Voices From a Trunk

A chance discovery of a trunk of documents by the author opened up a window on the rapidly expanding cities of Leeds and London in the nineteenth century. Cholera epidemics, Luddite disruptions, hopeless medical interventions, the births of the railways, a discovery of a murder, the mystery of an ancestor believed to be the unknown great-great grandfather of the renowned inventor Thomas Alva Edison, a great Quaker bank crash and travel in America newly recovering from the Civil War, all were intertwined with the story of the painful life of a Leed's lawyer, Edwin Eddison.