Susan is based on a girl who spent a lot of time with my family. Her details are different, but Susan has her voice.

By contrast, I know almost nothing about the real newsboy, even his first name. He started out as an entry in a pocket diary kept by an actor named Howson, preserved in the New York Public Library. Mr. Howson was in Edwin Booth’s company at Booth’s new theater on 23d Street. Among complaints about his not getting the roles he wanted, Howson wrote about having his gold pocket watch stolen backstage by a boy named McBride, who was caught by a detective when he pawned it. McBride’s mother appeared for him at his hearing, and the magistrate let him off with a warning. The rest, I’m afraid, is not history.

The only other characters known to history are Victoria Woodhull and her family, and a speculative philosopher she palled up with, Stephen Pearl Andrews. Andrews is little noticed in most accounts of her adventures, but for a while he was part of her circle, and of her thinking as well.. Victoria is famous for being the first woman to run for president, part of the equal rights campaign. Since she made “free love”—basically the ignoring of marriage—prominent among those rights, her campaign was outrageously controversial, and most other equal rights advocates disowned her. Susan knows almost nothing about this when she meets Victoria, but she is struck by her personality and promptly becomes an admirer. Are they kindred spirits?

Susan works hard on her identity as a boy from Australia. Victoria, too, has built identities out of whole cloth as a publisher, social theorist, politician, and financier, in addition to her initial profession as a spirit medium. She was born in rural Ohio in 1838 and named after the woman who had just become queen of England, which says something about her family’s aspirations. But her father had a shady reputation as a sharp trader and cheat, made worse by his insuring a grist mill just before burning it down. He moved his family from town to town, escaping neighbors and looking for deals. Victoria had less than three years of schooling, but even as a pre-teen she showed obvious intelligence and a remarkable knack for fortune telling. So did her younger sister, Tennessee.

Soon the clairvoyant sisters were the main support of their family. When they moved to Manhattan at the direction of a ghostly spirit named Demosthenes, they quickly made important friends. “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in America, set them up as the first lady stockbrokers in history; and Andrews, a deep but obscure philosopher, supplied her with many (most?) of the ideas that began to come forth in the sisters’ own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. Victoria’s bold self-revelations and empathic ability to read audiences made her a moving public speaker, and she became a leader of the movement to give women the vote--over the shocked objections of other leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.. A divided Women’s Rights convention nominated her to run for president. Soon afterwards Susan knocks on her door…