicide three months after his father's death in the asylum in 1838.   A tragic family indeed.  If you'd like to know more about the strange life of Jonathan Martin, there is a good article on him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and also a biography by T. Balston, The life of Jonathan Martin … with some account of William and Richard Martin (1945).

The (Twilight) Writing Zone

So, it's in.  I hadn't realised before writing this book how addictive working on it would become.  Worrying signs have included:

• writing in pyjamas or the nearest thing which came to hand
• omitting to clean teeth all day
• getting irritated for having to break off when you need the loo or to have a bath
• not noticing the weather or it growing dark outside
• wanting to get up early at weekends to continue
• sighing at having to go to previously-arranged social occasions with family or friends (and thinking about the book all the while when with them)
• being grumpy about clearing the table of papers and books when you need to lay up for a dinner party
• losing all track of time - what seems like 30 minutes has in fact been four hours
• willingness to subsist on endless snacks and breaking off to cook meals becomes an irritant
• seeing connections to your book everywhere you go, in the most obscure places.

To my long-suffering family and friends, all I can say is: thanks for your understanding and see you at the book launch!

Submitting the Final Edit

So, today was the day I submitted the final ms for OUP: two copies of my 108K text with e- and hard-copies of my 35 chosen images and the four maps I've drawn up. All on a memory stick too. I spent last week on leave working on the last edits, the acknowledgements and the bibliography. And confirmed The Day Parliament BurnED Down rather than BurNT Down was grammatically correct. It's hard to let go after five years of research and over a year of serious writing. Scary stuff.

All packaged up and ready to go

Next, it gets copy-edited at OUP and then the great machine rolls on: typesetting and cover design, proofreading, marketing, publicity and distribution in time for a launch in about a year. Talk bookings are already coming in for then.


Meanwhile, I need to start putting together a proposal for the next book, after discussing ideas with my agent. And the day job continues too.

The Invisible Women

I've worked hard to get women into my book.  It's not been easy.  A day-conference I attended earlier this year run by the History of Parliament Trust contained a whole session on their problem of undertaking a decades-long academic enterprise which, by definition, had to concentrate on the biographies of MPs and Lords before the 20th century - all of the subjects being men. 

So, in The Day Parliament Burned Down there is Frances Rickman, a principal witness to the fire, with her mother, who lived in the Palace, who have left behind correspondence which can been researched.  Then there are grand women, like Queen Adelaide, and bohemian ones like the poet Letitia Landon, whose views on the fire were recorded.  But there are others too, who flit through the records and therefore the pages of my book, in shadowy fashion.  The Westminster pub landlady whose beer barrels were drunk dry on the night by those pumping the engines.  The nurses at the new Westminster Hospital.  The terrified doorkeepers' wives in the Palace who first discovered the fire.  The waitress at Bellamy's whose uniform was burnt. The ladies in the crowd who fainted in the crush, and those scrambling up to their ankles in mud on the shore of the Thames to get a better view. The prostitutes in the back streets of the Devil's Acre slum nearby.  And the women whose lives were changed forever when their husbands were killed or seriously injured due to the disaster.  I wish I knew more about them. I never will.

The Work-Write Balance

The last ten days have been further practice for me in how to squeeze research and writing time around work and home life; something which people often me ask about.  I'm getting quite used to it now.  The main thing is to get straight down to writing whenever you have a slot available, and to identify and schedule those slots in advance.  I agree with what Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of Royal Palaces, says in this video: if you have a full time job to do which doesn't include working on your book, then you simply don't suffer from writer's block.  In fact, you're bursting to write down things as soon as you have a free minute.  Here's how it went.


