This is a note about what is is historically correct in the North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem:—

The working-class outsider who inherits a great man’s fortune is one of the common ideas in Victorian novels.

Molded earthenware teapots had indeed been a Burslem staple, and would continue to be. Twyford had indeed invented modern sanitary ware at his Bath Works at nearby Cobridge, and later developed them at his purpose-built model factory at nearby Cliffe Vale.

Sissy Mint was a real chip-shop owner in Burslem, but he lived in the 1930s. He was one of the most well-known of the chip-shop men.

Herbalism still existed at that time. The Bibliotheca Staffordiensis (1894) talks of Culpers’s, a book not yet excised from Staffordshire’s libraries despite the many accounts of the alleged “occult” properties of the plants it described…

“Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, and English Physician. Wherein several hundred herbs, with a display of their medicinal and occult properties”

See C.S. Burne’s fascinating 1896 article in Folk-Lore: A Quarterly Review, “Staffordshire Folk and Their Lore“, for more details of archaic survivals of herbal and other folk beliefs in the county. Sadly I didn’t see this article before I finished the novel, or I would borrowed a few names and phrases from it.

1768 was indeed deemed a “bad year”, of many eclipses.

There was indeed a Brewery in Zion Street, Burslem. Not mentioned in the novel is the fact that a young trainee manager there was once the Nottingham murderer and alcoholic William Horry. But by the time he was a killer, he had moved to Nottingham.

The southerly facing illuminated clock dial of the Burslem Town Hall was indeed illuminated, presumably at that time by gas.

The tradition of the “rat in the cider” is an old one, and I remember the BBC’s The Archers once spun a week’s worth of episodes out of it.

The ‘Green Man’ figure can still be seen in various places around Stoke. The artist Kate Lynch has done quite a bit of research on the topic, especially in Stoke old town.

The old Victorian ceramic-tiled underground toilets existed in Burslem town centre until very recent times. I went down into them myself, in the early 2000s. They were destroyed by the Council sometime in the mid 2000s.

Eugenics was then a current theory, and academically acceptable until the 1940s.

The ‘League of the Just’ did exist, although at a later date. In its later and more German form in the middle of the 19th century it was the place in which modern terrorism was theorised…

“Karl Heinzen was the first to provide a full-fledged doctrine of modern terrorism; most elements of latter-day terrorist thought can be found in the writings of this forgotten German radical democrat.” — Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (2009).

…thus the novel’s fictional conflation of the group with The Terror of the French Revolution is somewhat justified.

Some notes on the historical accuracy of Chapter Eight of the North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem:—

The Sytch is indeed just north of Burslem town centre, and appears to take its name from the old name for the Scotia Brook. There were such wastelands…

“The Burslem district, with its distinctive bottle ovens, a typical though vanishing feature of the Potteries scene, presents a built-up industrial landscape interspersed with several tracts of wasteland.” — A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 8 (my emphasis).

Here it is on the map of Burslem from 1800. There may be some confusion in the histories, because The Sytch appears to have been both a wasteland and the name of the road that ran alongside that wasteland…

Here is Paul Johnson on The Sytch, from his The Vanished Landscape autobiography of a 1930s childhood…

“The Sytch was the dark heart of the Potteries, an immense stretch of ground composed in almost equal parts of bare clay earth, black water, mud, industrial detritus both active and abandoned, and fumigerous furnaces, belching forth fire, ashes and smoke. […] The Sytch was desolation by day for, except when the wind was high, stagnant smoke clouds and a miasma of foetid mist which surged up from its black waters made sure that visibility was low and a semi-darkness prevailed.”

He may be mis-remembering somewhat, but the area was certainly the poorest in the district, and home to “fumigerous” small workshops that would not be tolerated elsewhere. The site of The Sytch is now said to be roughly on what is now the Trubshaw Playing Fields and the fields around the Brownhills High School, from there stretching up to the northern edge of Burslem…

BERT BENTLEY ARCHIVE – BURSLEM – Off Westport Road. The Sytch and Sytch mill. The old mill house.

There were two parish surgeons in 1834, so it seems possible there was at least one resident town surgeon for Burslem in 1869. Medical training for women was not unknown at the time. For instance, America had the New York Medical College for Women by 1869. In 1887 Scotland opened the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, so the idea of Miss Craft going to Edinburgh to train enough to be a local part-time “jobbing” town surgeon is not as far-fetched as it might appear.

