The Tilted Cross

In convict days, Campell Street, Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, was the privy of London, an Alsatia of squalor and crime. Just beyond its teeming stews lay Regency elegance, colonial luxury and civilised hypocrisy. It was unimaginable that the two worlds should ever commingle. Then the ex-convict Judas Griffin Vaneleigh - a character based on the notorious and enigmatic Thomas Griffiths Wainewright - began sketching portraits of the houses of the rich, accompanied by his dramatically handsome henchman, the cockney Queely Sheill. The shadows and flames of the two worlds ran together in a conflagration of incidents. Queely Sheill’s bawdy Campbell Street world and its mêlée of Hogarthian denizens became ravelled with the very different world of the aristocratic Lady Knight, the eccentric cripple Asnetha Sleep and her rococo page-boy. What each world learned of the other, and of itself, is the novel’s theme.