Thomas Pitt is the protagonist in a series of detective novels by Anne Perry. Pitt is from a working-class background in Victorian London. His father was a gamekeeper on a landed estate and Pitt was educated alongside the son of the house. He was prompted to enter the police force after his father was wrongly accused of poaching game and transported to Australia. At the beginning of the series, Pitt is a police inspector, but was promoted to superintendent. Later he is removed from his job as a result of investigating the "wrong people", i.e. those with sufficient influence and power, and joins the Special Branch, in which he becomes an inspector. Later he is promoted to commander as Head of Special Branch. His wife, Charlotte (née Ellison), is from an upper-class family. Her sister Emily's first husband was a viscount and Emily's second husband is a rising politician. Charlotte frequently uses Emily's connections to the landed gentry and aristocracy to assist Pitt in his investigations. Charlotte relies on her maid, Gracie, to take care for her children, Jemima and Daniel, when she is investigating a mystery. Charlotte's well-intentioned interference in her husband's investigations gives Pitt access to information which enables him to solve the case. Vespasia Cumming-Gould, the elderly aunt of Emily's first husband, becomes a friend to both Emily and Charlotte and eases their way into society.Thomas Pitt is the protagonist in a series of detective novels by Anne Perry. Pitt is from a working-class background in Victorian London. His father was a gamekeeper on a landed estate and Pitt was educated alongside the son of the house. He was prompted to enter the police force after his father was wrongly accused of poaching game and transported to Australia. At the beginning of the series, Pitt is a police inspector, but was promoted to superintendent. Later he is removed from his job as a result of investigating the "wrong people", i.e. those with sufficient influence and power, and joins the Special Branch, in which he becomes an inspector. Later he is promoted to commander as Head of Special Branch. His wife, Charlotte (née Ellison), is from an upper-class family. Her sister Emily's first husband was a viscount and Emily's second husband is a rising politician. Charlotte frequently uses Emily's connections to the landed gentry and aristocracy to assist Pitt in his investigations. Charlotte relies on her maid, Gracie, to take care for her children, Jemima and Daniel, when she is investigating a mystery. Charlotte's well-intentioned interference in her husband's investigations gives Pitt access to information which enables him to solve the case. Vespasia Cumming-Gould, the elderly aunt of Emily's first husband, becomes a friend to both Emily and Charlotte and eases their way into society.
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"
Shakespeare, King Lear (Edmund) Act I, scene ii
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