Author's Note

Elizabeth's gaol and Jen's museum are heavily inspired by a very real place, the Galleries of Justice Museum, located in the old Shire Hall and County Gaol of the city of Nottingham, England, where I worked, mostly as a Victorian wardress, during summer of the year 2000. The tour Jen presents to her visitors is very similar to the one I presented to tour groups of my own during those months.

Most of the historical information contained in Truths was gleaned during my time at the museum. I am indebted to both the Galleries of Justice and my colleagues of the time for teaching me not only the facts, but also some of the more gruesome and interesting details. The information Jen relates to her audiences is, to the best of my knowledge, mostly accurate.

I have, of course, used a liberal amount of artistic license in my portrayal of the building and its inhabitants, and their experiences in both time periods. None of my characters are based on real people, and the structure of the real building is similar, but not identical, to my fictional one. The museum has a library, but the one I describe and the archive Jen accesses are my inventions.

Elizabeth's experience in a gaol of 1808 is as historically accurate as it is possible to be, without interfering with the demands of my plot. Prisons in 1808 were not the disciplined, organized places they became under the Victorians. Though, in 1774, two penal reform acts were passed through Parliament, with the intention of improving conditions with such measures as provision of health care and the segregation of the sexes, prisons were still thoroughly filthy and unpleasant places. There was no regime, no uniform, and no real sanitation. Though debtors were often imprisoned for the duration of a prison sentence, most prisoners, especially in Nottingham County Gaol, were simply being held in the prison until their sentences to be served elsewhere were carried out.

The most significant artistic license I used in Elizabeth's story is that, chances are, Elizabeth would have met her fellow prisoners before her sentencing, as there was often no separation of the convicted and to-be-tried. It is also likely that preparations for her execution would have taken less than three weeks, though the system was far from systematic. One other point to note is that in 1808 executions in Nottingham were still being carried out on Gallows Hill outside of the town. They were moved to the steps of the County Gaol in the 1820s, though in many places in England this move, from designated sites of execution outside of the towns, to the frontages or flat roofs of the County Gaols, happened earlier.

In 1808, two women were executed in England. One was a murderess. The other, Mary Chandler, was executed in Lancashire for the crime of stealing in a dwelling place, the same crime Elizabeth is convicted of and for which forty-six people were hanged between 1800 and 1827. I am indebted to a grimly fascinating Web site, www.capitalpunishment.org, which made it possible for me to check my facts on executions in England in this period.

Before the unsuccessful (for Britain!) conclusion of the War of Independence in 1776, felons were transported from English gaols to the penal colonies in America. When this was no longer an option, transportation began to Australia in 1787. Figures vary, but somewhere in the region of 190,000 convicts had been transported by the time the practice ceased in 1868.

Though Nottingham is very much a real city, not all of the locations are based on real places. Those that are bear no more than a passing resemblance to the actual businesses and localities. This is a work of fiction, after all.

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