Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a popular Victorian British novelist best known for her novel Lady Audry's Secret. She was a prolific novelist producing over 75 novels. She founded Belgravia Magazine in1866, which included serialized sensation novels, poems, travel narratives, and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history, and science. London Pride: or When the World Was Younger is a historical novel. The story begins, "A rainy summer, and a mild rainy autumn had been followed by the hardest frost this generation had ever known. The Thames was frozen over, and tempestuous winds had shaken the ships in the Pool, and the steep gable ends and tall chimney-stacks on London Bridge. A never-to-be-forgotten winter, which had witnessed the martyrdom of England's King, and the exile of her chief nobility, while a rabble Parliament rode roughshod over a cowed people. Gloom and sour visages prevailed, the maypoles were down, the play-houses were closed, the bear-gardens were empty, the cock-pits were desolate; and a saddened population, impoverished and depressed by the sacrifices that had been exacted and the tyranny that had been exercised in the name of Liberty, were ground under the iron heel of Cromwell's red-coats."