Week 12

Trust your characters to make choices? Well, this week the fourteen-year-old Gooseberry goes on a spending spree with Franklin Blake’s money. Those two daguerreotypes at £1 each? In 1852, one pound is the approximate equivalent of one week’s salary for a skilled worker. I think he just blew something like a thousand pounds.

So, very roughly the modern-day equivalent of £500 for a sixth-plate. What does he get for his money? A miserably small portrait (though I would use the term “jewel-like” if I were trying to cast it in a better light) two-and-three-quarter inches by three-and-a-quarter inches in size. Now perhaps you can see why jewel-like is a better term.

In Britain, the cost of daguerreotypes was kept unnaturally high by a certain Mr. Richard Beard, the man who’d purchased the patent rights in 1841 for the sum of £800. He eventually opened a chain of studios, but he also made money by licensing the process to other photographers. Prices remained high until 1854, by which point the printable wet-plate collodion process had superseded daguerreotypes.

In America in the early 1840s, a sixth-plate also cost the equivalent of a week’s wage ($5). But, since no patents for the process existed there, within a few years they were half that price. By 1852, when Gooseberry is set, you could buy a sixth-plate for $1 or even 50c. When wet-plate collodion arrived, it drove the cost even cheaper—though generally the quality reflected the price.

In real life, the daguerreotypist in this chapter, Mr. William Edward Kilburn, did have a studio on Regent Street. He is in fact noted for his hand-colored portraits.

Till next week,
Michael


Michael Gallagher’s Gooseberry is serialized in weekly installments every Friday from July 4th 2014 on Goodreads. Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart, as well as the popular non-fiction title Why the Victorians Saw Ghosts.

Photograph: A Convicts’ Home by John Thomson, used courtesy of the London School of Economics’ Digital Library under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.

Week 11

Now everything becomes even more difficult, as I go back to teaching this week. Thankfully it’s only part-time, so I still have five days in which to write.

It felt very strange writing this week’s chapter, a denouement of sorts, where the family is summoned to the library by the detective, and the guilty party is revealed. Normally this kind of thing comes at the end of the novel, not two-thirds of the way through. Do not fear. I haven’t lost the plot this week. In fact I think I may have found it.

Eventually you just have to trust your characters to get on and do what they’re going to do. Sometimes you can guide their decisions, but often it’s more interesting to sit back and see what they will choose to do. They regularly surprise me and delight me.

Till next week,
Michael


Michael Gallagher’s Gooseberry is serialized in weekly installments every Friday from July 4th 2014 on Goodreads. Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart, as well as the popular non-fiction title Why the Victorians Saw Ghosts.

Photograph: Caney the Clown by John Thomson, used courtesy of the London School of Economics’ Digital Library under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.

Week 6

It’s a fairly short chapter this week, but it’s an important one. A certain amount of Gooseberry’s back story is revealed (yes, there is more in the pipeline), and with it come some strong hints as to why the eight-year-old Gooseberry chose Mr. Bruff’s offer of employment over returning to his important and lucrative position in ‘The Life’.

Julius’s character starts to reveal itself, and we also learn a little more about Bertha. Though the chapter finishes on a relatively high note, the truth is, at the moment it’s a relatively fragile accord, and one which any of the characters can upset with a wrong word or a wrong gesture. I love it.

Although we haven’t met him yet, I now have a name picked out for the clerk at Mr. Bruff’s law firm who gave Octavius the nickname Gooseberry. It’s Mr. Grayling—first name, Christopher. Here’s the only mention of him so far, from the very first chapter:

I don’t object to Mr. Bruff calling me Gooseberry, though I would have you know that it is not my real name. It’s a name that’s been given to me by one of Mr. Bruff’s clerks on account of my eyes. They bulge. At least, that’s what this clerk delights in telling me almost every single day. Naturally I can’t help them bulging any more than I can help being blessed with brains, and blessed with brains I am—to a far greater degree than either of the Georges, or that fool of a clerk, come to that.

This is in response to author Kathy Lette’s call to fellow authors to use the name of the British Secretary of Justice for a villainous character in their books. Like Lette, I think the Justice Secretary’s ban on sending books to prison inmates is shameful. Prisoners should be encouraged to read and to improve their literacy skills, not discouraged. This ban is small-minded, shortsighted, and petty.

Till next week,
Michael

P.S. Do let me know what you think of it. If you can, please post your comments on Goodreads (my blog has a comments box!)


Michael Gallagher’s Gooseberry is serialized in weekly installments every Friday from July 4th 2014 on Goodreads. Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart, as well as the popular non-fiction title Why the Victorians Saw Ghosts.