Caroline Lawrence's Top Roman Sites in London

A few days ago, a fan of my Roman Mysteries books emailed to ask which places I would recommend for a visit to the nation’s capital. It’s a good question. London has been almost continuously occupied since the paleolithic period and is crammed with history including a myriad of goodies from the four centuries of Roman occupation. There is history everywhere, especially in the City of London, the square mile that is now the financial district but once housed the Roman fort and port. These are my top half dozen Roman-related sites. Incidentally, they are all free of charge! 

1. The British Museum 
If you only have time for one stop, make it this one. I use it as a kind of club to meet overseas visitors. I go there at least once a month and take fans to the Roman Life Room (69) and also room 70. If you have time, check out the Roman Britain room (49) & the Enlightenment Gallery, where you can touch an exact replica of the Rosetta Stone.
Tip: Go in the back way, via Montague Place; they are now doing bag searches and you will avoid the worst queues. 
Related blog: The Riddle of the Roman Vase

2. Museum of London 
London’s other great museum will soon be moving to Old Smithfields Market and might have a train passing through it. At the time of writing it is near St Paul’s tube station in the Barbican. There is a wonderful section devoted to Roman London. 
Tip: Look out for bits of London’s Roman wall outside and indeed, all over the City of London. Related blog: Visualising Roman London

3. The Victorian & Albert 
Did you know you can see Trajan’s column in London? It’s a plaster cast, but still gives you a good view and lovely detail. It was recently cleaned but reopened in December 2018 and looks better than ever. You can also see a life-sized plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David. Yes, it’s Renaissance not Roman, but still worth visiting. 
Tip: Visit the tea rooms across the courtyard and marvel at their beauty. 
Related blog: Trajan's Column at the V&A

4. Petrie Museum 
Not far from the British Museum in the maze of UCL (University College London) is this delightful gem of a museum. Egypt was important in Roman times and you can see many Roman era artefacts on display. Look out for ancient fabric, palm leaf sandals, charms for turning away evil and portraits of some Romans who lived there. It is open from 1-5 on Tuesdays through Saturdays.
Tip: combine this with a visit to the British Museum nearby. 
Related blog: Roman Egypt at the Petrie

5. The Thames Foreshore
If you are brave, descend steep steps on the north side of the Thames beside the Millennium Bridge. Wear Wellingtons or sturdy boots and gloves. Go at low tide and you will be amazed at the artefacts literally covering the foreshore, including lots of Roman brick. If you are very lucky you might find a Roman hairpin, votive figurine or coin. You can keep anything you see on the surface. This is called ‘Mudlarking’
Update: You now need a PLA permit to go on the foreshore. 
Tip: Don’t touch anything you pick up with bare hands until you’ve washed it. 
Related blog: Mudlarks on the Foreshore

6. The Roman Amphitheatre 
Like most of Roman London, the amphitheatre is underground, below street level. Access is free via a lift in London’s Guildhall Gallery. If you look across the guildhall courtyard you can see the location of the amphitheatre marked out in different coloured paving stones, like an intentional urban crop mark. Down below, only a few fragments remain of the stone amphitheatre that replaced the wooden one, but there is a stylised indication of seating and competitors.
Tip: Plan your visit to coincide with the next re-enactment of Roman games.  
Related blog: Gladiator Fun Facts

P.S. I have now added London's Mithraeum, a fab immersive experience. For more info, go HERE! 

Caroline Lawrence’s book The Roman Quests: Escape from Rome, is partly set in Roman London, AKA Londinium. 

My Summer of Trees

I am calling this summer My Summer of Trees

As a writer of historical fiction, I want to be specific and precise about the world my characters inhabit. At the moment I am working on a book set in Iron Age Britain, fifty years after the Romans arrived. As this book will partly take place in woods and forests, I need to know my trees. 

I love trees, but I'm not particularly good at identifying them. 

I can spot the exotic or exceptional ones – like palms, yuccas, weeping willows and the bright red-blossomed bottle-brush plant that used to grow in the garden of my childhood house in Bakersfield, California. 

