First published on Blogcritics

As a resident of the central London district of Somers Town, which I often describe as the “last poor area community left in central London”, when I heard that there was a new novel, The Streets, by Anthony Quinn, set in the Victorian district, based on voluminous research, well I couldn’t resist.

Of course when I say “poor” today, I mean an area that’s been resistant to the gentrification of Bloomsbury to the south and Camden Town to the north, largely as a result of the fact that it’s nearly all council flats, built from the Twenties and Thirties onwards, replacing many of the dwellings in which the characters of Quinn’s novel reside. Extreme poverty of the Victorian kind is not the common way of things today, for all that there’s increasing desperation and struggle.

That Victorian reality is something that Quinn brings vividly to life, in a manner that suggests extensive research. One minor story in the tale is of a desperate widowed mother, clinging to a home that’s been condemned for demolition. Her fate is likely to stick with you, and has the ring of truth that suggests extensive browsing through historic newspapers.

That’s really the strength of this novel. Quinn has taken a fictional character, a young man from the provinces trying to make his way in big London town, of comfortable but fairly modest background, and by giving him a rich godfather, and a job as a poverty researcher, allowed him to roam widely, sometimes into the wealthy west, but mostly around the poor of Somers Town, who at first seem to him like another race altogether.

The story of his researches, based on a composite of Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, both familiar to anyone with a passing acquaintance with Victorian London, provides a comfortable frame for the novel.

So top marks for the textures, the tastes, the stories of Somers Town life, and for interesting, involving characters. I’ll admit I particularly took to Roma, the sister of the coster, Jo, who provides David Wildeblood’s route into the community, a fine singer with a sad but unsurprisingly Victorian back story that gradually unfolds.

The plot, where it departs from history, however, is a bit on the clunky side. Everything is neat, fits into the accepted romance frame, and left this reader a little cold. Tragedy tick, romance tick, I just felt I could see the author tugging at the strings.

Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed reading the novel, and you don’t have to live in Somers Town to appreciate the setting and detail. If you’ve any interest in Victorian London, you’ll enjoy The Streets.

Other views: Telegraph, Observer, Independent.

A shorter version was originally published on Blogcritics.

Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition is a collection of academic monographs, arising from a diet research group that came to recognise that to maximise understanding of this fascinating topic, it is necessary to be truly cross-disciplinary, to draw on historical, archaeological and scientific expertise. Inevitably in any such collection, some articles are more accessible and interesting to the general reader such as myself than others, the overall picture is fascinating, and given there’s much lost ecological knowledge here, potential valuable. It fits rather neatly with another recent read of mine, also from the London Library, on medieval manure.

But above all there’s a detailed vision of medieval life, viewed from an unusual perspective. And that perspective, if we’re thinking of the diet most people for most of the time in question, is pottage – a thick soup based on grain but into which pretty well anything handy could be thrown, although as time goes on and wealth grows, bread becomes more important. In 1394, one Lincolnshire ploughman was given 15 loaves of bread a week, seven of them made from wheat (the most expensive kind – the poorest could be made from pea flour). Beer and ale consumption also rises over time, with the quality, so that 1365 the ordinances governing a chantry in Chesterfield were amended. so that “Where the ordinances say that the chaplain shall totally abstain from visiting taverns, this is to be understood as meaning that he shall not visit them habitually.” (p. 23)

There’s considerable insight into the medieval landscape through understanding of food and farming.

“Medieval cereals would have been much more genetically diverse, so that a single field -even of a single crop – would show (for example) variations in height, time of flowering, resistance to disease, and colour. Despite this internal diversity, there would still have been different races with characteristics in common that farmers would recognize; these are known today as landraces. Landraces offer a diversity of characterctics within a single crop, which reduces the risk of serious crop failure in unfavourable conditions. Under optimum conditions, this is generally at the expense of maximising yields; but for farmers in traditional agricultural societies, the trade-off is well worthwhile, as some harvest is considerably better than none. …fields can also be seen to have supported a considerable diversity of arable weeds… Some… may have been tolerated by farmers as a minor food source in their own right, especially for ‘green’. The various species of fat hen and goosefoot (Chenopodium spp) for example, have edible leaves, and recent experimental work suggests the collection or cultivation of fat hen in the late prehistoric period.” (p. 47)

Included here is much agricultural skills and knowledge we’ve lost, but might have to regain – even lost words, like ‘maslin’, a mix of rye and wheat, and spring-sown ‘dredge’, a mix of barley and oats. (p. 13) This could make a valuable read for those trying to restore sustainable agriculture to Britain.
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