Queen Victoria's Book of Spells by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

About “Charged”

I’m not sure if I believe in past lives, but something had me doubling my skirts, speaking in Dickensian sentences, and obsessed with Gothic architecture from an early age. The Victorian era is my second skin. A difficult, complicated skin, warts and all. As a progressive woman of the twenty-first century, there is much to hate about the Victorian era. Yet it’s when most of the causes I care about were born, and there is much about the era that compels.

I’ve devoted my career thus far to historical fantasy and Victorian-set work. “Charged” is set in a larger Gaslight Fantasy world of Voltage, a work in progress at the time of writing this afterword. When asked, “Why Victoriana?” I respond in opposites: the grit and the grandeur, unspoken desires and secret languages, uptight restriction and a seething underbelly. A bipolar era rife with tension and fear, the era has an ego as big as its advancements, a wakening sense of social consciousness amidst arrogant imperialism, triumphs and terrors of the industrial revolution, and with romance as sweeping and sometimes as exoticised as its thirst to conquer. This Jekyll and Hyde era holds me in thrall, novel after novel. I wonder if the era will ever let me go; if I’ll ever shed this complicated skin.

The seed of “Charged” was planted while I was researching The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker. Jack the Ripper is an element in the story, and in a journalist’s account of the murders, he woefully concluded that if there had just been “more light” (gas lamps ended at Commercial Street and Whitechapel Road, keeping the area of Whitechapel well and truly in the dark), Jack’s reign of terror wouldn’t have happened. More light. While mere visibility alone was hardly an answer to the endemic problems of that neighbourhood, the comment got me thinking about technology as a saviour, and how the words light and power have multiple strong connotations. Out of a question of inversion, Mosley was born. “Power” hungry.

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