Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge
After their parents died, Maude and Constance Horton were raised by their grandfather and grew up helping in his apothecary shop in London. Maude’s knowledge of potions and poisons is going to come in handy later in the story. Maude breaks out of her expected role as a meek Victorian young lady to discover what happened to her runaway sister.
Constance ran away to an Arctic expedition disguised as a boy. Maude has to navigate rebuffs and plots at the Admiralty. She ventures into a pub full of surgeons making raucous public experiments with ether. Running parallel to Maude’s adventures in London, we (along with Maude) are reading Constance’s diary, where we vividly experience life on board ship in the frozen Arctic wastes as the crew searches for lost explorers.
Maude finds herself on the trail of the sinister Edison Stowe. Edison is renting a room from a taxidermist and is being pursued for his gambling debts by a brutal moneylender. He tries to rescue his dire financial situation by running lantern shows about the Arctic and organising ‘package tours’ to public hangings for a group of prurient, well-heeled ‘tourists’. Maude conceals her identity and joins the grisly tours in her quest to discover what happened to her sister. Edison’s fictional excursions are based on real Victorian murder mania, where huge crowds of people relished the spectacles of public hangings (especially the hangings of women), revelled in the art of the renowned hangman William Calcraft, and flocked to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks Chamber of Horrors. Tussaud, according to Punch, turned the abomination of blood ‘to the pleasantness of profit’.
Pook has fabulously conjured the period with a plot that twists and turns through melodrama and the macabre. Highly recommended.
