In this first extract from Exeme, Claudia is on her way back to School for her senior year. After an unfortunate accident, she arrives at The Poplars’ gates in the back of a patrol car. Jack The Cop calls in on his radio, tells the dispatcher he’s going to drop me off at The Poplars. […]
Category: Featured
Letters Home #2
Babe, You would not believe what I have had to do to get this to you. First, write it, like, actually scratch on paper with my hands and a sticky black ballpoint because there’s no way you can use the computers here to type anything you don’t want the teachers to see. Hens. We call […]
MISSING: Rhoda, 1899
Rhoda Evanston is the first Poplars girl to be officially recorded as Missing — she vanished during the grand Fin De Siècle ball held at the School on December 31st, 1899. Like Eudora and Thea, her disappearance was reported with much excitement by the press. Foolish, flighty Rhoda, so the official story goes, was engaged […]
MISSING: Nellie, 1888
Note: ‘Nellie’ Forbs may not be one of the Missing in the strictest sense. It is not clear, either from Edith’s letters or additional documents, whether “beloved Nellie” refers to the baby girl Cornelia, Edith’s toddler half-sister (b. 1886), or her full sister, Helena (b. 1878). The records regarding both girls are sketchy (birth certificates […]
HISTORY: Letter from a Civil War Surgeon
Dr. Isambard Jackson presided over The Poplars during the Civil War, when it was commandeered as a Field Hospital by the Confederacy. His letters to his sister, Maria, contain two brief references to Clarissa Lowell, a volunteer nurse who vanished in the spring of 1864, during one of the most brutal months of the entire […]
MISSING: Clarissa, 1864
Although she would never, of course, confess it aloud, Clara was not looking forward to the end of the war. She could not imagine returning to her old, ornamental existence. Sometimes, as she spent her days tending to the weakened and dying, bandaging bloody stumps and carrying buckets of the foulest slop imaginable, she flashed […]
HISTORY: Gilbey & Sons Photographers, Part 1
Aloysius Gilbey, gentleman scientist, was a contemporary of Edgar Forbs, although he was educated overseas, in Germany. The two men shared an interest in chemistry, although Aloysius was concerned that his friend focused on the esoteric rather than the scientific. Throughout the 1840s they visited one another regularly, sharing their thoughts on the latest papers […]
HISTORY: Raffney’s Oak
When Thomas Forbs arrived in the valley that was to become The Poplars, in the late 16th century, the only area that wasn’t thick forest was the clearing surrounding the Well. It took Forbs and his people many years to clear the area of trees and start planting their own crops, thus evolving from hunter-gathers […]
INSPIRATION: Passing
As we clock up one more year of the twenty-first century it seems news headlines increasingly reference the past. This week, TMZ reported that a Versace retail assistant “shocked the manager” by revealing he was African American – and was subsequently fired. Presumably, in order to get and keep his job for a luxury brand, […]
INSPIRATION: Jack’s Women
September is Ripper Season. Jack began the autumn of 1888 as a complete nobody and ended it as the most feared man in the United Kingdom. He materialized with the first mists but vanished before the winter frosts took hold, leaving an enduring mystery in his wake. To this day, people are still picking apart what he did, who […]