The efficient modern factory system of the division of labour, partly described in miniature in use at Craft’s workshops, has been said to have been the invention of ‘the Father of the Industrial Revolution’ Josiah Wedgwood of Stoke.

Some of the greatest grass engravers were indeed to be found at Wordsley in South Staffordshire.

Here are some visual examples of ocular devices of the type the novel envisages, although the simple middle one is closer to that in the novel…

Following the publication of my own North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem, I thought an article surveying other fictions set in the Potteries might be fitting:—

The classic author of the Potteries is, of course, Arnold Bennett. The most approachable novels are generally said to be the serious coming-of-age novel Clayhanger (1910), the more comedic The Card (1910), and the women’s stories Anna of the Five Towns (1902) and The Old Wives’ Tale (1908). All Bennett’s work is now in the public domain, and can be found online in various formats including Kindle. The Card was filmed, partly on location in Burslem and Middleport, with Alec Guinness in 1952. There was a major ITV TV adaptation, the last of the great weekly costume-drama series. The Old Wives’ Tale was also filmed as the 1988 BBC six-part drama, Sophia and Constance.

Paul Breeze’s My Guitar Gently Weeps (1979) is a neatly structured tale of hard rock music and harder revenge, set in the industrial Midlands of the mid 1970s. It’s a portrait of the music scene just before punk, but with a whiff of the notoriously violent Action comic and of the skinheads of the times. A first novel, it was published by the major publisher Micheal Joseph. Here’s their blurb…

“In this gripping novel of revenge, a young musician turns implacable avenger when his whole reason for living — playing the guitar in a rock band — is ended by a brutal assault.”

The writing in My Guitar Gently Weeps is excellent. There was a sequel called Back Street Runner (1980), featuring the same character (but, given the plot of the first book, it’s perhaps unlikely that Back Street Runner was set in Stoke-on-Trent).

Wedgwood Butterflies (2003) is a mystery thriller novel by Peter Corbishley. Set in the Potteries in an indeterminate time period, the book stars Eric Rattlestone, a researcher in ceramics.

The contemporary novelist Stephen Foster set two of his works in the Potteries. It Cracks like Breaking Skin (1999) was a Faber and Faber first novel, set around families and football in Stoke…

“A novel about what it is to grow up. On street corners and market stalls, in back kitchens and swimming pools, across the walkways and the terraces of Stoke-on-Trent, Hewitt the man faces Hewitt the boy. Finding rare passion in the ordinary moments, he discovers what he is, who he might have been.”

Foster’s last publication seems to have been the Kindle-exclusive The Final (2011), set on Stoke’s big day at the F.A. Cup final match (14th May 2011).

Award-winning artist and writer Andi Watson made his debut with a Potteries novel of relationships. Breakfast After Noon (2001) is a substantial and powerful graphic novel set around the end of the 20th century, as many big ceramics factories and the giant steelworks at Etruria closed down, to be replaced by unemployment and family strife — while the New Labour government looked on and did little except scheme about how to demolish people’s terraced houses.

Necromantra (2005) is a novel by Phil Emery, a brooding Kafkaesque novel set in a dark fantasy version of the Victorian-era 1850s Potteries which Emery calls “The Hundred Towns”…

“In the Hundred, the working folk are kept in order by the masters who administrate the various mills, pits and manufactories. Strict records are kept in town halls, every death certified despite a crushing mortality. However, the old grim certainties face a new threat with the arrival of the necromancers — dark-skinned pilgrims who, by the chant of a strange mantra, are able to raise the recently dead, thus throwing the immaculate records of the town halls into chaos. In retaliation, the masters appoint a number of rectifiers to each town. Reviled and feared by most of the Hundred, their job is to ‘re-decease’ the ‘discrepancies’, as the risen are labelled.”

The Bonemill (2010) by Nicholas Corder is a short and fast-paced historical thriller novel set in Stoke in the 1820s, and intended for young teenage readers (i.e., the “young adult” market)…

“A teenage orphan, Joseph lives hand-to-mouth, keeping one step ahead of the workhouse. And he’s trying to contact his dead mother through his landlady and medium, Gerda. When offered a chance to earn a few extra shillings, Joseph jumps at the chance and is soon dragged into the deadly sideline business at the House of Recovery with the slimy local anatomist.”

