Julius and the Watchmaker (34 page)
dipper
pickpocket
duce
tuppence, two pennies
geezer
a man
jerryshop
pawnshop
half-inch
to pinch, steal
lucifer
a match
the Family
the criminal underworld
the Fancy
the bare-knuckle boxing fraternity
mace
confidence trickster
mark
victim
neddy
a blunt weapon
peeler
police constable
rozzer
police constable
salts
sailors
swell
a gentleman
toff
a gentleman
A note from the author
Some of the names and events in
Julius and the Watchmaker
might be familiar to you. That is because I borrowed them from the pages of history.
Dr John Dee, the sixteenth century mathematician, spy and scientist, really did try to invent a perpetual-motion machine, though, of course, he didn't succeed. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a storm off the Italian coast in 1822, shortly after seeing his doppelganger, which he took to be a portent of doom. (Sadly, his boat-boy, Charles Vivian, died with him.) Shelley's closest friend was the poet Lord Byron. He died two years after Shelley while fighting with the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire. And Shelley's wife, Mary, wrote the novel
Frankenstein
when she was nineteen years old.
Between the years 1738 and 1757 a brilliant watchmaker called John Harrison built a watch. In its day it was a mechanical wonderâthe most accurate and robust timepiece ever made. There really was a City of London School on Milk Street in Cheapside in 1837. And a gigantic glasshouse was built in London's Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851âeveryone called it the
Crystal Palace
. Six million visitors were entertained there by extraordinary and unbelievable spectacles, and tickets were a shilling each.