When my family moved from Bakersfield to the Stanford campus I first encountered great groves of eucalyptus trees. Originally from the Australia, these were imported to suck up moisture from swampy ground. They are beautiful and distinctive, with their silver-green blade like leaves and their peeling bark scrolling away to show the smooth white flesh underneath. 

I learned to recognise magnolia trees with their fragrant waxy flowers. 

From the window of my parents' car I could easily spot oak trees, especially the evergreen California oaks that often stand sentinel on a golden hill. 

Laburnum, with its clusters of bright yellow flowers, I met when I first went up to Cambridge and stayed in Whitstead, the graduate house belonging to Newnham College, where Sylvia Plath once lived. 

And I will never forget the first time I came across wisteria. It was during my first trip to Athens, one May. I walked under an arbour in the National Gardens. It was like bathing in perfume. 

I can point to plane trees, those great urban survivors planted along the banks of the Seine, Tiber and Thames. Their giraffe-neck trunk splotches and spiky spherical seed-cases give them away. 

Silver birch I know, too: gentle and graceful trees with white trunks and trembling, heart-shaped leaves. There used to be one on the corner of busy York Road and Mendip Road in Wandsworth, not far from where I now live. It was a reminder of nature in an urban landscape. Sometimes I used to reach out my hand and touch it as I passed to give it a kind of affirmation. It was like a friend and it always cheered me up. 

A sliver birch blocked this building's sign

Then, one terrible day I walked by and they were cutting it down, because it partly blocked the sign of a storage warehouse. I grieved for that birch and still think of it every time I pass the corner where it used to stand. Sometimes I want to cry, a think I have not done for some people I have lost. So yes, I always recognise silver birches. 

But I have trouble identifying some of Britain’s oldest and most common species: lime, hazel, beech, field maple and sycamore. 

So now that I’m writing books set in Roman Britain, I have decided to learn the names of the trees that would have been here in the late first century. 

I've got my Tree Identifier app and my guide book. I have The Ancient Tree Hunt challenge and Kew Gardens. 

Sweet Chestnut planted in the early 1700s

Today at Kew I saw one of the oldest trees in the park, a Sweet Chestnut. Apparently the Romans introduced this species to Britain. 

Tomorrow I'm going to find Barney, the giant plane tree in Barnes.

Helen Forte's "Minimus" in a yew tree (taxus)

I've even got a small Latin-speaking mouse named Minimus to help me identify trees on a Pinterest board!

By the end of the summer I hope to be able to identify the native species in London's parks and garden squares, and at the very least the trees right outside my front door. 

Caroline Lawrence is working on The Archers of Isca, partly set in a Gloucestershire glade. @CarolineLawrenc

Mudlarks on the Foreshore by Caroline Lawrence

FORESHORE - the part of a shore between high- and low- water marks, or between the water and cultivated or developed land.

MUDLARK - a person who scavenges in river mud for objects of value

NOTICE: Aimed at young archaeologists, on this walk you'll discover the archaeology of the waterfront from its Roman origins to the Victorian period, with Museum of London Archaeology specialists - pick up artefacts and have them identified by the experts! Walk leaders: Alan Pipe & Nigel Jeffries of Thames Discovery. Meeting Point: Stairs below north end of the Millennium Bridge, Paul's Walk, EC4 

Last month I met twenty other adults and children at Trig Lane near the Millennium Bridge for an hour long guided wander on the foreshore of the Thames. After a short introduction by Alan Pipe and Nigel Jeffries of Thames Discovery, Museum of London, we went carefully down narrow concrete stairs to the foreshore.

I have lived in London nearly forty years and in a riverside flat for the past fifteen but this was my first time on the foreshore. I am astounded to see the amount of archaeological debris covering the shore. Alan and Nigel hand out plastic gloves to protect our hands from Rat Urine Disease and plastic bags to put our finds in. British law says you can keep anything you find, spotted 'eyes only'.