The Green Stone (197?), by Graham Phillips, is only partly or tangentially set in Stoke. It was apparently one of those famous Panther paperbacks of the late 1970s, full of ‘earth mysteries’ and faux mysticism, and is said to have some scenes of…

“battling with the spirits of Victorian magicians in dank basements under Stoke-on-Trent”

Mel Sherratt’s crime novel Taunting The Dead (2011) is a gritty and atmospheric crime story set in Stoke-on-Trent.

There are also short stories. Such as “Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges (to be found in his collection Labyrinths) which is set in “a suburb of Fenton” but which the narrator reaches by alighting from his train at a fictitious rural halt called “Ashgrove” and then walking through a countryside of “confused meadows”. I have a short essay on the story on this blog.

A more substantially “Stoke” short story is by H.G. Wells. His story “The Cone” (1895) can be found in The Country of the Blind and other Selected Stories, or for free online since it is in the public domain. It’s a macabre story, apparently inspired by a news report of someone throwing themselves into an ironworks melting-pot and by Wells’s own time in the Potteries. He vividly evokes the works at Etruria in Stoke. For details of Wells in the Potteries, see my book on the topic.

The novelist and pioneering werewolf scholar (The Book of Werewolves, 1865) Sabine Baring-Gould set his novel The Frobishers: A Story of the Staffordshire Potteries (1901) in North Staffordshire. The work is freely available online. However, the author of The Bibliophile Dictionary encyclopaedia thought it a piece of political propaganda: “A study of the hardships and oppressions of workers in the pottery districts of North Staffordshire, the details evidently ‘got up’ for the purpose of instructing public opinion.”

There are also apparently some unpublished works, such as Robert P. Clarke’s Five Gold Rings, a philosophical novel of Kantian ideas set in his terraced house in Longport, near Burslem.

Of note among autobiographies that evoke the poverty during the Great Depression of the 1930s are the major books by Arthur Berry (Three and Sevenpence Ha’penny Man), and Paul Johnson (The Vanished Landscape: A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries). Also heavily autobiographical is Arthur Berry’s book of stories The Little Gold-Mine. See also Tales of old Hanley (1992) by Fred Leigh.

Rhoda Broughton was the niece of the horror fiction pioneer Sheridan le Fanu. Broughton was once… “one of the most popular novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century”, but is now almost totally forgotten. She left Staffordshire (Eccleshall, a few miles to the SW of Stoke) as a young woman and lived most of her life in Oxford. A volume of her ghost stories was published in 1995, Rhoda Broughton’s Ghost Stories, and I suppose it may just be possible that one of these stories is set back in the Staffordshire of her youth, perhaps even in the Potteries?

Priscilla Masters’s short children’s book Mr. Bateman’s Garden (1987) is a fantasy set in the gardens at Biddulph Grange, North Staffordshire — although it seems unlikely that it includes a depiction of Stoke-on-Trent.

As for poets, Charles Tomlinson’s The Stoke Poems was published as an audio book by Keele. It collected all his Stoke and Staffordshire poems. So far as I know there has never been a print edition. Also see Arthur Berry’s 2007 collection Dandelions, and some of the poems of John Wain. Nov 2011 also saw the Kindle republication of the 1899 volume The Writings In Prose and Rhyme In North Staffordshire Dialect by the Potteries Poet by William Steele.

Oral storytelling is well represented by Alan Povey’s tales of his Owd Grandad Piggott character, set in the Potteries. LP albums and CD collections of the stories have been available in the past, and have been broadcast on BBC Radio Stoke — but the character doesn’t seem to have yet made the transition to podcasts.

In the local dialect, “A. Scott” (Wilfred Alan Bloor, 1915-1993)… “wrote over 400 Jabez tales in North Staffordshire dialect for the local Sentinel newspaper between 1968 and 1993.”

There was also a paperback book The Stoke Story: fiction and memoirs. This was published as a 2002 competition anthology. Despite being published by Stoke-on-Trent Libraries, it seems never to have been listed on book databases or on Amazon, and is now unobtainable as a purchase. I have placed the contents page online here.

(My thanks to Fred Hughes for pointing out three of these books).

Update: In late 2012, two new novels set in Stoke-on-Trent:

* Jonathan Taylor, Entertaining Strangers. Jonathan grew up in Trentham, and has used the city as a backdrop for a novel of eccentricity, obsessions, and fiery visions.

* A.N. Wilson, The Potter’s Hand. A historical novel of the interior life and work of Josiah Wedgwood, the famous pottery maker.

Added a new page, containing portraits of the characters in Spyders.

