The Snake-Oil Dickens Man. Ross Gilfillan
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Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain in 1998
Copyright © Ross Gilfillan 1998
Ross Gilfillan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781857028140
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007485062
Version: 2017-02-03
‘A quality romp set in the America of the late 1860s … Robustly written, and with plenty of Dickensian resonances, Gilfillan’s first novel is an ingenious and entertaining read.’ Mail on Sunday
‘Weaves a fascinating tale … The atmosphere of 1867 is brilliantly captured.’ Oxford Mail
‘Compulsive, quirky, beautifully constructed, a read that has you wondering why no one has ever tried it before.’ Birmingham Post
To my wife Lisaand Fae, Tom and Alice
Contents
Ces Américains qui aiment tant à être dupés Baudelaire
NO ONE DOES something for nothing any more.
So the smart money says, anyway. If this is true then I suppose there is no reason why I should not be well recompensed for the hours I will sit at this desk, removed from spheres of more certainly remunerative activity. There are infinite ways in which wealth can be acquired with much less expenditure of effort than by the writing of a memoir. No, the profit I hope for here will be of another kind. I relate what follows not for pecuniary gain but rather that I might by the process of autobiography come to understand more of myself and see the beginning of the thread that has woven the thing that now I am.
Let me begin as I mean to continue – honestly – and say right out that I am not as I seem. No doubt you know me by my reputation and my office but even were we strangers, you might observe my English-cut suit and my fancy waistcoat and hear my knowing tones and mistake me for a man of consequence. And if I’m offering you some deal that’s going to make you rich quick and won’t jeopardise your capital one little bit then that’s exactly how you would have me. For all the world, I am prosperous, refined and respected. I am solid and that is all you need to know.
But perhaps what you now see really is me. Perhaps money has made me one of you: just as prosperous and as solid as any of the speculators, private investors and city tycoons I have lately lived off so well. All I know for certain is that once I thought I was different and that this journal shall be my testimony.
At this