Promo: Lucie Dumas by Katherine Mezzacappa
Today, I'm delighted to welcome acclaimed author, Katherine Mezzacappa, to Ruins & Reading. I'm sharing a fascinating article and enticing excerpt from her evocative novel, Lucie Dumas. Based on a true story, it's a story you should check out, so read on!
Lucie Dumas is currently on blog tour with The Coffee Pot Book Club. Find other interesting articles, excerpts, author chats, reviews, and more HERE!
Lucie Dumas
London, 1871: Lucie Dumas of Lyon has accepted a stipend from her former lover and his wife, on condition that she never returns to France; she will never see her young son again. As the money proves inadequate, Lucie turns to prostitution to live, joining the ranks of countless girls from continental Europe who'd come to London in the hope of work in domestic service.
Escaping a Covent Garden brothel for a Magdalen penitentiary, Lucie finds only another form of incarceration and thus descends to the streets, where she is picked up by the author Samuel Butler, who sets her up in her own establishment and visits her once a week for the next two decades. But for many years she does not even know his name.
Based on true events.
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Guest Post:
Thank you for featuring my book Lucie Dumas on your blog today.
I do an immense amount of research for any of my historical novels. With this one, I had a bit of a head start as I’d read a great deal about the man who kept Lucie, as well as what he’d written himself. I think it’s really important to get the ‘voice’ right in a historical novel. What I mean by that, is that historical facts have to be right, and ideally the novel should read as though it was written in the time it was set, though you need to be careful not to introduce mannerisms that simply would not be understood by the modern reader, unless there is enough context that they become clear. My formation, if you like, was reading nineteenth-century novels (Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Brontës etc.) at quite a young age, so those voices have been sloshing around in my head for some time. The principle is to read novels or newspapers or whatever that your characters could have been reading at the time.
Because the main characters in Lucie Dumas actually lived, I needed to be absolutely sure that what I wrote about them was accurate. Here a genealogy site (FindmyPast) was really useful. I discovered, for instance, that Lucie, by then going by the surname Dewattines, lied to the census taker in 1891, claiming to be a ‘widow living on her own means.’ I found where Alfred Cathie, Butler’s former manservant, was living in the years after Butler’s death, and that Dr Louis Vintras, who (fictionally) comes across Lucie’s account of her life, was illegitimate (a significant social stigma at the time) and did not find critical success as a novelist (I read his reviews). I was able to discover what Butler left to Alfred Cathie in his will (and what he left to his laundress, Alfred’s aunt). Other resources are old maps, as so much of central London has changed, and of course biographies and academic studies. I devoured anything I could find about prostitution in Victorian London, the Contagious Diseases Acts (which mandated testing of prostitutes working in the vicinity of military and naval barracks), the care of tuberculosis patients, the Lock hospitals, the Magdalen penitentiaries. I am thorough. I even tracked down a little book that Miss Savage, a friend of Samuel Butler’s, published on the history of embroidery; he made sure that a copy was given to what is now the British Library. Miss Savage wanted to marry Butler; socially poles apart, they would never have met (but I do give Miss Savage’s little book to Lucie).
An invaluable resource – not just for me but for anyone working in the field of Victorian London – is Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. I have the four volume 1861 edition. Representatives of the entire teeming London underclass were interviewed by this journalist: costermongers, street sweepers, barrel organists, prostitutes, beggars, thieves…
Research is made easier these days by technology. I don’t just mean how much can be looked up online (but which always needs to be checked). Long forgotten texts, like poor Louis Vintras’s novels, can often by discovered through print-on-demand. What happens is that obscure books are scanned and a new, physical book printed off, often by firms in India and are delivered to my door, courtesy of ABEbooks.
Another source is visual art, especially because the Victorians were so fond of paintings with a message. Holman Hunt’s painting ‘The Awakening Conscience’ is a case in point. He apparently visited an actual brothel to get the interior right. The girl is springing to her feet, when a song her lover is playing on the piano recalls a memory of a more innocent time. Beneath the chair, a cat toys with a bird. The girl wears a lot of rings, but none is a wedding ring – that finger is bare.
William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1851-3, Tate Britain
Wikimedia Commons: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gandalfsgallery/5626470779
I am predominantly a writer of historical fiction partly because a creative writing tutor once said that I wrote in an ‘old-fashioned way’ (to which I thought, ‘oh, good’) but partly because I just love the research. It doesn’t mean that I put everything I found into Lucie Dumas, but it helped me assimilate what people at that time were thinking and feeling.
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| There is never enough room in our home for books… |
Excerpt:
I have been a femme entretenue, a flagellant, a penitent, a streetwalker, an inhabitant of night houses, a demimondaine. In some of these manifestations I have passed sometimes as one of my respectable sisters. But whatever I have been called, I am a whore. The rules are different for such as I.
To begin with I would look from the window when a gentleman was leaving, to see Brigid waiting patiently at the corner, but deliberately far from a streetlamp even on dark days. Another ten minutes would pass before she came up. She told me it was because she did not want to see me in déshabillée, not at five o’clock in the afternoon. I told her that English gentlemen expect to be helped into their coats by her, and their walking sticks and hats handed to them by someone wearing a maid’s apron. It was quite a different matter when she had the dressing of me at nine in the morning, because I passed my nights alone. It is some time since I have woken up beside a man; not since that house in Covent Garden. I would not want the baker to encounter any of my callers on the stairs, nor they any of the baker’s little children on their way to Princes Street Board School. Besides, my callers are usually expected at home for dinner.
It is from Mr Jones that I first heard about Miss Savage, who wanted to marry Monsieur, only Miss Savage was plain and walked with a limp and in any case Monsieur did not wish to be wed. I was relieved at this, though I felt sorry for the poor lady too. It is not that I ever thought Monsieur would marry me. This I learned early on in Paris. Not even the presence of my little boy – our little boy I should say – was any guarantee of his father’s affection. That I am in London at all is only because it was the sole means I had of ensuring that my Théodore should be provided for – provided for on pain of never seeing his mother again. Am I a mother still? I have no idea. I do not know if Théodore lives. All I know is that in relinquishing him, he may have had a chance at life. No, I am a woman no gentleman would wed, though when I paced Islington with Elise and Rachael the greater part of the men who followed me up to that dingy room wore a wedding ring or had the indent on a finger to show that a ring had been hastily removed (this I think was more about a struggle with their own consciences than any consideration of my thoughts on the matter). You see, if Miss Savage were to have wed Monsieur I could well have been dismissed, and if I wasn’t, and Miss Savage found out about me, then knowledge of my existence would have reduced her maiden dreams to ashes. A woman of my position in life is always expected to be mindful of the sensibilities of respectable ladies. We are to know of their existence, but they are not to know of ours. Any sufferings of my own moreover must be borne in silence, for not only do I no longer have Elise or Rachael to confide in, but a woman of my character has foregone the right to womanly feelings. So the nuns in that refuge told me, anyway.
Miss Savage died, and of course Monsieur was filled with remorse. He came to visit me by his usual appointment, but remained in his chair, one hand atop another, and talked at me about her for an hour. I was not required to do anything but emit the occasional sound to indicate that I listened. He got up, thanked me, and told me he would let himself out.
I wondered if he would come back. He did. I wondered too if anyone would speak of me when I am dead. But to whom?
Illustrations: Lucie’s two long-term lovers, Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones
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| Samuel Butler, c. 1858 Wikimedia Commons, Dutton, NY, 1920 |
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| Henry Festing Jones, painted by Samuel Butler, 1882 Wikimedia Commons: Public Catalogue, St John’s College, Cambridge |
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