ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my editor Jenni Hill at Orbit/Little, Brown for her enthusiasm and help in bringing The Oversight out of the shadows and into the world, and to Joanna Kramer for her painstaking copy-edit. Any infelicities are mine, not theirs. Thanks to Fergus Fleming, Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring for secret reading and encouragement along the way. I’m grateful to Willi Paterson for lending me “Lord” George Sanger’s memoir of life in a mid-nineteenth-century travelling show Seventy Years a Showman, which was as invaluable a resource for creating the world Sara fell into as Dickens’s essays from Household Words are for the London that she fell out of. The Sangers aren’t in my book, but the Pyefinches are close kin. Na-Barno Eagle and Hector Anderson his great rival did really exist, and Georgiana… well she existed too, but what happened to her you’ll have to wait and see. In real life she touched royalty.

The Westphalian-born Rabbi Samuel Falk was a kabbalist and an alchemist and is reputed to know the true name of God, hence his title of “Ba’al Shem” (Master of the Name), and he did indeed live and keep a laboratory in Wellclose Square. He counted Casanova as one of his wide acquaintance. He is reputed to have used his knowledge of the Name to create and animate the only golem ever to walk London’s streets. There is no official record showing he had a granddaughter named Sara. But then The Oversight doesn’t officially exist either, so who knows?

John Dee is of course an historical character, and his magic paraphernalia is still on display in the British Museum. You’ve probably unmasked The Citizen’s real identity, but if not you’ll have to wait, but he too existed and we’ll see more of him. The “estimable Mr Henderson” whose “receipt” Cook uses for her Eccles cakes is with us now: I’ve never met him but I have always deeply enjoyed his restaurants and especially the said Eccles cakes (with cheese), so I hope he doesn’t mind being anachronistically thrust back into 1840s London as a bizarre thank you from a stranger.

Anyone who knew my dad and has read this far may have recognised bits of him earlier, if not in The Smith himself, then certainly in his workshop which is my dad’s, minus the blacksmithery. Dad introduced me to Wayland Smith when he shared his love of Kipling with me as a young boy. I think he’d have enjoyed the way I repaid that gift by making him a part of this story, but he died before I finished it. Deaths are tough times for all families, but we and he were greatly helped and served by truly great district nurses in his final illness. Thank you Siobhan Dickson, Tina Dodd and Janice Colley, and also thank you Kathy, Karen, Theresa and Cheryl from St Michael’s Hospice. I am enormously grateful for the professionalism and enormous patience and good humour of Paul Allsopp, whose visits brightened up some very dark days for both my parents. Special thanks to my wonderful cousin Tracey Little, brick of bricks. You all helped us keep our promise to him, and we couldn’t have done it without your graceful help.

And speaking of grace… Domenica. Always and forever, thank you. Nothing is ever quite as much fun without you. A.V.O.