Creative History

   North of London in the county of Suffolk sits the medieval village of St.  Mary of the Wolf-pits.  The village is equi-distant from the Channel coast and from the town of Bury St. Edmunds which is home to an abbey and a thriving monastic community. St. Mary of the Wolf-pits could be described as rural; the type of place where nothing much has ever happened and where nothing much is likely to ever happen.  The village’s only claim to fame is the large “wolf-pits” for which it is named that ring the outskirts of the community.  The wolf-pits are six foot deep holes dug in fields around the town that are lined with stone and are designed to protect livestock and townspeople alike from the ferocious and marauding wolves who reside in the forest nearby and routinely venture near town looking for easy prey to devour. It is not uncommon for the villagers to awake in the morning and go out to find a helpless wolf trapped in the deep hole, howling and strug...

The date is July 30, 1858 and the gentlemen and ladies of London’s upper class are walking through the streets with heads bowed and perfumed handkerchiefs held to their noses.  A massive cloud, an opaque yellowish mist with the consistency of a thick soup, is hanging in the air.  This cloudy mist has been rising up from the river Thames for the past month and now, by the middle of the Summer, it has enveloped the entire city in its miasmic haze.     The river Thames cuts through all of central London.  It is the main artery of transport for the entire city through which the commerce of almost the whole English speaking world flows.  The Thames is the center of maritime world trade, and in many ways in conjunction with the greater Atlantic Ocean itself into which it flows, the Thames is the primary reason that the sun is said to never set on her majesty Queen Victoria’s British Empire.  But during this stinking summer of 1858 London’s all i...