Marchwood

An Essex / Limehouse Tale (1850s –1945)
Historical fiction set in and describing life in rural Essex and the East End of London at the end of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. It describes the London slums and criminal world at the time of Jack the Ripper.

1877, Seth Marchwood, an Essex horse trader, and Mary Nolan, a Whitechapel orphan raised by London slum prostitutes, meet and marry. Both characters are shaped by childhoods steeped in neglect, cruelty, ignorance and poverty. Together they form a villainous partnership.

When rural life declines, due to industrialisation, they move to Limehouse where they grasp opportunities to profit from the vice trade and form lucrative associations with brothel keepers, horse thieves and petty criminals. As Jack the Ripper carries out his murderous killings, Mary is imprisoned for larceny. Seth takes advantage of the terror on the streets to offer safe night-time travel in horse drawn cabs through Tower Hamlet alleyways.

Running a Coffee House and Penny Gaff he invests money in property development. His adult sons, moulded in criminality, are active in the family’s fraudulent business practice. During WW1 Seth supplies the military with horses and fodder. His sons enlist and experience the horrors of the Somme. The conflict affects the family’s post war choices. Aged forty-two Seth takes a young mistress. But can the pragmatic and resilient Mary find peace and fulfilment in her later years?

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