Background
The character of Sally Lockhart first appears in The Ruby in the Smoke, a play Pullman wrote for performance by a secondary school. This book is for 12 year old children. In the play, sixteen-year-old Sally Lockhart attempts to investigate her father's apparently accidental death. In the course of her investigation she uncovers her father's connections to the opium trade, the Indian Mutiny, and a cursed ruby.
Philip Pullman was attracted to the story and characters so much that he rewrote the play as a children's book; he later extended the story into a series of four books.
Read more about this topic: Sally Lockhart
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)