With Mr D away last weekend on a minibreak of his own, I had a couple of days free at home to start the final edits on the book and  to deal with other elements required - plans, front matter, bibliography.  I spent the time drawing up two maps by hand, armed with six 0.2mm pens and a pile of tracing paper. In some respects this was tedious; in others fascinating, as drawing everything out several times over really enabled me to get to grips with the maze of streets in the slum west of Westminster Abbey known as The Devil's Acre. I have also drawn a map of London from Chelsea in the west to Rotherhithe in the east, showing the principal buildings and streets mentioned in the text. I used various maps to do these from City of Westminster Archives service (Greenwood of 1827); the Horwood/Faden map of 1813 from The A-Z of Regency London; plus the Stanford 1862 map of Westminster (only for the position of Westminster hospital, built 1834) from the web; and after much searching - also on the web - I located Paris Street in Lambeth (from a really useful list of online historic London maps), which I needed for an eyewitness's location. Once submitted, the OUP typesetter will take my plans and make them look beautiful and clear.  I hope.


After the weekend I turned to editing the text on Monday (when I unexpectedly ended up at home due to train cancellations completely knocking out the rural line which I use to commute to London).  This was an amazing bonus. The two anonymous readers from OUP had sent in some suggestions for changes and I began working through those. They mainly comprised difficulties with the digressions in the book and a few comments on continuity. I've dealt with most of those (a few I disagree with) but there was one narrative lurch I continued to find a problem to resolve.  I got through about 50 pages of 253.


No more action until Wednesday, when I was due to travel to Cardiff by train to give a lecture on the 1834 fire for work.  I had planned to do at least two hours on the train, there and back, continuing the edits, but this was derailed by train cancellations which left me hanging around at Bristol Parkway and not in a suitable mood to concentrate.  I made it to my own talk only a few minutes late, but a bit frazzled. The lecture at Glamorgan Archives went well, though.  I was particularly pleased as the presentation I used, rejigged from a talk to the Westminster village and then made suitable for an external audience, now feels right to use with local history groups when the book is launched.


Then yesterday, Saturday, Mr D was giving a concert in Worcestershire.  Having dropped him off to rehearse in the morning, I went into the city to find a quiet spot to continue the revisions.  I finally found it in the Worcestershire History Centre which was a real haven of peace and quiet.  I got to page 77 and found what I thought was a nifty resolution to the worst narrative lurch.  Still more to do, though.  Tomorrow is the bank holiday (another lovely whole day), and then I will have another weekend free in a few weeks' time when Mr D is away at a conference to get down to some solid work.  Why don't you work on your commute, some people ask.  The answer is, I'm either doing work for work, as it were, or I'm sleeping because I'm so tired...and the house is a tip, too.

The Looooooooooooong 18th Century

I recently enjoyed a little lunchtime flurry on Twitter after asking about when the "Long" 18th century ended, in people's opinion.  That's because Conflagration makes the case for 1834 as one of the possible dates when the 18th century comes to a halt for various reasons.  (In fact, I also argue that 1834 is the last gasp of various institutions and practices from the middle ages).

In his book Waterloo, Andrew Roberts describes the battle as the exclamation mark at the end of the century, but I think it's much later, even though traditionally 1815 is often the end of school and university courses in the UK.  Dates which Twitter correspondents came up with included 1820 (end of Regency), 1830 (death of George IV, revolutions), 1832 (Great Reform Act), 1837 (accession of Victoria), 1848 (more revolutions) and even 1850.  And working backwards, the eighteenth century might even begin in the 1660s (or even the 1640s!) for some.  In the USA, 1812 is seen as the end of pro-British aspirations.

The whole periodisation issue is a bit of a red herring anyway, and obviously artificial.  After all, we don't go around thinking we're living through the dying days of the long 20th century.  People today might be tempted to view 9/11/2001 as the "end" of the 20th century - but will it really be seen as that in 250 years' time? I doubt it.  In Europe we're still living through the fallout from the Cold War: the point is, to contemporaries of any time or place, right now and before right now is seamless.  So it's all relative.  But still fun to play around with - many thanks to all the tweeps who sent in their ideas!

