A music teacher who moonlights as a sneak thief and a penniless gentleman with a knack for uncovering secrets—what could possibly go wrong? The Gentleman and the Thief by Sarah M. Eden is the sequel to The Lady and the Highwayman, one of my favorite books from 2019. I’ve been keeping this cozy historical romance at the ready to serve as a comfort read during this dark and dreary winter, and I’m so glad I did. This book had everything I’ve come to expect from the Dread Penny Society series: an abundance of mystery, a sweet courtship between two lovable protagonists, and a clever interplay with the uniquely Victorian literary phenomenon of the penny dreadful. If you need to keep the love going post–Valentine’s Day, I can’t recommend this series enough!
Each book in this series explores a romance involving one of the members of the Dread Penny Society, a secret brotherhood of social justice–inclined writers. While the reigning penny dreadful king Fletcher fell in love with his literary rival Elizabeth in Book 1, Book 2 follows Fletcher’s close friend Hollis Darby, who writes adventure tales set in a boarding school for ghosts. The second point-of-view character in this book is a music teacher at Elizabeth’s school, Ana Newport. As wealthy merchants, Ana’s family was once able to climb the social ladder and gain access to London’s aristocratic High Society. But after a business scandal ruined their fortunes, Society turned its back on the Newport family and they lost nearly everything. Now, Ana teaches music by day to earn enough money to care for her aging father. By night, she steals back sentimental family heirlooms from the wealthy, disguised as the Phantom Fox. Hollis seems to represent everything Ana resents—he comes from an “old money” aristocratic family that is welcome at every drawing-room soiree. But though he and his brother keep up appearances, in actuality that “old money” is almost all gone. Hollis secretly supports himself through his ungentlemanly literary pursuits, but he worries his brother may be drawn to more desperate methods. When a spree of robberies plagues the upper-class neighborhoods, Hollis is eager to prove himself to the Dread Penny Society by catching the thief. But his investigations uncover a much more dangerous set of criminals. And to capture enough evidence to put them behind bars, what he really needs is good thief….
As in The Lady and the Highwayman, the main story of The Gentleman and the Thief is interspersed with chapters from two penny dreadful tales. One of these is Hollis Darby’s story, “Higglebottom’s School for the Dead: A Ghost of a Chance,” which features three mischievous ghosts who decide to prank their school by smuggling a living boy into the year-end competition of ghostly skills. Since Ana isn’t a writer, the second story is one of Elizabeth’s. “The Gentleman and the Thief” follows a lonely young gentleman who rekindles his friendship (and something more) with the daughter of his steward by enlisting her help to investigate the many objects that have mysteriously gone missing from his estate. I wasn’t quite as impressed with these meta-stories as I was with the ones in The Lady and the Highwayman, nor did they feel quite as central to or reflective of the main plot. But it’s still a fun gimmick for the series, and I appreciated the production value that went into the physical book—these penny dreadful chapters are printed on slightly grayer paper than the rest of the story to mimic the cheap wood pulp paper that such publications would have historically been printed on.
“Higglebottom’s School for the Dead” reads a bit more like a modern middle-grade novel than an authentic penny dreadful, and its themes of disguising one’s self to fit in and finding a found family amidst people completely different from you are only superficially connected to the main plot. Elizabeth’s titular story is much closer to what I had come to expect from Book 1. Although Elizabeth only plays the most tangential of roles in this book, it is clear that she is incorporating the bits of Hollis’s and Ana’s relationship that she observes into the story. The steward’s daughter Tillie deals with humiliation and feelings of inadequacy when faced with members of the upper class, but she brings Wellington a joy that wealth and status never could. Their investigations lead them to believe that there may be a supernatural explanation behind the string of thefts—but the true magic of the story is the way that love can overcome class barriers.
Pick up a copy of The Gentleman and the Thief to get your fix of Victorian-era courtship, literary history, and a mystery with heist-like drama. You can find it on shelves at your favorite local retailer, or buy it online and support both The Gothic Library and indie bookstores in the process by using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Then come back and let me know what you think in the comments!