Charles Babbage

Mathematician, inventor and designer of the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. Babbage's very real attempts to construct a programmable calculating machine provide the historical seed from which the much more disturbing Engine of the novel grows.

William Ballantine

Barrister and an old friend of Inspector Field. Sharp, experienced and possessed of that dangerous professional defect — a conscience. An apparently routine prosecution leaves Ballantine increasingly uncomfortable about the unseen influence surrounding the case.

Admiral Henry Barklay

A senior naval intelligence figure with uncomfortable knowledge of the Office of Imperial Statistics. Urbane, secretive and accustomed to the darker necessities of government, Barklay gradually finds himself forced to decide where duty ends and complicity begins.

Sergeant James Brannan

Field's dependable G Division sergeant. Practical, observant and considerably less theatrical than his inspector, Brannan provides both investigative muscle and a steady professional counterweight to Field's more instinctive methods.

Edwin Chadwick

Victorian social reformer whose pioneering use of statistics in public health forms part of the real nineteenth-century world in which increasingly large quantities of information were being used to understand — and govern — society.

Clarkson

One of the defence lawyers involved in the Old Bailey proceedings against Whicher and Sayward. His distinctly unenthusiastic cross-examination does little to reassure Brannan that justice is proceeding entirely without interference.

Constable Connors

A young Metropolitan Police constable who carries an important message to Field and his companions during the investigation.

Charles Dickens

Novelist, journalist and social observer — and a real friend and admirer of Inspector Charles Frederick Field. Dickens sometimes accompanied police officers on nocturnal expeditions into the poorest and most dangerous districts of London. In the novel his curiosity proves impossible to confine to literature.

K. Drummond

A name appearing on an Engineering Liaison identity tag associated with the Department of Public Infrastructure. The clearance carried by the tag suggests rather more than ordinary municipal engineering.

Adelaide Ferris

A member of the Metropolitan Health Advisory Board whose name emerges during the investigation into the reach of the Office of Imperial Statistics. Her work illustrates how apparently benign administrative information can acquire a very different purpose.

Inspector Charles Frederick Field

One of Scotland Yard's earliest and most celebrated detectives. Portly, theatrical, immensely experienced and possessed of an instinctive understanding of London's criminal world, the real Field became a friend of Charles Dickens and helped inspire the novelist's Inspector Bucket.

Engine of Empire takes that remarkable historical policeman and gives him a case unlike anything recorded in his official career.

William Farr

Physician and pioneering medical statistician. Farr's work showed the growing Victorian belief that society, disease and mortality could be understood through the systematic collection and analysis of data.

Babbie Freeman

Veteran dust-sifter at the Hatfield Street yard and leader of one of its teams of women. Thirty years among London's refuse have made Babbie tough, sharp-eyed and quite unwilling to overlook another worker pocketing something valuable.

Captain Absalom Haines

Retired naval officer who once worked alongside the Office of Imperial Statistics during experimental coastal surveillance operations. Living quietly outside Portsmouth, Haines carries memories — and records — that others would prefer to remain buried.

Halliwell

A young naval signal clerk whose duties bring him briefly into Admiral Barklay's increasingly uncomfortable struggle with the machinery of government.

Lieutenant-Colonel Erasmus Kincaid

Former Royal Engineer subsequently embedded in Home Office logistics. His association with the Office of Imperial Statistics suggests that streets, buildings and infrastructure can become instruments of policy just as readily as policemen and prisons.

Dr Horace Littleton

Formerly of the Statistical Office and dangerously interested in predictive modelling using census information. Littleton discovers that some pieces of academic curiosity are considerably safer left unpublished.

Sir Edmund Mallory

Permanent Undersecretary at the Home Office and a formidable administrator. Cultured, controlled and utterly convinced that government exists to preserve order, Mallory believes information can remove uncertainty from the management of an empire.

Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne

Joint Commissioner, and later sole Commissioner, of the Metropolitan Police. The historical Mayne helped shape the new police force during the turbulent decades in which London expanded into the greatest city in the world.

Inspector Mayhew

A long-standing police contact of Brannan's. His name eventually surfaces in circumstances that force the investigators to reconsider just how far unseen influence may extend.

Lieutenant-Colonel Atherton Merewether

Known within OIS protocols as The Tallyman. Precise, unemotional and devoted to classification, Merewether sees human beings less as individuals than as variables whose behaviour can be measured, ranked and, where necessary, corrected.

