Miss Corvus’s students learn boxing, fencing, and jujitsu. These skills are historically accurate for the period, but for the latter, I had to massage the time line a bit to make it work for my story. Though Japan opened trade with the West in the 1850s, it wasn’t until the close of the century that martial arts began to become widely known to the British public. In her excellent book Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society (2012), historian Emelyne Godfrey expands on the rise of Japanese martial arts for Victorian women and “the phenomenon of the ‘ju-jutsuffragettes.’ ” Her book was an invaluable resource when crafting the self-defense curriculum for the Crinoline Academy. I highly recommend it to any readers who want to learn more about women’s self-defense in Victorian England.

St. Giles and the Victorian Slum Clearances

The location of the St. Giles Rookery made it unique among Victorian slums. Instead of being on the outskirts of the city, it was in London’s West End, bordered by the wealthiest communities. At the time of Rules for Ruin, the acreage of the Rookery had already been reduced during the slum clearances of the previous decades and was on the verge of being further diminished by the clearances still to come.

Reform of the slum was never the goal, at least initially. The object was to clear the old neighborhoods away to make room for new development. Unfortunately, amid all these improvements, there was no plan for rehousing the displaced poor. Some Rookery residents relocated to other London slums. The rest remained in the Rookery, crammed into a progressively smaller space, where crime, filth, and vice still ran rampant.

This period was a pivotal time for residents of London’s slums, and a perfect encapsulation of the greater changes taking place in the Victorian era. Even as industrialization and invention were revolutionizing every aspect of the age, the poorest of the poor were being left behind, pushed into increasingly overcrowded slums or relegated to workhouses—out of sight and out of mind.

For a character like Gabriel Royce, reforming the slum is an uphill battle. It’s also an ultimately unsuccessful one. Public housing for the poor wouldn’t begin to be implemented until the 1890s, more than thirty years after Gabriel first proposes his model lodging house scheme. Today, the corporate offices of Google stand on the ground where the Rookery once stood. The slum itself is no more.

The Tragedy at Cremorne Gardens

In Rules for Ruin, the character and ultimate fate of wire walker Mr. Galezzo were based on the tragedy of real-life acrobat Carlo Valerio. The twenty-five-year-old Valerio was killed at Cremorne Gardens in the summer of 1863 when his rope gave way and he plummeted forty feet to the ground.