'Although the Thames foreshore is an amorphous splurge because of the churning and the tides,' explains Nigel, the medieval expert, 'there are lots of different interesting strands of evidence that you can tease out of it…' So let's tease out some strands:

1. The first strand is rocks and stones. London has no stone to speak of, mainly clay, sand and gravel, but you can still see chunks of imported Kentish ragstone, worked and unworked gemstones (!) and heating stones, used for boiling water but only re-usable a few times before they crack and have to be thrown out. You can find imported chalk and also flint, prehistoric man's favourite material for make tools.
STAR STONE OBJECT: a complete Neolithic flint scraper found by an American teenage student on the foreshore in front of the Tower of London on one of these Thames Discovery walks at the beginning of this summer (2015).

2. The second strand of finds are metal tools and artefacts. Of course the famous Battersea Shield and Waterloo Shield (now on show at the British Museum Celts Exhibition) were both found in the Thames, but a mudlark can find lots of other goodies. These include bronze brooches, iron nails, gold thimbles, brass Hindu river tokens, gold rings, brass parts of Victorian oil-lamps, Medieval shoe buckles, lead cloth seals from the 17th century and many different types of coins.
STAR METAL OBJECT: set of car keys (above), possibly from a Vauxhall Cavalier

3. Glass. Lots of glass fragments but also whole items including marbles. Nigel once found bottles of wine with corks and Madeira wine still in them.
STAR GLASS OBJECT: trade beads like the ones used to buy Manhattan. (Found on previous occasions)

4. Pottery. Alan tells us that the most common type of pottery is a plain white glazed material used for chamberpots, bowls, plates, etc. They are mainly British made from Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire from the late 18th and early 19th century. You also find loads of pieces of pottery coloured by the transfer method. Chinese style prints popular imitating much more expensive Chinese imports. You get mass-produced 20th century pottery but can also find much much older pieces including late-medieval and even Roman.
STAR POTTERY OBJECT: Victorian fragment in blue and white

5. Bones. Unlike pottery, which can be dated by ornamentation, type of clay and manufacturer's marks, bone does not reveal much about its provenance. Pieces of bone could come from anywhere. But bones can tell us what species are being consumed and which parts of them are popular. 'What you're seeing here,' says bone-expert Alan Pipe, 'is a snapshot over centuries of waste disposal arising from consumption of animal and bird species that people still eat. Some of is personal consumption for meals,  a lot of it is coming from butchery waste from butchers' shops where carcasses are being prepared and a little of it will be coming from further back in the process where the animals are being slaughtered and then their carcasses being trimmed before they go to be butchered and then consumed.' But some of the bones are from non-edible animals like dogs, cats and horses. What did you do when a domestic animal died? You threw it in the Thames. We have even found human bones. 

'Many of the bones we find on the foreshore have be modified in some way, either by saw cuts or by cleaver cuts or by knife cuts. This reflects the way the carcasses were cut up to produce manageable joints for cooking. That kind of technology changes over time and location.' Other tool marks are not necessarily linked to butchery. One shoulder blade of a young calf shows a hole where it was hung on a butcher's hook. In the days before plastic, bone was worked to make buttons, dominoes, inlays and knife handles. 

STAR BONE OBJECT: A bone hairpin from the Roman era showing a woman with a Flavian hairdo. (Found a few years ago and now on display in the Museum of London.)

6. Shells. You see masses of oyster shells on the beach. You might also find mussels, cockles, winkles and whelks, but they are not as common as oysters. This is because for centuries oysters were poor people's food and even street food. 'It's only when you get well into the 1800's with the buildup of pollution contaminating the oyster beds around the estuary that oysters started to become rarer and more expensive.' A piece of shell from a Chinese mitten crab (so-called because of mitten like claws) shows us how the ecology of the river is changing. This freshwater species was an accidental introduction into Western Europe and Britain, probably reaching England in ballast tanks on ships. They are a burrowing species and can cause riverbanks to collapse. You would not have seen them before the 1920s, but now they are established.
STAR SHELL OBJECT: A piece of abalone shell, possibly from California.

7. Clay pipes. There are so many of these that they deserve their own strand. We all know Sir Walter Raleigh brought tobacco to England but did you know that it was first used medicinally? And that the millions of white clay pipes are modelled on wooden versions used by Native Americans?
STAR CLAY PIPE: A so-called fairy pipe spotted on the London Mudlark Facebook page which tells you that If you're looking for one of the really early tobacco pipes, this is the size you're looking for - small because tobacco was expensive when it was first imported at the end of the 16th century. It also explains whey they are also known as 'fairy pipes.'

