Author Archives

Dr Stephen Basdeo

Stephen Basdeo is a historian and writer based in Leeds, UK. He is the author of several peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and popular history books.

Camilo Castelo Branco’s ‘Mysteries of Lisbon’ (1854): Chapter Four | [Trans. Stephen Basdeo]

A man of frightful figure looked at us with a choleric eye. The priest looked directly at him for a moment without moving so much as a muscle, simulating the best feigned indifference I ever saw. He did not forbid me to look at that man—perhaps he thought we would be less suspicious.

The Mystery of Susannah F. Reynolds | Robert J. Kirkpatrick

Despite the best efforts of researchers such as Dick Collins, her true identity and background have never been established. All the available records give us is that she says she was born in London in around 1819. We know that she married Reynolds in 1835, but this was not her first marriage – she had married another man three years previously.

Camilo Castelo Branco’s ‘Mysteries of Lisbon’ (1854): Chapter Three | [Trans. Stephen Basdeo]

And yet my position was already different in the little society I knew. A new lease of life was given to me—a new freedom—more attention was shown to me—I was even placed in a new room! What was all this for? Why wouldn’t D. Antonia, whom I asked with childish idiocy, tell me wherefore? The priest didn’t tell me, but then I wouldn’t have the audacity to ask him.

New York in the Nineteenth Century: Illustrations from the life of George McWatters’s “Knots Untied” (1871)

At a time when Henry Mayhew ventured like an explorer into the ‘darkest’ parts of London to publish London Labour and the London Poor (1851), social investigators such as Jacob A. Riis and Helen Campbell did the same for New York city. And just as French policemen such as Vidocqu published their recollections of their time in the police—a book which inspired the characters of Jean Valjean and Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables—so too did one Scottish-American detective, named George McWatters, publish his memoir of policing.

Youthful consumption and conservative visions: Robin Hood and Wat Tyler in late Victorian penny periodicals | Stephen Basdeo

“Talk of Robin Hood and Little John, and their dingy imitators in this metropolis described by Dickens and Ainsworth … The same man passes from one form into another – developing, according to the changes in society, from a forester to a mountaineer, thence to a highwayman, thence to an instructor of pickpockets and the receiver of their day’s work in St. Giles.”