The expert consensus is that cholera is spread by “bad air” or “miasma,” but Dr. He’s still looking for more work, though, and local gentlemen pay him for odd jobs here and there. Eel used to make his living as a “mudlark,” scavenging scrap from the banks of the Thames, but these days he is more gainfully employed as the “boy-of-all-work” at the Lion Brewery. On top of that, Eel is paying board for his little brother Henry, to keep him out of Fisheye Bill’s clutches. Eel’s stepfather, the notorious ne’er-do-well Fisheye Bill Taylor, is looking for him, demanding money, and Eel is trying to save up enough to pay Fisheye Bill off for good. The novel is set in 1854, a hot summer in London, “as if the sun were a giant who’d aimed his moist, stinky breath on all of us.” Eel, who narrates the story, is desperate for money. John Snow to prove that cholera is spread by contaminated water and not, as had previously been believed, “bad air.” As well as an adventure plot and a historical setting, the novel offers an introduction for young readers to the methodology of scientific investigation. The titular Eel is an orphan boy in Victorian London, who becomes involved in the (real, historical) quest of Dr. The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel is a 2013 YA novel by American author Deborah Hopkinson.
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