The London Mudlark Facebook page also sets down some rules and guidelines for Mudlarking, including: Anything made of precious metal (gold or silver) and over 300 years old (not including coins unless they are found in a hoard) must by law be reported as Treasure Trove. It will then be assessed by the coroner and offered to various museums who have the right to buy it. If they choose to buy it the finder gets half the value and the land owner will get the other half. The process can take a while, sometimes years*… And: You can collect surface finds, spotted eyes only without a license.

NB As of November 2016 EVERYBODY needs a permit to go down on the foreshore and look for goodies: Check PLA's site HERE. 

Happy Mudlarking!

*Read the exact terms of Treasure Trove HERE.

Caroline Lawrence is currently working on a series of books for kids set in Roman Britain including Londinium. The Roman Quests 1: Escape from Rome is out May 2016. 

Visualising Roman London by Caroline Lawrence

The historical novels I love to read (and hopefully write) transport me to the past. They make me hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Most of all, they make me SEE the past. As a visual thinker that is what is what I crave most.

When I wrote my Roman Mysteries set in Ancient Rome, I had the ruins of Ostia and Pompeii to inspire me, along with the well-preserved frescoes, sculptures and mosaics, and all the art and movies that attempt to envision those places. I know Pompeii better than I know cities on America's east coast. 

When I was writing my P.K. Pinkerton Mysteries, set in Nevada in 1862, I found that photography had been invented just in time to let me look into the past. There were even stereographic photographs that let me gaze into canyons, along railway lines and over the roofs of Virginia City at exactly the times my books were set.

Now I’m working on a book set in Roman Britain during the last decade of the first century. Pre-Trajanic Londinium is not as well-preserved as Pompeii or as well-documented that Virginia City in the 1860s. Scholars are not even sure who the governor of Britannia was in AD 94, the year my book is set.

Luckily, London offers some fabulous resources. The British Museum has rooms devoted to stunning artefacts like the Snettisham hoard and the Vindolanda tablets.

3-D Model of Roman London's port at the Museum of London

The Museum of London (MOL) is even better. Not only does it have bits of the original Roman wall poking up around it, but it has replica Roman rooms, street scenes, delicious artefacts and 3-D models of Londinium’s port and forum.

Gladiator Games in August 2015, sponsored by the Museum of London

They go above and beyond. The MOL stages gladiatorial combats with dedicated re-enactors like those put on last month. Their archaeologists give regular tours of the underground amphitheatre, hidden bathhouses and Thames foreshore. The tech guys at the MOL have even produced a brilliant app of Londinium with an interactive map: you can ‘dig up’ artefacts, listen to ancient street sounds and watch ancient Romans superimposed on modern streets.

Mudlarking with Museum of London archaeologist September 2015

But as I was making a pass over my second draft of my Roman Britain book last week, I wasn’t seeing it.

For me to write something clearly enough for nine-year-olds to get it, I have to get it first. And I was confused. How did the north bank differ from the south? When were the city walls built again? How extensive were the wharves? What was the main building material? What did Londinium look like?

Then I stumbled across a wonderful resource on the Museum of London’s website: the paintings of Alan Sorrell. It was just what I needed: postcards of the world I was writing. Bird’s eye views of the streets and buildings. Inspired vignettes of daily life with great attention to archaeological and historical detail.

A commercial artist who worked in many mediums and on many projects, Alan Sorrell (1904 – 1974) first studied art at Southend and later at the RCA in London and Rome. He spent WWII in the air force. After the war he worked closely with some of the most respected archaeologists of the day. His 'neo-Romantic' training accounts for the often moody lighting of his work. His time with the RAF is reflected in his fondness for aerial views. And his attention to historical detail attests his collaboration with scholars.

