Places that lent thread to the weave of this novel include Avebury Manor, Kelmscott Manor, Great Chalfield Manor, Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury, Lacock Abbey, the Uffington White Horse, the Barbury Hill Fort, the Ridgeway, the countryside of Wiltshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, the villages of Southrop, Eastleach, Kelmscott, Buscot and Lechlade, the River Thames, and of course London. Should you wish to visit a house with genuine priest holes, Harvington Hall in Worcestershire retains seven designed by Saint Nicholas Owen. It also sits upon a moated island.
If you are eager to read more about nineteenth-century London and the streets occupied by Birdie Bell and James Stratton, some useful sources include: London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew (providing insight into such forgotten occupations as ‘The Blind Street-Sellers of Tailors’ Needles’ and ‘“Screevers” or Writers of Begging Letters and Petitions’); Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840–1870 by Liza Picard; The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London by Judith Flanders; The Victorians by A. N. Wilson; Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet; and, Charles Dickens by Simon Callow, being a deeply affectionate biography of one of the greatest Victorians and Londoners. The Seven Dials is still a bustling pocket of Covent Garden; however, should you visit now you will find more restaurants and fewer shops selling birds and cages than when Mrs Mack was running her enterprise. Little White Lion Street was renamed Mercer Street in 1938.
I was inspired by a number of museums whilst writing The Clockmaker’s Daughter, which seems fitting given the novel’s focus on curation and the use of narrative structures to tell cohesive stories about the disjointed past. Some of my favourites include: the Charles Dickens Museum, the Watts Gallery and Limnerslease, Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Fox Talbot Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. I was thrilled to attend the following exhibitions and am grateful to galleries and curators who make such works available: ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2015–16; ‘Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age’, Tate Britain, 2016; ‘Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography’, National Portrait Gallery, 2018.
With special thanks to: my agent Lizzy Kremer and all at DHA, my editors Maria Rejt and Annette Barlow, Lisa Keim and Carolyn Reidy at Simon & Schuster, and Anna Bond at Pan Macmillan. Thanks also to the many people at A&U, Pan Macmillan and Atria who played a vital role in turning my story into this book and sending it out into the world so beautifully. Isobel Long generously provided information about the world of the archivist; and I am grateful to Nitin Chaudhary – and his parents – for assistance with the Punjabi terms in Ada’s story. All errors are of course my own, whether intentional or not. I have, for instance, taken the liberty of situating a Royal Academy exhibition in November 1861 even though during the nineteenth century the annual exhibition of the RA opened in May.
Those who helped in less specific but no less important ways while I was writing The Clockmaker’s Daughter, include: Herbert and Rita, precious departed friends, still in my thoughts; my mum, dad, sisters and friends, especially the Kretchies, Pattos, Steinies and Browns; every single person who read and enjoyed one of my books; my three lights in the dark, Oliver, Louis and Henry; and, most of all, for too many things to count, my life co-pilot, Davin.