The Devil’s Acre - Matthew Plampin

Книга “The Devil’s Acre” авторства Мэтью Плампина - это интригующий роман о насилии и конфликтах преданности от автора “Уличного философа”. Какую цену нужно заплатить, чтобы схватить за правую руку дьявола? Весна 1853 года. После триумфального выступления на Большой выставке в Лондоне легендарный американский предприниматель и изобретатель полковник Сэмюэл Кольт расширяет свой оружейный бизнес и проникает в Англию. Он приобретает речной склад в Пимлико и начинает превращать его в завод по производству пистолетов, способный производить его запатентованные револьверы в беспрецедентных масштабах - осознавая, что перспектива войны с Россией означает огромные прибыли. Молодой амбициозный Эдвард Лоури нанят Кольта в качестве своего лондонского секретаря. Хотя изначально он был впечатлен динамичным подходом американца к своему делу, Эдвард начинает подозревать, что намерения американца в Метрополисе не все, чем они кажутся. Тем временем секретарь становится романтично связанным с Кэролайн Нокс, сильной женщиной из

The Devil's Acre by Matthew Plampin. This novel, published by Bodley Head in 2013, offers a complex study of corporations, revolutionaries, art, and politics in nineteenth century London.

Set during and just after the Great Exhibition opening, London's most infamous radical figures conspired to steal weapons plans and make a profit from irrational fear in the general populace. Led by gun inventor and trader Samuel Colt, America's only representative at the exhibition, this makeshift group formulates an unholy alliance with the impoverished clustered within their workplace, the Pimlico Armory. The protagonists included a tabloid reporter LaRouche, an artist Neville Chamberlain, Charles Darwin's older brother Erasmus, Gerrit Smith Jr., the Royal Astronomer Geoffrey Chivers, IRB leader Sarah Townsend Welch, Barbara Coxe, Florence Nightingale, Friedrich Engels, etc. High hopes and groundbreaking ideas blended with straightforward personal greed and stupefying cowardice, poisoning all interactions between brands like dark roots and elevating the sordid concepts to the height of art and politics. All the while, public records wonderfully coalesce Wilberforce Fowler, Herbert Gladstone, Camel chief Alfred Russel Wallace, and archaeologist Edward Forbes brace themselves against incessant violence among troubled hearts. Understanding of this disaster would pit Victoria herself against the futile schemes of Henry Pottinger, Thomas Carlyle, the Irishman Bolt Benson, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, James Mill, amongst other representatives from different classes and beliefs—from industrialists to artists, literary figures to social reformists, medieval philosophers to serial killers.

Cooperating with Edward, Colonel Colt seeks to destroy violent fighters that threaten to destabilize public order and profit. The secretary is entrapped deeper and deeper into frenzied conflict, coming to suspect not only the American's criminal scheme but also his own connection to the secret cell. Meanwhile, adopted Irish worker Patrick Geary, enraged by the theft of his forefathers' honor and worked up by optical illusionist George Zambai he injured his eyesight and descends into insanity. Union organizer Walter Guinness-Jones schemes to mix arms with radical Christianity to cadge attention from middle and working class viewers; 19th century linguist Michael Seery Dragomen comes in disguise of monk Franciscan Rosier to wireless alliances with Radicals while Col. John Morranton races to neutralize Captain William Walker's piracy activities, hoping to earn a fortune, land, or even save his former lover from handcuffs. Waiting at Colonial Williamsburg for king Lear are secretive poetry enthusiast Lord Byron, hubristic fen alchemist William Cullen Bryant, misanthropic author Mark Twain, Renaissance scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson, inquisitive historian Thomas Metcalfe, hopeful reporter Benedetto Ferrari, blundering astronomer Charles Sippens, nomadic jew Madison Cavour, Calvin Harris, Murphy Anderson, Liberian president George Washington Williams, gutter punk Peter Singer, New Orleans newspaper proprietor David Sills, young poetic unemployedJoel Cooper, midwestern feminist movements leader Nicola Davidson, theatre critics Vesta Perren and Thomas Brandon, imprisoned hero William Wordsworth, palm reader Mary Lou Young, religious apologist Gregory B Sadler, Iraq veteran James D Wolf, obstetrician Thomas Jefferson, rural Mogadorian wild man Simon Lake, press officer politician Ty Burrill Kimball, tomboy Chilean journalist Virginia Alvarado, Jewish traveller Jacob Moncrief, circus theatre group leader Abdullah Bin Sultan, chess champion Bobby Fischer, birdwatcher Josephine Pujo Pujon, millican male Ernest Everett Haynes, crooked matriarch Naomi Zimmer, terrapin property Annie Walton Monroe,... With the underlying motive to excel all others, protagonist compete to ensnare Colonel Colt in their corruptive webs in a mass guidelines to idleness and incompetence. As a side effect an equal and opposite attraction of low-aggression neophiJs, virtual creation societies, and underground networks continue to form, unstinting for the sake of progress...

Электронная Книга «The Devil’s Acre» написана автором Matthew Plampin в году.

Минимальный возраст читателя: 0

Язык: Английский

ISBN: 9780007395248

A novel of intrigue, violence and conflicted loyalties from the author of The Street Philosopher.What price to take hold of the devil’s right hand?Spring, 1853. After a triumphant display at the Great Exhibition in London, the legendary American entrepreneur and inventor Colonel Samuel Colt expands his gun-making business into England. He acquires a riverside warehouse in Pimlico and sets about converting it into a pistol works capable of mass producing his patented revolvers on an unprecedented scale – aware that the prospect of war with Russia means huge profits.The young, ambitious Edward Lowry is hired by Colt to act as his London secretary. Although initially impressed by the Colonel’s dynamic approach to his trade, Edward comes to suspect that the American’s intentions in the Metropolis are not all they appear.Meanwhile, the secretary becomes romantically involved with Caroline Knox, a headstrong woman from the machine floor – who he discovers is caught up in a plot to steal revolvers from the factory’s stores. Among the workforce Colt has gathered from the seething mass of London’s poor are a gang of desperate Irish immigrants, embittered refugees from the potato famine, who intend to use these stolen six-shooters for a political assassination in the name of revenge. As pistols start to go missing, divided loyalties and hidden agendas make the gun-maker’s factory the setting for a tense story of intrigue, betrayal and murder.