London's Praetorium by Alan Sorrell, via the Museum of London

An atmospheric watercolour of London’s Praetorium (Governor's Palace) shows all the features mentioned by Peter Marsden, its excavator. This is one of Londinium’s lesser-known but great buildings (now totally covered by Cannon Street Station.) As soon as I saw it, I knew it would be the setting for a key scene at the heart of my book. With Sorrell’s illustration alongside the sparse archaeological plan and dry written accounts of this structure, I can now write a believable setting for my scene.

Sorrell’s watercolour of the wells beside the Walbrook reminded me to include rubbish heaps in my Londinium. His red-painted goose-neck on theBlackfriars barge encouraged me to add more colour. His aerial view of Londonin the time of Hadrian prompted me to check whether London Bridge had a drawbridge in the mid 90s. The answer is we don’t know, so I’ll have to use my instincts.

Like authors of historical fiction, archaeological artists also need to use flashes of creative instinct when fleshing out the dry bones of the facts. In a preliminary sketch of 3rd century Londinium, Sorrell felt he should give the Roman city a river wall. A notation on his sketch shows that he was asked to remove it for the final painting as there were no remains of such a wall. His theory was justified however, when a few months after his death evidence of a riverside wall was indeed found.

Sorrell’s diligently researched and inspired paintings have finally helped me ‘get’ Roman London.

I am grateful to his family and fans who have made his work available to the world. 

A superb paper on his life and output has been made publicly available on Academia. 

Escape from Rome, the first of four books in The Roman Quests, a new Roman British series by Caroline Lawrence, will be out in May 2016. 

Roman Egypt at the Petrie Museum

by Caroline Lawrence

I was nosing about the treasure box that is the Petrie Museum last year when I overheard a father telling his little girl, 'You know, the Romans were in Egypt after the pharaohs.'  He was showing her one of the beautiful encaustic portraits done during the Roman period. I longed to give her my historical novel for kids set Roman Egypt, The Scribes from Alexandria.

I have filled it with fascinating facts about the Romans in Egypt, and wrapped up in a treasure quest full of danger, intrigue and romance. But I didn't have a copy of my book on me.

Instead, I convinced the education department of the Petrie to let me do a fun session on Roman Egypt one half term holiday. They kindly agreed and the day is almost upon us: I will be giving two sessions, one at 2pm and one at 3pm on Wednesday 18 February 2015.

When I was researching The Scribes from Alexandria, I read tons of books on Roman Egypt, searched the internet and visited museums like the British Museum and the Petrie. Best of all, my husband and I made two research trips to that wonderful country: one around Aswan and one around Cairo and Alexandria.

One of the most amazing facts I learned was that the Romans thought of Egypt as upside down. The north-south oriented map is one we have so engrained in our minds that we can often assume it the way the ancients thought of the world, too.

A river flows from its source to the sea or nearest body of water. If you travel with the direction of the current, you are travelling downriver. If you start where it empties into the sea and sail towards the source then you are necessarily travelling upriver. So why not have the source at the top and the egress at the bottom? Also, if you think about a sailor or merchant travelling from Rome or Greece to Egypt, the first place they would reach is the Nile Delta, the fertile triangular area where the Nile branched out to flow into the sea. Why not put the delta at the bottom of the map and work up? 

This way it looks like a capital Delta

That's exactly what the Greeks and Romans did. When you look at a flipped map of Egypt, like the one my husband and I designed together, you can clearly see the delta looks like the capital Greek letter 'delta', hence the name. (In Roman Egypt most people spoke Greek, the lingua franca of the early Roman Empire.) When you look at the map of Egypt this way then the delta area becomes Lower Egypt and the Nile Valley is Upper Egypt. This is how the ancients thought of it. If you went 'upriver' you were travelling south and 'downriver' was north.

That means that to an ancient traveller everything on the right bank was 'Libya' and everything on the left (or eastern) bank was 'Arabia'.

The current always flowed downriver, from Aswan to Alexandria, but the wind conveniently blew upriver or south. Wherever a ship is shown in Egyptian wall paintings, carvings or votive models, you can easily tell which direction it's travelling. If its sail is up, it's probably travelling upriver. If there is no sail, it's probably going with the current, downriver towards Alexandria. See the ship models from the British Museum. 