This is a note on what is historically correct in Chapter Seven of the North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem:—

The Burslem Workhouse. The original local workhouse is imagined in the novel as lasting into the late 1860s, but in reality the old one became the Scotia Pottery in 1857 and soon after was sold to Bodley & Harrold…

“The old parish workhouse was sold by the guardians in 1857 for £1,000 after several unsuccessful attempts to secure more. It was bought by James Vernon who converted it into the Scotia Pottery” — A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 8.

The newer and purpose-built Wolstanton & Burslem Union Workhouse at Chell served a wider area than simply Burslem. It had 132 inmates in 1839. It had around 160 adult inmates listed in the 1881 census. This suggests that my estimate of about 100 Workhouse inmates from Burslem town (then a town of 22,000) would be about the right number for 1869.

The Lyme was a real local forest, although long gone by 1869. It gave its name to Newcastle-under-Lyme.

There was a North Staffs Fox Hunt. See the book: A History of the North Staffordshire Hounds and Country, 1825 to 1902. Also the 1995 updating by Simon P. Huguet, The North Staffordshire Hounds: a history of the North Staffordshire Hunt, 1845-1995.

Mrs. Mary Brougham the bookseller was a real historical figure. See the historical notes on the previous chapter for full details. She did indeed commission some fine ceramic Parian miniatures from local artisans.

The Free Trade Movement was real. See the book The Free-trade Movement and its Results for details.

The various trades of Birmingham, Burton, and Leek are correct. However, leather was more in Walsall.

The Cat Motor is an obvious invention. There was however much activity in this area in the mid 1800s, and Dr. Morton suggested that the history of static electricity in the UK could be…

“divided into three periods … the second, a period extending from 1800 to 1869”.

Earth currents had indeed only just been discovered in 1869. The Stoke inventor Oliver Lodge — a partial inspiration for Miss Craft (the inventor in the novel) — apparently made one of the first practical local demonstrations of electricity as a boy at Wolstanton in 1868. Like Craft he was a science prodigy, and later was a key player in the invention of radio.

Mrs. Brougham’s casual mention of Mr. Morlock Bones and his assistant Moriarty again shows the reader they are in an alterative history. Morlock Bones is, of course, a play on the name Sherlock Holmes. Morlock is my allusion to the ‘morlocks’ in H.G. Wells’s famous The Time Machine. Wells published a macabre story set in Stoke, in the same year that The Time Machine was published.

The description of the Rousseau psychographic portrait is correct, and is based on this painting of him…

Rousseau wore this type of dress in the Staffordshire Moorlands, and did indeed go hunting herbs on the moors. Erasmus Darwin did once try to meet with Rousseau in the Moorlands, but the paranoid Rousseau rebuffed him.

Rousseau did indeed give his five children into the care of the state. The extreme Jacobins of the French Revolution indeed adored Rousseau. And…

“The Jacobin leaders were explicitly disciples of Rousseau […] It was Rousseau’s followers who prevailed in the French Revolution, especially in its destructive third phase” — from Rousseau and the French Revolution.

The real Thomas Wedgwood was indeed interested in educational theory in his youth. See the biography for more details.

This is a note on what is historically correct in Chapter 6 of the North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem, set in 1869:—

The description of differing times is broadly correct. The passage of measured time was not yet wholly uniform in provincial England in 1869.

The animosity toward women readers is correct. A old colleague of mine once wrote her M.A. dissertation of the subject. Here is a report of a debate, given in the Journal of the Society of Arts (2nd April 1869), on the topic. This is advocating in the other direction…

The novels mentioned are of the time, but Middlemarch was only begun in 1869 and did not see print serialisation until 1871.

The famous fantasy novel At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald was indeed in that year being serialised in Good Words.

There was indeed a Mrs. Brougham, Bookseller, in Burslem. As well as selling books she held what then amounted to a local lending library and a local records service before the opening of the Wedgwood Institute library in the 1870s. She seems to have inherited the business from her father(?), Mr. Stephen Brougham, since he is mentioned in regard to his marriage as a Burslem bookseller in The New Monthly in 1816. She appears as “Mary Brougham, printer” of Burslem, and appears to have operated as such from 1828 into the 1850s, whence the printing seems to have taken a back seat to the bookselling.

