o part owner and editor of the St. James's Magazine, one of the most prestigious literary magazines of the 1860s.
Her writing may not have been on a par with Dickens, but she was a big hitter in her day.
During the 1860s/70s she lived in St John's Lodge on the site of St Ann's Hosptal - opposite Blackboy Lane - admittedly Harringay borderlands today, but she used to desribe herself as living on Green Lanes, near Harringay House.
She used to host literary parties at the house inviting a wide range of the most famous literary and other society names of the day.
I've written a short article with links on Wikipedia…
St. John’s Lodge on St Ann's Road (then called Hangar Lane) for about ten years until 1873. I added a very short entry to Wikipedia about her a couple of years or so ago. I also added a small entry about Shadbolt, the main subject of the Independent article (clearly had too much time on my hands in 2007!). You can see a great Shadbolt picture taken over Harringay in the 1860s here.…
rreclaimable morass " that surrounded her home in St Ann's Road, before the train line arrived and swept the old village away.
Bruce Castle has a ghost called Lady Constantia Coleraine…
According to British History Online, there were a number of lodges/villas here before the hospital was built, one of which iirc was St John's Lodge where Charlotte Riddell lived.
angar Lane, West Green, a place she described in 1874 as,
no more rural village could have been found within five miles of the General Post Office than West Green. It was as utterly in the country as though situated a hundred miles from London, and by a natural consequence it was country in its ways, habits, and manners.
Charlotte was born in Carrickfergus in Ireland but, while some of her stories are set in the land of her birth, many of them are concentrated on the culture of money (or suffering from the lack of it) in the City, a place she describes in her novels almost lane by lane, alley by alley.
Charlotte and her husband made their home in St John's Lodge, situated where St Ann's hospital is now (and the view above is probably not too different from the one from her front door) and entertained the great and the good of the literary establishment at her home in West Green. She became editor and part-proprietor of The St. James’s Magazine and had great influence in the publishing world. The arrival of the railway and the development of the area dismayed her greatly and drove her further into Middlesex and away from the loss of the countryside around West Green.
Like many Victorian writers she turned her hand to supernatural tales; well-written, creepy and evocative tales, often of the haunted house variety. In modern times, critics have written that "Next to Le Fanu...[she] is the best writer of supernatural tales in the Victorian era."
So why not spend Halloween weekend reading scary tales written by our "local" Victorian writer?
You can find Weird Stories (1882) as a free download (pdf, epub or kindle) here.
Click on the photo to discover more about it on HOL and discover more HOL images of West Green here
A plaque was placed at the entrance to St Ann's hospital in 2010 to commemorate her time in Hangar Lane.
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