Sergeant Mulready

A Metropolitan Police sergeant and husband of Annie Mulready. Dependable when the investigation requires trusted men rather than merely available ones, Mulready becomes involved as Field's inquiry moves into increasingly dangerous territory.

Annie Mulready

Sergeant Mulready's wife. Like many police wives she understands that a husband's duty does not necessarily stop at the station door — and that those left behind may ultimately pay for it too.

Feargus O'Connor

Flamboyant Irish Chartist leader and one of the great popular political figures of the 1840s. O'Connor and the Chartist movement embody precisely the sort of mass political uncertainty that terrifies the secretive administrators imagined in the novel.

Annie O'Donovan

A thirty-year-old dust-sifter already aged beyond her years by poverty, hard labour and the choking ash of the Hatfield Street yard. Combative, suspicious and desperate for every penny she can find, Annie lives in a world where survival rarely permits the luxury of gentleness.

Ellie O'Donovan

The young O'Donovan girl caught up, through no fault of her own, in events far beyond the ordinary struggle for survival in St Giles.

Mrs O'Donovan

Annie O'Donovan's mother. Another member of a family accustomed to hardship, she becomes one of the ordinary Londoners swept into a struggle conducted by men who barely acknowledge that people like her exist.

Parnell

One of the defence lawyers named in the Old Bailey proceedings involving Whicher, Sayward and the absent Winter.

Police Constable George Peck

A young Scottish policeman who served in Glasgow and Preston before joining the Metropolitan Police. Intelligent, conscientious and ambitious for proper detective work, Peck's careful handling of an unpleasant discovery in a London dust yard brings him into Field and Brannan's orbit.

Sir Samuel Morton Peto

Engineer, railway contractor, businessman and politician. Peto's political connections make his name a useful one when police authority alone may not be sufficient to force open institutional doors.

Emilie Prescott

Mathematician and former collaborator of Charles Babbage with an intimate knowledge of the ideas that ultimately became the Engine. Brilliant, guarded and carrying very physical evidence of the cost of dissent, Emilie knows better than almost anyone what happens when elegant theory is placed in unscrupulous hands.

Thomas Rook

Contractor and foreman of the Hatfield Street dust yard. Rook rules his impoverished workforce through petty authority, intimidation and the knowledge that losing even this miserable employment may mean the workhouse.

Colonel Sir Charles Rowan

Soldier and founding joint Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Rowan helped establish the professional standards of the young force and remains one of the figures against whom conscientious Victorian policemen might measure themselves.

Phoebe Rose

A young dust-sifter from the poorest reaches of London, clever enough to recognise that the world contains possibilities far beyond those allotted to her by birth. Phoebe's discovery in the Hatfield Street dust pile provides the first thread in a mystery stretching far beyond the yard gates.

Sayward

A nervous defendant in what appears to be a thoroughly ordinary prosecution for the theft of cloth and muslin. His confidence that influential friends will ensure a favourable outcome proves increasingly misplaced.

Police Constable Frederick Shaw

Metropolitan Police constable involved in the search of Whicher's premises and subsequently called to give evidence at the Old Bailey.

Stidolph

A woman remembered in connection with an earlier incident at the Hatfield Street dust yard, when money apparently discarded in household refuse caused considerable trouble for Thomas Rook.

Whicher

A confident and well-connected defendant accused of stealing cloth belonging to the South-Western Railway. His apparently petty case becomes one of the first indications that something considerably larger may be moving behind ordinary criminal proceedings.

Mrs Whicher

Whicher's wife, whose dresses and attempts to conceal pieces of merino cloth form part of the evidence presented against her husband at the Old Bailey.

Professor Charles Wheatstone

Physicist, inventor and pioneer of electrical telegraphy. The real Wheatstone's work helped transform Victorian communications. In Engine of Empire, that expertise provides the speculative bridge between Babbage's mechanical ideas and something faster, smaller and considerably more powerful.

Wilkins

One of the lawyers representing the defendants in the Old Bailey proceedings. His cursory questioning contributes to Brannan's suspicion that the case is being managed from somewhere outside the courtroom.

Winter

Immaculate, controlled and exceptionally dangerous. Winter moves through respectable Victorian society with the assurance of a man accustomed to possessing authority that cannot be questioned. His precise relationship with the machinery behind the investigation is something Field must discover for himself.