Mrs. Brougham also appears to have had a sideline in commissioning brooches from the finest local artisans, since in 1851 it was recorded that “The elegant Parian Brooches manufactured by Mrs. M. Brougham, of Burslem, had received the patronage of Queen Victoria”. This fact features in the novel, and is tied into the visit of the Queen to Burslem.

The real Mrs. Brougham appears to have been connected with the Burslem and Tunstall Literary and Scientific Society (founded 1838, seems to have later floundered and was re-founded in 1849 as a Mechanic’s Institute which lasted until 1854).

Charlotte Cotton was another female bookseller in Burslem at the time. For a small town of 22,000 to support two booksellers suggests good sales and a wide readership.

The Potteries has indeed been called the cradle of the nation’s comedy, although at a later date.

In 1869 about nine out of ten of the town’s children and youth did indeed have some form of schooling, and could read and write.

I remember reading years ago that some historians had changed their views on the history of British education, and had come to see the penny schools as providing a generally good service, regulated by the market because paid for weekly and directly, and the compulsory state education as often inferior to what it replaced. I assume in the novel that people in a prosperous working town would pay a shilling (five pence) a week rather than a penny. This supposition seems to be backed up by this quote from the Journal of the Society of Arts, 1869…

“Penny schools [in England] used to be laughed at, and then the fee was raised to twopence and threepence; and when the parents found the value of the education which was given they were willing to give even another penny, and thus more teaching [staff] power could be provided.”

My grandmother has bad memories of being schooled by nuns, and this is reflected in the narrators’ comments about the potential cruelty of compulsory education run by religious zealots using corporal punishment.

Blackshaw was, I seem to remember from my research reading, a real chemist in the Burslem Market Square. Lovatt was a real drapier (gent’s outfitter), and there was a Commercial Bank of England branch.

Toni Chilterni the barber is a name some people may recognise 🙂

Pigeon racing may have been a gambling sport at that time, since cock fighting had been abolished.

This blog post has now been superseded by my new book on H. G. Wells in the Potteries.

Zompist today gives an intelligent newb’s impression of first encountering H.P. Lovecraft (specifically, the classic At the Mountains of Madness). I think he may also have inadvertently summed up some people’s reaction to The Spyders of Burslem (which is imagined as written by an old man in 1919). Especially if they’re not aware of the tradition that Spyders arises from, and are instead expecting a speed-read supermarket novel…

“What stands out about both stories is the narrative technique, which I find so antiquated that it’s hard to deal with. Bluntly, the narration hides the good stuff as long as possible. It approaches the theme from way off, teases us with ambiguous details, goes out of its way to suggest that there may be rationalistic explanations or it may all be mad hallucinations. This was kind of standard for the period, of course, but Lovecraft takes it to an extreme. I let him go on and on, but I think it’s not to modern tastes.”

This is a note on what is historically correct in Chapter 5 of the North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem, set in 1869:—

“A spectral cloud was haunting Burslem” is a play on the opening line of the Communist Manifesto. The title of the chapter is a play on the famous final line of the most famous poem of the period, Dover Beach.

The Burslem and Tunstall Gas Company was a real company of the time, supplying the town’s gas.

Most of the names given for the type of pottery worker are correct. But I have invented “jug-runner”, imagining them as the boys who would go to fill water jugs for the potters, and fetch their weak beer during the mid-morning meal.

Mow Cop is a real place, and the topography is as described. Rousseau had indeed lived in the Staffordshire Moorlands, and had seemingly gone mad there, in the 1700s.

Above: Burslem Town Hall, with a storm coming in from the tower and hill of Mow Cop.

The Town Hall does have “immense Roman columns”, but today it only has one golden angel, and not four as in the novel. On the inside, I’m not sure if the town ever displayed paintings of its prize cats on the walls. Probably not 😉

Above: the golden angel atop the Town Hall today.

Above: The mythological figures that support the top structure of the Town Hall tower.

From the novel: “These [county police] were well-paid men of large mustaches and little insight who saw a posting in Burslem as a penance. They were county men and they took the train to Stafford and to their warm beds every night, and left the patrol of the darkened streets to the night-watchmen of the manufactories or to the lamp-men.”

…the Town Hall did indeed house the Police Office at that time, among several other things. The lock-ups were indeed in the cellars. The County police stationed in the town were indeed thought to be much worse than the local ones they replaced, although the reference I found to that sentiment was from a little earlier in the century.

Above: the Town Hall today, seen from what the novel imagines as Mrs. Brougham’s bookshop (left).