Traveling upriver from Alexandria, you could sail for over 700 miles before coming to the first cataract or change in water level. This was found at Syene, (modern Aswan), and marked the border of Egypt and Nubia, the Land of Gold.

This was just one of the amazing facts I discovered about the way the ancients viewed Egypt in Roman times. I also learned about an unlucky hieroglyphic, the colour Egyptians hate, a jewel encrusted crocodile and lots of other wonderful aspects of Egypt in Roman times.

For a chance to see this small Egyptian Museum in the heart of Bloomsbury, to follow a treasure trail, handle some replica objects and hear me give a reading, come along with your children aged 8+ on Wednesday 18 February 2015. It costs £3, but EVERYONE who comes will receive a free Roman Mystery. Book HERE. 

If you can't make it to my event you will learn lots about Roman Egypt by reading The Scribes from Alexandria, now out in paperback, Kindle format and as an abridged audiobook, brilliantly read by Nigel Anthony.

And if you get a chance, don't miss the Petrie Museum, open 1pm to 5pm on Tuesdays through Saturdays. It's free. 

Leighton House is a Box of Chocolates

by Caroline Lawrence 

One of the most maddening museums in London is Leighton House. The former mansion of Victorian artist Frederick, Lord Leighton, it is an exotic hidden gem in the leafy streets near Holland Park in Kensington but they won't let you take photos inside. Yes, there is an amusing  YouTube tour of the house, but it focuses on actors playing the part of Leighton and his staff and does a poor job of showing the extraordinary interior of the house itself. Leighton House is one of London's best-kept secrets and this is wrong; it should be better-known.

There are a thousand details there that should be captured in high-resolution for the millions who will never come to London: sandalwood screens, glazed tiles from Damascus, a bubbling fountain in the famous Arab Hall, a hidden alcove, a trick fireplace, a skylight, a dome, a secret door for posting oversized paintings from inside to outside, secret entrances for the models to use, stained glass windows, silk divans, chandeliers, Turkish carpets, velvet drapes, sculptures, statues, plaster casts and peacock feathers galore. 

Actor playing Lord Leighton for the YouTube tour

Oh, and there are some paintings, too: quasi-historical compositions depicting Greek myths, Old Testament stories and the world of imperial Rome. The paintings are great fun, but only a few are by Leighton himself and they are a bit thin on the walls. I am always left wanting more of them. It is the house itself that never fails to satisfy me.  

Cover of the exhibition guide

However, for the next few months – until 29 March 2015 – the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea have beefed up the wall decoration with fifty paintings generously loaned by wealthy art-lover Juan Antonio Pérez Simón. The exhibition is called A Victorian Obsession. Victorian because the artists represented are Victorian, like Lord Leighton. Obsession because (and I’m guessing here) the painters seem obsessed with beautiful women in erotic poses and exotic settings.  

Godward Study 1913

Critics and academics like to sneer at Victorian artists like Alma-Tadema, Godward and Leighton himself for being purveyors of soft-pornish Roman confections. They are partly right. Buttocks strain against diaphanous silks and nipples can be glimpsed through filmy drapery. Women are usually nymphs, maenads or bathing. In a couple of instances, the artist drapes a little gauze on the model for the study, but then whips it off for a totally nude finished product. It put me in mind of the hilarious bit about 6 minutes into the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comedy sketch set in the National Gallery. 

Pete: ‘There was a lot of gauze in the air in those days… a tiny little wisp of gauze that always lands on the appropriate place. Always the wind blows a little bit of gauze over you-know-where…’ 

Dud: ‘Course it must be a million to once chance that the gauze lands in the right place at the right time. I'll bet there's thousands of paintings that we're not allowed to see because the gauze hadn't landed on the right place.’ 

Well, Pete and Dud, A Victorian Obsession at Leighton House is the place to go if you want to see some of the paintings sans gauze. In fact, according to the audio guide the first actual public glimpse of female pubic hair in British art is flaunted by Poynter’s Andromeda writhing on her rock in 1869. 