Picture Perfect

Things are moving on quickly now.  I've signed three copies of the contract, and have filled in an author publicity form.  Now I have to choose pictures for the book and send a list to OUP before the end of the month, so they can start getting licences for those which I'm not getting from work.  Selecting them is difficult - there are at least a hundred I could use, but I have to get it down to 35.

In the end I decided the easiest way was to lay everything out on
the floor to see how they looked side by side...



Jammed Up

Although the manuscript is finished, there will always be just one more tweak to make.  I was due to drive to Gatwick today to pick up husband from the airport (Jct 7, M25), and thought I could do a few final checks on some rogue references at the National Archives (Jct 1A, M4).  

A massive queue on the South Circular (A 205) put paid to that though.  I'll have to go another time.  Bah!

Vulgar Clatter and Clamour

Sent off chapters 7 to 10 today to my prospective agent, at the end of a day of leave.  Feel very pleased.  Also sailed over the 99,000 word mark with some last minute splicing in of new sources.  One of my favourite bits added today:

Contemporaries described the fire as (amongst other things), “fearfully imposing” and “the acme of sublime terror”.  Sometimes the effect was eerie, even chilling.  In the darkness, viewed from the white-stuccoed palazzi overlooking the trees across St James’ Park, “the many and monster-tongued flames…seemed to be moving and twisting, seeking fresh objects to involve in the ravening jaws of destruction.”  The moon turned blood-red as fire-charged smoke ran across its face.  The inhuman sounds of the wind and the flames were, “deeply awful, and seemed as distinct from the vulgar clatter and clamour of the mob, as do the solemn notes of the cathedral organ from the squeaking of the itinerant hurdy-gurdy”.

A Room of My Own

I write in the cellar, which also doubles as a dining room.  I also share it with the washing and the hoover.  Here is the view this afternoon as I finish off chapter 11.  Of particular note is the ubiquitous diet coke can, and my cat in a warm spot by the radiator.  The cat also likes to walk on the keyboard at crucial moments and to stick its nose into buttered toast.

Christmas Presents!

Having been given a print of the fire for my birthday in November, my other half presents it to me - framed - for Christmas - lovely! 

Time's Winged Chariot

Had planned today as a day off, to complete work on chapter 7, but the fates conspired against me and I was called back into work for an urgent meeting which I couldn't avoid.  Then, when that was shifted to 90 minutes later, even the chance of having an afternoon free began to recede.  In the end I managed 90 mins at the end of the day in the Bodleian checking online newspaper references but feeling a bit frustrated at present, as this was pretty much the only work day I had free till Christmas.

Mices Crisis

1834 was also a bad year for German mice.  One of the newspapers I was reading reported alongside the fire that:

A remarkable phenomenon has been observed in the neighbourhood of Frankfort. It is a sudden malady among the mice, thousands of which are found dead or dying in the fields.

Firemen to the Rescue

Yesterday (Friday) I had a quick chat with some of the fire safety guys at the Houses of Parliament.  They are all ex-firemen so they really know their stuff.  I wanted to make sure I understood the technical details of the descriptions of the fire from contemporary newspapers and other sources I have been working on.  We discussed 6 or 7 extracts from the book which I had queries about.  Now I know much more about pyrolysis, flashover, the reasons why flames are different colours, and the melting points of different metals.  All fascinating.   Today (Saturday) I spent an hour in the Bodleian Library checking some references in various online databases of 19th century periodicals and newspapers - a real boon for researchers, and something it would have been impossible to cover twenty years ago.

James Braidwood, hero fireman of the

1834 disaster, photographed in much later life

What did the fire look like?

I was really interested to see this BBC video of the fire at Hastings pier, East Sussex, which burnt down last night.  I think it gives an insight into what the 1834 fire may have looked like from the south bank of the Thames: reflections in the water, sparks falling off the sides, and afterwards a great cloud of smoke rising from the smouldering ruins.