The Street Philosopher (44 page)

Although much of
The Street Philosopher
is based closely on actual events and a number of historical figures make brief appearances, both the main story and the principal characters are completely fictional. The 99th Foot (Paulton Rangers), in particular, is an invention, imagined as a typical line regiment in the Light Division of the British expeditionary army–albeit one with some rather untypical officers. There was a 99th regiment in the British army at this time, but it spent the duration of the Russian war in Australia guarding the penal colonies. Also, although the Art Treasures Exhibition included numerous works attributed to Raphael, a depiction of Pilate washing his hands was not among them. No such painting has ever existed, and Queen Victoria’s tour of the Exhibition went off without incident.

Many sources were used in the writing of this book; all distortions and errors are, of course, my own. The Crimean sections owe an important debt to the Times reports of William Russell, with whom some of Cracknell’s more admirable attitudes originate, and to the many published diaries, letters and personal accounts written by the soldiers and civilians who were involved in the war, notably those of Nathaniel Steevens, Frederick Dallas, Roger Fenton and George Lawson.

Among the modern texts used, special mention must be made of Matthew Lalumia’s
Realism and Politics in Victorian
Art of the Crimean War
, which first interested me in the representation of warfare–visual and verbal–in the mid-nineteenth century press. A vital reference work was Alastair Massie’s
A Most Desperate Undertaking: The British
Army in the Crimea
, a catalogue of the 2004 exhibition at the National Army Museum in Chelsea. Also frequently consulted were volumes by Trevor Royle, Clive Ponting, J.B.R. Nicholson, A.J. Barker, Albert Seaton, Andrew Lambert and Stephen Badsey.

The massive amount of contemporary literature generated by the Art Treasures Exhibition served as the foundation for the Manchester sections. This included the lengthy coverage provided by the
Times
, the
Art Journal
and the
Illustrated London News
; the enormous catalogue; the
Art
Treasures Examiner
, the official magazine of the Exhibition published throughout its run; and the plethora of unofficial, slightly domineering guidebooks with titles like
What to See and Where to See it
. Especially informative were Cornish’s
Stranger’s
Guide through Manchester and Salford
and
The
Visitor’s
Guide to Six Days in Manchester
–general guides to the city produced to coincide with the Exhibition which provided a detailed and fascinating counterpoint to the famously grim portrait of mid-nineteenth century Manchester found in Friedrich Engels’
The Condition of the
Working Class in England
.

Two modern histories were particularly helpful:
The Public
Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the
English Industrial City 1840–1914
by Simon Gunn, which introduced me to the concept of street philosophy, and Martin Hewitt’s exhaustive study
The Emergence of Stability in the
Industrial City: Manchester 1832–67.

Thanks are due to my agent, Euan Thorneycroft, without whom it simply wouldn’t have happened, and all at AM Heath; my editor, Susan Watt, whose guidance and incisive comments were instrumental in shaping the novel, and the team at HarperCollins; Emma Logan and Lorna Plampin, who waded through the first draft and offered
early encouragement; Katie Espiner and Joy Chamberlain, for help and criticism in the initial stages; James Middleton, for those articles on the Crimea; the staff of the British Library and National Art Library; my mother and brother, for their unwavering support; and SLH, the best, always.

Matthew Plampin was born in 1975 and grew up in Essex. He read English and History of Art at the University of Birmingham and then completed a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He now lectures on nineteenth-century art and architecture. This is his first novel.

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