The Tiger in the Well

The Tiger in the Well is a novel by the English writer Philip Pullman. It takes place in the autumn of 1881 and is one of his books about Sally Lockhart.

Sally has a daughter, Harriet, a nurse called Sarah-Jane and a cook called Ellie, and her friends Webster, Jim and Charles are away in South America taking photographs. Then a divorce affidavit arrives at the house. Sally, who has never been married, is confused to find that a commission agent named Arthur Parrish is claiming to be her husband and Harriet's father, and that the affidavit says Harriet's father wants custody of the girl.

She takes the document to her lawyer and gets no sympathy from him: she is only a woman, and she has no power, so he prefers to concentrate on the charges Parrish has used to claim custody rather than on whether Sally was ever actually married to the man.

The book also follows other people. Russian Jews are arriving by boat in England, and a German socialist journalist called Jacob Liebermann goes to a meeting of the Democratic Socialist Association, where he meets another socialist journalist, Dan Goldberg, and tells him about a paralysed man known as the Tzaddik who is manipulating events so that Jewish people are harmed both economically and physically. Jacob also mentions the name Parrish, which Dan recognises as being involved.