Description

Sir Richard Francis Burton--explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman; his name damaged; his career in tatters; his former companion absent and possibly dead.Algernon Charles Swinburne--defeated poet and fan of de Sade; for whom pain is joy, and brandy is wreck!They remain at a crossroads within their lives and are captured in the epicenter of an empire divided by conflicting forces: Technicians change the scenery with larger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technical miracles; Eugenicists create expert creatures to supply outstanding work; Libertines oppose repressive regulations and need a culture centered on elegance and imagination; as the Rakes press the limitations of individual Conduct towards the limitations with wonder, medicines, and anarchy.The two males are drawn in to the dangerous depths of the moral and ethical machine when Lord Palmerston profits Burton to research attacks on ladies dedicated by way of a strange apparition referred to as Spring Heeled Jack, and to discover why werewolves are terrorizing London's East End.Their inspections cause them to among the defining events of age, and the frightening possibility that the planet they occupy shouldn t occur at all!