![]() And yet, only a few pages in, The Quietness plunges us into all the vice and hypocrisy of Victorian London, and a horrifying story unfolds which takes in illegitimacy, infant death, rape, prostitution and worse.įourteen year-old Queenie longs for some respite from the squalid slums where she grows up, squeezed into one room with her parents and hungry siblings. Its foiled William Morris wallpaper look and the rather clean and contemporary looking model on the front both hint at a conventional historical novel, which the blurb confirms as set in London in 1870. Apart perhaps from the bottles of Laudanum and Godfrey’s Cordial – ‘the Quietness’ – tucked out of the way on the back. There is little about the way this novel is presented to suggest the dreadful happenings within its covers. ![]()
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