![]() In the background, overshadowing the capital’s warrens of gin-sodden destitution and lawlessness, is the gallows. In the foreground are cosy snuggeries and convivial dinner tables replete with steaming tureens of eel soup. Strange legacies and outlandish lawyers twist lives in fateful new directions. Out on the mud flats of the Thames, scavengers find curious jetsam, such as an infant dropped from London Bridge. Freakish figures with quirky mannerisms and odd names – Mrs Halfstairs, Captain Constable – lurk in skewwhiff little rooms or down narrow corridors lined with ancient, mildewed ballgowns. ![]() Peter Kemp, Sunday Times, September 21, 1997, Sundayīringing together a motley throng of vigorously alive characters in a 19th-century London of pea-souper fogs and flaring gaslights, escutcheoned carriages in the West End and child-felons in the slums of Seven Dials, Jack Maggs is the most Dickensian novel Dickens never wrote. ![]()
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