The Little Professor’s got some very interesting shoots and tendrils curling about the idea of Victorian/”Dickensian” fiction, with shout-outs to the great Sarah Waters (whose own trio of fierce Victorians – Affinity, Fingersmith, and Tipping the Velvet – I came to just this year) and others whose work can be classified as neo-Victorian.  As Under the Poppy is my own first venture into the waters of historical NV fiction, I can browse the LP’s checklist and confirm that yes, there is sexuality present, in various forms and formats, and yes indeed, there is stink. (Sidebar note: smell, scent, olfaction is so visceral and such a powerful descriptive tool, everything I write has stink in it. Yum.)

As for the actual history — well, the fact is I didn’t think beforehand about the book as historical fiction, as any “kind” of fiction; I understood in a backdoor sort of way that it would be part of a genre per se, but other than that I thought not at all; I just wrote. When I needed to know if a certain activity or device was present and/or available in my variant Victoriana, I looked it up (and sometimes became pleasurably lost among the byways of the pince-nez and buttonhook et al) and then added, or did not, accordingly.

What was most important to me, what is always most important to me when I write, was recreating on the page that world I saw so clearly in my mind’s eye: the universe of Rupert and Istvan, that most faithful and intimate world they had built and sustained between them, and all the concentric temporal worlds of society and custom, the road, the stage, the brothel and the salon, through which orbits they passed in turn and tandem on their way. Anthony Lane’s wonderful observation about Flaubert’s use of detail – his research “furnishing and feathering a world that had already taken shape within his mind” – is exactly my model.  Everything on the page is there to feather that nest, to hold you in that world until the story is done.

Is it odorous, sex-charged, boots-and-corset puppet-mad, this world? Oh absolutely. Is it neo-Victorian? It can sit at that table, I hope, without annoying its fellows. Need you wear pince-nez when you read it? Only if you want to. Did I make it all up? Yes and no, like all fiction, like the best fiction it aspires to be. Read it, please, then you tell me.