This is a beautifully written story about an alternate early 1800s England where magic is discovered to be real and is soon put to work for the crown. I was enchanted by the near-Dickensian prose and enjoyed every chance I had to sit down and read until......about 100 pages into the work, a black butler is introduced, Stephan Black who is then revealed to be the most intelligent and witty character in the story. The whites around him (revealing how ignorant they really are) assume him to be some African king in exile. Everyone around him dotes on his wondrousness. I hoped that he would be some minor character and soon disappear but as I scanned the next few hundred pages I saw his name popping up again and again and again to the point where I knew that no matter how much I liked the writing and the flow of the story so far I just could not continue such an anachronistic uber-PC work.