The steampunk concept for the top of the Town Hall is an obvious invention. One can see, however, that there might once have been a detachable top section.

The Stoke inventor Oliver Lodge — a partial inspiration for Miss Craft (the inventor in the novel) — apparently made one of the first practical local demonstrations of electricity in 1868 at Moreton House on the southern tip of the Wolstanton Marsh, when aged about 16 or 17. Like Craft he was a science prodigy, and later was a key player in the invention of radio.

From the novel: “They had gone down into The Backlands, that area of sooty scrub and farmland that immediately surrounded the town to the south. Unlit at night, the locals told tales of great black dogs and loathsome toads that roamed there after twilight. The dogs had eyes that softly twinkled in the moonlight, like the reflections from lumps of fresh-cut coal. That, anyway, was the tale told to little boys to bring them home promptly for their tea.”

“The Backlands” broadly equate to the area now covered by Grange Park, between Burslem and Festival Park. The only black dogs there today tend to be slobbery labradors.

“Burgweard Woods” is my play on the name Bradwell Woods. These woods still exist on the western slopes of the valley opposite Burslem. Burgweard Lyme may have been the first name for Burslem, Burgweard being a man’s name, and the Lyme being the huge county-spanning escarpment forest that once ran past the valley. Hence the novel calls them the Burgweard Woods.

“Aetherstorms” are an obvious fantastical invention, and yet the aether was of course then a common concept, and many supernatural things were attributed to it.

The town’s Great Beast Market is my name for the meat market, which seems to have been built around 1836. Rather than being to the east between the Town Hall and the Queen’s Theatre, I have imagined it as being just to the north.

Tripey Ashley was a real name, I think he was mentioned in Arthur Berry’s autobiography. Ashley had a famously stinking yard between Burslem and Hanley.

Added a new Gallery page for the panels of the zodiac on the front of Burslem’s Wedgwood Institute. I made these pictures some years ago for the old Burslem School of Art website.

Notes on “Chapter Four: A Pint of the Finest”, in the North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem:—

There was indeed a horse-tram that ran between Burslem and Hanley.

There was no pub called The Albion, as far as I know. Burslem did have an Albion Pottery and an Albion Street. Albion is, of course, an ancient name for the British Isles.

“I was not at all a pub-going man, and had no local woman with fur cuffs and a sharp bonnet to place on my arm and to guide me in such matters.” [so in procrastination about entering the pub] “I stepped into a shadowy little side alley and spent some minutes there reading some garish poster adverts for ‘The Circus of Pandemonium’. I knew that the Circus had then just arrived for its winter camp in the great railway sidings at Cliffe Vale…”

…there was indeed a large circus based there in the winter, but later. The railway sidings and buildings at Cliffe Vale were used as the winter quarters for the world’s biggest circus, Barnum & Bailey, from 1897 until 1911.

“The faces were not always of an attractive nature, and there was much use of powder and rouge, for that was a time when many of the diseases of childhood were not kind to the skin.”

…broadly true of the faces of the 1860s. There would also have been a lot more deformity around.

“the shallow diggings of the Red Shagg, the Bassey, and the Half Yards”

…these were the names of local ironstone mines. The Bassey had, however, been abandoned in 1861.

“For the deep coal mines were then a very new thing, and the first of them had only recently been sunk. The deep pits were able to be sunk because the really powerful steam engines had then become available to drain such places, and the Davy lamps to detect the gasses.”

…true. The first deep coal pits were sunk in Warwickshire, seemingly in the 1850s. These two new inventions made possible access to the deep coal seams, which otherwise would have been out of reach.

The description of the coal miner’s lifestyle seems to have been correct. Their pay was indeed twice the pay of an ironstone miner.

It seems there were many female publicans around at that time. I found many during my family tree research in South Staffordshire. The licencing magistrates seem to have not been prejudiced against them.

The Burslem Cosmograph newspaper is an invention of the novel. The 1855 Stamp Act had indeed removed the tax on newspapers, provoking a rash of such little town newspapers. However, it seems Burslem did not have its own newspaper. There was a North Staffordshire Mercury, and Potteries Mercury, whose titles have a similarly ‘cosmic’ ring to them.

“family memories of the last-ever plague year of 1647”

…1647 was indeed the last year the plague seems to have been in Burslem.

Rousseau had indeed lived in the Staffordshire Moorlands, but only for a year in 1766-7. He is also featured later in the novel.

