Lucie Dumas
London, 1871: Lucie Dumas of Lyon has accepted a stipend from her former lover and his wife, on condition that she never returns to France; she will never see her young son again. As the money proves inadequate, Lucie turns to prostitution to live, joining the ranks of countless girls from continental Europe who'd come to London in the hope of work in domestic service.
Escaping a Covent Garden brothel for a Magdalen penitentiary, Lucie finds only another form of incarceration and thus descends to the streets, where she is picked up by the author Samuel Butler, who sets her up in her own establishment and visits her once a week for the next two decades. But for many years she does not even know his name.
Based on true events.
An interview with Katherine Mezzacappa
What inspired you to start writing?
With this particular story, it was reading a biography of Samuel Butler and discovering that for twenty years he had visited a lady he had found streetwalking. He would go to her once a week but didn’t initially tell her his real name. After some years of this he introduced his best friend and arranged for him to visit the day before he called. I wondered, ‘How much say did she have in this arrangement? What did she think of it?’
What was the hardest part about writing this book?
In doing the research, I read accounts of girls who had come to London from the continent believing they were going to get jobs as servants and then finding every obstacle possible in their attempts to get out of the prostitution they had not chosen. A century and a half later, it feels as though nothing has changed other than the origin of the women and girls concerned.
Does one of the main characters hold a special place in your heart? If so, why?
I think it might be Alfred Cathie, who was Samuel Butler’s manservant. It’s from him we know the most historical facts about Lucie. He seems to have been a practical and kind person, with no nonsense about him. Without him, Samuel Butler could not have managed a large part of what he did. Just one example: Butler was an accomplished photographer, but he only took the pictures. Alfred did all the darkroom work.
If your book was to be made into a movie, who are the celebrities that would star in it?
Good question! I think for Butler, it might be Colin Firth, as he has just the right combination of British stiffness with passionate undercurrents. For Lucie, Marion Cotillard. She is older now than Lucie when she died, but doesn’t remotely look it.
What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
I hope they feel that Lucie was a person of dignity and resilience who did the best she could with the situation she found herself in. Also that we should not judge and we must always challenge hypocrisy. There was an awful lot of that in Victorian times but it’s not gone away.
The last resting place of the real Lucie Dumas, St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, London. Wikimedia Commons, credit BSD685
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