Vinegar and Brown Paper

In 1868, Charles Dickens sits down opposite Kate, a twelve-year-old American girl, on a New England train. She is sassy and tells the most famous man of the age that she skips the boring bits in his books. It is not the usual fawning appreciation he is used to, but he is captivated by her direct openness and her stories of life in small-town Maine. As past, present and future unwind in the railway carriage, Kate’s life emerges as one where good fortune and death are sealed by accidents of fate – a Dickensian tale. Vinegar and Brown Paper is a new, but true Dickens story, created not from his pen, but by the effect on another of a chance meeting with him on a train.