The Twang of Surprise

Karen Odden - every other Thursday 

In my very first post I talked about how I came to the Victorian period. Today, I want to talk about why I stayed. The short answer is I love the Victorian period because, despite studying it for twenty-five years (since grad school in the late 1990s), it continues to surprise me. 

It’s a long period, from 1837-1901, nearly 64 years, and most scholars divide the Victorian period up into three parts – Early, Middle, and High – because trying to make generalizations about the Victorian era would be like us making generalizations about the US from 1961 to 2025. Obviously, this is fairly useless. 

The twang of surprise when I discover something new about the Victorians zaps an energy into my brain. Sometimes it’s not big enough to sustain a whole book. Sometimes it’s just a short story. I used to think, Oh, no one else will find that interesting. But experience has taught me otherwise. Now I pay attention when I feel startled and intrigued. 

This happened a few years ago, when my daughter Julia was studying for a semester at Oxford. I went over to visit as her semester was winding down. (I joked, "Oh, honey, I'm coming over to help you with the ... um .. language barrier as you pack up and travel home." She laughed.) It was a late afternoon in December, dark and spitting rain. We dodged into the Great Scotland Yard hotel, on the former site of the detective branch, for a drink. Imagine my delight when I walked into the lobby and discovered glass cases full of Scotland Yard memorabilia! Boots belonging to thieves, mug shots, knives, truncheons, police whistles (below), photographs with short explanations, and more. 

Then we went through to the bar, called The Forty Elephants. Given the hotel's Victorian theme, I imagined the name had something to do with British imperialism in India or Africa (where elephants live). But in the bar hung some images of beautiful women, in bejeweled 1920s garb. Thank goodness for the square black-and-white QR code on the table that said, “For more information.” 

I was wildly curious. 

To my surprise, the Forty Elephants were an all-woman thieving gang out of the Elephant and Castle area, in Southwark, south of the Thames. Their heyday was the 1920s, and Scotland Yard tried for decades to shut them down, finally succeeding after WWII. 

Originally, Elephant and Castle was a stagecoach inn, in the 1700s, located at the hub of six (or seven, depending on how you count) roads, coming in from Dover, Canterbury, and various parts of London. It was known as a hotbed for thieves. Just imagine … you’re an unwary traveler who arrives, tired and hungry, by stagecoach. You appear well-to-do. You enter, and someone offers you a warm chair by the fire, a glass of wine (perhaps laced with laudanum), and you have a good meal and fall asleep. In the morning, you wake, to find all your belongings gone, including your hat, coat, and boots. But this was largely the men’s province of crime, along with dragging (pulling luggage off stagecoaches) and mugging. The women wanted a domain of their own, and they found one -- in the new department stores in the West End. 

With the rise of these stores, thieves found a new place to work. The women used sophisticated methods for thieving. They had special long pockets sewn into their skirts. They had fishermen’s mesh sewn inside their coats. They practiced tucking jewelry into their hair. They used muffs. They even had dresses with false arms sewn in, so the real arms and hands could be stealing stealthily. They had two-sided cloaks that they could flip for a quick appearance change. And they practiced their dodges. 

This intrigued me enough to write a book about it. I set my book (An Artful Dodge, coming in June) in 1870s London because that’s my era. But the impulse came from that moment of surprise, followed by a glass or two of wine with my daughter, on that rainy night in London.

How do you feel about surprises?