“the strange newly-discovered earth currents and the electrikery”

… earth currents had indeed only just been discovered by science in 1869.

“firedamp and chokedamp” were real names for coal mine gasses.

“Jimmy Tunnicliffe” — this major character is based on a “James Tunnicliff”, a Staffordshire ‘cunning’ man brought to trial at the Stafford spring assizes, 1857 (full account in Susan Hoyle’s unpublished “James Tunnicliff’s Story: The Narrative of a Cunning-Man’). His appearance, however, is taken from Arthur Berry’s autobiography in which he describes a Burslem man of the 1920s or 30s…

“an effeminate man who wears a ginger wig … muttering to himself all day, he pushes an old pram with a bird cage in it.”

The working-class tradition of tolerating cross-dressers is correct. The term “intersex”, as used by the narrator was in real use in the 1880s until in faded away in the 1940s. Since the novel is imagined as an account written in 1919, it is the sort of word a narrator of that time would have used.

Astrology had indeed been suppressed in England in the 1850s, as stated in the novel. This makes the real choice of the Zodiac for the frontage of the Institute all the more curious. It seems there is no historical documentation about why it was chosen.

The anti-socialist feelings of Moses Steel the mine-owner are broadly historically correct. The North Staffordshire Miners’ Association was about to be formed. His comments about Kropotkin, Marx and Engels are all factually correct.

This is a note on the historical accuracy of “Chapter Three: The Raising of the Zodiac” of the North Staffordshire novel The Spyders of Burslem:—

Brickhouse and the Cock Yard are real, and can still be walked down, although in the 1970s the western side of Brickhouse was marred by modern shop units in the ugly ‘municipal socialism’ style. Below is an old view of the alley and the yard off it. For the purposes of a later chapter of the novel the Cock Yard has to be more enclosed, and so it is envisaged as having a wall and entrance into it from Brickhouse…

The Cock Yard was indeed used for cock-fighting, a sport which had been abolished by 1869.

The portrayal of John Ruskin is accurate. He did have ginger hair, and he was famously worried about the fossil hunters destroying faith in the historical ‘truth’ of the Bible. He was a…

“London art critic and champion of the Pre-Raphaelite school of English painting, and more recently a great practical advocate of the education of girls and young women”

Above: the young Ruskin.

Ruskin also donated his books to the Wedgwood Institute library. It’s not known if he ever visited the Instutute, but he travelled widely inspecting education, so he may have. Ruskin did write one of the first real fantasy novels, The King of the Golden River (1841), and also the second book mentioned, The Queen of the Air (1869) which was “a study of the Greek myths of cloud and storm” rather than a novel. He did not, however, write the latter for little Rudyard Kipling.

Ruskin’s friend William Morris did live in Leek, in the Staffordshire Moorlands — although in reality that was a little later than 1869, between 1875 – 1878. The novel has shifted those dates to imagine him in Leek in 1869, thus giving Ruskin a reason to visit North Staffordshire.

Rudyard Kipling’s father John Lockwood Kipling did design the façade of the Wedgwood Institute in Burslem. The Zodiac frieze is real, and can still be seen today. The bas-reliefs for Cancer and Aries are indeed reversed, which is used in the novel…

In 1869, Rudyard Kipling would have been about four years old, not the seven years old imagined in the novel.

Ruskin’s reference to Horace Walpole and the wider architectural influences that his horror genre spawned is historically correct.

Psychographs (photographics in which human feelings are recorded) are an obvious invention of the novel. They are introduced in the Curiosities Room because they play a crucial part later in the novel.

Some of Thomas Wedgwood’s earliest photographs were indeed of leaves, probably made at the Etruria Hall near Burslem…

The skull of an auroch was indeed found on a gravel bank of the Fowlea — but that was later, in 1877.

The North Staffordshire Field Club was a real organisation, founded in 1865.

Carnivorous “living fossils”, found in the mines and on display in the Curiosities Room, are an obvious invention of the novel.

Priestley did discover oxygen, and his bust is enshrined above the Wedgwood Institute entrance.

The Birmingham “toy trade” was actually something different. But the novel imagines it to be “small clockwork toys”, which are on display in the Institute’s Curiosities Room.

Feeling earth tremors and experiencing earth slippage was indeed common in Burslem in the 20th century. Possibly also in the 19th century, although in 1869 the deep coal mines had only been sunk for a matter of a decade or so.

The comment by a craftsman about an “angel satyr” is an allusion to Kilvert.