The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1888

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a giant chocolate box lid of a painting called The Roses of Heliogabalus. It shows a depraved Roman Emperor (the best kind) about to smother his dinner guests with rose petals. Far from looking terrified, the diners look like they are having a Herbal Essence flowergasm. This effect is heightened by the room being scented with Jo Malone rose essence, a nice touch that they could have taken further. I’m thinking some Ylang Ylang in the upstairs ‘zenana’ (harem area) and frankincense in the Arab Hall downstairs. 

I'd love to know who this guy is...

In fairness to Alma-Tadema, he was meticulous in his research. Around the walls of the Roses Room are a dozen research photos of landscapes and artefacts that he used to give the painting authenticity: a tripod from Pompeii; a bronze sculpture of Bacchus and one of his pals; a photographic view of the mountains of Albano as they would be seen from Rome; details of Roman couches; a bunch of grapes and various roses & peonies. Apparently he had a collection of over 5000 photographs of real Roman artefacts, not to mention the real works of art he acquired on his travels. This is the sort of attention to detail that thrills the heart of an historian or author of historical fiction. 

Confession: I love Lawrence Alma-Tadema. 

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Born in Holland in 1836, Lourens Alma Tadema was passionate about drawing from the time he could hold a pencil. He spent every free moment sketching, used his pocket money to buy art books and got his mother to wake him at five in the morning so he could draw before school. His family wanted him to be a lawyer, but when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis aged fifteen and given two years to live, they said he could spend those last years doing whatever he liked. He took up painting, conquered his affliction and lived to the ripe old age of 76. For a while he made Merovingian Gaul (don’t ask) his specialist subject but a visit to the ruins of Pompeii in 1863 changed everything. He was there at the perfect moment just when Fiorelli was electrifying the world with his world-famous plaster casts made from the cavities left by dead and decayed Pompeians. 

Returning Home from Market by Alma-Tadema 1865

Later the artist moved to London, anglicised his first name Lourens to Lawrence and made his middle name the first part of a new double-barreled surname to ensure he would be at the front of all the catalogues. He knew and admired Leighton and his fabulous house and bought a mansion of his own in St John’s Wood. When a hazelnut barge exploded on Regent canal and a rain of nut shrapnel blew out the windows of his children’s bedroom, he commissioned Leighton’s architect to rebuild parts of his house in an equally exotic fashion. 

When I was writing my Roman Mysteries series I would pore over reproductions of Alma-Tadema’s densely detailed paintings in a beautifully written and illustrated book by Rosemary J. Barrow, (from which I got the facts of his upbringing and the hazelnut explosion.)

Two paintings by Alma-Tadema not usually seen

So I was thrilled to see two of his paintings not known to me. The first, Agrippina Visiting the Ashes of Germanicus, shows a scene inspired by Tacitus Annals. The second, Returning Home from Market, was painted soon after his return from Pompeii. It shows a Roman matron returning home flanked by her son and daughter, with a slave following behind, laden with her purchases. A monkish looking door slave stands with key, humbly looking down. He has just opened the double doors of the entryway and we catch a glimpse of the bright atrium inside. Best of all is the mosaic on the threshold combining two real Roman mosaics from Pompeii: SALVE and CAVE CANEM. 

An Exedra by Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1871

Another small painting by Alma-Tadema, An Exedra, is clearly set on the outskirts of Pompeii and shows several Roman citizens enjoying a view while a shaven-headed slave, his one-shouldered tunic labeled property of Holconius, sits resignedly with a parasol on his lap and his bare feet in the gutter. 

A Victorian Obsession is like a gorgeous box of chocolate liqueurs. Some of the bon-bons are overpowering, a few cloying, and one is a giant chocolate covered piece of rose-flavoured Turkish Delight, but plenty are truly delicious and will make a visit worth your while. Don’t gulp them down. Stand in front of the ones you like and nibble at them, letting them dissolve on your tongue. And if you really don’t like Victorian chocolates, I can guarantee you will love the box they come in. 

A Victorian Obsession is on until 29 March 2014. Open every day from 10.00am - 5.30pm except Tuesdays; the cost is about £10 unless you can claim concessions.

UPDATE! A new exhibition, Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity will show from 7 July - 29 October 2017.

Caroline Lawrence writes history-mystery books for kids.