Jake Arnott, Guides, Assists and Inspires Writers
By: Irene Edwards
Tags: Writers Life, Writers On Writing, Interview, Storytelling, Writer

The Interview

Irene Edwards: Did you find it great fun delving into the lives of ‘spruce-prigs,’ ‘twangs,’ and ‘buttock brokers?’

Jake Arnott: There was a certain pleasure in immersing myself in the underworld of 1720s London, it was an age of pleasure after all. But it was a dangerous time to live as well, so there was a poignancy in how I reflected on the lives of my characters, particularly with the central character Bess. She is determined to have a good time despite the odds but she does want more than that too. There’s fun to be had with the creativity of the language and the gallows-humour but it comes from a precarious existence. It’s a dark comedy.

Irene Edwards: Through your research, the parallel between poverty and crime is seen in abundance in ‘The Fatal Tree,’ where the ‘underworld’ impinges on the ‘legitimate’ in society, as it trends today. Did your research satisfy you in providing evidence for this correlation?

Jake Arnott: What fascinated me was that writers of that time made that very correlation. In John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, there are direct references to how the rich bankers and stock-jobbers have got away with the fraud of the South Sea Bubble whilst ordinary people get hanged for stealing a shilling. I think this sense of injustice was behind much of the ironic, satirical style of writers of that period. You certainly see it in Swift, for example. So I didn’t think I was imposing modern values on the period but rather capturing the mood of the time.

Irene Edwards: Would you agree that the crimes of the rich and those of the poor are still mirroring eighteen-century behaviour?

Jake Arnott: There are obvious parallels, not least between the South Sea Bubble and the financial crash in 2007 and its consequences, ‘respectable’ society still tend to blame the poor for their own poverty. The gap between rich and poor in the 18th century was more extreme but we’re heading that way and that’s a dangerous prospect.

Irene Edwards: The ‘flash’ language slang of the underworld will be new to most readers as it is a different form of language to us, and we will need to reflect a lot on the translation in the glossary. The end result of your narrative has produced something so unique in style and language that ‘The Fatal Tree’ has already been termed as a Classical Novel to study. Words like ’glim,’ ‘widd,’ ‘patter,’ ‘darkmans,’ ‘gape-seed,’ ‘sky parlour,’ or ‘gentry-mort,’ and ‘trull,’ spring to mind. How long did it take you, (research time included), to write the whole novel which draws in this unusual slang language?

Jake Arnott: I wrote the first draft in a year, which is quite fast for me, but I was writing and researching at the same time. The story and its structure came very quickly. It then took me about a year of redrafts and editing, largely because there was so much material that I had to shape. The early 1720s is a particularly rich moment in criminal history with some really excellent contemporary sources to draw from. With the flash slang, I found a dictionary from 1725 so I was able to recreate the street patois of the time but it took some time to make it flow, particularly in the dialogue.

Irene Edwards: What inspired you to reach back in history and write an underworld narrative?

Jake Arnott: I suppose I’m always more interested in the unofficial rather than the official history, I want to give a voice to the dispossessed. I don’t see the ‘underworld’ as being a separate place but an integral part of any society and maybe the best viewpoint of it. You don’t get a real sense of the capital from the London Eye, you have to get down into its side streets and back alleys to really understand it.