I have been having troubles with my current writing project. Whilst I have undertaken quite a lot of research already, I couldn’t quite see how it was going to come together. I was certain that I wanted to focus on Sir William Pearce and his son but, to be honest, I am not super interested in the 19th century shipping industry so that line of enquiry was not really getting my creative juices flowing. It wasn’t until I sat back and started looking through the research I had done that I could see where my interests lay. It was in the women they had been involved in. The women who, in most cases, lives they ruined. It is a totally different writing journey than the one I took with my first book. The Pearce’s were incredibly good at covering their tracks and destroying evidence of any of their wrongdoings so I am relying very heavily on information I find through public records and newspapers. This is working very well for several of the women, especially those whose dealings with the Pearce’s were documented in newspapers but there are others where I am piecing together small bits of information and then conducting wider research to try and place these women in Victorian society and what that would have meant for the situations they found themselves in.
The common factor between most of these women was their involvement with show business, with acting and singing and dancing and both of the Pearce men seem to have an attraction to women who made a living on the stage. My challenge is to now gain a better understanding of what life was like for actresses in the late Victorian era and how stage door johnnies like the Pearce’s preyed on them. Back to the libraries for me! Got some books reserved and desks booked at the British Library and the V&A library as well as at my local library. It would seem like proper work if it wasn’t so much fun.
Photograph from the National Portrait Gallery, London