Ghostwriting Historical Fiction Sample

 

The following text is from Chapter One of a literary title for adults about a young woman living in Victorian Britain.

Chapter One

On the Monday morning of 30 March 1896, local bargeman Charles Humphreys was leisurely navigating a cargo of ballast up the River Thames at Reading. He had passed the untidy belchings of the gasworks at the mouth of the River Kennet and was making his way in the direction of the tranquil expanse of the Thames which flowed past the broken teeth of the eel-bucks toward Caversham Lock, the foaming cascades of the weir and the wooden footbridge known as the Clappers.

 

It was a bitterly cold day. Poplars and limes, just coming into bud, stood stark against the open scenery, and willows overhung the water’s edge. To one side of the river were long views stretching toward the town of Reading, and to the other the outspread countryside of peaceful fields and farmland. The well-trodden towpath which ran alongside the river was pitted with horses’ hoof prints and lined with fat tufts of coarse grass. As the barge came within a few hundred yards of the main railway station, the left bank of the river ran away into King’s Meadow, a green sweep of public recreation grounds, and the Huntley & Palmers cricket club, fenced off from the towpath. In the river, lying in the shallow water several feet from the bank, was a lumpy, brown paper parcel.

 

Humphreys reached for the parcel with a punt hook and dragged it out of the water on to the boat. Curious, and expecting to find at least a cache of linen or some other goods of value, he began to pull open one end of the half-sodden parcel. Beneath the paper, however, there was only a layer of thick flannel fabric which, when pulled to one side, revealed, to his horror, part of a leg and a tiny human foot.

 

Reading Gaol was built in 1844 on the site of the former county prison alongside the banks of the River Kennet. Built from red Tilehurst bricks with keystones of honey- coloured Bath stone and ornate turrets and crenellations, it created an imposing backdrop to the town dubbed “The Capital of Berkshire”. It was one of a number of “New Model” prisons built in England at the time, based on the design of London’s Pentonville. Its innovative cruciform shape enabled the four radiating wings to be visible to the prison staff stationed at the centre, the wings being galleried with separate cells on open landings, which allowed the enforcement of the “separate system”. Inmates were kept isolated for twenty-three hours a day in dark, badly ventilated, ill-smelling cells, with only an hour a day being spent in the chapel and the dreary, damp exercise yard.

Amelia Dyer was to spend the next four weeks of her life here, locked inside one of thirty-one cells arranged over the three galleries of E-wing, home to female drunks, thieves and syphilitic prostitutes. The cells were dismal, dimly lit and measured only thirteen by seven feet with a tiny slit of a window to frame a sliver of sky. The meagre furnishings which graced each interior consisted of a roughly made three-legged stool, a stained table nailed to the floor, a crude set of shelves and a narrow plank bed. A dented copper hand-wash basin and a fetid earthenware WC lurking in a corner of the whitewashed room were the only concessions to feminine hygiene. The iron-studded wooden doors which hung heavy in their frames kept prisoners apart and muffled the moans and cries which all too often reverberated around the landings.

This harsh regime, unrelenting and soul destroying, was immortalized by Oscar Wilde in The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Wilde had been incarcerated in cell three, floor three, block C, since May 1895 and by the time Amelia Dyer arrived in April the following year he was already a broken man. Sentenced to two years first-class hard labour for the crime of sodomy, Wilde was compelled to spend six hours a day on the treadmill; ascending the wheel step by painful step for twenty minutes at a time, interspersed by only five minutes’ rest. It was exhausting and wholly unproductive work. With breakfast and supper consisting of only bread and a thin gruel, and a dinner of 8oz of potatoes and 4oz of bread, Wilde suffered from chronic diarrhoea and his health was irreparably damaged. When not employed on the treadmill, Wilde would be locked up in his cell to sew endless pieces of rough sacking into post bags or to pick loose the hard and tarred fibres of old rope until his fingers grew slippery with blood.