Search results for ""Author Thom Braun""

Following Charles Dickens’s death, his friend and biographer, John Forster, discovers a ‘lost’ manuscript that provides a radically different view of the year the young author spent working in a blacking factory. But is the account fact or fiction? In the 1820s the Dickens family arrive to start a new life in London . Charles (‘Charley’) is just eleven and looking to continue his education. However, instead of being sent to school – and as his family fall deeply into debt – he is put to work in a boot-blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs. With his father soon cast into the Marshalsea debtors prison, Charley’s eagerness to earn an extra shilling sees him drawn into a criminal network led by the dark figure of Mr Magnus. The combination of demeaning factory work with this new and dangerous criminal activity places a huge burden on Charley, at a time when his mother and siblings are increasingly dependent on him. Life becomes even more complicated when Charley is approached by the mysterious Mr Hesketh. How can the future novelist balance the demands of family, paid work and the London underworld amidst a situation that moves swiftly from casual abuse to violence, and ultimately the hangman’s noose?

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When Kitty falls to her death in one of Covent Garden's seedier tenements at the end of 1735, it's seen as an unfortunate accident. But the memory haunts the nightmares of Kitty's neighbour, Jeremiah Potts. Jeremiah scrapes his own poor living by running errands for local artists, the most famous being William Hogarth seemingly unstoppable since the success of his Harlot's Progress. Hogarth has started work on a new painting that shows a woman walking across Covent Garden Piazza. The image raises immediate questions for the artist's wife, Jane but also appears to hark back to something in her husband's past. A similar, half-forgotten history torments another local resident, Prudence Hyssop, who is determined that the New Year of 1736 should signal a fresh start. Meanwhile, gentleman-painter Jonathan Smallow has one thing only in mind. Murder. In a fast-moving tale of lost innocence, thwarted ambition, artistic skulduggery, and blind passion, the lives of Jeremiah, Pr

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