![]() ![]() But for our heroine, understandably, it has few attractions. With its chipper rogues and multifarious squalor, it is, perhaps, a rather more familiar milieu than Hester seems to think, but it is brought to life with such grimy vitality that it seems a shame to leave it behind. The year is 1831, and the streets Hester has come to know are lightless and filthy, teeming with thieves and vagrants. Her London, she assures us, “isn’t the one Papa visited, or the one you might think you know”. ![]() Consigned to insalubrious lodgings among the backstreets of Bethnal Green, Hester now counts “foglers, lifters and murderers” among her neighbours. ![]() Orphaned at 11, and lacking better prospects, she has been taken in by the family of his former gardener. Raised in a parsonage in the Lincolnshire Wolds, she would listen raptly when her father returned from his travels, imagining a wonderland of “wherries and steamers”, where one might “take a seat on Shillibeer’s omnibus…stopping at The Unicorn for beefsteak with oyster sauce”.īut Hester’s father, by the time we encounter her, is long dead, and her childish illusions have been abandoned. Do you think you know London? Hester White, who narrates Laura Carlin’s debut novel, confronts us first with this question. ![]()
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